Art Hag

Lenore Solmo | Through a Plastic Lens

Artist Lenore Solmo at Compère Collective where her exhibit "Through a Plastic Lens" is on view

Fantastic Plastic! Head over to Red Hook and check out a fabulous new exhibit, Through a Plastic Lens, by Brooklyn-based artist Lenore Solmo.

Presented in three sections or "environmental moments" – "Garden," "Ocean," and "City" – the exhibit showcases incredible works made with found objects including plastic bottles/caps/lids, produce netting, and vintage beads. Solmo transforms the discarded materials into jewel-toned flowers, whimsical mushrooms, iridescent jellyfish, and an urban dreamscape.

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Solmo uses heat to reshape plastic from empty beverage bottles into flower petals, foliage, coral, or spindly tentacles. She spray paints honey bears and mini liquor bottles to create bronze pendants and majestic spires. Mesh vegetable bags become spun gold and gossamer veils.

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Solmo previously worked in fashion accessory design. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, she left her decades-long career for a more meaningful creative outlet pursuing art full time. A self-taught artist, she is dedicated to doing her part to reduce urban waste by repurposing objects found on the streets and transforming them into treasures. The metamorphoses of these everyday objects are remarkable!

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Lenore Solmo
Through a Plastic Lens
Up-Cycled Art Made From What We Leave Behind
Compère Collective, 351 Van Brunt, Red Hook Brooklyn
On view through April 30
More Info

Mark Anthony McLeod | Dear Self

Artist Mark Anthony McLeod and his Bluetooth piece Listen at Established Gallery

"Love yourself" is the message of Dear Self, artist Mark Anthony McLeod’s solo exhibition currently on view at Established Gallery. The exhilarating show features interactive mixed-media works emblazoned with uplifting messages and affirmations.

“I feel like self-love is missing in the world,” McLeod said at the exhibit’s opening on Friday. “I know myself—always in a hustle, always in this bustle in life—and [I] never stop to smell the flowers… never stop to say ‘Hey, I appreciate myself,’ or ‘I need this’ or ‘I don’t need that.’ We’re always saying ‘yes’ to things we don’t need to say yes to. We’re constantly on the go and we’re not stopping to think, ‘What do I need?’”

Charismatic figures populate McLeod’s contemplative and buoyant artwork. Visitors are encouraged to use buttons and knobs to activate the works, switching on lightbulbs or Bluetooth speakers. Five doors—"portals into a different version of yourself,” according to the press release—serve as backdrops to life-size characters. Strewn with playful drawings of crowns, dogs, hearts, and flowers alongside motivational text, such as “evolve,” “dream,” “love,” and “think,” the works invite visitors to write and clip on their own inspiring words.    

Dear Self (left to right): No Excuse, Carpe Diem, LOVE

Stay Royal and No Doubt by Mark Anthony McLeod

Detail of Mark Anthony McLeod's Lady in Pink

Detail of Mark Anthony McLeod's Dive Into You

A message seen in Mark Anthony McLeod's Stay Royal

As a Black man in America, a husband, and a father of three, McLeod feels “pressures from everywhere” in his daily life. The strain of “always [being] on the go” can lead to exhaustion and depression, he notes. McLeod uses his art to deal with the stress. It struck him one day in the studio that he was sending messages to himself through his work. “I started noticing the repeating images and repeating quotes,” he recalls. “And then I noticed…I’m letting myself know, ‘This is what you need to be your best self.’”

Along with directives like ‘focus’ and ‘self love,’ McLeod sometimes includes “obstacles” or disparaging terms on his canvases including ‘fear,’ ‘mistakes,’ and ‘doubt,’ but he cancels out these negative words with bold slashes. “I find myself stopping short a lot, not going through the finish line, worried about what’s on the other side,” he said. “You’ll see a lot of time I’ll put ‘doubt,’ or ‘sky’s the limit’ and I’ll add a question mark because there is no limit. [I’m] motivating myself to keep going. Self-doubt kills. It kills dreams, it kills brain cells, it kills hope. It’s a daily battle to fight that.” 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, McLeod was a creative child. “I was lost in my imagination,” he recalls. “I would always take things off the street and try to do something to it, paint it, reuse it in the house,” he said. “I literally had a park bench in my room. I just love seeing things repurposed. I hate seeing things go to waste.” For Dear Self, McLeod fused mirrors, fabric remnants, clothes pins, and a trumpet into his vivid works.

Mark Anthony McLeod and his lighting piece Enlightenment

It's all in The Flowers by Mark Anthony McLeod

Give Yourself Flowers (Red) and GIve Yourself Flowers (Yellow) by Mark Anthony McLeod

Messages clipped to Mark Anthony McLeod's Give Yourself Flowers (Red)

While studying photography at FIT, McLeod began merging his love of photography, crafting, and painting. When a stall became available at the school’s weekly flea market, he started making functional items to sell using empty liquor bottles he collected from a bartending job. “There are some beautiful liquor bottles. I hated throwing them away…. One day I started making different things, lamps, fishbowls, all sorts of different things.” Though he received some help from an electrician friend, McLeod is primarily self-taught, adding playful electronic components to his artwork, including light-up eyes or speakers that play “Whatever you want… whatever music helps you to heal.”

McLeod wants audiences to interact with his functional artwork. “I want people to be part of it,” he insists. If viewers interact and engage with the work “it gives you that reminder about these affirmations that I put into the pieces,” he adds. “We all need those affirmations. We all need that meditation. We need these constant reminders that it’s okay not to be okay.”

Artist Mark Anthony McLeod poses with family at the opening of his solo exhibit Dear Self

Listen by Mark Anthony McLeod

Along with his current exhibit at Established, McLeod can be found every other weekend in Williamsburg selling his work from his mobile art truck. He launched the pop-up art shop about two years ago, after his mentor, artist Andrew Cotton, gave him the vehicle he previously used himself as a mobile art gallery.

Visit Mark Anthony McLeod’s website marktheartison.com to see more of his work and check him out on Instagram to see when he’ll be out next with his art truck.

Mark Anthony McLeod | Dear Self
Established Gallery, 75B 6^th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view Saturdays, 2pm to 6pm (or by appointment), August 6 through August 29

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D

Marlene Weisman holds her Super Deep 3D Collage 'Cosmic Desert' (2020)

You may need to do a little dance when looking at Marlene Weisman’s Super Deep 3D Lenticular Collages, shifting your stance to examine the many layers that appear to waver and transform right before your eyes.

“It’s John Waters meets Robert Rauschenberg with a little Cy Twombly thrown in there,” Weisman said of her mind-blowing collages, currently on view in her exhibit Life in 3D at Blue Table Post. Composed with kitschy lenticular images (prints that appear to move when viewed from various angles), her Super Deep 3D series blends Waters’ camp aesthetics, Rauschenberg’s use of found objects, and Twombly’s signature scribbles.

Weisman recalled finding a trove of tacky lenticular images at a 99-cent store about three years ago. “I was mesmerized and I said, ‘how can I use these?’” After experimenting with the hypnotic images, layering pieces onto existing traditional collage works, she discovered that some of the lenticular prints were slightly transparent. “You can see type through the images.” She then began scratching windows onto the prints, removing portions of the images to reveal text and images underneath that she either creates or clips out of books, magazines, atlases, and advertisements.

“It all starts as kitsch images—puppies, landscapes, all kinds of camp images—which I take out of context and then work through destructive practices,” she explained. “Some of them look like something you’d see in nature and some of them are pure abstraction, fantasy, or science fiction.”

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D: (top, left to right) Juvenile Heart (2018), Women in Danger (2018). Below are two recent Super Deep 3D Lenticular Collages by Weisman.

Forest for the Trees (2021), Geometric in Nature (2019) by Marlene Weisman

On Time (2019) by Marlene Weisman

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D: (clockwise from top left) Now What? (2019), Portrait of the Artist (2019), Glam Rock (Reed, Pop, Johansen) (2019)

Portrait of the Artist (2019) by Marlene Weisman

Weisman titled the series Super Deep because “it brings you ‘super deep’ into the work” to discover the dreamlike figures, objects, and settings inhabiting the depths of her collages. The works give a “nod to the history of kinetic art,” according to the artist, since they create the illusion of movement and encourage viewers to move around and engage with the pieces.

Born in Brooklyn, Weisman grew up in Queens before her family relocated to Long Island in her teens. She studied graphic design at SUNY College at Buffalo, where she happily discovered a “great music scene” and started a fanzine with a friend. “I listen to a lot of glam rock when I work,” she says. “I love the energy—Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music…”

The music-lover moved straight to New York City after graduation and fulfilled her dream of working in the music industry, creating graphics for Stiff America Records and venues including Area, Danceteria, and Peppermint Lounge. Weisman’s work was also featured in two exhibits curated by Keith Haring that showcased Xerox Transfer Art.

“I was lucky enough to be part of the whole early ‘80s scene in New York,” she says. “I got to have the ultimate New York creative experience. I don’t think people today have had that. We would live on nothing. It was unbelievable.”

Weisman landed a plum position from 1988 to 1995 on the in-house design team for Saturday Night Live, creating on-air graphics and skit props for seven seasons. Demanding work schedules kept her from her art practice for several years until she signed up for a collage workshop in 2013. “When I was trained as a graphic designer it was a very hands-on craft and there was a lot of cutting and pasting,” she notes on the correlation between her design and visual art practices. “That whole cut-and-paste sensibility is really ingrained in me. I love it,” she continued. “The cut and paste, composition, and design, I really think it’s all one thing. I think that it’s just how you see the world.”

Ebb and Flow (2019) by Marlene Weisman. Below left is a recent Super Deep 3D Lenticular Collage by Weisman.

Marlene Weisman's Optimystics collages (left to right) Climatica (2021) and Global Conversation (2021).
"I created these as the new administration came in. I felt like there was such hope when the former administration went out, and Biden went in," Weisman said of her recent mixed media collage series. "I felt like science was back, reason was back, and empathy was back. I was kind of ebullient and optimistic about the future."

Marlene Weisman's Optimystics collage titled Holy Gumballs (2021)

Some earlier works by Weisman are also on view at Blue Table Post. (Left to right) Mod Shopper (2018) and her Pop Art Punchboard assemblage titled 170 Winners (2018)

Weisman moved to Brooklyn about 15 years ago and currently works from Ti Art Studios in Red Hook. “What I love is this art community in Brooklyn,” she said. “I love knowing the other artists. I love sharing the work. I love the feedback. I love going to other people’s shows. It’s so important.”

Weisman planned on debuting her Super Deep 3D Collages at The Other Art Fair in April 2020, but the pandemic shuttered the event, forcing it to take place digitally. The dimensionality of Weisman’s works are better viewed in person and do not translate well online, so she was thrilled when Blue Table Post’s founder, Oliver Lief, reached out to her. “These pieces are very hard to show online so I was so happy to have an opportunity to show them at Blue Table Post.” The post-production studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn regularly exhibits work by local artists. Weisman's Life in 3D opened in June.

Blue Table serves as “a place where the artist community and different filmmaking communities can meet and get to know each other,” Lief said. Though he typically attends the annual Arts Gowanus Open Studio events—as well as last year’s Atlantic Avenue Art Walk—to find artists to exhibit, Lief discovered Weisman online. “I was looking for someone…just digging on the internet and was just struck by the first images I saw [of her work],” he said. “The layering, colors…some of the themes in her work are really fun.”

Fragile by Marlene Weisman (2018)

Otherworldly Buster (2021) by Marlene Weisman

Influenced by Surrealism, Dadaism, Pop Art, Strategic Vandalism, psychedelic art, and more, Weisman’s vibrant, playful works are packed with artifice in myriad layers of hallucinogenic, otherworldly scenes. “It never ceases to surprise me to see the interaction between the layers,” the artist says. “I’m attempting to redefine collage for the 21st century.”

See more of Marlene Weisman's work at the artist's website and on Instagram @marleneweisman.

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D
Blue Table Post, 67 Dean Street (between Smith & Boerum Pl), Boerum Hill, BK
To schedule a viewing of the exhibit, email [email protected].
Exhibit on view through mid-August.

Thornton Dial: The Tiger That Flew over New York City

Thornton Dial, The Tiger That Flew over New York City (1990)

The Lower East Side's David Lewis gallery currently has on view Dial World, Part I: The Tiger That Flew over New York City featuring eight of late artist Thornton Dial’s intricate found object assemblages. Discarded materials including carpet, bedding, clothing, wood, tin, rope, even an animal jawbone, are given magnificent new life in the hands of the self-taught artist.

Born in Emelle, Alabama in 1928 to a single mother, Dial grew up on a sharecropping farm where he started picking cotton at an early age. Receiving very little formal education, Dial worked in many construction jobs, such as a bricklayer, house painter, and carpenter. He was employed as a welder at Birmingham’s Pullman Standard Company for nearly 30 years until the company closed in 1981. Dial retired that same year and began focusing on his art, a hobby he’d picked up in his youth, according to artnet.

Dial met the art collector William Arnett in 1987. Arnett had amassed a vast collection of work by Black—mainly self-taught—artists from the American South and founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in 2010 to house and manage hundreds of these works. Arnett provided Dial with a weekly allowance, offering the artist the freedom to fully devote himself to his art, according to Arnett’s August 2020 obituary in ARTnews.

The current exhibit at David Lewis is named after a 1990 work by Dial inspired by his first visit to NYC. A white tiger glides above the peaked rooftops of the congested city—pristine white skyscrapers towering above bleak tenement buildings composed of brown carpet—representing “the struggle for life, liberation, and justice,” according to the show’s press release. Colorful striped tigers also appear in Dial’s Patterns: Road Map of the United States (1992) and All the Cats in Town (1993), displaying joy and energy in their united fight for freedom.

Thornton Dial, Everybody Loves the United States (2002), In the Making of Our Oldest Things (2008)

Thornton Dial, Patterns: Road Map of the United States (1992)

Thornton Dial, All the Cats in Town (1993)

“People say I make all my art about tigers, but I got tigers in just some of it,” Dial told Arnett in an interview compiled at soulsgrowndeep.org. “Women be in just about everything I have made, in one way or another way. That tiger for me symbolized the Struggle, in the works of life, but women are the creation of the world, at the creation of all works. If it wasn’t for women it wouldn’t be none of us here, and without them we couldn’t make it through the struggle.”

Dial pays tribute to the women who helped raise him in his two takes on the time-honored African American tradition of quilt-making, In the Making of Our Oldest Things and In Honor. “Women was the ones always responsible for me. My great-grandmother raised me up. After she died when I was ten years old, I went to my mother’s sister, stayed there for two years, then come to Bessemer. Sarah Lockett [his grandmother’s sister] took me in and raised me on up,” Dial told Arnett.

“Women are the creation of the world,” the artist continued. “They give love and care, and they also give strength and power. But you got to listen. I always paid attention to what the women was saying, ever since I were a little fellow. Women back then was picking cotton, doing hard time fieldwork, cooking, making, and providing.”

Thornton Dial, In the Making of Our Oldest Things (2008)

Thornton Dial, In the Making of Our Oldest Things (detail)

Thornton Dial, Meat (2003)

Thornton Dial, Meat (detail)

Thornton Dial, In Honor (2002)

Thornton Dial, In Honor (detail)

Thornton Dial, Bone Dry (2011)

Dial’s first exhibition, Ladies of the United States, in Atlanta, 1990, featured work on plywood with house paint, rope, and tin. In an interview with Arnett, Dial recalled a critic condemning the show: “Mr. Dial can’t draw worth nothing and his art is ugly.” Despite this negative early review, Dial eventually found success in the art world. His work was exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions across the country and was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Dial died in 2016 in McCalla, Alabama at 87.

“I like to use the stuff that I know about, stuff that I know the feel of,” Dial told Arnett. “There’s some kind of things I always liked to make stuff with. I’m talking about tin, steel, copper, and aluminum, and also old wood, carpet, rope, old clothes, sand, rocks, wire, screen, toys, tree limbs, and roots. You could say, ‘If Dial see it, he know what to do with it.’” This statement sums up Dial’s work perfectly. The artist had a natural ability to take discarded objects and transform them into showstoppers. Click here to see my 2011 article on Dial’s show at Andrew Edlin Gallery which was held in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Tiger That Flew over New York City is one part of a two-part exhibition of Dial’s work presented by David Lewis. The second part is taking place at 47 West 12th Street. Email [email protected] to schedule an appointment to visit that location.

Thornton Dial
Dial World, Part I: The Tiger That Flew over New York City
88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, NYC
Exhibition on view October 24 through December 20

Upcycling | A Group Exhibit that Transforms Trash into Treasure

Upcycling is on view at 357 Atlantic Avenue through November 1

As part of the massive Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave event that opened this past weekend, six Brooklyn-based artists are exhibiting works created with discarded materials. Upcycling, on display in the window of the bright blue vacant storefront at 357 Atlantic Avenue, wonderfully demonstrates art composed with items that otherwise would have wound up in a landfill.

“Upcycling is all about taking things that have been discarded or unwanted and transferring them or translating them into something with more purpose and more value,” explained Park Slope-based artist Tracy Penn on Saturday afternoon. Penn, who curated the Upcycling exhibit, uses discarded produce bags to create “misaligned” grid-like impressions in her textural encaustic paintings.

Unable to host its popular Open Studios event this year due to the pandemic, Arts Gowanus joined the Atlantic Avenue Business Improvement District to present a socially-distanced, self-guided art walk, exhibiting work by Brooklyn-based artists in the windows of 65 participating storefronts along 1.5 miles of Atlantic Avenue, spanning 4th Avenue to Hicks Street. When the organization announced an open call for submissions for the event, Penn quickly sent her idea of “featuring artists who work with upcycled materials.” 

“Most of my work uses upcycled material and it’s something that I’ve really embraced in terms of the idea of transformation, of taking something that’s been discarded and transforming it into something new,” Penn said. “I’ve always cared about the environment…this is environmentally friendly, but more because of the value added by using these materials and creating something more.”

Six Artists Featured in Upcycling

Along with Penn’s recent encaustic piece, Stronger By the Minute, other works showcased in Upcycling include an aggressive rooster puppet by Manju Shandler created with a cast plastic rooster head, spray foam, mesh, toothpicks, tulle, ostrich feathers, and glass beads, and Mark Anthony McLeod’s pair of dapper figures whose grinning faces are illuminated by the flashes of old-school Instamatic cameras.

Dara Oshin's Nesting, The Gatherer, and Belief, all 2018; Manju Shandler's Cock n Guf 1, 2016

Ward Yoshimoto, You Talk Out Your Ass With a Forked Tongue, 2016; Mark Anthony McLeod's LEVELS and SELF CARE IS, both 2020

Marlene Weisman, Saved Souls No. 18 Gamila Gavini, Seamstress, 2018

A trio from Dara Oshin’s Nest series combines her abstract egg images with both natural and man-made found objects including seeds, two-dollar bills, chains, and dryer lint tucked into small drawers. Four works from Marlene Weisman’s Saved Souls series juxtapose antique tintype images with ephemera and found objects such as newspaper clippings, dice, buttons, and jewelry. And three pieces commenting on the 2016 election from a series by Ward Yoshimoto feature found objects, many unearthed at Dead Horse Bay, including pig figurines, fencing material, doll heads, and trophies.

More About the Curator

A graduate of Boston University, Penn has “always circled the drain” of creativity, working in photography and interior design and toiling in marketing and advertising for years in “art related industries.” She took the leap to fully focus on her own artwork three years ago.

A regular participant of Gowanus Open Studios, Penn misses the camaraderie normally sparked by the event but found this weekend’s substitute art walk inspiring. “It’s usually a very social time for us…we see other people’s work and we have events where we get together in preparation, and I missed that, the community of other artists. We connect online but it’s not the same as being together, so it’s been so nice just being here today and people walking by and seeing old friends,” she said.

Tracy Penn at 357 Atlantic Avenue standing next to her work Stronger By the Minute, 2020

She also enjoyed watching kids “connect to” and recognize some of the materials in the artworks, like the trophies and the cameras, and talking to them about upcycling. “This mom was saying to her kid, ‘We’ve got so many old trophies lying around at home.’ The idea that you can repurpose something and create something better. We don’t always have to buy new,” Penn noted. “We can take what’s there already and create things that are beautiful, interesting, and thought provoking.”

All of the work featured in Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave will be on display through November 1. Stop by and support local artists and small businesses during these challenging times. Go to artsgowanus.org for a map and a list of participating artists.

With the sunny skies on Saturday afternoon casting a glare (or shadows) on the storefront windows, my photos sadly don’t do the artwork justice. Check out the Arts Gowanus page on Artsy for better images of the works.

Upcycling
357 Atlantic Avenue (between Bond & Hoyt)
On view as part of the Arts Gowanus Art Walk on Atlantic Ave through Nov, 1,2020

 

Continuum | Established Gallery

Brooklyn-based artist Gail Flanery celebrates friendship, collaboration, and women artists in Continuum, a group exhibit currently on view at Established Gallery.

L-R: JoAnne McFarland, Free, 2012 and Tatana Kellner, Violent, 2018

While reading Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, which chronicles the careers of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Flanery reflected on her life as an artist and the relationships she has developed with fellow women artists over the years.

“I was musing over the time I’ve spent in my life as an artist here in the city and the people I know,” she said at the gallery Sunday afternoon, “and the women that I have known through this whole period of [our] living in New York and paddling through the art world. I met these women in different ways but all of it having to do with art.”

Flanery was moved by the connections formed by the five artists in Ninth Street Women, “the influence that they had on each other” and “the risks that they were taking” when the arts community was “still a man’s world” and women had to balance their careers with their families. “That really made me stop and think because I’ve seen it. It was not always easy to be acknowledged [as an artist] and to get a show.”

L-R: Gail Flanery, Ocean, 2018 and Damali Miller, Memories of Home Once....and always

L-R: Ellen Chuse, Totem, 2017 and Kathy Caraccio, Victorian Wallpaper I, II, 2016

L-R: Amy Weil, Flowers not for Algernon and Karen Gibbons, Snake, 2018

Doris Rodriguez, Kite Dreams

L-R: Olivia Beens, Flowers of Perseverance, I, II, III and JoAnne McFarland, Positive Shirley, Negative Shirley

It can still be challenging today for women artists to be recognized, making the need for a supportive community crucial. “If you’re a functioning artist and you’re trying to get shows, you’re trying to be seen, and you’re trying to figure out what do…there’s a conversation that you can’t really have with anyone else as easily, as naturally [as another artist],” Flanery said. “There are things you don’t even have to describe because you know they know. There was a familiarity in a lot of [Gabriel’s] writing, just with the relationships.”

After receiving the offer to curate the exhibit at Established Gallery, Flanery faced the daunting task of coordinating the show in three weeks. “That night I tossed and turned,” she recalled, “and the next morning I got on the phone and I just called everybody.” She contacted artists she has known and collaborated with over the years—some for more than four decades—including former classmates, members of the printmaking community, members of 440 Gallery, and colleagues from the Studio in a School program. With the help of assistant curator Mitchell-lee Van Rooij, who is also assisting Flanery with her archives, the pair managed to present an empowering, consistent exhibit showcasing a diverse selection by 14 artists who have paid their dues in the NYC art world.

Born in Ohio to a career army sergeant, Flanery spent her childhood moving every 18 months around the world. “We’d ship out of Fort Hamilton Army Base in Bay Ridge. We’d leave from there and come back there,” she recalled. When her father retired from service, the family settled not far from the base in Staten Island where Flanery completed her last year of high school.

“From the time I was a little kid I’ve always drawn,” Flanery said before fondly telling her “fairy princess story.” During a visit to her grandmother’s farm in Ohio when she was about five years old, Flanery remembers standing outside with her pet cow and seeing a “fairy princess” fly by. “She was exquisite and had amazing wings, long blond hair, and high heels, of course.” While she now realizes it was probably a dragonfly, as a child she excitedly ran to tell her grandmother about her sighting. “I started to describe her and my Grandmother Abigail said to me, ‘Wait, don’t tell me. Show me,’ and she handed me a paper and a pencil.” This sparked Flanery’s passion for visual storytelling. “I always drew from that point on. It started early and it never ended…. Grandma, until the day she died, had that picture taped behind her bed.” she said. “When I became a teacher I often used that as my experience in how…there’s more than one way to tell a story.”

After completing high school, Flanery sold refrigerators in Manhattan for a brief stint before enrolling at The Cooper Union where she met Damali Miller, one of the artists featured in Continuum. “I love that school so much,” she said. “That school picked me up from one world and dropped me in another in such an enormous way.” Flanery recalls making lifelong friends and having incredible instructors at the school, including the art historian Dore Ashton who guided Flanery when she felt overwhelmed. After waitressing at many of the old Soho artist haunts to pay her rent throughout school, Flanery received her BFA in 1972.

Amy Williams, The Hemingway Series

Robin Holder, Copper Leaf Promise

Tracy Penn, Everything is Everything

L-R: Susan Newmark, The Language of Flowers I, II, 2015; Olivia Beens, Flowers of Perseverance, I, II, III; JoAnne McFarland, Positive Shirley, Negative Shirley; Amy Williams, The Hemingway Series

Shortly after graduating, Flanery met Kathy Caraccio whose “unique and extraordinary” personality fostered Flanery’s love for printmaking. “I discovered that I loved process and that’s what [Kathy] gave me,” Flanery said. “I learned so much from her and she gave me such confidence,” Flanery added, noting that she continues to learn from Caraccio today.

“The printmaking world is so small and intense, that everyone who has a shop knows everybody else in the city,” according to Flanery. She adds it was through Caraccio that she met Tatana Kellner who contributed two pieces to Continuum.

In the mid 1980s when Flanery moved from Soho to Park Slope, she needed to find a kindergarten for her son so she visited PS 107. “I went to look in on one of the classes and Olivia Beens was there with Studio in a School,” Flanery recalled. “I had never heard of it but I walk in and here is this artist and she’s really teaching. She’s not doing the turkey hand [tracing] kind of things…. I was like, ‘This is where I want my boy to go to school.’”

After working with Beens as a volunteer for Studio in a School, Beens recommended Flanery as a teacher for the program. Flanery spent the next 20 years teaching art to pre-K through high school students across the city, retiring about six years ago. Along with Flanery and Beens, Flanery’s old friend and classmate Damali Miller also taught for Studio in a School. Other Continuum artists Flanery met through the program include Robin Holder, Doris Rodriguez, and Susan Newmark.

Flanery has been a member of Park Slope’s 440 Gallery for ten years. It was at the artist-run gallery that she met Ellen Chuse, Karen Gibbons, Amy Weil, and Amy Williams, 440’s Gallery Director. Connections with Continuum artists JoAnne McFarland and Tracy Penn were more recently established through the Gowanus arts community.

Flanery’s prints are inspired by nature and feature vast landscapes, open skies, and bold horizons. “I would say palette is definitely my first consideration,” she notes. The deep blue waters in her Ocean complement Miller’s Memories of Home Once….and always. The similarities in the works' colors and lines suggest the synergy between the two longtime friends.

Gail Flanery stands next to Ocean, her monotype with chine collé

Flanery points out the relationships between Kellner’s Almost Gone and Weil’s Flowers not for Algernon, and the conversation between their palettes and grids. Penn's intricate encaustic piece Everything Is Everything is a perfect companion to Newmark's multi-layered collages The Language of Flowers I, II in the rear of the gallery just across from William's entrancing installation The Hemingway Series. “Mitchell and I walked through here and we were both like, ‘Wow. This is such strong work,’” Flanery recalled after hanging all the pieces. “I’m really glad we were able to hang it with space because each piece is so powerful.”

Joyfully explaining Continuum to a visitor at the gallery on Sunday, Flanery noted, “The thing that pulled it together for me is my relationship with these artists. I’ve known them and made art with them 30, 40, some of them almost 50 years in New York, and we never dropped the thread. And the thread was creation…our work. There’s great variety in our work but there’s a strength and a continuum.”

“It was about us keeping on keeping on,” she continued. “After decades it continues. That was the commonality, the artists I knew who have never stopped.”

Continuum
Established Gallery
75 6th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view January 18 through February 9

Studio Visit: Dara Oshin | TI Art Studios

After seeing Dara Oshin's artwork in several group shows around Brooklyn including the Park Slope/Windsor Artists 2019 group exhibition at Ossam Gallery, The Constructions at Ground Floor Gallery, and the 15th Annual Small Works Show at 440 Gallery, I wanted to check out more of her nature-inspired work and was happy to find an opportunity to visit her studio last weekend.

Dara Oshin's artwork on display in her studio

Dara Oshin's 'Ascension' available at 440 Gallery as part of the 15th Annual Small Works Show

On Saturday, December 7, Oshin invited visitors to her sunny, fourth-floor space at TI Art Studios in Red Hook for a studio sale featuring artwork by her and fellow artists Robin Roi and Mahalia Stines. Originally from New Jersey, Oshin studied English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania and minored in Studio Art. She discovered her true calling was art and continued taking various art courses, including a two-year stint studying oil painting at a Paris atelier. She painted for more than ten years but after having three kids found that she needed to switch media because of the toxic chemicals in paint. 

Dara Oshin's studio at TI Arts Studios

Line Drawings by Dara Oshin

A line drawing by Dara Oshin (courtesy of the artist)

A line drawing by Dara Oshin (courtesy of the artist)

In 2016 she began a series of line drawings. "There was a point in time when there was so much bad news...and I was feeling distressed about it and I wanted to do something to bring love into the world and that showed people connecting and loving one another," Oshin said. "This whole project was about spreading love and good feelings and showing what emotional connections are all about." The uplifting, stark drawings unite the figures by blending their body parts "so it becomes kind of ambiguous where one person ends and the other person begins," she explained. "I try to minimize the amount of lines that you actually need."

Works from Oshin's 'Not A Toy' series

Another earlier series, Not A Toy, consists of small interactive boxes filled with a variety of beads and moving objects that viewers can shake, rattle, and roll inside the wooden containers. "I don’t think I ever would have moved into this mixed media world if I didn’t have to move away from [oil painting] and I’m just loving it. I’m loving having no restraints on what I do," Oshin said. The boxes include everyday objects from Oshin's Windsor Terrace home, such as dryer lint lining the edges of the works, and abstract photos of kitchen items such as plates and pans. "I incorporate a lot of stuff from my domestic life into my work," she explained. One image, which suggests a woman's nether regions, is actually a close up shot of the corner of a baking pan. "I was just playing with the idea of women in the kitchen and, it being a toy, women as objects," she noted.

Dara Oshin, Rising and Falling, 2019 (image courtesy of the artist)

Her photographic Eggs series was conceived in her kitchen. "I was boiling eggs for my son’s lunch every single day, and they would burst, and I started realizing how cool they were. Most of the work is really inspired by my life with my family." she recalled. "You can’t fight trying to separate it, I had to just incorporate it into my work."

"They’re just abstract forms. They don’t have to be an egg," she said of the photos. "They’re just these cool forms that everyone can see in them whatever they want to see." Oshin began photographing the misshapen eggs—many of which could be mistaken for sculpture or otherworldly beings—and soon started incorporating the images into mixed media sculptural works. 

Artwork by Dara Oshin

Works by Dara Oshin

Artwork by Dara Oshin

These rustic yet elegant Icons feature images of the distorted eggs on a gilded background embellished with beads and surrounded by twigs, feathers, seed pods, and other natural materials she collects from Prospect Park. Oshin said she gilds the works as a way to "raise nature to a religious level," presenting them "like little altars or reliquaries." She also sews glittering beads onto the images to create a sense of movement and sparkle and to symbolize seeds or Mother Nature.

L-R: Robin Roi and Dara Oshin pose with an elaborate nest they created for a duo show at Ground Floor Gallery in March

"I was feeling really disconnected from nature...and when I started making these I felt very nourished by getting out and constructing them and bringing these pieces of nature into my space and then living with it," she said. Oshin soon discovered that she wanted viewers to interact with the works. "I want people to connect with stuff…pick flowers and stick them in and just continue adding on to them and swapping them out," she insists. "One of the things I like about this series is that it really can be interpreted on a lot of different levels. Some people see completely different things than me and I love that."

To learn more about Dara Oshin, and to see more of her artwork, visit daraoshin.com.

The Constructions | Ground Floor Gallery

Kurt McRobert's signage on the window of Ground Floor Gallery

Ground Floor Gallery’s latest group show, The Constructions, is packed with wonders inspired by the art of Joseph Cornell including sculpture, assemblage, collage, and painting.

“I have a long affair with Joseph Cornell. I love the work. It’s kind of heartbreaking. It’s poetic,” said the exhibit’s curator, John Gagné, during the gallery opening Friday evening. “His kind of working method was [going to] Downtown Manhattan, [into] old bookstores, antique stores, and gathering up all these small bits and then building them into boxes.” 

Cornell (1903-1972) crafted dreamlike scenes with found objects arranged inside wooden boxes as intricate tableaux. The self-taught artist called his boxes "constructions,” Gagné added. Learn more about Cornell and see his artwork at Guggenheim.org and artnet.com.

The exhibit features work by 21 local artists, including Kurt McRobert who hand-painted the eye-catching vintage type on the gallery window.

Clockwise from top left: Jon Bunge, Energy #5, 2017; Tony Stanzione, Glass Punching Bag, 1991-2019; Christina Martinelli, MY MEMORIES/OF YOU/HAVE BECOME/SILENT FILMS/YOU CONDUCT/AN ORCHESTRA/NOW AND THEN/I HEAR IT/CALLING ME, 2018; Rachel Wren, Nevertheless, 2017

Clockwise from top left: Barry Rust, Marsh Wheeling Cigar Box Ukulele, 2014; Barry Rust, Club House Cigar Box Ukulele, 2015; George Horner, Enlighten Up, 2014

Clockwise from left: Andrew Robinson, Jamón in the Marais (For the love of Bruno Lenoir and Jean Diot), 2019; Sophia Rauch, Ghost at Lunch, 2018; Sophia Rauch, Stripe Dot, 2018

Barry Rust’s cigar box ukuleles breathe brand new life into found objects while Sophia Rauch’s “literally constructed” photographic works reinterpret Cornell’s tableaux. Rauch created rich abstract scenes with painting, self-portraiture, cardboard, string, and spray paint, according to Gagné. “I think [this] is the essence of what Cornell was doing,” he said.

Assemblage works include Ward Yoshimoto’s compelling mixed media pieces and Susan Greaves’ ornate frames filled with photos and an array of trinkets. Marlene Weisman’s Pop Art Punchboard assemblages and Saved Souls collages mix vintage objects that evoke different eras. Weisman’s recent Super Deep series combines 3D lenticular plastic panels to create captivating images that transform from different vantage points.

Ward Yoshimoto, At the Bell/Papal Escutcheon/Parking on Left, 2001

Clockwise from left: Susan Greaves' Sir Michael, 2014; Lady Diane, 2014; Demonica, 2014; Little Ruth, 2015

Marlene Weisman, Saved Souls Series - #16, 2017 and Barbara J. Norman's School Kids/Palms/Eyes Small/Bricks/Eyes Full, 2019

Marlene Weisman's Super Deep Series: Glam Rock, 2019; Hudson Valley Abstract, 2019; Geometric In Nature, 2019

“I’m always interested in the materials,” Gagné noted before pointing out Tony Stanzione’s wood pieces filled with hundreds of colored pencils providing an unexpected pop of color, as well as the artist’s Brass Dumbells—a pile of shiny doorknobs transformed into a work of art.

Tony Stanzione, Penciled Logs, 1999-2019 and Tree Project, 2019

Tony Stanzione, Brass Dumbells, 2014

With such diverse artwork showcased in the exhibit, Andrew Smenos decided to display six ceramic pieces. “I wanted to make it as straightforward as possible,” he said. The artist’s three 24-karat gold-lustered figures are fixated on their cell phones while catastrophes surround them—Smenos’ other sculptures of a burning building and a pair of sinking ships. “It’s fun to have them in the middle of the three disasters. They just can’t be bothered,” the artist noted.

Andrew Smenos' Idle Worship I, II, III, 2019; Looks Good Going Down, 2019; Destroyer, 2019

Clockwise from back left: Tony Stanzione, Glass Seed Bomb Prototype, 1990; Barbara J. Norman, Franken-Her, 2019; Jordan Maurice, Light Study No. 11, 2019; Andrew Robinson, Reliquary, 2019; Andrew Robinson Chicken Paw, 2019

When curating the exhibit, Gagné was drawn not only to materials but also to the artists’ practice. Of Jordan Maurice’s Light Study No. 11—a stout aluminum base topped with two 9-volt batteries and wrapped with a simple strip of LEDs—Gagné said, “I love seeing the batteries. I like seeing the process. When I saw that work, I thought that walks right into what I’m trying to show.” The intensive manufacturing required to produce Scott Albrecht’s steel tabletop sculpture Rise also appealed to Gagné. “I’m interested in what these artists are capable of doing,” he said.

George Horner, Putties, 1985 (front) and Scott Albrecht, Rise, 2018 (rear)

Like several of the artists included in the group show, Gagné met Albrecht in October during Gowanus Open Studios. Albrecht created his sculpture last year as part of a series of work that “use the same shapes and relationships, but personify different characteristics or situations,” the artist explained. For Rise, he “took the basic geometry of a circle to represent the sun, but abstracted it and personified it” to represent “rising up, rising above.”

Scott Albrecht and his work Thinking/Feeling, 2017

Originally from New Jersey, Albrecht studied graphic design at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. “A majority of my work is mostly informed by abstracted typography,” he said. Albrecht’s puzzle-like Thinking/Feeling overlays the two words in the work’s title. “Because they are overlaid on top of one another, you’re seeing little moments of each word coming through, but as a viewer you can’t really distinguish the words independently,” he explained. “It’s intentional because those two ideas are conflicting with each other. They’re fighting for your attention, and in the end because they are in direct competition, [neither] can get resolved.” Albrecht adds that his intention is to encourage viewers to slow down and “have them meditate on those ideas [and] find their own relationships.”

Earlier this year Gagné launched Gagné Contemporary, an online gallery where he represents 13 NYC-based artists and organizes exhibits, studio visits, gallery tours, and more. Originally from Canada, he traveled across Europe in 80s and 90s creating experimental films. Gagné worked in advertising as a Creative Director for twenty years, moving to NYC eight years ago. He left the ad industry three years ago to focus on art—his “first love,” he says.

“Gowanus, Bushwick, Greenpoint, Red Hook, DUMBO…they’re filled with really good, strong artists doing great work and I love being able to share that,” Gagné said. Head over Ground Floor Gallery and check out work by 21 of those artists.

The Constructions: A Complete Fabrication 
Ground Floor Gallery, 343 5th Street, Park Slope
On view November 22-December 8
Learn more here.