The French artist and expat, Philippe Halaburda, arrived in the United States on November 6, 2016, looking to take his artistic career to new heights and clearly, new places. This was, of course, just two days before Donald Trump would shock the world and win the presidency. As if moving to an entirely new country isn’t stressful enough. Halaburda …
Constance Edwards Scopelitis Embraces The “Tech Effect”
“I have returned to the scene of the crime, as I call it… That’s Indianapolis, Indiana. But I’ve lived in New York, California, London… I’ve ventured out a lot.” Constance Edwards Scopelitis. Though Scopelitis finds the political climate in Indiana, where she grew up (“I mean hello, we gave you Pence”) really interesting to “rub up against,” especially from, as …
Incubus’ Brandon Boyd Teams Up with The Surf Lodge at Art Basel Miami Beach
Brandon Boyd, the multi-talented Incubus frontman, whose artistic (image making) output has run parallel to-if not fully integrated with-his musical offerings for more than two decades, is taking over the Surf Lodge bungalow at The Confidante Miami Beach Hotel for this year’s larger Art Basel circus on December 6th & 7th. On Thursday evening, Boyd will host an intimate dinner for …
Artist and Illustrator Joe Roberts Releases New Monograph, “We Ate the Acid”
It’s been “stay inside weather” in San Francisco recently, or at least that’s how the artist Joe Roberts, who’s lived in the city for 20 years, describes it over the phone. As pretty much everyone knows, massive, increasingly destructive fires have been ripping across the state of California (most have been extinguished as of this writing), and though towering flames …
A Good Boy and a Wall of Sound at Olsen Gruin Gallery
There isn’t much time left to catch one of the best two-person shows on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, or more accurately, two unique, but not so disparate exhibitions; Kevin Bourgeois’ Wall of Sound and Rhys Lee’s Good Boy, both seamlessly coexisting inside Olsen Gruin Gallery and coming down Sunday, November 18th. Each body of work; Bourgeois’ angular, colorfully remixed, square (but …
Let Me Define Fantasy For You
I really don’t understand the outcry over a lack of body representation at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. The fashion industry as a whole? Definitely. But this particularly extravagant gig, which the brand itself calls “the biggest fashion show in the world?” No. This network TV event (filmed this past Thursday in NYC and airing Dec. 2ndon ABC), an over-the-top …
Nightlife Review: How Did Our Dreams End Up Like This
At the end of the day, or more accurately, after a long, tempestuous night, I’m ultimately happy I got off my ass and went to Friday’s installment of “How Did Our Dreams End Up Like This,” a big Halloween rave co-produced by You Are So Lucky and MATTE Projects, which took place on Governor’s Island, a location that, according to …
The Gratuitous Glory of Gilbane Peck
It’s a mid-October afternoon and mixed media artist Gilbane Peck is working on a series of “fine art glory hole paintings” in his corner studio in the 56 Bogart gallery and studio complex. Peck was a clear standout at this year’s installment of Bushwick Open Studios, where he also put on a short-lived, pop-up solo exhibition called Sunshine and Rainbows in …
Fahren Feingold’s Golden Touch
If I’m going to write about the Los Angeles-based, naughty watercolor artist Fahren Feingold’s GOLDEN TOUCH, a new series of works presented by Indira Cesarine’s The Untitled Space that deals with the “changing perspective of menstruation,” (currently available online and exclusively at Artsy) I’m humbly requesting Fahren make a new series of paintings of and for men called THE BLUEST OF …
Tim Kent Paints a New Perspective at Slag Gallery in Brooklyn
Despite showing up on motivational posters and Internet memes, there’s no concrete evidence Albert Einstein ever said: “If you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t understand it well enough.” Seems to be fake news. Still, it’s an interesting thought and one that should be applied, especially in casual scenarios where complex modern ideas are being disseminated-a bar, at dinner …
Klea McKenna Steps Into The Light With Bicoastal Art Exhibitions
It’s not surprising that the San Francisco-based artist Klea McKenna’s earliest memory is filled, not only with various visceral, almost tactile sensory messages from the past, but with humor and drama as well. More so than this, it involves each of her parents, who, depending on the reader, may also occupy a certain chamber in their hearts and minds. (adsbygoogle …
Donkey Days & Donkey Nights: Aaron Fowler Seizes The Moment
“Basically, I’m an artist, so I make to figure out things,” claims the mixed-media artist Aaron Fowler less than three hours before his show, Donkey Nights (June 27 – August 10, 2018), is set to open on Bowery. Fowler expresses this notion through his enormous, oceanic eyes; sensitive two-way mirrors which convey a completely justifiable exhaustion and a blissful meta-fugue state, …
19-Year-Old Artist And Producer Joel Ronson Drops “Waiting For You” Exclusive Music Video And Interview.
Joel Ronson, a beyond precocious 19-year-old producer, composer and multi-hat musician, doesn’t have a middle name, so he did what any creative kid would do: he made one up. “I used to pretend that it was Bruce,” he says with his delightfully soft yet calculated English accent while crafting a hand-rolled cigarette out on the sunny back patio of an …
Defining The Demiurge With Artist Justin Orvis Steimer
Almost a decade ago, in my earliest days living in New York City proper (I’m a Long Island boy), I met a tall, quiet, slightly shy, longhaired artist at the coolest annual improvisational jazz-meets-blues jam on the Upper East Side. This was Justin Orvis Steimer. The party, thrown every year on jazz legend “Duke” Ellington’s birthday (April 29th), took place …
Adam Stennett Proves A Humble Master With His Water Paintings
How does or how should someone approach Adam Stennett’s Water Paintings (also the title of his current solo show at Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, Denmark)? Where does one begin? In the womb, figuratively and metaphorically, of course, or maybe. The title seems to ask for an open mind. But what does that even mean anymore? In 2018, “Open mind,” as …
Andy Mister Ascends With “New Dawn Fades” At TURN GALLERY
There’s nothing overtly didactic about 39-year-old artist Andy Mister’s solo show at TURN Gallery, New Dawn Fades. There are, however, 11 painstaking works on display featuring roughly the same number of representational images, each deftly rendered in incredible detail on monochrome paper using carbon pencil, charcoal and acrylic. The recent passing of Tom Wolfe, an at times controversial literary giant, …
Caveat Brings “Intelligent Nightlife” To The Lower East Side
The still somewhat quaint, Callery pear tree-lined Clinton Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has served as an ongoing case study in urban advancement since the early nineties when it transformed from a drug-swirling hotbed to niche culinary destination. Molecular gastronomy pioneer Wylie Dufresne’s wd-50 led the gentrifying charge in many ways, but it was the restaurant’s late 2014 closing …
Mel Frank: When We Were Criminals
“My method of intake is smoking a joint that I rolled,” says Mel Frank, the super-chill, 73-year-old ‘godfather of marijuana growers’ over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I like to roll myself because I know what I’m smoking. When you smoke a joint you get the full effects; the taste, the fragrance.” Mel Frank is not the man-the …
NSFW: The End Of Love by Rebecca Leveille at The Untitled Space
“Things we perceive to be ideals are often built upon faulty, weak and diseased foundations set forward and reinforced by society and pop culture. We are made to fall in love with an arbitrary set of stereotypes, physical ideals or cultural goals that are twisted and often deeply damaging to us……what happens once we cross to the other side of …
Superfine! NYC Is Keeping It Real
There will be no metaphorical free lunches at this year’s Superfine! NYC, Alex Mitow and his partner, photographer James Miille’s fun and highly approachable art fair, which opens May 2nd in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. “After being involved with art fairs for about five years, I’m sick of the, ‘It’s going to bring a lot of people’ thing,” says the fast-talking, …
Allison Zuckerman: Sky’s The Limit
The young painter, no, the remixed-media collage artist or better yet, the hyper-meta art cannon image sampler, Allison Zuckerman, who experienced a wild, meteoric rise in the contemporary art world over the last year and a half, is ready to embark on the next and sure to be exciting chapter of her life and career. Last week, just one day …
Naama Tsabar Stages a Rockin’ Feminist Performative Intervention for The Guggenheim’s 2018 Young Collectors Party
It’s been well documented in the annals of Rock lore, that in the winter of 1970, Led Zeppelin holed up in Headley Grange, an ivy-clad poorhouse in Hampshire, England to record the majority of their fourth album (LZ IV), which went 23x Platinum, features “Stairway to Heaven,” and is considered one of the greatest albums ever made. Other bands in …
NSFW: Nick Weber’s “Night Turns” Reclaims the Male Gaze
It is true, that for centuries, viewers of art have basked primarily in the “male gaze,” a term that, among many curators in the 2018 contemporary art world, has become as icky and professionally repulsive as an unsupervised photo shoot with Terry Richardson. But also true, is the notion that the male gaze plays an indispensable role in making the …
Filipino Painter Jigger Cruz Offers a Picture Towards the Other Side
The young Filipino artist Jigger Cruz uses the word “playful” a lot during our brief conversation Thursday night inside Chelsea’s Albertz Benda Gallery. Cruz was celebrating his first solo exhibition in the United States, Picture Towards the Other Side. “Chaotic” is another word that comes up frequently during the conversation. It becomes clear that these two words-playful and chaotic-are the …
Slow Motion with Charlie Rubin & Michael Chandler
On Thursday, March 1st, at the roughly year-old John Doe Gallery in Brooklyn, the Bronx-born multi-media artist Charlie Rubin and the long-time New York painter Michael Chandler joined forces for a joint exhibition they’re calling Slow Motion. Before getting into the work, the name of the gallery deserves some careful explanation. Grace Noh, John Doe’s Curator-who sat in during the …
Odili Donald Odita | Creating in Vain
In the lead up to the latest exhibition by Nigerian-born, American-raised artist Odili Donald Odita-his fifth solo outing since 2006 at Jack Shainman Gallery-all press materials pointed to this particular show being called Celebration. But in the days leading up to the exhibition’s January 5th opening, the show’s title evolved, one could say. It is now Third Sun. “There is …
Three Pulses: Ventiko, Fischer Cherry and Kennedy Yanko.
n the lead up to Art Basel Miami this year and every year for that matter, freelance art writers accumulate a plethora of urgent press materials advocating for why certain fairs cannot be missed, why their party will be the party, their activation, intervention, booth or installation the most memorable, salacious or avant-garde, and so on and so forth. Some …
Rashaad Newsome. | Running. | Park Avenue Armory.
n Tuesday night, November 7th, multi-media artist Rashaad Newsome unveiled the fruits of his Artists Studio residency at The Park Avenue Armory in back to back presentations of his stripped down and yet most emotionally evocative performance series yet: Running. Taking place inside the newly restored Veterans Room, “a monument of late 19th-century decorative arts” that combines multi-ethnic architectural influences …
A Matter of Dust.
Mike Weiss, the art dealer and former Chelsea gallery owner, liked to give out assigned seats at his more formal gallery opening-after-parties. I can’t remember which artist he was showing that evening roughly two years ago, or what restaurant it was, but I do remember being deliberately plunked down next to a charming young stranger with an infectious, liberally-used laugh, …
Electoral Collages: An Interview with Isabella Huffington.
sabella Huffington’s self-titled art show at Anastasia Photo on the Lower East Side could have been called Just Me or Nevertheless… or, in a decidedly more straightforward approach, Women in Politics and Power. It’s an overtly political show from someone who, as you may have already surmised, carries a weighty surname that has become synonymous with hard line, left-leaning political …