Splotch, a two-venue exhibition on the Lower East Side, featured artists whose work involves a methodical and controlled process of creating seemingly freeform or random daubs and spots. The title of the show was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s fiberglass pieces titled Splotches and their working drawings or “footprints.” LeWitt’s 12-foot long sculpture Splotch #3, 2000, last shown in New York City at The Met, was on view at Sperone Westwater. The footprints of Splotch #3 were exhibited for the first time at Lesley Heller Workspace.

Splotch at Sperone Westwater featured works by Nicole Awai, Lynda Benglis, Trudy Benson, Matias Cuevas, Lucky DeBellevue, Alex Dodge, Mary Heilmann, Andreas Kocks, Sol LeWitt, Emil Lukas, Riad Miah, Takesada Matsutani, Landon Metz, Angel Otero, Otto Piene, David Reed, Taney Roniger, Brie Ruais, Julia von Eichel, Terry Winters, and Jian-Jun Zhang.

The artists’ approaches are structured, yet left up to elements of chance and failure. With predetermined and self-imposed rules, these artists explore the boundaries of various mediums as well as the tension between control and spontaneity. They also examine the body, scientific and mathematical concepts, nature, pop culture, and cultural identity. Dichotomies examined include: absence and presence, fluidity and stability, order and disorder.

An opening reception took place at Sperone Westwater on July 7 from 5 - 7 pm. Splotch was also on view at Lesley Heller Workspace from July 20 to August 19, 2016. A catalogue published on the occasion of the two-venue exhibition is available.

Installation views are courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, unless otherwise noted. All artworks are copyright of the artist or artist's estate. Lynda Benglis: Art © Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Sol LeWitt: © 2016 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

PRESS

The New York Times Style Magazine

Hyperallergic

Splotch, a two-venue exhibition on the Lower East Side, featured artists whose work involves a methodical and controlled process of creating seemingly free-form or random daubs and spots. The title of the show was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s fiberglass pieces titled Splotches and their working drawings or “footprints.” The footprints of Splotch #3 were exhibited for the first time at Lesley Heller Workspace. LeWitt’s 12-foot long sculpture Splotch #3, previously shown at New York’s The Met, was on view at Sperone Westwater.

Splotch at Lesley Heller Workspace featured works by Lynda Benglis, Walter Biggs, Elisabeth Condon, Nene Humphrey, Andreas Kocks, Sol LeWitt, Riad Miah, Jamie Powell, Taney Roniger, Karen Tompkins, Julia von Eichel, Aaron Williams, Magdalen Wong, and Jian-Jun Zhang.

The artists’ approaches are structured, yet left up to elements of chance and failure in the drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures in the show. Some of the artistic processes include casting, cutting, and wrapping. Lynda Benglis continues to focus on the physicality of materials in Hot Spot, 1999, a biomorphic form cast in aluminum. Combining elements of drawing, painting, and architecture, Andreas Kocks utilizes cut paper and pins to create works that examine space and time. Meticulous and methodical, Julia von Eichel simultaneously embraces and conceals the underlying structure of wood dowels, wiffle balls, and thread with acrylic covered silk in her amorphous and jagged sculpture protruding from a corner.

Inspired by pop culture and cartoons, Jamie Powell’s paintings incorporate elements of chance and improvisation as she manipulates the canvas by dyeing, cutting, and tying pieces to create sculptural forms, revealing the underlying frame. Magdalen Wong appropriates found imagery in mass media and commercial packaging; familiar objects are decontextualized and abstracted in her cutout milk splashes. Carving into a painted MDF surface with a router, Aaron Williams recreates graffiti imagery in photographic sources, expanding the idea of mark marking and materials.

Using patterns and precise puncturing, Taney Roniger creates biomorphic and cellular-like forms, referencing landscapes, mythology, and geometric shapes found in nature. Walter Biggs’s abstract paintings of graphite, sand, and acrylic are the results of play between expressionist gesture and labor-intensive finishing processes.

Materials can ultimately dictate the outcome when they are released onto surfaces – the results can be unexpected and spontaneous. In his monoprint First Drop of Water (print series #1), Jian-Jun Zhang explores the physicality and connotations of water. He paints printing ink directly onto steel plates with calligraphy brushes before printing these gestural marks. Inspired by nature and her time in Shanghai, Elisabeth Condon begins with a pour of paint and then edits the surface by outlining dots, manipulating contours, and slicing paint.  

Riad Miah combines a calculated approach of using drops of paint, geometric configurations, and spontaneous brush marks to create his abstract painting that depict cellular and amoeba-like forms. Nene Humphrey also explores biological systems in her sculptural and performative works consisting of two and three-dimensional cerebral and cellular forms of synthetic material. Influenced by the solar observations of the Italian astronomer, physicist, and philosopher Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century, Karen Tompkins creates abstracted paintings on insulation board that closely resemble these sunspot drawings.

With predetermined and self-imposed rules, these artists explore the boundaries of various mediums as well as the tension between control and spontaneity. They also examine the body, scientific and mathematical concepts, nature, pop culture, and mass media. Dichotomies examined include: absence and presence, fluidity and stability, geometric and organic, order and disorder.

An opening reception took place at Lesley Heller Workspace on July 20 from 6-8 pm. Splotch was also on view at Sperone Westwater at 257 Bowery from July 7 to August 9, 2016. A catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition, is available.

Installation views are courtesy Lesley Heller Workspace, New York. Photo: Peter Gynd. All artworks are copyright of the artist or artist's estate. Lynda Benglis: Art © Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Sol LeWitt: © 2016 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

PRESS

Hyperallergic

New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture, curated by Jan Garden Castro and Eileen Jeng, opened at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs on Sunday, May 10, 2015 from 2:00-5:00 p.m. and remained on view through July 12, 2015. A color brochure with an essay by the curators has been published to accompany the exhibition.

The multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-national artists of the exhibition, Claudia Alvarez, Afruz Amighi, Rina Banerjee, Christian Ruiz Berman, Sanford Biggers, Cui Fei, Leonardo Drew, Rashawn Griffin, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Wenda Gu, Ginny Huo, Tamiko Kawata, Iván Navarro & Courtney Smith, Kambui Olujimi, Cecilia Paredes, Soo Sunny Park, Yinka Shonibare, Nari Ward, and Ishmael Randall Weeks, are changing and expanding the vocabulary and agendas of the art world by injecting ideas from their unique world cultures and experiences. These proactive artists utilize materials and imagery in innovative ways that address themes including race, gender, ritual, craft, and language. The materials often challenge existing associations and subvert expectations. They break down barriers to create new mythologies. Their works conflate the local and global, past and present, fact and fiction. These artists are transcending the limits of individual cultures.

In New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture, beauty, craft, and aesthetics become the handmaidens of truth—to expose dilemmas, problems, and histories that can be ugly, repressed, and hidden. The artists are consciously reshaping dilemmas into objects of contemplation. They—along with many other artists whose works could easily have fit in this exhibition— are vernacular cosmopolitans of a kind, moving in-between cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have a prior existence within the discrete world of any single culture or language. Their works are inclusive, revelatory, and in search of common grounds and associations. The works trigger a conversation with viewers and with each other—to propose positive interventions from which we can gain courage and new ideas.

Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs is a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit organization that presents independently-curated exhibitions of contemporary art. Working with curators, writers, and art historians, DGCP aims to illuminate and deepen the public’s understanding and appreciation of issues and trends in contemporary art. Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (closed Tuesday and Wednesday), and by appointment.

From Within the Flesh of the World at Radiator Gallery presented recent photographs, sculptures, and videos by Adam Frelin and Rena Leinberger. By re-creating, displacing, and transforming seemingly familiar images, objects, sites, and actions, the artists construct distinctive narratives as well as explore the role of the mediums. With their formal qualities, the works subvert art historical conventions as well as cultural and societal expectations. The works conflate fact and fiction, past and present, and the natural and man-made environment. The title of the exhibition, From Within the Flesh of the World, is taken from Victor Burgin’s essay, “Monument and Melancholia” (2008).

Installed on a diagonal in the back of the main gallery was Frelin’s outdoor sculpture Drifter, a tapered 14-foot long unsealed wood cylinder coated with layers of dirt at the bottom. Having first been situated in a cemetery, the sculpture — symbolic of a safety coffin’s cylinder from the 18th century — has absorbed its surrounding environment. It bridges the uncanny divide between the living and deceased as well as reality and fiction.

Kodamazothgolemnkiski consists of a series of close up photographs of anthropomorphic, totemic sculptures of blackened gum that Frelin scraped off the sidewalks of New York. At a distance, these objects resemble primitive prehistoric figures. The video Firefall is a re-creation of an epic event that took place in Yosemite National Park until the 1960s, where hot embers were shoveled over a cliff, resembling a vivid red waterfall.

Leinberger focuses on the intrigue of the spectacle in relation to constructed and demolished environments in her work. Her Zero Panorama series was inspired by an image she found while searching for historical explosions on the Internet — one of naval officers and one of the wives cutting into a cake to celebrate a nuclear testing site — which was deemed obscene by The Washington Post. Leinberger’s black and white photographs are of re-creations of iconic images, such as the historical explosions of Nagasaki and the Challenger, but in cake frosting. The artist explores the “seduction of the spectacle” of both of the explosion and frosting as well as the dichotomy between the rational and absurd.

In Utopias, Unmoored, Leinberger creates a series of photographs and videos of small-scale islands of urban settings constructed out of unstable and inexpensive materials — foam, colored paper, wood pieces — in the water. Leinberger obscures referential details of location. She examines the relationship between architecture, landscape, and societal interventions as well as failure theory in building materials.

About the Artists

Adam Frelin’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; Las Cruces Museum of Fine Art; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Recent group shows have been held at Sculpture Center, Cleveland; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Columbus Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and part of a screening at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Frelin has published two photography books and has had several public artworks commissioned throughout the world. He received a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art at the SUNY University at Albany, and he lives in Troy, NY.

Rena Leinberger’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois at Chicago, and Evanston Art Center, and in a commissioned public project by NYC DOT’s Urban Art Program in Queens. Her work has been included in group shows internationally in Germany, Great Britain, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates. Recent group shows have been at the Queens Museum; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz. Leinberger received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she lives and works in New York.

Suddenly, There: Discovery of the Find, a group exhibition, curated by Eileen Jeng and Tamas Veszi, at Garis & Hahn focused on the creative process and its unexpected outcomes. Suddenly, There featured drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations, from 1974 to 2013, by 21 New York-based artists.

Hungarian psychologist, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, describes the concept of flow as an optimal experience and single-minded immersion that requires focus and full concentration. He applies this notion to the creative process and states, “in flow we only feel what is relevant to the activity.” The exhibition Suddenly, There takes this idea further in examining the complexities of the creative process. With multiple access points to an excess of information at any given time, artists who are working in one direction sometimes start working in another; the flow is broken and redirected toward a new and exciting place.

Diversions, distractions, and deviations lead to discoveries. This exhibition focuses on the find, including works in various media that have been created or conceived of while in the process of making other artworks, during the installation of works for exhibitions or presentations, or utilizing materials – remnants or parts of other works – from around the studio. Rather than concentrating on the sketching or planning of specific works, this exhibition emphasizes the chain reaction and progression of the creative process toward the unexpected – a proactive place for artists to move forward. Thereby, works in progress develop into pivotal or new important works.

A booklet with descriptions of the works and processes was published for the occasion of this exhibition. On December 18 from 7 - 8 pm, András Böröcz performed 11 Grapefruits 2, a conceptual work that introduces the fruit into his repertoire of ordinary, round sculptural objects and includes a new video.

Featured artists: Michael Alan, Eve Bailey, András Böröcz, Matías Cuevas, Dave Hardy and Siebren Versteeg, Clinton King, Daniela Kostova, Thomas Lendvai, Alan Lupiani, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Robert C. Morgan, Christopher Moss, Joe Nanashe, Ian Pedigo, Jamie Powell, Armita Raafat, Mónika Sziládi, Tamas Veszi, and Aaron Williams

About the Artists

Michael Alan was born in 1977 in Bushwick during the New York City blackout. Alan’s intricate drawings, paintings, and sculptures have been featured in 9 New York solo shows, over 200 group shows, and over 200 Living Installations – happenings, founded and directed by the multimedia artist, where human beings are transformed into unique, living art objects with original music. Alan’s work has been discussed in over 200 publications and media sources, including American Artist, Artforum, Art+Auction, Marie Claire Italia, The New York Times, Art 21, NBC’s Today Show, and Fox Channel 5, to name a few.

Eve Bailey creates ergonomic and kinetic sculptures, based on the concept of balance and coordination, which embody her love for architecture and dance. Bailey has exhibited her work in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Cuba, Russia, and across the US. She was awarded funded residencies from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Triangle Arts, Brooklyn, NY; I-Park Foundation, East Haddam, CT; and Sculpture Space, Utica, NY, among others. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the École des Beaux Arts, Paris and a BFA in architectural metal work from Olivier de Serres School of Design, Paris. Bailey started incorporating performance in her sculptural work after receiving a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute.

András Böröcz was born in Budapest, Hungary. He studied painting at the Budapest Art Academy and was a member of Indigo, an underground artist group that was critical of the dictatorship. In the late 1970s, he began performing for international audiences and participated in Documenta (8) in Kassel, Germany in 1987. After moving to New York in 1986, Böröcz concentrated on sculpture, conceptually working with post-Pop ideas of discarded and common materials. The pencil became his object of choice, both for its democratic nature and its function as an artist’s tool. Böröcz has exhibited and performed extensively in the US and Europe, most recently, in a number of museums and galleries in Hungary. Böröcz is the founding director of Alma on Dobbin, Inc., a trustee of the Ampersand Foundation Johannesburg/NYC, and co-founder and director of 2b Gallery in Budapest, Hungary.

Matías Cuevas was born in Mendoza, Argentina in 1980. Following his early classical training at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Cuevas received his MFA in 2009 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received a number of awards. Recent exhibitions of his paintings and sculptures have been held at El Museo del Barrio, New York; Lehmann Maupin, New York; Leyendecker Gallery, Spain; Alderman Exhibitions, Chicago; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee, among others. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario and Museo de Arte Moderno de Mendoza.

Dave Hardy and Siebren Versteeg continue to collaborate on the multimedia project Spirit Tours, started in 2004, for the exhibition. Versteeg received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the RISD Museum, Providence; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, among others. His work has been in museum group shows in the US, Czech Republic, and Austria, to name a few. Versteeg’s work is in various collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, The Margulies Collection, RISD Museum, Ulrich Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

Hardy received a BFA from Brown University and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Solo exhibitions have been held at Art in General, La Mama Galleria, Regina Rex, and 92Y Tribeca in New York as well as at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. His work has been included in group exhibitions at PS1, SculptureCenter, and Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Hardy is currently a professor of sculpture at New York University.

Clinton King graduated with an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings have most recently been exhibited at the Dorsky Foundation and Parallel Art Space in Brooklyn and One River Gallery Space in Englewood, NJ. He will soon reside at the Yaddo artist retreat. Previous exhibitions have been held at the Boots Contemporary Art Space, St. Louis; Gallery 400, Chicago; The Suburban, Chicago; International Performance Art Festival, Helsinki; 1a Space Gallery, Hong Kong; Youkobo Art space, Tokyo; and Zaim Space, Yokohama, Japan.

Daniela Kostova uses photography, video, and installation to address issues of geography, cultural representation, the production and crossing of socio-cultural borders, and the processes of translation and communication. Kostova has exhibited her work at numerous museums, including the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Sofia City Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italy; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, among others. Kostova received many awards and fellowships, including an Unlimited ’11 Award for Contemporary Bulgarian Art and a Graduate Fellowship from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. In 2011, together with Stanislava Georgieva, Kostova started Bulgarian Artists in America (BAA), where she is Exhibition Director. She is also the Director of Curatorial Projects at Radiator Gallery and a Board Member of CEC Artslink.

Thomas Lendvai was born on Long Island, New York and raised by parents who emigrated from Hungary in the early 1970s. Growing up on Long Island, Lendvai worked during the summer months with his father as a carpenter.  This experience has shaped and influenced his sculptural practice to this day.  Most, if not all of his work, uses construction based materials and techniques. Today, Lendvai continues to make sculpture and site-determined installations, which have been exhibited in Chicago, Key West, and Tokyo, and, most recently, in Hoboken, NJ. Lendvai received his BA from SUNY Stony Brook in 1999 and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2002.

Alan Lupiani engages in socio-political issues on a local, regional, and international level in his multi-media installations, performances, sculptures, and paintings. He has exhibited and performed in multiple museums, galleries, and art events throughout the United States, including Winkleman Gallery, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; the “No Comment” Art Show for Occupy Wall Street; Third Ward Gallery, Brooklyn; Governor’s Island; Radiator Gallery, Long Island City; and his alma mater, Binghamton University in 2012. Lupiani presented "Art Road Show" at Art Basel Miami Beach, where he interviewed gallerists and artists in 2010 and 2011. Most recently, he curated the exhibition So Real at Radiator Gallery in 2013.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy explore changing conditions around social roles, categories, and genres in their range of work from sculpture to video installation to software to curatorial practice. They wonder what counts as ‘new’ and about the associated technological, environmental and social costs. In New York, their work has been exhibited at museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, PS1, The Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum. International exhibitions include projects at the Pompidou Center, Paris; the British Film Institute, London; and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, to name a few. Recent grants include a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Articles about their work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, and Newsweek. Their work is represented by Postmasters Gallery, New York and by Guy Bartschi, Geneva and is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM, Luxembourg.

Robert C. Morgan, an artist and writer, began showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston as well as at Artists Space and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in the 1970s. His films have been presented at Anthology Film Archives, White Box, and Millennium Film Workshop. Morgan’s photographs, visual books, paintings, conceptual works, and installations have been shown at White Columns, New York; CEPA, Buffalo, NY; McKissick Museum, Columbia, SC; Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and The International Artists Museum, Lodz, Poland, among others. Recent solo exhibitions in New York have been held at Bjorn Ressle Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, John Davis Gallery, Able Fine Art, Creon Gallery, and, currently, at Rooster Gallery, where the show has been recommended by Art in America. Morgan’s work has also been reviewed in Artforum, ARTnews, artcritical, The New York Times, and Wolgan Misool (Korean) and is in many prominent collections.

Christopher Moss received a BFA from Marywood University, Scranton, PA in 2000 and an MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College in 2006.  His work has been included in group exhibitions at Shaheen Contemporary, Cleveland and Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia, among others, and is available at Artware Editions, New York and Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, where he will have his first New York solo exhibition in March 2014.

Joe Nanashe was born in Akron, Ohio. The city’s post-industrial landscape and emphasis on manual labor influenced the repetitive, task-driven nature of his work. He received his BFA from the University of Akron in 2003 and his MFA from Rutgers in 2005. A multimedia artist, Nanashe creates works that confront the viewer with issues of violence, control, meaning, humor, perception, and the body. His videos have been shown in film festivals in the US and in Switzerland. His drawings, sculpture, photographs, and sound work have been recently exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum and Islip Art Museum on Long Island as well as internationally in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Russia, and Switzerland.

Ian Pedigo was born and grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. He studied visual art/sculpture at the University of Texas at Austin and participated in the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Art in Austria, studying with such figures as Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys. His work has been exhibited across North America and Europe, including solo exhibitions in at the Abrons Art Center and Klaus Von Nichtssagend, New York; University of Gothenberg, Sweden; and Rokeby Gallery, London. His sculptures, photographic works, and installations have been written about in Artforum, ARTnews, Art Review, Frieze, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. A monograph of his work was published in 2011 by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Jamie Powell was born and raised in West Virginia, thirty miles south of the Mason Dixon Line. She received her MFA and the Paul Robeson Emerging Artist Award from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2006. She has received grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Pratt Institute. Jamie has exhibited her cutout abstract paintings extensively over the last eight years at venues including FLUXspace, Philadelphia; Seton Hall Law School, Newark; the National Arts Club, New York; and Soil Gallery, Seattle. She teaches painting and drawing at Pratt Art Institute in New York. 

Armita Raafat received her BFA from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran and completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist’s installations have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2009 and Threewalls, Chicago in 2010. Her work has been featured in recent group exhibitions in Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Tehran, and Seoul, Korea. Her solo shows have been reviewed in publications, such as Art in America and New City. In 2011, she was featured in the book Out of Rubble, published by Charta. Raafat was a 2009 recipient of a swing space residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and currently holds a studio residency with the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York. She will also participate in the Artist at Market Place (AIM) program at the Bronx Museum of Art in 2013.

Mónika Sziládi was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. She received an MFA in Photography from Yale in 2010 and a Maitrîse in Art History and Archaeology from Sorbonne, Paris in 1997. She was the recipient of the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship, Daylight/CDS Photo Award, and Humble Arts' Fall 2012 New Photography Grant as well as the winner of The Philadelphia Museum of Art Photography Competition in 2010. She was a resident in Skowhegan in 2008 and at Smack Mellon in 2012. Selected institutional exhibitions she has participated in have been held at the DUMBO Arts Center, Brooklyn; Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros, Hungary; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany; The Magenta’s Foundation’s Flash Forward Festival, Toronto, Canada; and Hasted Kraeutler, New York. Sziládi’s work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Tamas Veszi is a multimedia artist with an academic background in painting. His activities as a community initiator bridge a gap between his restless interest for the questions of embodiment and formlessness. Veszi left Hungary at the age of seventeen and studied in Israel, Italy, and France, and he moved to New York in 1997. In 2000 he received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute, and formed the group “Greenpoint Riverfront Artists” who curated and produced performances, rooftop independent film screenings, and annual open studios. He earned his MFA at Brooklyn College under the guidance of Elisabeth Murray and Vito Acconci. Veszi has exhibited his work in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, France, Hungary, Italy and throughout the United States. As director of RadiatorArts in Long Island City, Veszi has collaborated with the Embassy of Israel and Art Market Budapest as well as organized exchanges with La Couleuvre Art Center, Paris and Bäcker Strasse 4 Gallery, Vienna.

Aaron Williams was born and raised in Rhode Island and holds a BFA from the Maine College of Art and an MFA from Rutgers University.  Using common photographic sources, such as mass market posters, Williams continues to expand idea of mark-making and materials. His solo exhibitions have been held at Max Protetch Gallery, Baumgartner Gallery, Mulherin + Pollard in New York, and, most recently, Lamontagne Gallery in Boston.  His work has been featured in several group exhibitions throughout the United States at venues including the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Howard House, Seattle, WA; Hal Bromm Gallery, NYC; Parallel Art Space, Queens, NY; and Memphis Social, Memphis, TN. 

About Garis & Hahn

Garis & Hahn is a gallery-cum-Kunsthalle that mounts exhibitions focused on conceptual narratives and relevant conversations in contemporary art. By displaying an array of carefully curated artists, the gallery endeavors to provide accessibility, education, awareness, and a market to the art while engaging both the arts community and a broader general audience.

PRESS

The Brooklyn Rail

Arte Fuse

Break / Step at Radiator Gallery featured artists, currently based in the New York metropolitan area, whose works embody deconstruction in creation and vary in techniques. The imagery, act, and aestheticization of deconstruction play an important part in contemporary art, especially in process-oriented works that focus on materiality. The title refers to the movement when soldiers are instructed to “break step” when crossing structures, such as bridges, sensitive to resonance. The unified rhythm is intentionally broken to create a new sound and image.

In the matrix that composes our urban environments, buildings, land, and materials are constantly being developed or constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Materials are recycled and reused, sometimes in creative ways. Land erodes, only to be built upon or preserved again. On a practical level, the infrastructure of cities, like New York, is constantly being reconstituted and the act of deconstruction occurs everyday — which begs the question: what is the nature of creation when construction and deconstruction are integral parts of the process?

Over the past four decades, contemporary artists have continuously challenged the medium utilized and process involved in works of art; narratives are broken, reinterpreted, and recreated. The artists in Break / Step use various traditional and innovative media, such as oil paint, fabric, plastic bags, glass, and industrial tubing. Surfaces are highly mediated. Images are re-construed, deconstituted, and altered. Sounds are fragmented. And public and private spaces are transformed. Chance, risk, and failure are evident and inevitable.

Abstracted in composition, these paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, performances, films, and videos gain transformative dimensions. Out of disclarity and fragmentation, clarity and fresh perspectives re-form and develop. Some works produce a confounding affect, evoking a sense of tension. The artists examine aesthetic and formal qualities in their work, and some confront personal memories and histories as well as address cultural, social, and identity issues. Many dichotomies are suggested, such as permanence and impermanence, stability and instability, utopia and dystopia, reality and illusion.

Featured artists: Esther Choi, Rachel Hayes, Todd Knopke, Rena Leinberger, Stephanie Loveless, Alan Lupiani, Angel Otero, Ian Pedigo, Armita Raafat, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Peter Soriano, Miryana Todorova and Sebastian Vallejo

Facture at AIRPLANE featured works that combined a handmade aesthetic with a range of materials. The works in this show manipulated spatial perception and challenged the distinctions between sculpture, painting, photography, and video. Through their formal qualities, along with personal, cultural, and technological references, the works evoked questions about the physicality of the art object. Facture included work by Hector Arce-Espasas, Jeremy Couillard, Amy Feldman, Elana Herzog, Gisela Insuaste, Jessica Labatte, LoVid, Heather Rasmussen, and Jamil Yamani.

In Jessica Labatte’s photography, everyday objects are juxtaposed to create abstracted tableaux of vivid colors and geometric shapes. Heather Rasmussen reconstructs scenes of shipping container accidents from pieces of brightly colored paper on seamless background paper. In the resulting photographs, the objects retain the fragility of their constructions. Familiar objects are decontextualized and abstracted.

Using frayed pieces of fabric and wooden and metal supports, Elana Herzog’s labor-intensive work transforms architectural space while reinterpreting the structures of painting, sculpture, and installation.Hector Arces-Espasas’s photograph incorporates painting and portrays a paradisiacal landscape. Gisela Insuaste’s wooden sculptural works depict urban spaces and landscapes and explore the intersection of architecture, topography, and memory. In Amy Feldman’s abstract painting, inverted triangular shapes are utilized to examine spatial structures, as she explores the relationship between figure and ground.

Jamil Yamani’s video projection of brightly colored circular shapes recall the imagery of mosaic tiles in Islamic architecture and transform into chaotic, flashing lights in the landscape of New York. LoVid, an interdisciplinary artist duo of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, constructs works of disparate materials ranging from video to fabric as well as performances. In NetWork, electrical wires are woven together by the audience as part of a live video installation. The resulting sculpture NetWork: Amsterdam serves as a physical memory of the revealed electronic infrastructure and tactile experience. Jeremy Couillard views science as an aesthetic in his painting, which illustrates the evolution of totem poles in a cellular environment —in architectural and biological terms. Patterns and shapes are maniacally repeated, creating a distorted space.