Desert skies, as far as I can see
The Recap July 1-28, 2024
After seeing Lucas Arruda’s exhibition at David Zwirner last month, I checked out his Instagram and he had posted this quote from Agnés Varda (from her film Beaches of Agnés) - “If we opened people up we’d find landscapes”.
Being back in the desert, surrounded by the mountains and wide open spaces, has me thinking a lot about art, landscapes, and the influence of various environments on artists and their work.
Below is some of the work posted on the website this month.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery used other people’s slides she found at flea markets and estate sales to create new landscapes with her own color palette.
Stephen Shore used a drone to capture new perspectives with aerial views of rural and urban landscapes for his recent exhibition Topographies at 303 Gallery.
Sometimes a collection of memories and images combine to build more complicated landscapes- like in the work of Rosson Crow (on view in July at Miles McEnery Gallery) and Dylan Vandenhoeck (whose work was on view at Jack Barrett in June).
If you feel inspired by the landscapes around you, the artists who make up small_bars, (Ry McCullough and Nick Satinover), are looking for participants for their new collaborative project– small_bars: To Activate A Landscape. Throughout July, and continuing for a few more weeks, they are posting pairs of instructions, like the two above. You can choose to do any (or all) of the activities, in any order. All contributions will be included and credited in a gallery exhibition at the Farmer Family Gallery at Ohio State University-Lima this August through October 2024, as well as the online archive of the project, and a small_bars printed publication.
The Museum of Modern Art showed a comprehensive retrospective of work by Joan Jonas- an artist who has made a lifetime career of exploring and experimenting with her surroundings.
About the above image-
Wind takes place on a beach in Long Island on the coldest day of the year. Strong gusts batter the performers as they attempt to complete choreographed tasks for the camera. According to Jonas, "the wind became a character and a force," an idea that anticipates her ongoing interest in the agency of natural elements such as air, water, and lava. The mirrored clothing featured in the work also inaugurates a recurring element of the artist's practice: the use of reflective surfaces to create refracted doublings of performers and environments.
Joan Jonas was part of the Downtown NYC art scene in the 1960s and 70s and still has a loft there today. For Loft Law, at Westwood Gallery, documentary photographer and filmmaker Joshua Charow photographed artists living and working in the remaining spaces still protected by the 1982 Loft Law in NYC. It’s interesting to see what the artists have done with their lofts, but it is also a reminder of how much the city has changed, especially for artists just starting out and trying to find places to live and work.
Going further back in NYC history, The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Below are two images from the show but there were so many great artists included, head here or to The Met’s site for more images.
The Spring/ Summer exhibitions came to a close at Canton Museum of Art. They featured- drawing and augmented reality work by Ginny Ruffner; colorful paintings by Laine Bachman; and porcelain work created by Janice Jakielski- who invented a new way of casting and manipulating the ultra-thin material to create objects that at times look like they are made of paper.
The pictures don’t really do justice to the experience of being in Ginny Ruffner’s rooms and watching the earth-toned sculptures burst with animated colorful plant life through an Ipad/phone. She wrote some humorous descriptions of her fictional creations as well.
I posted two Florida murals- one by Nicole Salgar in St. Pete and the other by Thomas Evans, aka Detour, in Sarasota.
Music Monday artists- new songs by Dream Phases, Softcult, somesurprises, and Spiritual Cramp.
Finally, I posted some images from the group exhibition, A Shadow Set Free, at Palm Springs Art Museum.
There is a two wall section in the exhibition, featuring numerous artists. One piece is a sketch study by Eva Slater for San Jacinto Mountains, a painting which is located in another section of the museum. The hard-edge work is a lovely take on the Coachella Valley landscape.
And, that’s all for this week! I hope whether your current landscape is urban or natural, or some mix of the two, that you take a moment to appreciate an aspect of it that is beautiful.