On the fourth floor of a fortunately yet-industrial, local-beacon-like outcropping on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 46th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is the NARS Foundation, an arts organization and residency program. During my recent round of studio visits there as a guest critic, I met with Gunilla Daga, from Sweden; Julie Trudel, [READ ►]
I visited Katherine Jackson in her Williamsburg studio yesterday to get a closer, more comprehensive look at her multifariously formal artworks in light and glass that are abundantly luminous on levels literal and metaphorical alike. While looking at, into and discussing a dozen or so of those pieces—some of which feature incised drawings or [READ ►]
I visited Rosalind Tallmadge in her studio, currently located in Ridgewood, just days before she’d be packing up and shipping off a suite of new paintings to Detroit, Michigan, for her forthcoming solo show, Nocturnes, at David Klein Gallery. Rosalind had ten or so recent works to show me—abstract interventions on stretched silk or [READ ►]
A couple days ago I visited Brett Wallace in his East Williamsburg studio situated in a recently converted minor factory of sorts down the block from ex-3rd Ward. The door to Brett’s chunk of space within this structure is the last on the right down a long hallway of one studio door after another, [READ ►]
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Rico Gatson’s Bushwick studio as he prepares works for his forthcoming solo show at Samsøn Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. It will open this June. While looking and at and making installation-related associations among the artist’s boldly marked, abundantly bright, curiously meta-dimensional, and politically suggestive yet not overtly [READ ►]
I recently visited Lawrence Swan’s studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to talk about and select pieces for Of Plectics, Swan’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Centotto Gallery, slated to open later this month. While discussing works and their conceptual and material geneses, we talked about halved squares, split mandalas, cursive pictograms, pictorial fluidities, implied symmetries, plans interrupted, [READ ►]
During my most recent visit to Kurt Steger’s Bushwick studio I was accompanied by filmmaker Kai Nottapon Boonprakob. Steger’s studio is neatly arranged, a gallery of artworks and processes. Much of the works from his Urban Structures series of sculptures line one long wall, while a workshop table sits towards the rear of the studio surrounded by [READ ►]
Lars Kremer’s basement studio situated near Bushwick’s western border would be brimming all over with quirkily brilliant bodies of work even if its ceilings weren’t quite so low. When I last visited we chatted about obscure arachnids, symmetries and grids, controls and loosenings thereof, verbal pathways unto imagery, comically recraftable chairs, anthropo-ergonomic balloonery, and [READ ►]
I recently paid a visit to Bill Schuck’s studio, a crypt-like lair of curiosity tucked deep into the guts of uppermost Greenpoint. Schuck’s geologically informed, scientifically conceived, empirically iterative, and both temporally determined and grounded works involve meticulously calibrated machinery, gradual drips and capillary seepings of an array of inks, a range of mostly [READ ►]
Elisa Jensen’s studio is in one of my favorite nether reaches of north Brooklyn, up where the grid of streets suturing outerlying threads of Greenpoint and Maspeth, Queens—and with a bit of extension, certain chunks of East Williamsburg—is still almost entirely industrial, and thus still heavily trafficked enough by hefty trucks snaking along to [READ ►]
