May 11, 2024
Independent New York marked its 15 years long run this weekend downtown. And once again, art lovers were treated to a wide ranging selection of contemporary art that encompassed painting, film, sculpture, and mixed media. Dozens of galleries from as faraway as London and Houston were on hand to present the work of more than a hundred artists. The Fair runs through Sunday and some of it can be viewed online.
Dustin Emory; Long Story Short
“Working in oil, acrylic, and pumice, Emory approaches the canvas and his personal life with a haunting, dream-like realism and his signature grayscale. As if dancing between the unconscious and immediately recognizable, Emory repeats a formula, mining its possibilities: a figure, a curtain, a spotlight. Working in tightly cropped compositions and rendering his subjects from close range, Emory fixes the viewer into a voyeuristic gaze, revealing dynamics of power and control.”
Oscar Santillán, 1’111,111, 2023 Sneaker shoes structurally aged to a million years; Copperfield, London.
“Oscar Santillán is interested in connecting distant points: the sweat of a person with the beat of drums, paper made out of a medicinal tree with Nietzsche’s typewriter, or bringing together the breeze displaced by a running jaguar and a marble container.”
Jen Fisher, Hemmed Just Beneath the Flowers, 2024; F, Houston
“Jen Fisher (b. 1981, Florida) lives in Queens, NY. For the last eight years, Fisher has been engaged in the elongated performance Vortexity Books, selling books on the street in the East Village on St. Marks and Avenue A, a performance which she concluded earlier this year. Recent exhibitions include HARRY SMITH’S SHIRT, F, Houston, and numerous book related events such as Book Works et al., organized by Sequence Press, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. A renown poet, Fisher reads and organizes readings regularly throughout New York City. Her books of poetry include In the Mud, Desuetude Press: Portland (2020) and Going Home is Leaving It, F, Houston (2024).”
Tom Uttech, Nin-Babishagi, 2022, Alexandre Gallery
“Alexandre is pleased to present a selection of recent paintings by Tom Uttech (American, b. 1942). Uttech’s small and large-scale landscape paintings depict the remote wilderness of the Precambrian Shield—a vast expanse of land that spreads across southern Canada, Minnesota, and his native Wisconsin. Uttech renders woodlands, lakes, swamps, and rivers with a magical realist precision that illuminates the majesty of this precious landscape, part of the ancestral lands of the Ojibway people.
“Presented in Uttech’s own hand-made and painted frames, the works carry a luminosity and detail that invokes medieval altar pieces. Almost all works are set “in the crepuscular light of dawn and dusk.” Uttech writes: “When I am there at this time of day and with a clean and empty mind a door opens for me to enter a state of tranquil ecstasy.” This is an emotional state he seeks to entreat in the viewer as well.”
Anna Tsouhlarakis, HER MAN THINKS HE’S A HUNTER BUT HE CAN’T EVEN TRACK HER, 2024
“When I started making work, I loved the idea of constructing and problem-solving—and sculpture comes down to problem-solving,” Tsouhlarakis says. “Building three-dimensionally is something that came easily to me. But gradually it became less about materials and more about how I could put the stories and experiences of Native Americans more bluntly and straightforwardly out into the world.”
(L) 4 paintings by Marty Schnapf, Diane Rosenstein Gallery; (R) Janis Provisor, Say It Straight, 2024, Halsey McKay Gallery