nyc art scene

Closes June 14:

“Peripheral Visions: Contemporary Art from Australia”
 curated by Marissa Bateman

Garis & Hahn Gallery, 263 Bowery, NYC

The works in Peripheral Visions provide a tangential narrative for Australian art, “which is all-too routinely associated with landscape painting… Each artist was selected for their unique mark making processes with peripheral materials such as Plasticine and LEGO and are all unified by the occasion of the exhibition which marks the first time each artist exhibits in New York”

Artists: Vernon Ah Kee, Joel Beerden, Liam Benson, Stephen Bird, Nicholas Folland, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Dan McKewen, Amanda Marburg, Phoebe Rathmell

recently opened:

“Criss Cross”
 Susan Bee

Accola Griefen Gallery, 547 W27th St., NYC (634)

Black and white film stills are the pictorial basis of the majority of Susan Bee’s new oil paintings… solitary individuals, couples and familial groups depicted in these works are nearly overwhelmed by tumultuous passages of paint that threaten to separate and engulf the figures. Her works are full of tension as well as tenderness. - thru June 29

Closing May 25:

“Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow”
 Elena Sisto

Lori Bookstein Gallery, 138 Tenth Ave., NYC (bt W18th & W19th St)

For the last three years, Elena Sisto’s paintings have explored the formative years of young women artists. Three-quarter profiles of women against the backdrop of the studio or partially hidden behind the canvas provide a portal into the psychology of a unique cast of characters. Though certainly abstracted into cartoonish guises, Sisto’s figures still maintain unique personalities and dispositions that hint at the possibility of narrative. The most recent paintings show an increasingly tighter cropping of the picture plane.

Opens Wed, May 22, 6-8p:

“There Are Women at the Gates Seeking a New World…”
 Elektra KB

BravinLee Programs, 526 W26th St., NYC (#211)

an exhibition in the gallery’s project room by Elektra KB of new works on paper, photography, and a selection of cloth pages of her 20 page, hand-sewn artist’s book. The pages of the book, each a sewn and embroidered felt collage, depict guerilla warfare in a mythological, semi-autobiographical world parallel to ours: a female rebel army revolting against the forces of a tyrannical police state. The women are primitivist and often uniformed and weaponized—most wear only short petticoats and veils or ominous balaklava. They pose brazenly with machine guns and chainsaws in photo ops, but Elektra KB has rendered these weapons more like toys, and according to her rule-set for this alternative world, they shoot rays of light not ammo.

thru June 8:

“Logical Expressions and Variations”
 William Betts, Gary Carsley, Shane Hope, Julie Oppermann

Margaret Thatcher Projects, 539 W23rd St., NYC

a group show including works by four contemporary artists who each incorporate the logical, rational and at times accidental reading of visual data by automated or organic systems in their artwork.

thru June 16:

“Day is Long”
 Erin Shirreff

Lisa Cooley Gallery, 107 Norfolk St., NYC

For the past few years, Shirreff has explored the effect of mediation on our experience of form. In works that draw together the mediums of photography, sculpture, and video, she has explored how the body responds to moments that are largely imagined, and the uncertainty at the root of knowing something that has transpired in a time or place other than our own. An extension of these interests, the new body of work on view in Day is Long both reflects and speaks to ideas of process. The photographs, sculptures, and videos allude to the daily labors of a studio— repetition, vestigial form, documentation, remnants, blunt material fact. But of interest to Shirreff are the broader ideas at play: the twin acts of making and un-making, the burden of permanence, and what remains of an object once it is gone. Taken together, the works in the exhibition speak to a more general anxiety about finding one’s place within our moment in time.