shop, Uncategorized, visual art

Collectors’ Paradise at Fall For Art in Millerton

Over 20 local businesses take part in Millerton’s Fall for Art, Village-wide Art Festival on Saturday, October 12, from 1-6 PM. Retail business setting aside one day out of the year for the selling of art makes for some high-profile hobnobbing, as well as a day of endless inspiration for art-loving locals.

Hair Modern, at 63 Main shows select paintings by Alex Sanzo. Sanzo’s loud colors layer oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas. Measuring three to six feet across, the paintings would brighten up an ecru interior, injecting any neutral space with life through brilliantly saturated pigments in sanguine color schemes. The painter leaves just enough white of the canvas showing through for the colors to breathe and the pieces to feel uncluttered.

At Meta44, 5916 N. Elm Ave, David Valyou shows capricious sculpture bricolages of Dadaist found objects, sculpted plaster, and paint. New works: brooding enigmatic large-scale wood panel misshapes serve as dark grounds for aggressive mark-making: cutting into an alchemy of marble dust suspended in painted acrylic medium. Layered heavily in acrylic and marble on wood panels, bone-white abstract waterfall paintings of various sizes are fraught with kinetic textures over gradient reliefs.

“Bed Of Nails” Bricolage Sculpture by David Valyou, Photo By Tara Nugent

At Veteran’s Park, keep an eye out for Mitchell Hoffmaster showing palatable paintings with soft color schemes and whispery sketch lines in acrylic, pastel, and oil stick on canvas. Also at Veteran’s Park, Tilly Strauss’ painterly bucolic landscapes of the nearby region are clever visual captures with Fauvist color harmonies. Her highly collectible miniature acrylic paintings on paper (about 3” x 4”) of farm scenery are as hip as Polaroids, and even more rare.

Acrylic Paintings on Paper by Tilly Strauss

Patty Mullins exhibits at Oblong Books, 26 Main St. Mullin’s rich etheric paintings show deftness of color and a studied application of oil paint. The landscapes build up organic-shaped patterns in warm tones over mottled and vacuous blue and green receding grounds in oil paint on small boards and canvases. New landscape paintings by Mullins are on view this Saturday.

At Millerton Mercantile on 3 Main St, Shira Toren shows select two-dimensional works. Repeated minimalist abstractions go over smooth negative space applied in subtle visual textures of muted chromatic greys in pigment, ink and plaster on canvas.

Swamp Boats 24”x20’ Venetian plaster, ink and pigment on Canvas by Shira Toren

Feast your eyes on the abundant art from eclectic to classic, at Fall For Art Millerton. The harvest mood not only applies to enjoying the great local agriculture, but also to the wellspring of creativity flourishing within the region. Enjoy strolling about the changing colored foliage and you may find an original work of art made by a living artist to take home with you.

Uncategorized, visual art

Stefan Beauvais Solo Exhibition

art

Stefan Beauvais Solo Exhibition opens May 9 6-9PM. The exhibition runs May 9 – 18.

at 3Squared Gallery

157 West 24th Street, Chelsea, New York 10016

Uncategorized, visual art

Get Love

By Noel Hartman

There’s something both subtle and overt about the newest work from perfomative sculptor Cat Chow, on display now until March 30th at “I Love You Bedford” in Williamsburg. For instance, “Passive/Aggressive,” the elegant arm’s length “gloves” linked together from strands of wire and chain over porcelain found-object hands into a webbing that barely conceals the arm yet calls conspicuous attention to only one very impolite finger.

Installation View, “shoe me the dove right meow” at I Love You Bedford

This is the kind of provocation in which Chow specializes, mixing noirish sexuality and refinement with a vulgar gesture of defiance. Chow, whose residency — “9 Lives” — will be on display next year at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, offers us a pinch of seduction with a wallop of satire. That’s the central tension in her work, and it’s very much in keeping with the Dada spirit that inspires Chow, whose work is also on display in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Found objects spring to life in a kind of militarized feminine form with her dress, which is also currently on display at “I Love You Bedford.”

passive/aggressive series 2016 Porcelain, wire, chain

The dadaists, whose hundredth anniversary is being celebrated around the world this year, strove to attain a state of creative detachment that re-conceived the very idea of art and even pursued modes of anti-art in their revolt against bourgeois society. With its chain-mail vest made of brass and skirt of venetian blinds, Chow’s “Dada” reassembles found objects and offers testimony to Dada as the biggest influence on the development of modern art in the 20th century.

Chow’s reckoning with Dada also comes out in her “Exquisite Corpse,” which looks like a kind of transparent glass hope chest containing a pile of crushed bird feathers, the hands of discarded mannequins and a heart-shaped pillow with enough heavy embroidery to remind one of what a burden love is.

Chemise 1999 Plastic, brass

Chow’s mathematical, minimalist aesthetic has made her a favorite of collectors for more than twenty years, often because her subtly subversive humor appeals to the thinking side of one’s fashion sense.

One added benefit of the current exhibition — entitled “shoe me the dove right meow” — is that it also functions as a kind of career retrospective and features many significant works by Chow, such as the iconic “Not for Sale,” a slinky, form-fitting evening gown woven from a thousand shredded dollar bills. (Behind the dress, you’ll find an honor roll of the thousand benefactors who each gave Chow a dollar bill to create the dress.)

The chain-mail formation is one that Chow mastered early in her career and put to good use in many other instances, including a chain-mail dress that was made of Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger trading cards. The Power Ranger dress and others, including a hausfrau gown made entirely of 1950s era tape measure, let Chow show off her prowess for subverting and toying with conventional notions of femininity, often with unsettling effects.

Exquisite Corpse (detail) 2015 Mixed media

Exquisite Corpse 2015 Mixed media

Perhaps the most famous of her works, the zipper dress looks sleek, sharp and light, but it is also made entirely of zippers. One cannot help being in awe of its aesthetic achievement, just as one cannot avoid the impression that only a harshly Victorian tolerance for pain would ever allow a living woman to wear it.

For a little relief from all those harsh lines — you can turn to the high-concept and lush collection of sustainable fashion designer Alisha Trimble, whose “Blanche DuMois” line of lingerie provides a complementary foundation for all those shackles of chain-mail brass and plastic.