Inspired by organic forms found in nature, Sarah Crowner renders color, line, and pattern into unique abstractions that play with positive and negative space. In a new series of hand carved, marble sculptures titled “Wings after a Ballet,” Crowner revisits forms first explored in her acclaimed interactive set design for “Garden Blue,” choreographed by Jessica Lang for the American Ballet Theatre and performed in 2018 at Lincoln Center. Originally conceived as light, movable large wooden props activated by dancers in colorful leotards, Crowner’s new, static marble pieces are smaller in scale and constructed from weighted stones such as Golden Tepexi and Sodalita. Each structure is hand carved from a single block of marble; the organic stone is contrasted by their engineered geometry and highly-refined surfaces. The wing-like structures are loosely inspired by seed pods of maple trees, slowly twirling and hovering in air like helicopters before falling to the ground, whose forms are a repeated motif seen throughout her diverse artistic practice.
Chris Duncan’s work begins with color fabric wrapped, pinned or draped, around specific objects and left to absorb the elements of their surrounding environment. Without the use of dye, emulsion or any purposefully manipulated chemical process, imagery emerges through months of ultraviolet sun bleaching. These exposures act as markers of time and an outlet for Duncan to capture sites and objects that are part of his life and practice. Where previous compositions were unwrapped to reveal completed, almost narrative, depictions of places and things, his new works begin from failed exposures. Lacking any captured likeness to their origins, these latest pieces begin from an abstract haze. Solid shapes of color are sewn around these ethereal fields as loose borders that imply portals or openings to the sea. Fine lines of geometry are then hand-painted onto the fabric, creating further illusory space, and reclaiming them as authored paintings.
Elias Hansen has spent the last ten years developing an elaborate language of interrelated objects, materials, installations, and environments. Recently Hansen has begun to augment his expansive practice to focus on singular glass pieces. Aptly titled Light Sculptures, these works, illuminated by a spectrum of bulbs, cast the glow of man-made light through hand-blown glass. The authentic and the reproduced are called into question though his glass objects that convey a regularity, not unlike that of a mass-produced process. The polished appearance of intensely saturated glass paired with knotted electrical wiring and time-worn fixtures hint at suspect narratives.
Through varying processes of additive and subtractive layering, Sheree Hovsepian’s inventive approach to drawing, photography, and collage emphasize the performative and bodily implications of line and shape. In her newest assemblages, Hovsepian combines silver gelatin photographs and photograms married with fragments of ceramic, string, textiles and wood. The prominent inclusion of clay makes a connection between photography and ceramics, both made by impressions (of light or of the hand) and with the use of chemistry and machine. The string drawings above and below the images evoke new-age craft, as lengths of string resemble rays of celestial light, beaming down on a composition of earthly bodies.
In Rosy Keyser’s most recent body of work, the interaction of disparate parts colliding, generates deliberate beauty and symbiotic flow. Relationships between the artist’s surfaces are that of both friction and integration. Keyser’s emerging constructions come from using her anatomy as a tool for physical change. She paints, bends, casts, and conducts all in an effort to describe aspects of nature. Keyser’s paintings exist as poetic forms realized in tangible objects. Evidence of exchange through disruption flows, welcoming shifts and calling the material to life. The artist uses painting as a tactile and physical exercise like abstractionists before her, yet she pushes beyond the simply gestural. The materials are recast, distorted and reconfigured in an interplay that embodies energy changing form.
Sam Moyer’s wall-mounted works are combinations of stone and canvas, painting and sculpture, that she emphatically considers to be about qualities of painting, surface light, and layers. The new works bring in a plaster component that references the historic surface of fresco while simultaneously representing construction and stucco, the bridge of materials between the industrial and high art.
The gray of Kianja Strobert’s world is pewter, a metal alloy dating back to ancient Egypt and used throughout human history as the primary material for utilitarian objects such as plates and utensils before the invention of porcelain. The open pewter colored troughs attached to the wall containing bright colors of paint, put the viewer in the same position as the artist—between potential and product. Her “paintings” themselves are strewn throughout and smeared with lines, at times of bright colors and in other moments in what appears to be soot.
In Martha Tuttle’s work natural materials like wool, silk, and dye are worked by hand, each resulting piece having undergone an immaterial transfer of energy through her touch. The artist’s relationship to materiality is revealed further by the inclusion of small “stones,” both actual and cast polished metal, and of fabricated steel weights. These elements add another layer of visual incident and mark-making, to further open a dialogue of possibility and substance, light and weight. Overall, the unification of immaterial energy with material form results in constructed canvases and loosely hanging paintings that vibrate with a felt, unseen force.
Striking a balance between painting and sculpture, Rachel Eulena Williams revels in the structure and propositional space of painting but finds freedom in tossing out the stretchers and letting her compositions roam freely beyond the rectangle. Her work brims with the joy of an artist finding thought and pleasure through making. The staple ingredients include rope, fabrics, hammocks, glue and paint. She often starts by painting loose fields of color on raw canvas that she subsequently cuts up and refashions to create her collaged pieces. While the paintings never refer directly to anything in particular William’s abstractions do evoke construction sites, clothes lines or well-loved quilts.
Continuing a trans-generational practice Miranda Fengyuan Zhang draws influence from memories of watching her grandmother unravel and recycle old sweaters to fabricate new functional clothing. Zhang’s own language began as a child identifying recognizable imagery in the endlessly improvised arrangements of abstract shapes and colors in her grandmother’s up-cycled garments. Working formally and freely in weaving and knitting, Zhang uses leftover industrial threads from remote Chinese factories to juxtapose contemporary experience with tradition that harkens back to the origins of object making. Vibrating at the borders of abstraction and representation Zhang’s subjects are mysterious but feel familiar: semi-abstract gardens, animal silhouettes, layers of colorful mountains, volcanoes, rivers and icebergs. The tactile surface presents a structure for material to clash, and she is able to manipulate the specific properties of each yarn to create wildly varied textures.
