*The opening reception will take place outdoors, with limited viewing sessions. We require all attendees wear masks and adhere to the NY State Social Distancing guidelines.
Overview
Back in late August, as if awakening from a dream, New Yorkers began to warily return to the city and their jobs. Venturing out into the streets for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, there was an overwhelming sense that nothing was as it once was. At first, those trepidations were pushed aside and the city’s good citizens bravely picked up where they had left off before the pandemic as if almost nothing had happened; but deep down they knew that everything had changed.
As New Yorkers slowly, albeit resentfully, accepted the reality of an unrecognizable world, they came to understand that the symbols, signs and relationships they depended upon to situate themselves in community with others, and to give their lives meaning, were no longer valid. Stripped of the superficial trappings that dull the senses to the fragility of culture, there arose an urgent need to reevaluate what in this life is true, real and worth knowing better.
Curatorial Aim
The curators of Intersections came together, as cautiously as the city’s populace, with the intention of mounting an exhibition that would explore the strands of production they were encountering that seemingly gave voice to the conflicting impulses of tenacity and fragility arising simultaneously in a wounded city determined to heal itself. Of singular importance to the development of Intersections is its location -- an unconventional retail space in the heart of Union Square, generously donated by Chashama, that symbolized a utopian and inclusive impulse the curators favored. Union Square is the city’s wild card— the poker face of the city’s ever shifting fortunes and serial enthusiasms. For an art show to exist as essential and intrinsic to the culture of Union Square, it would need to risk being all things to all people —an egalitarian open portal to art appreciation that would be accessible and engaging regardless of the viewer’s predisposition. In a word, the show would need to be equitable.
The curators also believed that the works should aim to forge new narratives, conversations and formalist connections. Hence the show is diverse and representative of a myriad of expressions with undeniable currents that connect the artists to each other and to a community of viewers.
Intersections
In an overarching manner, the poetics of color offers the first bridge. Forsaking irony as passé, color insists on announcing itself—feisty in its outré claim to universality. Artist Kylie Manning for example, spreads luscious waves of yellow ochre across miles of canvas in an ode to a never was August. Leslie Ford and Brooks Frederick take a different tack and deploy high chroma squares, no more than a foot in any direction, to arrive at an impactful expression of the universal. Frederick opens the viewer to the beauty of nature’s fleeting forms while Ford offers a momentary glimpse past those forms to the infinite unknowable that lies beyond the veil of appearances.
Color conspires with form to animate Matthew Wood’s layered cutout paintings; a similar confluence occurs in Wade Schaming’s found object sculptures and in the collage works by the artist duo Nataša Prljević and Joshua Nierodzinski. All present works that connect through an expression of tension brought on by fragmentation or the adjoining of disparate parts that form tenuous compositions uncertain of their unity.
Many of the works on display in Intersections privilege a composited abstraction—a union of forms that span from the harmonious to the discordant. Julia Brandão, Allen Hansen, Erika Ranee, and Jamel Robinson break-up their painted surfaces with distinct fields of expression that subtlety vie for supremacy; Eveline Luppi’s planar surfaces are animated with a well-tuned orchestration of shapes and lines. Contrarily, Sara Jimenez and Barbara Rosenthal disrupt the surfaces of their works with an energetic dash of sharply cut and collaged imagery seemingly sparring in white space. The dramatic contrast of chiaroscuro connects the works of artists that seem to inhabit a monochromatic dream. Recalling the surrealism of a film noir classic, the black and white photographs of Paul Clemence, Anita Goes and Michael Meadors present carefully crafted narratives juxtaposing the man-made with nature. Sculpture historically suppresses chroma in service to form and we see this effect well demonstrated with large scale pieces by sculptors Hannah Bigeleisen and Christopher Scott Marshall. Both sculptors toy with scale. Bigeleisen’s oversized geometric shapes invite interaction and active play; Marshall’s dumpster dive assemblages, comprised of suspended refrigerator doors, crashed car seats and burnt wood shipping pallets are fossil specimens from an industrial age run amuck.
Alongside the deeply intuitive, sublime and meditative process works by artists Henry Biber, Karlos Cárcamo, Katherine D. Crone, Augustus Goertz, and Robert Solomon, the curators give equal presence to the exuberant figurative works of JoAnne McFarland, Kyle Hackett, Andrew Hockenberry, Carlo Cittandi and Bradley Wood and the playful ceramic sculptures of Claudia Alvarez’s. For these polarities need to be in conversation too.
In closing, perhaps the installation of fractured spheres by the sculptor Miguel Otero Fuentes best conjures the reality and aspirations informing Intersections—an exhibition that explores the fissures and joinings of an impermanent and fragile world strained yet committed to renewal.
Chashama supports artists by giving them space to create and present their work, while fostering community development through the arts. Chashama is a 501(c)3 non-profit founded in 1995 in response to the lack of affordable space for emerging artists in New York City. Through partnerships with property owners we re-purpose unused real estate into space for artists. Chashama gives artists work and presentation spaces, and provides free art workshops in underserved communities.
New York Artists Equity Association, Inc. ("Artists Equity") is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1947 by artists and art patrons with the mission to promote opportunities for artists. It operates Equity Gallery, an art space located on the Lower East Side of New York City. Equity Gallery opened in October 2015 and is designed to be a fluid and flexible new model that is responsive to a range of artists’ needs. It simultaneously serves as a gallery for artists to exhibit and sell their work; a hub for professional workshops and innovative programming exploring critical issues of interest to artists and curators; and a gathering place for artists, curators and patrons. With today’s increased focus on the art market, Artists Equity aims to provide a space focused on process, where entrepreneurial spirit and the artist as creative provocateur are celebrated.
Equity Gallery was made possible through a gift by Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence.
Lichtundfire is a gallery and concept space on the Lower East Side in New York City that serves also as an open ended art and culture platform for an organically growing community of artists, collectors, curators, performers and writers since its inception in the fall of 2015.
