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Adjacent To Life, presents Scratch Frame Painting by Caroline Koebel. Curated by Mark Roth. Essay by Jennie Klein, Ph.D.
Caroline Koebel’s exhibition Scratch Frame Painting features 28 12x12 inch paintings from an ongoing series initiated in 2022. The intimate scale enables Koebel to make and store these paintings in her partner’s East Village studio/apartment and in her small 19th century home in Columbus. Koebel began her career as a filmmaker, writer and conceptual artist in the early 1990s. In comparison to her earlier work, Scratch Frame Painting is something of a departure.
Koebel has long been fascinated by analog technology and the historical processes and techniques in the development of photography and film. Her decision to use black and white acrylic paint recalls the experimental work of 19th and early 20th century photographers that included William Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins, John Whipple Draper, and Barbara Morgan all of whom advanced the new technique of photography to make botanical, astronomical and scientific images. The look and feel of the paint frequently has a glossy texture that is similar to albumen prints, while the crispness of the lines and shapes is reminiscent of the detail in daguerreotypes.
The early days of photography were a wild west of experimentation with light, chemicals, developing, and printing fixed images of anything and everything. Quite a few of these photographs, including Atkins’s botanical contact photographs, Whipple Draper’s image of the moon, and Morgan’s images of nuclear fission, were very abstract. Scientific and medical photography were as important as photographic portraits and landscapes. Photomicrography, produced by using a daguerreotype camera that was stabilized over a microscope, yielded fantastic images of amoebas, viruses, bacteria, and other microscopic dangers that were not apparent to the naked eye. Photography was also mobilized slightly later as a tool for documenting surgical treatments including amputations, horrific injuries resulting from trench warfare, and rudimentary attempts at plastic surgery.
Koebel’s 28 paintings arranged as though they are two rolls of film have parallels with this early work, much of which was made prior to the invention of film. The artist’s process of applying layers of either black/white or white/black paint and then delving in with a palette knife or drywall tool is akin to photography by way of a simultaneously additive and subtractive action. Regarding how Koebel’s paintings become occasions for the investigation of the materiality of paint, Eva Hesse’s positing of material as both subject and object comes to mind. The synthetic paint reinforces the scientific/clinical feel; the forms produced are hard edged and clearly defined. They recall the equally hard edged and clearly defined photomicrographs as well as the glass slides that fixed (and killed) the microscopic subjects that were documented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The variation in the surface of the paintings, a result of the generous use of paint, recalls the unruliness of Atkins’s contact print botanical cyanotypes, a wildness that had to be tamed to a contact print in order to prevent the picture from becoming too confusing and incomprehensible when translated into a two dimensional black and white image. Koebel’s abandon with the paint gestures as well to the excess of photography, an excess that is produced by the promise of the Real, even if that reality, as Roland Barthes argued persuasively in Camera Lucida, is already dead, an image of the past rather than the present. The ridges, the gouges and the unevenness invoke a previous moment in which the material was not fixed and remained malleable.
When seen altogether, there is something uncanny about Koebel’s stark black and white plastic paintings that are simultaneously sculptural and nonrepresentational. The disordered tectonics reverse the quiet eeriness of Man Ray’s Rayographs, spare arrangements of small objects that become monumental as they are translated into black and white contact images. Koebel does the opposite by removing the object and leaving only the traces of its mark. Scratch Frame Painting is about destruction and dissolution, a psychotic, corporeal break rather than a dreamlike hallucination.
Koebel’s intervention recalls Late Modern artistic experiments with film that involved scratching, splicing and modifying the film itself, as seen in the work of Len Lye and Carolee Schneemann, both of whom viewed the film strip as another object whose surface they could manipulate, scratch and splice. Lye’s best known film, Free Radicals (1958), was created by scratching designs on 16mm black film leader with objects that included a dental tool and an ancient Native American arrowhead. The images were rather problematically synchronized to a field tape of the Bagirmi Tribe, whose lands border Lake Chad. Free Radicals won second prize at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, a testament to the enduring power of the colonizing impulse in avant-garde art.
Carolee Schneemann’s 1971 Fuses, begun less than 10 years later, eschewed primitivism in favor of female eroticism from the perspective of Schneemann’s beloved cat Kitch (whose creations have been exhibited on this very same wall). The film depicts Schneemann and her then lover (and husband), composer James Tenney, joyfully making love for 29:51 minutes. Fuses was made as an homage to a man that Schneemann had lived with and loved for ten years. As a painter, Schneemann felt free to be even more experimental than Lye, examining the celluloid itself and fearlessly burning, baking, cutting, and painting it. Schneemann dipped her footage in acid and built collages from the layers of film, holding those layers together with paper clips. Fuses was filmed over three years with borrowed, wind-up Bolexes.
Not surprisingly, Koebel’s films are similarly manipulated, a combination of her own footage, found material and re-filmed images, which are seamed together with pastiched audio clips, film “noise” resembling the glitches found at the beginning of the film strip, and stroboscopic effects. Scratch Frame Painting can be read as a trajectory in Koebel’s artistic project, an extension of the films that Koebel made earlier. For hole or space (2006) a 3:22 color/black and white 16mm film (also available as a digital video) Koebel employs early cinema and avant-garde classics as compositional notes: Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894); Crissie Sheridan Serpentine Dance (Edison, 1897); Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924); An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938); Tarantella (Mary E. Bute & Ted Nemeth, 1940). Only two of these performances are recognizable as quotations: Edison Manufacturing Company’s circular film of contortionist Luis Martinetti (1894) and Crissie Sheridan’s 1897 Serpentine Dance, performed by making circular forms with her clothing. There are quite a few circles in this film, which conveys the rest of the footage with large circles, a lively yellow circle, and smaller revolving circles in formations that reference the more abstract work of Ballet Mécanique, An Optical Poem and Tarantella.
There are altogether 10 paintings featuring circular forms attained by pressing a tool into the paint layer and rotating it with varying degrees of force, opening passageways from the surface to the substrate. This is particularly evident in Scratch Frame Painting Overflow 3 (2023), where a circle is scraped out of paint that had overflowed off of the surface of another painting. Koebel collects these “overflows” in order to make paintings that like hole or space become pricks, dots, dashes, or openings spiraling out from the body–in this case the artist’s own body. In exploring how interiority is made visible by its external signature, Koebel’s paintings find congruency in the work of Ruth Asawa.
Koebel’s film Repeat Photography and the Albedo Effect (2008) repurposes Martin Scorsese’s black and white classic Raging Bull (1980) to address climate change and glacier melt. Using a Bolex 16mm camera, Koebel reshot the fight scenes, which she then hand processed and juxtaposed with National Public Radio reportage and Katie Paterson’s audio project, Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2008), made from the sounds of a melting glacier. The violent imagery of Raging Bull is followed by a blank white screen while the disembodied voice of an NPR reporter explains that the Mingyong Glacier, situated at the foot of the Khawa Karpo, a mountain named after the protective warrior God who took up residence in the mountain bearing his name, is rapidly retreating and likely to disappear by the end of the 21st century. Koebel’s film takes its title from the albedo effect, a process by which the glacier reflects the sun’s rays away from the earth, preventing it from overheating. The final portion of the film returns to the footage from Raging Bull, this time set to the trickling water sounds of Vatnajökull. The violence of the boxing match is mitigated by solarization, a reference to the power of the sun, whose destructiveness is belied by Paterson’s deceptively soothing soundpiece.
With Scratch Frame Painting, Koebel draws from Lye and Schneemann, embracing analog work and the marvel of film through direct means to mark and score the paintings. Schneemann deliberately made her 16mm film into an object that she could transgress. Koebel goes even further, retreating away from experimental film and back to painting, an art form that had been all but dismissed at the end of the 20th century.
Koebel’s film ethos conjures the unboundedness of bodies, which overflow the frames of the film just as melting water overflows edges, containers and barriers. A self-avowed FemAbEx artist, she is inspired by Abstract Expressionists Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner. She is also influenced by the work of Amy Sillman, who embraces doubt, unknowability and intimacy in her oil paintings. Koebel is interested in “nature’s complex relations of randomness and patterning, order and chaos, energy and inertia, force and resistance.” She seeks to “embolden painting as a ground zero for such dualities.”
Like Schneemann, who came to film through Abstract Expressionism, Koebel probes the relationship between the actions of the body and the canvas, expanding the range of work past the borders of the canvas through her own agency. Whereas Schneemann’s journey began with male Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Koebel’s inquiry begins with the Pictures Generation, Postmodernity, Douglas Crimp (who curated Pictures), and Craig Owens (author of “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism”). There is excess in Koebel’s work, but it is controlled excess rather than the excesses of “primitive soundtracks,” oil paint and raw meat.
Brian Wallis’s 1984 anthology Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation includes an essay by Thomas Lawson entitled “Last Exit: Painting.” In 1984, painting seemed to have run its course. Incapable of making grandiose statements and inspiring new art movements that might have been included on Alfred J. Barr’s 1936 chart of modern art, painting had become a last exit, a means by which Lawson could expose the fallacies of media representation, which for Lawson meant television and newspapers. In 2024, painting is no longer a last exit. Rather it is a new entry.
Making physical artworks has a very different meaning now than it did in the 1980s, an analog decade that saw itself as cutting edge. Today, embracing the analog is a radical strategy that eschews the plethora of social media noise in order to return to the purity of making. Koebel’s proliferating Scratch Frame Painting insists on taking up space. The discipline of Painting and Drawing is still alive and well in most art schools and universities. Lawson was wrong when he argued in 1984 that painting was a last exit. Instead, it has continued to be a productive entrance to craftsmanship, embodiment and meaning.
Jennie Klein, Ph.D.
Professor of Art History
Ohio University School of Art and Design
Jennie Klein writes about contemporary art, particularly as it intersects with feminism, new media, and performance. Her current project, Blessed Be, addresses the intersection of historical feminist art, Goddess feminism, and the urgency of climate change in contemporary art.
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Scratch Frame Painting is on view through November 15, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist's reception: Friday, October 18, 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life, presents Blobsquatches by Mark Roth.
Mark Roth’s paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature.
Roth contends the resilience of Bigfoot speaks to the persistent yearning to see primeval nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own.
In a blobsquatch the circling line is the essential component for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. In these works the artist has made it his quest to locate evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Here the encircling lines of the blobsquatches are drawn from painting referents where the composition rotates around a central locus. This target-like shape utilizes the notion that a bullseye represents an apogee of yearning – in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.
Blobsquatches is on view through October 17, 2024 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Strangers and Family by Elizabeth Hatcher Williams.
Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
The photography of Elizabeth Hatcher Williams captures the choreography of intimacy. Composing a narrative from stills of daily life, her work illuminates the ways in which we mirror, invite, close off, and hold space with others.
The genesis of this project came after reviewing eight years worth of photo negatives that Hatcher Williams had yet to use. Pulling images that were strong and arranging them together, an unconscious theme embedded throughout her work emerged: the exploration of the intangible familiarity that connects us. Over the past year and a half, Hatcher Williams continued to shoot new work documenting the dynamics among close friends, total strangers, and between artist and subject.
Hatcher Williams has a natural sensitivity for composition, lighting, and perspective. Equipped with a small point-and-shoot film camera, she records quickly and generously her environment. “The word I keep using to describe [the work] is ‘incidental,’” she explains, “I’m allowing the scenes to come to me.”
Moments of friendship, solitude, joy, and connection are revealed in her photographs. Some subjects are aware of their participation, others are not, yet in each image there is the sense of a tender observer. “You're constantly interacting with people, you’re responsible for holding that person within your atmosphere whether they know it or not” says Hatcher Williams, “[as an artist] you're responsible for telling some kind of truth about them and responsible for that person's right to intimacy with you.”
- Marisa Malone
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Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
Strangers and Family is on view through September 20, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist's reception: Saturday, August 24, 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Random Reflections by Jack Tricarico.
Jack Tricarico is a New York City painter and poet who has lived on the Lower East Side for more than 40 years. He began studying art at the age of 12 at the Art Students League of New York, and later at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited his paintings in New York art galleries in one-person shows and group exhibitions since 1963.
He states: "Art has always felt as a necessity for me. I develop an image exclusively on impulse based on my immediate reaction to a blank surface. This reaction is primarily chaotic. Gradually an underlying structure arises, reflecting an interconnected whole."
His poetry has been published in poetry journals and anthologies in the United States, Europe and Mexico. He recently published a book of poems, Selected Poems, Jack Tricarico".
Random Reflections is on view through August 23, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist's reception: Saturday, July 27, 5:00 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Gesture Generations by Sigrid Wendel.
Marisa Malone writes:
Sigrid Wendel’s practice embraces nonlinear paths of discovery, responding intuitively to what emerges rather than imposing a narrative. This series of ceramic sculptures are the confluence of influences, the subconscious, and trust. Guided by the tug of intuition and a desire to build off her previous series, Gestures (a grouping of abstract forms themed around the body's contortion, unfolding, and change), these pieces began to materialize and ultimately take the shape of something deeply familiar to Wendel: that of her mother’s doodles.
Thin slabs of clay curl and drape gingerly against a solid shape, others cut angles more severe and energetically; while not intentionally setting out to echo her mother’s aesthetic form, the fact that this occurred was not altogether surprising. “The word that comes to mind is relief,” says Wendel, “like ‘oh that’s what I’ve been working on this whole time!’ I’m reinterpreting my mom’s unconscious style.” Her mother’s doodles–sketches in the margins, designs in the borders of cards and notes–were impressed on Wendel and have transformed through her.
The transformation continues into the next generation as well, as Wendel was pregnant with her daughter while making this series. These sculptures are a translation, a dialogue between generations (mother and daughter) and mediums (drawing and clay), making visible the unseen imprint we leave on one another.
For Wendel, creating this work has been a testament to “trusting that the process means something, even if it's not precisely clear from the [start], and to trust that whatever I'm making is a product of all the things that are filtering through me.” We can let this serve as an intimation for us as well.
Inspired by what arose while making this series, Wendel and her mother are in the process of collaborating, drawing from her mother’s extensive archive and creating new work together.
- Marisa Malone
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Sigrid “Siggi” Wendel is an artist, teacher, and writer based in Alphabet City. She grew up on the California Delta and in the woodlands of Western Massachusetts before studying politics and visual art at Yale University. She’s passionate about mutual aid activism and co-teaches a Yoga for Climate Justice series at the Sixth Street Community Center on Thursday evenings, open to all. She made the majority of the work in this show (inspired by her mother) while pregnant with her own daughter, Cuinna: her most ambitious creative endeavor to date.
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
Gestures Generations is on view through July 26, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist's reception: Saturday, July 20, 7:30 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Everything Must Go! by Matt Hart.
From the gallery statement:
Matt Hart was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, spending much of his youth and young adulthood engrossed and participating in the vibrant art and music scene of the SF East Bay (Oakland/Berkeley) throughout the late 1980s and into the early double zeros when he relocated to the Chapel Hill/Durham area of North Carolina until 2019. Matt now resides in Boulder County, Colorado where he makes a living tattooing “permanent” pictures on the skin suits of his fellow impermanent human beans.
Between spending years on the road hitchhiking and train hopping around the Americas, Matt went to several community colleges throughout California, eventually attending art school at the California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC) in Oakland and San Francisco on a full printmaking scholarship in the late 1990s, graduating with distinction in the Fall of 2001.
Alongside his fine art career, for decades Matt has happily made flyers, t-shirts, gigposters and record covers for many of his favorite bands throughout the country and abroad. Matt Hart has exhibited works in California, Oregon, Washington, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York and North Carolina and has been a part of several traveling exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.
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Everything Must Go! is on view through June 28, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, June 1, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Indigo by Sandy Van Iderstine.
Van Iderstine states:
After studying art history, my career as a senior fashion executive traveling throughout the world visiting art galleries, museums and art fairs, conversing with artists, curators, writers and gallerists has enriched my passion for art. More recently I have been involved with the Modern.Toronto, a contemporary private art museum, and I assisted my partner Ben Woolfitt with the execution of his exhibition and catalogue Rhythms and Series at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Being immersed in the art world and having the opportunity to see many outstanding works of art, with exposure to the distinctive techniques of historical work by great artists like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Turner and 20th century painters such as Matisse, Avery and Frankenthaler inspired me to experiment with paint to express myself creatively.
For this new exhibition titled Indigo, I utilized the colour Payne’s Grey (Indigo) with washes and collaging. I enjoy working with this dramatic colour as it produces rich shadows with subtle blue undertones which emerge when diluted with mediums, gels and water. The collaged pieces are acrylic skins from the palette which provide textural contrast when applied to the canvas. Together they produce a mysterious and layered surface.
My paintings are done flat so that I can view the piece from above. I continue adding layers by pouring or spreading the paint and if the work seems tentative or disjointed, I make drastic changes to strengthen the piece. I use a palette knife to manipulate the paint to balance the density, space, texture and colour until it is cohesive image.
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Indigo is on view through May 31, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, May 4, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Strange Days Indeed by Tracy Thomson.
Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
In Tracy Thomson’s latest paintings we see a shift further into abstraction, the interior space often present in her work is breaking down even more. There are suggestions of walls from the straight lines that cut across an otherwise fluid and layered background. Yet these walls are transparent, unable to fully contain or mark a solid distinction between spaces. There is a juxtaposition of boundaries: inside vs outside, the built environment vs wilderness, containment vs irrepressible growth.
These paintings emerge from an intuitive practice that mirrors nature’s building and restructuring of itself. Working with mixed media on wood panels, Thomson starts by painting pieces of cut paper, then plays with their arrangement seeking interesting contrasts, textures, and shapes. There is a lot of permission in her process, an allowance of happenstance and spontaneity. “I call them reconstructed paintings,” she explains, “[the process] can feel like the world rebuilding itself, no urban planning, just life regenerating wherever it can.” Even with such immediate aesthetic decisions, we can see her work in conversation with painters such as Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka.
Thomson imagines future landscapes with a mix of a post-apocalyptic vision and a persistent hopefulness, “I always think that organics will regenerate in any environment, providing a continuum of life, though it will look quite different with unfamiliar beings and new flora and fauna.” Her work unearths possibilities of what this new scenery might look like. Our experience of a landscape rapidly changing in ways we have yet to understand is a recurring tension for Thomson.
Long interested in the unseen elements that shape us and our environment, this series probes the underside of rocks, logs, the psyche, culture, and myths; “I’ve always been fascinated by what is hidden beneath, the underbelly in both nature and human nature… the unseen liminal space in the night.” Her work speaks to the messy, layered, symbolic elements of creation, destruction, and adaptation. The collaged paper, thick coats of paint, embedded metallics, and found imagery, all combine to create a unique and uncanny world.
- Marisa Malone
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Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
Strange Days Indeed is on view through May 3, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, April 6, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Car Show by Cooper Ronan.
@c0000000000per's statement:
As one could probably gather, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the cars that sit on the streets of New York City. Battered and war-torn from wild drivers, winter weather, street sweepers etc., these cars screech loud and proud, puttering along, only to potentially break down the next avenue over.
My appreciation of cars started at an early age with the usual Scholastic book fair poster on my wall and watching BBC’s Top Gear. Ironically, it was the repetitive walks I would take, in whatever neighborhood I lived in at the time, that I found myself daydreaming of these cars. Everywhere I looked, they taunted me with their roadside freedom. Scratched, crashed, dented, rusted over and in need of repair, all waiting in single file lines along every block. It doesn't make sense really, in a city so walkable, with public transportation built into the infrastructure, and “No fucking spots anywhere!” – Why would anyone have a car in this city? What drives us to hold on to these pieces of highly manufactured garbage, expensive repair after expensive repair?
It's obvious really, they're icons. Symbols of a limitless and immediate reality, of dreams realized or lost, of extra space held in a city that can feel so small. Above all, there’s hope welded into their chassis. They represent us as people. We slap stickers on the back bumpers, boasting our political beliefs, brands we like, or silly jokes we think will align with someone behind us. We raise them up, drop them low, add suspension, tint the windows; they’re our personalized motor companions. Their iconography is nostalgic, they remind us of the dreams we once had when we held child-like bewilderment for toy cars, now actualized as functional motor vehicles.
Car Show is a return to that boyhood glimmer in my eyes. It grapples with my simple interest in cars and how that’s informed an entire construct in my life, such as notions of masculinity. It’s a car-centric coming of age, distracted and fixated on aesthetics while crossing the road from boyhood to manhood. It is both an escape and acceptance – so utterly boy, it hurts. Beyond all, it is a love letter to these icons and my younger, present, and future self’s infatuation with them.
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Car Show is on view through April 5, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, March 9, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents pepi do it by Pepi G. Friedman.
Caregivers take photographs of children, especially when they are young. But what does a child see? The works on display here, compositions “made” and images “taken” by an infant, conjure classic debates about meaning and signification in photography. Can photos index the will of an author whose thought, prior to speech, is largely instrumental? In the case of an artist only partially initiated into any community of language and representation, it would seem impossible to glean intentions from photographic effects.
Audiences often ponder what exactly an artist meant to convey, but the author’s subjectivity operates here on a different plane. With these photos we encounter intention not in the symbolic language of composition, but in the manipulation of a device, in the claim to a tool in the representational world of adults. Pepi seized our phones with purpose (we fretted; should she be engaging with technology so young?). This exhibit recognizes her declaration: “I am here. I am part of this community, even if I have not yet mastered its languages.”
With these interventions, Pepi interrupts our habitual documentation of her as a passive object of affection. She pulls the brakes on the 24/7 recording of her life. Some photographs seem to carve out significance from the morass of everyday experience. Others render — by accident, surely? — pleasing abstract forms. Altogether, they provide an occasion for you, the viewer, to recall memories, to make connections, to invent stories, and to engage in your own subjective experience.
- Andrew Anastasi and Rose Friedman
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pepi do it is on view through March 8, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, February 10, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Dark City by Dina Litovsky.
Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
What is a city without its people? Photographer Dina Litovsky shows us it’s disorienting. “During COVID the city became nonsensical,” she says, "there were street lights guiding no one, signs and advertisements became useless…it’s like a segment of a dream. You're not exactly sure what is going on.” Photographed during the height of the pandemic while taking hours-long walks at night, Dark City encapsulates the dreamlike, dystopian reality of that time.
The title of this exhibit comes from a dystopian sci-fi film of the same name. These photos nod to the film's neo-noir aesthetic and combine the isolation often felt in the paintings of Edward Hopper. “I love artificial light sources, like the way Hopper used them,” she says, “I was looking for light sources from street lamps, headlights, neon signs, and windows.” There is a voyeuristic quality to this body of work. A roving eye that seeks life in the dark.
Beyond this series, her style can be described as confrontational, using flash and vivid color much in conversation with her mentor Bruce Guilden. Guided by her interests in people, sexual politics, and subcultures, Litovsky documents her subjects in such a way that feels revealing of some unspoken truth or understanding.
Finding photography after studying pre-med and psychology, she continues to observe human behavior from behind the lens. It has also changed her own behavior, “I’m an extreme introvert,” she says “but with a camera I'm a different person. It gets me out to social events I wouldn't feel comfortable going to otherwise.” The proof of which is in her photographs – up close, bold, and intimate.
- Marisa Malone
Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer living in New York City since 1991. Dina's imagery can be described as visual sociology. Her work explores the idea of leisure, often focusing on subcultures and social gatherings. Dina is a regular contributor to National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, New Yorker, GQ and New York Magazine. In 2020 Dina won the Nannen Prize, Germany's foremost award for documentary photography.
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
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Dark City is on view through February 9, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Friday, January 12, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Some People by Nathan Stapley.
Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
This exhibit marks the 10th anniversary of artist Nathan Stapley showing at Adjacent to Life gallery. Doubling the number of paintings, 40 in total and all from this year, Stapley presents us with scenes of life in New York City and around the world.
With the method of en plein air painting, Stapley captures a moment in time. His impressionist style creates a duality within the work; what appears at a distance to be a crisp, almost photorealistic landscape, upon closer look dissolves into a blur of brushstrokes and paint. Stapley excels at going beyond what the eye sees, expressing and augmenting a mood or feeling through quality of line, color, and spontaneity. There is a notable softness throughout his work; the way light hits the top of a building or illuminates the leaves of a tree, these paintings express a tender view of our world and cit
It stands out that few people populate these scenes of what we know to be a bustling place, but it’s not lonesome or desolate. Rather, there is a quietness, a sense of familiarity and intimacy. This is the magic of Stapley’s work, depicting a world that belongs to everyone and making it feel uniquely our own.
Some People is on view through January 5, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Friday, December 8, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents The Man in the Higher Castle – more artifacts from an alternate timeline by John Tebeau.
John Tebeau returns with a selection of newspapers, magazines, 8-track cartridges, record albums, children’s books and cereal boxes acquired from a thrift store residing in an alternate timeline of the 20th and 21st century.
The artist explains the emergence of this parallel narrative:
“In a nutshell, here’s how that timeline diverged from ours: President Dwight D. Eisenhower underwent safe, professionally administered and 100% legal psychedelic therapy for trauma following his 1955 heart attack. (See NYT-1956.) After all, psychiatrists in the ‘50s effectively used LSD to treat anxiety, depression and addiction with minimal risk. Once his ticker was healed up, Ike went for it, and in three sessions confronted his innermost challenges and, at the height of his (and the nation’s) power, came through “a better man.”
“Eisenhower’s vision of himself and the world was forever altered, and as Ike went, so went the nation, including his bundle-of-neuroses vice president Richard M. Nixon. At his boss’s urging, Nixon gave psychedelic therapy a whirl, and, lo and behold, he too came out a better man. He whupped JFK in 1960 (the cool, self-assured “New Nixon” mopped up the floor with him in the debates) and became the best version of himself. No paranoia, no loser-boy, chip on his shoulder, no sweat-drenched upper lip. He took Ike’s aggressively enlightened agenda and ran with it. Read the stories in NYT-1963. (Happily, JFK had a much better November 22, 1963 in that timeline, and lived to the ripe old age of 88, dying in bed –- natch – in 2005.)
“In short, the psychedelic revolution was officially condoned, medically normalized, and ubiquitous.”
The exhibition is on view through December 1 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Infinite Constructs: The Fractal Architecture Series by Aleko Syntelis.
Aleko Syntelis’s Infinite Constructs: The Fractal Architecture Series explores architecture as a mechanism to reveal what they describe as “the mesmerizing complexity and beauty of recursive structures.”
Historically, society harnessed natural resources, bending and shaping them to give birth to architectural marvels. Infinite Constructs takes this transformation a step further. Through the artist's lens, architecture—once a testament to human ingenuity—undergoes another metamorphosis, bending and folding into new, unimagined shapes that challenge our perception of space and material. This series invites the viewer to a space where the walls between the natural world, societal constructs, and artistic reimagination blur and intermingle.
In this body of work the artist explores the built environment as a “relatable approach to psychedelic art.” While the world of art has seen interpretations of fractals and kaleidoscopic patterns, Infinite Constructs carves a niche of its own. What sets this series apart is the maintenance of structural integrity. These aren't just random or chaotic bends; they are calculated, precise, and informed by an understanding of architectural principles. Unlike typical kaleidoscopic art, which might lose the essence of its origin in the pursuit of patterns, Infinite Constructs ensures that the essence of architecture—the strength, design, and purpose—is preserved, even in its transformed state.
Syntelis’s recombinant photographs posit that even the most Brutalist of human constructions contain the same iterative structure of self-similarity across scale as does nature. This suggests that architecture - and other human assemblages - maintain an expression of nature and as such might be accessed as a source of abstracted spiritual refreshment in a manner comparable to that of an excursion into untrammeled wilderness.
In these images, ostensibly static buildings are recast as objects of contemplation in the form of interstellar, interdimensional crafts. Ready to survey worlds interior and exterior, these fantastic, gravity-liberated vehicles welcome the viewer into the driver’s seat to experience expanding symmetry as the pervading architecture of nature --- a story of transformation --- from nature to architecture, and from architecture to art. It prompts viewers to ponder upon the spaces they inhabit, the materials they encounter, and the infinite possibilities of reimagination.
Infinite Constructs: The Fractal Architecture Series is on view through October 27, 2023 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Monday, October 9, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Mythological Narratives at 10 & B by Emma Enriquez. Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
While Artist Emma Enriquez’s work begins from a personal place, often a feeling, it inevitably extends into the collective, “I think connection is really important,” she says, and “I think we’ve lost that and we need to find a way back to it.”
Her work sits at the intersection of technology, history, and culture. Combining German Expressionism with Mexican Muralism, she speaks to her German-Mexican lineage, and layers over it a love of classic sci-fi and horror - which conspire to create a unique spin on these traditional forms.
Her work often expresses imaginative scenes from remote eras (like the Mexican Revolution). During her research, Enriquez noticed there are “a lot of parallels in what was going on [in the past] and what is going on today - a dismantling of grand narratives.”
She wonders, “what would it be like if there was a freedom fighter who stepped through a portal into today's world?” Under the growing specter of an AI-dominated world, Enriquez playfully recasts her figures into an imagined digital-like realm; “I’m trying to find positivity in the future,” she says.
Hidden within her richly layered paintings is a kind of alternate dimension, quite different in tone and feel. When shown under a blue light, details are submerged and glowing fluorescent lines and patterns, once hidden in plain daylight, emerge. Her figurative imagery transforms into a more abstract and futuristic scene. From her work we can sense tension around the narratives and technology that separate us from one another. During an age that is characterized by isolation and fear, she presents us with portals into other worlds that might help us see our own in a new light.
- Marisa Malone
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
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Mythological Narratives at 10 & B is on view through September 22, 2023 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, August 19, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Mood Portals by Andrés Marino. Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
Andrés Marino’s first solo exhibit, Mood Portals, is an homage to the multiplicity of the self and the unconscious. It is a study of what emerges when we cut through the noise.
While making art and music on and off for most of his life, a dedicated painting practice is fairly new. His technical limitations become a constraint with which he generates images that surprise even himself. With a nod to Surrealist techniques of drawing one’s unconscious to the fore, Marino often starts a painting “faster than I feel comfortable with,” he says. “Then stuff starts to emerge and I’ll play with that.”
Accepting the challenges of being a novice with humility, Marino explains, “if I can do just well enough to communicate the idea then it’s fine. [S]omething photorealistic. . . isn’t my goal, and inadvertently (and luckily) I come through.” There’s something to be said for work that is less filtered to bring us closer to the artist's initial impulse.
Marino’s paintings are part meditation on the self, part pure creative drive. “Identity stuff is a big deal,” he says. “I get viewed in certain ways and, consequently, I view myself in certain ways. It’s a pain in the ass.” We see this grappling take place on the canvas, addressing themes of selfhood, cultural hypocrisies, and inside jokes with a wry sense of humor.
Considering his approach, it’s no surprise there is a range of styles and subjects, reflecting the plasticity of identity. “Even though [the paintings] are all different,” says Marino, “there’s something cohesively coming from me.”
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
Mood Portals is on view through August 18 at the Adjacent To Life gallery hosted by Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Spines by Mark Roth and Leon Brown. Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:
I imagine going through artist and curator Mark Roth’s sketchbooks as something akin to an excavation, an archaeological dig through decades worth of material. Writer Leon Brown can attest it’s much more intuitive than that. At Adjacent to Life Gallery is the collaborative show Spines, featuring text by Brown paired with selections of Roth’s archive, on view from June 9th-July 14th.
Roth’s sketchbooks are dynamic in their function, “there's a diaristic aspect, there's free drawing, there’s collage, there's all sorts of permutations of how I use them,” Roth explains. One hundred and thirty sketchbooks in total, Brown and Roth went through all of them, selecting at first instinct which pages to show and narrowing it down to twelve books. “If we thought about it too hard,” Brown says, “we might have not done it.” They chose to avoid taking too critical an approach by simply asking themselves “what do we like?”
Through this process a dialogue formed between the text and the artwork. Brown’s distilled evocations bring us into a moment in time that’s been captured in Roth's sketchbooks, tying in themes that are present, not just within the pages on view, but within the books as a whole. “I like that all the information that is concealed or behind the scenes is relevant,” Roth says. The spaciousness of the text, both visually and narratively, in conjunction with Roth’s images, allows us to enter into these scenes, letting us feel what they are like rather than be told. “The test for these things is people's enjoyment of it and if they get an experience from it,” Brown says, “and also whether or not each of the contributions inhabit one another and I think they do. In my mind now they’re inseparable.”
Brown’s writing is sensitive to the images, colors, and energy in Roth’s work. “The love and attention has been put into trying to speak to the art and, where possible, contribute to what Mark’s captured,” says Brown, “the shape and the form of the words on the page are designed to be as sympathetic to the artwork as possible.” One of Brown’s strategies for this was to refrain from naming any colors. “The color field ones are particularly interesting,” notes Roth, “because in a way any one can work but it changes everything.”
Within this collaboration is a clear appreciation for one another's work and trust given to the process. “The idea hasn't needed to go through a number of different conceptions, we just did what we said we were going to do and it’s been a wonderful experience,” says Brown. “The generosity of Mark to give us access to his archive is extraordinary and I’m really grateful for that. It’s a privilege to be part of the reason to show it and get it out there.” The privilege is extended to us to not only get a glimpse into Roth’s impressive catalog but, through Brown’s granular sense of language, inhabit a world it helped inspire.
- Marisa Malone
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
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Spines is on view through July 14, 2023 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Tuesday, June 20, 7:00 - 9:00.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Días de Admiración by Alex Reyes. Marisa Malone contributes the following essay:
“The thing I find both impressive and instructive about Reyes’ practice and person is his trust,” says curator Mark Roth. “He delves into his canvases with abandon, trusting the process and his impulses and curiosities to conjure forth something novel, something authentic, something fun, fascinating, and profound.”
On a recent studio visit, Roth and myself sat with artist Alex Reyes to discuss his latest work being shown at Adjacent to Life Gallery under the title Días de Admiración (Days of Admiration). Emerging after his Dark Series, these pieces express a subtle shift in tone. Surreal in style, full of distorted shapes and figures, and thick with paint that rises off the surface; nothing appears in stillness. There is constant movement and tension. The marks are active, unable to rest quietly on the canvas and we can see the influence of such figures as Goya and El Greco to Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, and child art.
Reyes’ work appears deeply subconscious to me. Creating comes first, analysis after. These paintings carry references to Reyes’ childhood memories and current life. He is unafraid to change course in the middle of the process, to follow the thread of a thought or feeling as it unfolds before him. “If I get something in a moment,” says Reyes, “and then lose it, I just keep going. The best part of being an artist is that it isn’t like the end of the world.”
Roth expands this idea, “left unsaid is the corollary that it isn’t the end, because it’s the beginning. Reyes’ trust extends to the inchoate. His paintings maintain the sense of becoming; all options are plausible. A “finished” work might at any time return to the easel to embark on a new journey. In this way the paintings are reminders and a demonstration that all lived experience is emergent and irreproducible.”
And there’s humor. The piece titled Erotic Hat is darkly funny, portraying a hat made out of the top half of a bird and the lower half of a woman. This surreal, somewhat unsettling image is also cartoonish and goofy, the dainty woman’s legs dangle as the bedraggled bird holds in its beak a book titled The Britannica Sampler that’s collaged with vintage porn. “I love comedy so much,” Reyes says, “I think that’s what’s fun about being a human, laughing is important in my book and being able to joke freely.”
The way Reyes describes his paintings is like telling a story that can only partly be expressed in words. There exist little worlds within worlds, strange surprises that catch your eye and keep you looking longer, opening you to the possibilities of your own imagination. “Deep down it’s my inner child having fun,” Reyes says. As viewers we’re invited to do the same.
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
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Días de Admiración is on view through June 9, 2023 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Paintings at Tenth Street 2023 by Peter Stankiewicz.
Stankiewicz's statement:
Trying to do something a little surprising with spraypaint (mostly for the background) and airbrush. Still keeping away from using an actual brush, with which I find it hard to do anything fresh. Still trying to get colors to fit together. Still trying to create atmosphere in a picture.
No brushwork, no fine facture, no ‘hand’. No drips, almost. No canvas texture.
Not even a complete mark but one abraded and scraped away.
Still, one can compose pictures by putting colors and gestures together.
Phantom painting
Meteorological excavations
Geological forecasts
Raw, awkward, unpolished
Little or no facility, only a sensibility.
Uncertain formulations, no geometric proofs involved.
Dark and comfortable moods, frozen fireworks
Nocturnal or subterranean roots
Wages of a youth spent watching the moon through the studio window.
Spirits without names or stories, absences.
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Paintings at Tenth Street 2023 is on view through May 12 at the Adjacent To Life gallery hosted by Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents The Past Sealed Away by Deborah Carruthers. Marisa Malone conducted the following interview with the artist:
Deborah Carruthers’ work is built from layers of research, history, and mediums compounded into dense yet clear evocations of our evolving climate.
Showing at Adjacent to Life are two bodies of work, Allegory for a New Ice Age and Re-Viewed: the Athabasca Glacier.
With a childlike curiosity and a researcher's attention to detail, Carruthers creates work that embodies the depth of her topics. Every detail is intentional and rooted in the subject matter. Using research as her foundation, her creative interpretations can expand way out, taking shape in multiple forms and mediums, including sound, paint, photography, text, performance, and even mud.
Talking with Carruthers you get the sense that her eyes are wide open to the world and her ideas have free reign. Following her intuition and interests, she magnifies hidden worlds that most of us might overlook, and in doing so shows us their beauty and importance.
The following conversation took place over email.
When did you become interested in the climate and climate change issues? Was there a specific moment or event you can recall that sparked something for you?
Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the Laurentians, north of Montréal, Québec. My father had grown up on a farm close to where we had our family cottage on Upper Rainbow Lake. To me, it was paradise: a log house with no electricity or running water that was at the head of a pristine lake that only had 2 log houses on it (excluding the beaver lodges). A spring with the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted was less than a minute from the cottage. Growing up all I wanted to do was spend time there; it was a place that I knew better than my own skin, and our neighbours were the wildlife. I grew up alongside them and recognized many of the creatures that came back year after year.
I would often canoe down the lake to the bay where the loons nested, and swim with them. In the early 1970’s, when I was about 12 or 13, I’d noticed that there were often cracked eggs on their nests, and that their breeding success was greatly diminished. I kept a lake diary for about 30 years: I’d sketch the moose, birds, fish, frogs, toads, and insects; their nests and eggs, draw maps, record weather, record behaviour, disease, and anything else that caught my attention. I was able to see the difference that acid rain made, and more importantly, the effect of people upon places.
I saw the way that people clearing plants and trees to the shoreline changed not just the immediate ecology, but the ecology going way back into the forest. That putting in cutlines for electrical towers and roads for logging changed behavior, not just of the creatures that would normally live there, but of the people that shared their space.
I’m just 63 years-young now, and still spending as much time as possible in the Laurentians, alas no longer at that lake. The time that I spend up there has always coloured how I view other places and spaces.
Did you study art in university or have you found your way to it through other channels?
In university, I initially graduated with a double-major: a specialization in Psychology (psychopharmacology- aka brain chemistry) and a major in community development. Some years later, I decided to go back and study Biology, both molecular and ecology, didn’t finish the degree.
I really became aware of the arts as a vocation when I was 7. My family was visiting the American pavilion at Expo 67, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. As you rode the escalators through this enormous open space, there were these massive abstract paintings by artists such as Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, and most importantly for me, Helen Frankenthaler. She had this wonderful 30’ x 16’ painting, Guiding Red (although described on the works list for the exhibition as Painting for Expo, 1967). I’d never seen works like this before, and not at this scale, and hers absolutely transfixed me. It was the first time that I was struck by the idea that this was something that one could DO – as a vocation!
I’d always participated in the arts: spoken word, painting, drawing, photography, and decided when I hit my 40th birthday that I was going to fully go for it. When I hit my 50’s, I decided to go for my masters degree in studio arts. I can’t ever imagine not creating now.
I love the Allegory for a New Ice Age work! What a coincidence that you should come across these toy dinosaurs emerging from the snow as you’re on your way to a climate change meeting. Can you tell me more about what this work evokes for you?
Thank you! It evokes so so many things for me… (lol – one of the things you may start to notice about me is I obsessively overthink my work – all tangents welcomed!).
So… initially the images themselves were striking: plastic dinosaurs emerging from the snow- could there be a better trope related to climate change?! As images, what makes these works believable on another level is that they truly are emerging from the snow as it melts rather than being staged. They are our contemporary woolly mammoths, though not nearly as friable! You can look at the literal implications, thinking about the evident effects that discarded plastic has on the environment coupled with the extinction events of dinosaurs.
However, it also makes me consider ideas of intergenerational memory as relates to environmental issues, in the manner of the philosopher Matthias Fritsch (especially as he relates in his book Taking turns with the Earth: phenomenology, deconstruction, and intergenerational justice). When we do nothing to take action now, we are showing clear indifference to our future generations.
Can you go into more depth about what drew you to create the works in Re-Viewed: the Athabasca Glacier?
I’d done a research trip to the glacier in 2017 preparatory to my residency at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, a think tank at the University of British Columbia where I intended to do further work on glaciers and ice. I started looking through my files for images, looking for some of the original journal articles. Then, I found a file containing printouts of travel reviews of the Athabasca Glacier on TripAdvisor and Yelp.
The absurdity of these reviews gobsmacked me:
FUN, BUT NOT WORTH THE MONEY.
IT’S NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL.
A SIGHT THAT WAS A LITTLE UNDERWHELMING.
THE WOW FACTOR JUST WASN'T THERE FOR US.
After wondering whether these people had indeed been to the same place as me, I reflected upon what they would have seen.
The differences of scale of the environments and vistas one can see on the glacier vary from majestic to microscopic (the philosopher Gaston Bachelard got it right in his discussions of “immense immensities”).
As the people who wrote the reviews had the opportunity to view the glacier as closely as they wished within a given area, I chose to represent the intimate views of the ice that I was privileged to see when I was there: lying prone with my face to the ice. This was a view that they too could have chosen.
I often think about how intergenerational memories are formed: how they’re held, expressed, become part of us and of those who come after. Could their impressions of this glacier influence the impressions of later generations? Could its importance to our environment and the devastation of its loss be diminished by the casual reviews of visitors?
I chose to create these intimate, though not mimetic views of the ice on the birch panels, whose diameters evoke the ice cores. The titles of the individual works are quotes from travel reviews of the glacier and are stenciled as 3 repeats around the edges of the paintings. The reason I used stencils for the text is that stencils are often used to label the crates used to transport the ice core samples.
Looking at the works face on, I could recall that feeling of immersion in the ice, of looking for the past sealed away. Seen obliquely, the text of the review is seen, and provides a different perspective of the view, albeit not as poetic.
What sparked your interest in ice specifically?
My interest in ice started about 10 years ago during a visit with some bee-researchers – (see what I mean about tangents?). En route to one of the research pavilions, we passed these strange, empty metal racks on wheels with V-shaped shelves. When I asked what they were for, the researchers told me they were for ice cores, and started telling me about how labs were amalgamating their ice core collections because of budget cuts. The more questions I asked, the more alarmed I felt. This triage resulted in many core samples being discarded, and their invaluable information irretrievably lost.
And so I started to think about ice and what its loss could mean. These ice cores provide invaluable information regarding not only the anatomy of the glacier, but climatic, geologic, ecologic, and anthropologic conditions both local and global.
When I first started my research, I came across this quote in a book of short stories:
"Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays." - Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
I knew at that moment what the title for the new series should be (and I highly recommend this book! Knowing a title for the series allows me to begin to focus on the aspects of the work that I want to delve deeper into.
Your work is rooted in research and often science based. Would you say that these modes of investigation help you to create art more freely? Put another way, to use research as your foundation do you feel you’re able to expand in more abstract or inventive ways on the topics you’re addressing?
Definitely. I also feel that at times my work provides an opportunity to contribute to theoretical scientific or artistic knowledge. An example could be found in the exploration of the Anthropocene through examination of historic samples of honey, thereby providing a perspective not only of climate and other environmental conditions over time in specific areas, but also a timeline for the Anthropocene that is human rather than geologic in its scale. This was an idea I started exploring at the Peter Wall Institute, and there are research nodes currently exploring what that could mean for climate research.
In expanding upon that initial work, I look for the inherent poetics: what are the dreams of bees, and what forms do their nightmares take? What games do they play, and what are the outcomes? How do they pass on their histories, memories and maps, and what would those look like?
I often call researchers of papers that really grabbed me to tell me more about their work, and sometimes that leads me to the fascinating stories about following their gut feelings to what grabbed their initial interest and why – I mean, you don’t often have their papers describe that!
What is your process for choosing which medium to work with on any given project?
When I first start exploring something, I read and watch and take in everything, with minimal editing. I’m interested in how things grab attention, and why they do. I’ll print out journal articles and chase down literature and philosophy.
I want to go places and see things for myself; talk to the people who wrote the articles and books, and music and poetry about them. I take photographs so that I can capture in the moment what caught my eye and provoked even more questions. I’ll print them out, large format if I can: usually 24” x 36” and put them up in my studio. I’ll even print them out on regular printer paper and carry them around, adding notes, tearing or folding them up, taping them into my idea books. They are my aide memoire and more. They are truly my souvenirs in both meanings of that word for me: in English they are my tangible mementos, and in French they represent my memories and remembrances.
You’ve done some interesting sound compositions that use your physical art works. What is the process like to create these pieces and their accompanying scores?
When I paint, it allows me to process, focusing the visual, the theoretical, and the abstract and is often the point at which I really begin to hear the work. I sometimes create studies to play with individual or tangential ideas as I go, pausing work on the central piece. I seem to want to do bigger pieces lately…the one I’ve just started is 5 ft x 10 ft., but the studies can be anything from 4” to 24”. Once the big painting is done, I generally have a sense of what the graphic score could be like. I then start with the outline for the instructions for play.
I fold into the score the elements I want to emphasize from that narrative and begin to play with what that aspect of the score could look like; how could I depict playing the past in the present, for example. With Slippages, I had bespoke paper made with random openings; these openings allowed the past, or what could be seen through the hole from the sheet or sheets below, to be played in the present with all the other elements on the top sheet.
Your work tells stories beyond that of your personal experience. Your “eye”, so to speak, seems directed outward towards the world and your surroundings rather than an internal landscape. Is this a conscious choice on your part? Do you draw from your personal life to interweave into your practice?
Sometimes outward and inward landscapes feel indiscernible.
I think a lot about solastalgia, the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s idea, that considers the distress that we feel when our environment changes, but we are unable to leave. This distress can arise from something catastrophic, like earthquakes and tornadoes, or from the sound of trees being cut down by chainsaws on a city block. Imagine what it is like for species whose habitats are being irrevocably changed with no means to leave. Or to consider that glaciers indeed have agency but are unable to compete with human’s abilities to contribute to global warming. Although we talk about history repeating itself (and it does certainly seem to – we aren’t the best at learning from experience), the rate and degree of change is alarming.
My personal life interweaves: the Athabasca Glacier I saw when I was 10 is not what I saw when I was 57, and it was disturbing. The bullfrogs at the lake diminished so much in number from when I was 5 to 25 that it went from deafening and constant at dusk to mostly silent and occasional.
Is there a medium that you feel particularly at home in? What was your first entry point into art?
I’m fickle. Every time I think I have a “one true love” because of how it enabled me to express exactly what I wanted at the time (think paper and acrylic ink with slippages), I inevitably find myself enamoured deeply with another. I think that switching mediums, for me, keeps things fresh and pushes me to experiment.
Mud was probably a first entry point, both sculpturally, and as a medium with which one could paint. I have continued to play with it in some form or other since then.
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
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The Past Sealed Away by Deborah Carruthers is on view through April 14, 2023 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Friends & Family by Clay Chivers.
From Chivers' statement:
"I picked the theme, Friends & Family, for this photo show for a couple reasons. First, I’ve been drawn to the sense of community I have encountered since moving here. I have been lucky to meet and build relationships with people from all over and different backgrounds. Having no immediate family within thousands of miles of here these people have become my New York family. Many of these photos here are of my close friends, and some are of people I may have only met for a brief moment, a short chat, just long enough to snap a photo. I think it’s also important to be part of the community around you, looking after each other and uplifting others when and how you can.
"Secondly, I am lucky to be close friends with such talented individuals who continue to inspire me with their creative abilities and supportive demeanor. It didn’t hurt that they also happen to photograph really well. There are so many others that I would like to add to this show but the wall is only so big and film ain’t cheap!"
Friends & Family by Clay Chivers is on view through March 17 at the Adjacent To Life gallery hosted by Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Provisioning Beauty: The Shopping Bags of Dorothy Thurman.
Dorothy Thurman is an archivist, documentarian and historian. Her practice started with the simplest of motivations: an appreciation for the design, materials and beauty of shopping bags.
This appreciation - coupled with a rebellion against disposability - formed the genesis of what has become an active, substantial archive of retail shopping bags.
Focusing on Manhattan, the collection chronicles decades of shopping and provisioning, forming a time capsule of successive mercantile eras in the life of the city.
The archive also represents a diaristic catalog of a particular shopper, an individual living their unique life in interaction with a specific temporal economy -- an individual, in this instance, who is always attentive to surrounding beauty – even that of alleged ephemera.
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Provisioning Beauty: The Shopping Bags of Dorothy Thurman is on view through February 16 at the Adjacent To Life gallery hosted by Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Two series, Gestures and Focail Farraige, by Sigrid Wendel are currently on view at Adjacent to Life’s home in Ninth Street Espresso.
Walk in and you’re greeted by a graceful wave of fragmented pieces of clay, each captured in a different state of motion. As they appear to glide across the wall, collectively forming a larger abstract shape, it is reminiscent of a flock of birds diving and curving in unison or leaves gathered up and tumbled by the wind. This is her Gestures series. Started during the pandemic, these pieces twist, unfold, curl, open and close, in much the same way many of our lives have during this time. But the idea is bigger than this moment, it explores the elasticity of our sense of self.
“On an artistic and personal level, I’m interested in what it means to “hold one’s shape” vs. changing to fit the expectations or conceptions of other people or societal norms” says Wendel, “the gestures emerged as a way of reflecting on those undulations—opening and closing oneself to the world, navigating constriction and freedom—both in regards to the pandemic and my own personal journey.”
Each small piece can be appreciated as a single, stand alone object as well as be arranged in many configurations in relation to other pieces, reminding us that the outline of the collective is both formed by and contains the individual.
Further along the wall is her Focail Farraige series. Several abstract forms serve as an ode to how language reflects the connection a culture has with its environment. Each piece is based on an old Irish word that relates to the sea. This is made all the more poignant by the fact that the Irish language, though taught in schools throughout Ireland, is not widely spoken and thus falling out of use. “The fact that the people who spoke and lived in this language were so observant and connected to nature to have evolved this incredibly specific and (in my opinion) beautiful language makes me want to slow down and tune into my senses and experience of the natural world around me.”
While considering how language acts as a filter of our experience, Wendel began to ask herself “what small phenomenon am I bustling past? What happens when you quiet down long enough to tune into something as specific as water pulling at pebbles on the shore at night? How does that change your relationship to the natural world and your place within it?”
Wendel has Irish roots and grew up listening to her grandfather talk about his Irish family and traditions. But her relationship with Ireland really took hold when she began spending every summer helping at a family friend's Bed and Breakfast on Sherkin Island, off the coast of Baltimore in County Cork.
“When not making pancakes or putting laundry on the line, I would go on epicly long walks and really lose myself (or find myself more accurately) in nature. There’s a wildness that is allowed to breathe there and a magic that can transform you if you open yourself to it. The experiences I was having in Ireland did not easily translate to English, and so I turned to Irish songs and then to picking up bits of the language and folklore.”
Through her research Wendel found the book Thirty-Two Words for Fieldwork by Manchán Magan, an Irish writer and documentary filmmaker, particularly inspiring. “One of the points he makes in this book is that it's worthwhile to remember not just the simplest, most streamlined definition of a word, but its deeper connections to mythology, history, and culture.”
A few of Wendel’s pieces are based on the following:
Suaitiú: The sound of the ocean pulling at pebbles on the shoreline at night.
Calm Leaidí: A sea smooth as a plate, so rare as to be called Leaidí, a term of affection.
Tine Shionnaigh - Literally means “fox fire.” A term for bioluminescence seen in the ocean on dark nights.
Often language can be a limited form of expression, difficult to or falling short of capturing the essence and experience of our thoughts and lives, however, Wendel understands these words to be “a window not only into the language, but of the world perspective that it holds.” Creating physical forms to capture the feelings and ideas behind them serves as another window through which we can open ourselves to a new language and perspective, one that starts from the senses.
Wendel found her way to ceramics after creating her own “DIY MFA” by taking advantage of the many classes and workshops taught by working artists here in New York. “I took classes in anything that even remotely piqued my interest—encaustic wax techniques, screen printing, oil painting, acrylic painting, collage, mixed media…” While learning much and appreciating the cross-discipline experiences, Wendel still felt like she was searching for her medium, “I wanted an artistic home. I wanted to fall in love.” Things clicked for her once she took a ceramics class offered through the Educational Alliance at the Manny Cantor Center, “I was pretty instantly hooked…I loved the organic nature of the material, the patience and humility required of the firing and glazing process, and the recyclable nature of clay that allows for experimentation.”
In each series, we are presented with contradicting elements highlighted through the use of clay; the abstract and the tangible, the pliable and the static, idea and object. Wendel’s pieces are all hand built and skillfully utilizes clay’s inherent duality of softness and rigidity to create tension within the work; making something still appear in motion, something fluid fixed. “As I've developed my handbuilding practice, other mediums I've worked in have certainly come into my pieces, particularly welding. When working with metal, I always wanted to “pervert” the medium – make something hard and rigid appear fluid and weightless. I like stretching clay in similar ways – seeing how far I can push its limitations.”
Throughout her work we see a grappling with the complex relationship between language and perception, our relationship to nature, and shape given to the invisible forces that inform our way of being. There is the notion of someone looking, listening and feeling closely to their surroundings in her practice. “My favorite definition of an artist,” Wendel says, “is ‘someone who pays attention.’ It just sounds like a great way to walk through life: paying attention to the details, moments, emotions that you might otherwise miss. I try to bring that practice to clay.”
- Marisa Malone
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Sigrid Wendel spent her earliest years living on a flotilla of boats and barges in the California Delta before moving to the woodlands of Western Massachusetts. She studied political science and visual art at Yale University and has lived in the East Village for ten years, where she is currently working on several visual and written creative projects, primarily in the mediums of clay and flash fiction.
More of Wendel’s work can be found on her website: Sigrid Wendel Ceramics.
Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.
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Words + Images: Sigrid Wendel is on view through February 3, 2023 at at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Dog days 2022 by Nathan Stapley.
From the artist's statement:
"For my ninth year showing here at 9th street, I decided to paint in acrylics on wood panel. This is a change from the last handful of years in which I painted exclusively in gouache. I like the way the brushstrokes and textures come through on the panel and I am slowly trying to get myself back into oil paintings. These paintings are observations starting from about June, from around New York City, my home now for 14 years. The greens of the trees are starting to fade from the bright neons of spring and into the more browns and oranges of late Summer and into Fall. I was lucky enough to spend some time in Maine in June and have included a couple of pieces from there as well."
Dog Days 2022 is on view through January 6 at the Adjacent To Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents OUT OF THE SYSTEM by Orianne Cosentino.
From the artist's statement:
OUT OF THE SYSTEM is a small show of large work, a mix of excerpts from the Q U O T A painting series.
The newest abstractions are a departure from the usual Q U O T A landscapes which are largely literal except for the NYC parking tickets that are collected from the ground and collaged into the marrow of each work. For almost two decades those contemptuous pieces of found paper have been a stable base from which to create this series.
Steadfastly incorporating tickets initially represented (to me) the luxurification of NYC and the exacerbating changes of living in a place that was blowing up so quickly - for lack of a better way to put it. We are far past that now living in a complex habitat of determination, exhaustion, love and confusion, in whatever order, seemingly often reprocessing familiar processes. Still here, but not giving up on growth.
Experimenting with abstraction (painting, writing, thinking) forces decisiveness and ushers in newness. A fresh pattern to free old energy, to release stagnation and to invigorate.
OUT OF THE SYSTEM is on view through December 2 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents 20th Century Artifacts...from another timeline by John Tebeau.
John Tebeau presents a selection of newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, concert posters, T-shirts, brochures and children’s books acquired from a thrift store residing in an alternate timeline of the 20th century.
The artist explains the emergence of this parallel narrative:
“In a nutshell, here’s how that timeline diverged from ours: President Dwight D. Eisenhower underwent safe, professionally administered and 100% legal psychedelic therapy for trauma following his 1955 heart attack. (See NYT-1956.) After all, psychiatrists in the ‘50s effectively used LSD to treat anxiety, depression and addiction with minimal risk. Once his ticker was healed up, Ike went for it, and in three sessions confronted his innermost challenges and, at the height of his (and the nation’s) power, came through “a better man.”
“Eisenhower’s vision of himself and the world was forever altered, and as Ike went, so went the nation, including his bundle-of-neuroses vice president Richard M. Nixon. At his boss’s urging, Nixon gave psychedelic therapy a whirl, and, lo and behold, he too came out a better man. He whupped JFK in 1960 (the cool, self-assured “New Nixon” mopped up the floor with him in the debates) and became the best version of himself. No paranoia, no loser-boy, chip on his shoulder, no sweat-drenched upper lip. He took Ike’s aggressively enlightened agenda and ran with it. Read the stories in NYT-1963. (Happily, JFK had a much better November 22, 1963 in that timeline, and lived to the ripe old age of 88, dying in bed –- natch – in 2005.)
“In short, the psychedelic revolution was officially condoned, medically normalized, and ubiquitous.”
The exhibition is on view through November 2 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents 2021: A Year, A Life by Elizabeth Hatcher-Williams.
Elizabeth Hatcher-Williams is an artist and archivist currently working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work focuses on the insight to be found in the routine of the mundane. She approaches her task as a curator with a commission to identify and share those truths.
“This exhibition represents the public offering of my ongoing personal archive. As part of an annual, year-long artistic project, I undertook the challenge of recording my year in film resulting in approximately 432 images chronicling the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These images are an extension of my 2020 project, in which I took and printed a physical photograph every day, unexpectedly benefiting from the kismet of foresight that it would be a year worth documenting.“What’s presented at Adjacent to Life is my attempt to share the narrative of one year as it appears in reflective consideration. The richness of my personal archive (journals, outtakes, playlists, screenshots) serve to document an ordinary life; its curation and circulation is simply an offering to make that life observable.”
2021: A Year, A Life is her second exhibition at the Adjacent to Life gallery, and her first solo show. This collection continues the artist’s exploration of the personal archives we are all unconsciously driven to create and the artists’ innate ability to realize those interior glimpses for our collective consciousness.
The exhibition is on view through September 29 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). The opening reception is Friday, September 9, 7-9 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Um Sonho Brasileiro by Camille Farge.
Camille Farge’s exhibit Um Sonho Brasileiro presents love as both content and context.
Based in New York, the French Chilean photographer has an extremely special bond with her father Georges. Five years ago, Georges moved to Brazil and Camille’s passion for photography blossomed with her exploration of a new country. Her discovery of Brazil through the lens of a camera is influenced by the teachings and lifestyle of her father.
“Le monde appartient à ceux qui ce levent tot” (The world belongs to those who wake up early) is a phrase that Georges echoes and embodies. He puts great importance on appreciating each day as if it was his last. With an emphasis on this way of life, Camille is able to navigate Brazil with a deep hunger for life.
Um Sonho Brasileiro is what Brazil feels like to Camille, a dream. The warmth and joy of its people, the explosive colors on every corner, the powerful deep-rooted music that gives goosebumps to the listener, the freedom of bodily expression, the chaos, the carefreeness, the diversity… Brazil has left its beautiful mark on Camille.
Um Sonho Brasileiro is on view through September 2 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents 9 to 5: Barista to Boatbuilder, A Tribute to the Workers of Venice, PERFORMANCES ON CANVAS by Yolanda Hawkins in collaboration with William Niederkorn.
People sometimes talk about Venice as though it were a museum, but it is not. Venice is a living work of art that would be an empty shell were it not for the people who work there.
In an effort to honor the work life of Venice, Yolanda Hawkins highlights the importance of the labors of those who make Venice happen. Sometimes unappreciated and performed under trying circumstances often invisible to visitors, the labors of these workers deserve recognition. With the workers themselves as her teachers, she endeavors to celebrate and capture with careful study and seriousness their intelligence, charm and skills.
9 to 5: Barista to Boatbuilder is an exhibition of performance works on canvas that were included in a book Hawkins published for Venetians under the title “Da Marangona a Marangona.” The Marangona is the huge bell in the Campanile tower in St. Mark’s Square that historically signaled the beginning and the end of the workday (like our 9 to 5) for the shipyards of Venice. The bell’s name is derived from the word for carpenter. This exhibition records the third major theme of Hawkins's ongoing work in Venice, developed through her observations and interactions with people there. The first phase was performances for Venetians; the second, performances with Venetians, and this third phase is performances about Venetians.
One of the most vibrant features of Venice is its commercial prudence – not only for the maintenance of Venetian infrastructure, which operates at a level of fortitude that requires science as well as art, but also the thrivingly active Venetians providing whatever is necessary or desirable in the most artful ways: fruit and vegetable sellers, fish mongers, butchers, baristas, perfumers, jewelers, shop assistants, ice cream makers, push cart vendors, waiters, artists, trash collectors, gondola builders and gondoliers.
Performances by Hawkins of each of these roles in Venice, documented in photographs and published in her book, are here displayed as larger scale canvas prints.
Yolanda Hawkins is a longtime resident of the East Village whose work encompasses multiple mediums of the fine arts as well as performance, theater (directing and acting), and art books. She is a founder, director and the president of True Comedy Theater Company and was a co-founder of the art collective Group Material and a member of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change. She has participated in group and one-person shows in New York and Venice.
William Niederkorn is a photographer, writer, artist and composer who has lived and worked in the East Village for decades.
9 to 5: Barista to Boatbuilder is on view through August 5 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). The reception for the artists is Sunday, July 24, 4-7 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Catrin Rhiannon Steward: Between My Homeless Clavicles curated by Caroline Koebel.
Treatment for metastatic breast cancer entailed removal of the artist’s upper sternum; thus, her collarbone no longer attached to her breastbone. The exhibition title originates on Steward’s @love_energy_walking when she repurposes a jarring encounter with a medical provider into a chance to spread awareness about care ethics.
My nurse was taking my vitals. She suddenly reaches toward the (raw and sacred) place between my homeless clavicles.
The nurse proceeds to take Catrin’s necklace in her hand.
I am sharing this to remind all healers: If you have permission to be in the personal space of a client or patient, it is still personal space. Be aware that a person’s trauma history can affect how they are able to receive touch or other gestures of intimacy.
Catrin’s personal, poetic, practical, and philosophical explication — through language and vision — of what it means to be alive while enduring stage 4 cancer is a love letter to her “fellow cancerians.”
The triumph is just existing. And experiencing the flow of pleasure and pain that emerges.
Her conscious self-presentation also acts as an empathic beacon for non-cancerians to envisage how best to affirm and support from an external vantagepoint.
All the plants and plantish things and all their relationships were there for me to love. All the feelings of missing out on the outside, of being trapped by my illness and unable to access the freedom of nature - were finally lifting and I felt what I know, that beauty is always all around me and within me. I felt connected and so happy.
I’m indebted to the late Carolee Schneemann for guiding me on how to be the best friend possible to a person with cancer:
It will be so helpful for you to be with Catrin. As for my overcoming cancer… that is never an assumption. I don’t know how severe or advanced the cancer is with Catrin, but you have to support her, whatever decision she has chosen or been forced to accept. Certainly do some research on alternative therapies, which can only help. Being with her will be positive…
Invoking Carolee here is a heartening act. Knowing that toward the end of her life, she exhibited on these very walls only makes it more so.
Within this forest is a dazzling world of flowers within flowers.
In her diagnosis years, Catrin has led a deep inquiry into the coalescence of aesthetic sense and the marvels of the natural world. She has reassessed her tools and modes and come to the determination to be as lo-fi and lightweight as possible. She upgraded her phone and added a macro lens, and onto the beckoning trail into the forest or meander across the field she continued to go.
I started late and underestimated the distance. My chest was hurting and my eyes were strangely tired. This is why I hike alone. Sweaty and blundering. No time to talk. Just discovery, wonder and beauty, beauty, beauty.
Catrin’s predilection for “crouching around” in the nearby-ness to nature as time suspends is the embodied foundation for her mesmerizing eye.
Imagine being a tiny pollinator exploring this apparently colossal space.
She does not rush beauty, and beauty rewards her sustained and continuous presence by finding its way to her.
In the woods, I told myself I’d go back for better pictures. But the better picture lives in my weirdo heart along with renewed faith in the alchemy of devotion.
Catrin Rhiannon Steward: Between My Homeless Clavicles is on view through July 8 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
• Catrin was integral in the creation of this exhibit. She died on June 7. We celebrate her spirit and legacy.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents nous sommes Paris Heights by Eugênio Marino, Inácio Marino, Thabata Frota-Marino, and Andrés Marino.
The Marino Collective is engaged in a lifelong, multi-generation, artistic exploration that prioritizes growth, mutual support, curiosity, and the fullness of expression. Working in an ever-widening scope of genres and mediums, their commitment to each other’s personhood and practice demonstrates that art both flourishes from within - and is an offering to – community.
nous sommes Paris Heights is on view through June 3 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents The Door Behind is Closing Fast by Alex J. Reyes.
The artist states that this selection of paintings was made from within a headspace of “lucid consciousness with periodic manic pacing around the studio while reading poems, entries from my journal, looking through old photos, and telling myself stories from my upbringing.”
The Door Behind is Closing Fast is on view through April 22 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, The Crew by Dallas Starky.
The Crew is a showcase of people at Ninth Street Espresso. Lovingly lensed and printed by Dallas Starky, these photographs are a meditation on the human element at the helm of the espresso machine. The portraits are set on a neutral background, a far cry from the baristas’ quotidian context of the coffee shop, where they exist in motion. Here, they are captured in a moment of heightened drama, illuminated by cinema lights existing outside the frame. The lighting acts as a guide to draw attention to the subjects’ details: eyes, lips, cheeks, hair, tattoos, jewelry, clothing, and costume are on full display.
These photographs also act as a document for the future. The crew at Ninth Street is ever in flux - Starky aims to make permanent that which is fleeting, to archive this era of people working in service through the pandemic. In fifteen years, there will inevitably be a new mix of baristas and roasters; for now, here are fifteen portraits with which to sip a beverage and take the extra second to wonder, Who are they?
The Crew is on view through March 18 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Reliquaries for Demon Auntie: Paintings by Isabella Kapur.
"Pieces of the body taken from a saint after death and enclosed in gilded sculptures, reliquaries divide and distribute parts of the deified body to far-flung worshippers seeking blessing, or solace. It’s a morbid process, one where belief and hope transform remains into fragments of power. Reliquaries for Demon Auntie adopts and toys with this precious language of gold, stone, fabric, and jewels as they modify, preserve, and create ancestral, and by extension living, bodies. Borrowing faces from vintage Bollywood, in particular the face of “Tragedy Queen” Meena Kumari; as well as the artist’s own hands; fragments of mythology from Scandinavia, South Asia, and The British Isles; familial anecdotes; North Indian weapons and jewelry; Nordic textiles; and a dash of popular culture, the works in this show serve as sections of one many headed, many limbed body. Gilded but torn apart, Demon Auntie, or Demon Mausi, is a personal anti-saint and an undead family member to look up to – some assembly required."
Reliquaries for Demon Auntie is on view through February 11 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life presents The Third Wave, the latest suite of observational gouache paintings by Nathan Stapley. This is the eighth exhibit of the painter’s work in what has become a December tradition. Embracing the timing, Stapley composed this year’s gallery statement in the form of a holiday update newsletter:
“The spirit of the season has touched us all. Another year has passed and the second year of a global pandemic is behind us. We go into 2022 with new variants, new boosters, and a newfound connection with our ancestors from 100 years ago who went through the same crap. Personally, this is my first complete year living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn after 12 years in the beautiful East Village, which I miss and think of everyday. I am still connected to the neighborhood though, through this annual show of plein air paintings. I am happy to show you what I see in these little moments that have caught my eye throughout the year. They are mostly paintings of my new neighborhood's parks, streets, and bodegas as well as a few from trips my wife and I were lucky enough to take in 2021. Here's to a safer and happier 2022.”
The Third Wave is on view through January 7 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Woman Walking on Avenue B: Drawings by Cliff Fyman.
Chronicling neighborhood scenes, New York native and poet Cliff Fyman extends the realm of the familiar to include particular paving stones, specific tree trunks and branch bends, new leaves, even the distant perambulation of a stranger.
Exploring a variety of drawing media, the artist lovingly scrutinizes every element in his fields of observation, rendering each detail with the same focused degree of curiosity, suggesting that any branch, trunk, leaf or new encounter offers a portal for the possibility of transcendence if graced with attention.
Woman Walking on Avenue B: Drawings is on view through December 2 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Blobsquatches by Mark Roth.
Roth’s paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature.
Roth contends the resilience of Bigfoot speaks to the persistent yearning to see primeval nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own. In a blobsquatch the circling line is the essential component for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. In these works the artist has made it his quest to locate evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The encircling line repeats so that the composition assumes a target shape, utilizing the notion that the bullseye represents an apogee of yearning – in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.
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Blobsquatches is on view through October 21 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Impressions and Atmospheres by Peter Stankiewicz.
With these newest works, sculptor Peter Stankiewicz revisits his formative entrancement with oil paint. Exploring its evocative materiality and emotional resonance, Stankiewicz creates fields of communicative touch that embody the sensation of being immersed in nature. Naturalistically minimalist, the paintings hint at sun-dappled efflorescence, verdancy, fecund darkness and the landscape within.
Impressions and Atmospheres is on view through September 17 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents “Just Happy to Paint My Own Paintings” by Dane Hagen.
Painter Dane Hagen’s work verifies that empathic inquiry into one’s immediate orbit offers a point of entry to the universal.
Born of the deceptively simple desire to share the pleasure of oil paint’s capacity to convey a likeness, Hagen’s work chronicles the friends, bandmates, spaces and objects that populate his intimate domain.
The paintings are created with the intent that they might enter into and inhabit this sanctum as companions to the people and objects they depict. In doing so, Hagen’s paintings enact the idea that seeing and being seen is a practice of hospitality that fosters community, expanding the realm of the known.
“Just Happy to Paint My Own Paintings” is on view through August 13 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Tryna Get Over by Orianne Cosentino.
With a mix of humor, wistfulness and bravura, Orianne Cosentino’s Q U O T A painting series champions New York City’s dynamism and humanity while remaining cognizant of the loss and cruel opportunism that also shapes the city.
Cosentino states:
“Every painting in this series contains a collage of found NYC parking tickets. They come from the street ripped, waterlogged, scuffed, scrawled with angry messages and sometimes pristine. In these conditions the tickets form the foundation of each painting. Barcodes and numbers peek through the image to lend structure, texture, and color.“Q U O T A was born in the early 2000's as response to the luxurification of NYC. The tickets represent inflated fines doled out to the citizens and businesses that reside here. They are layered into street scenes which serve as documentation of places that come and go in the same name of progress.”
In their current manifestation the artist describes the paintings as “love letters more than ever.” Encouraging a beloved she implores: “New York, please be the beacon of energy, love, art, inclusion, wildness and solidarity that I know you to be. The world needs you now.”
Tryna Get Over is on view through July 9 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents On the Road, Downunder by Leone Ioannou.
In August of 2020, photographer Leone Ioannou embarked on a roaming 800 mile journey from her birthplace of Perth to Exmouth along the West coast of Australia. This exhibit presents an immersive selection of images that transmit some of the elements, beings, light, crystalline beauty and experiences of deep time encountered along the way.
On The Road, Downunder is on view through May 28 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
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Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Announcing the Coming of the Sun.
This exhibition brings together the work of four artists all working with issues of replication and regeneration in a multifaceted approach to both process and content. By applying techniques of printmaking, collage, photomontage and painting each artist engages the social issues of contemporary life through artworks of multi-layered intention in their imagery and installation. The artists address the entangled and sprawling problems that have been unleashed on the planet in the time of the Anthropocene and speak to the precariousness and complexities of Being in this posthuman era.
The works represent a connection between visions of the Anthropocene as both an epic challenge and an opportunity to de-center the human and imagine a different, more accurate, empathetic, functional and enlivening relationship to other beings and systems. Here the artist acts as imaginative liaison for the agency of different beings, forms and structures, including that of future arrangements or yet-to-be-discovered loves.
Deborah Carruthers presents studies for a graphic score, Between the Song and the Silence: Hobrechtsfelde, Germany, based on the sounds of songbirds that have been largely extirpated from a now-verdant yet still-toxic landscape in Germany, while Margaret Hart envisions the intersection of human and non-human beings as a form of ever evolving patterns of life.
Gabriel Deerman sheds light on the linkages between Earth and human-induced change through repetition and chance. Mark Roth posits the idea that Being itself is ecstasy - with the sun as the animating energy that activates everything in our orbit.
Participating Artists:
Deborah Carruthers (Montréal, Québec, Canada)
The role of art and artists in providing a record of our evolving landscapes and environment is incalculable. Artwork can provide a record and timeline of loss and allow us to view and estimate rates of change. It can create nascent memories of what has vanished and remind us of our role in that loss. It can translate alternate perspectives of our ecologies and provoke public discourse.
As an artist who has often been preoccupied with translating environmental concerns into an artistic narrative, the opportunity to work with scientists in unpacking complex ideas and presenting them in another form has been critical to my practice.
Gabriel Deerman (Bella Bella, British Columbia, Canada)
These works began with a single climate change-related issue: Pine Beetle infestations. These have a status in common with contemporary weather events of being a ‘natural disaster’. The devastating effects of these sprawling infestations in North America can be traced back to logging practices that created ideal breeding conditions and were exacerbated by rising temperatures. In looking for the root of this specific problem, I was led from the boards my home is built with to the foundations of western rational thought, modernity, modernization and colonialism. When I began to trace the effects, they expanded outward from localized destruction of ecosystems to wildfires, to shifting economies, populations, and animal migratory patterns - creating a feedback loop which amplifies the already overwhelming situation. This particular issue serves as one example of the entangled, interwoven and self-replicating/perpetuation nature of the problems that unbridled capitalism has unleashed on this planet and the enormity and irreducibility of human impact in the Anthropocene.
Margaret Hart (Boston, Massachusetts, USA)
These new works are an evolution of an earlier body of work, the Situated Becomings series, where I considered the evolving understanding of gender in these Posthuman times. These works continue to explore gender issues across human and non-human integration, where gender is a form of becoming…becoming something new and expansive.
Science and art are my two main interests, and in this work I see them combined in imaginative ways. Genetic manipulation afforded by CRISPR technologies and our developing sense of the agency of all non-human beings merge in these pieces to explore possible outcomes or connections. Nature and technology have much to teach us and are venues to an expanded sense of humanity. My work scratches the surface of what may be and what is possible.
Mark Roth (New York, New York, USA)
Aurora is about the idea that Being itself is ecstasy. The sun/aurora/dawn is ecstasy and activates ecstasy. The grasses (a quote of Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf) represent revery taking form. This visual quote along with the allusions to Bridget Riley and Frank Stella are intended to indicate an equivalency in terms of operation and nurturance between the ecosystems of Nature and Art.
Announcing the Coming of the Sun runs through April 23 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents A Trip to the Garden by Cooper Ronan.
In an exuberant series of chromatically radiant prints, Ronan enacts the idea that the refreshment of the natural world is accessible in the interior garden of the embodied mind.
The artist states:
"We often delve deep into everyday objects trying to find patterns and dissect their meanings. We get so caught up in doing this that we forget to enjoy the moments of connection we have with our surroundings. In these pieces I aim to create a space to do this through celebratory colors and motifs. Gardens are a space to enjoy and connect back to oneself and one’s place in nature. These pieces represent this feeling of simply enjoying a moment in time."
A Trip to the Garden is on view through March 19 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents K(NO)W MORE by Eugênio Marino.
For his sophomore exhibit, K(NO)W MORE, Eugênio Marino continues to explore and develop his signature imaginative narratives, landscapes and characters. Critiques of war and the fossil fuel industry coexist with observational and whimsical visions of urban nightlife. Animals - namely his beloved cats - continue to be mainstays. The artist’s commitment to attain an ever more refined technical command and pictorial sophistication is evidenced in the active study and respect for perspective and the faithful rendering of real or fantastic vehicles.
Marino elucidates:
“Sometimes when I’m sleeping I think of one to do but it’s the night so I try to remember it for the next day so I can draw it.”
K(NO)W MORE is on view through February 12 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Nathan Stapley’s newest collection of gouache paintings.
Venturing far from his signature subject of East Village streetscapes, this year found the artist on a protracted cross-country working road trip, painting en plein air in wide open expanses. With sly homages to earlier, iconic landscape painters, Stapley advances the twin narratives of his concerns: the evocative depiction of light and the refinement of craft.
The painter states:
“When Covid hit in March my wife and I were lucky enough to have a friend who had a friend with an empty house in Maine who offered it to us for as long as we needed. On March 16th - the day that Los Angeles announced they were shutting down - we packed a bunch of stuff and drove up to Maine. We stayed for two and a half months until May 4th. My wife and I had started the process of moving to Brooklyn back in November but were given a 3-6 month time frame for when the place would be ready. At this same time our lease was expiring at our apartment of 12 years on 8th St. and Avenue D here in the east village. Instead of re-signing a lease and having to break it in a few months, we decided to drive to California. Working along the way, we would stay for the summer and drive back when our place was ready. We made it back to New York on September 6th. These paintings, inspired by our trip, are painted from on-location studies, sketches, and memories.”
The exhibit is on view through January 8 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Things From The First Floor: Paintings by Yuri Tayshete.
With luscious, seemingly incandescent brushstrokes, Yuri Tayshete’s paintings of fruit, candy, cakes, cups of coffee and other comforting treats demonstrate the tantalizing notion that aesthetic delectation – reveling in the pleasure of sumptuous paint handling and pitch-perfect color calibration - can be as nourishing as caloric intake and longer lasting than a mere sugar-high.
The artist states:
My ultimate goal is in finding harmony in the universe by looking at everyday things that affirm each other. I want to portray this view of the world through my still life paintings. My paintings also bring out the dialog between light and shadow; inorganic and organic; and natural and synthetic.I employ alla prima techniques to emphasize the ephemerality of my painting. This renders the freshest and cleanest colors, which give the paintings a vivid and playful atmosphere. In addition to the alla prima technique, painting primarily with a large brush provides bold and dynamic forms to my paintings.
Through a truncated, bird's-eye-view of the composition, I aim to invoke contemporary aesthetics, poetic, calm, and isolated feelings. These paintings hope to capture the fleeting, yet strong relations that exist between ordinary objects. No same painting can be created if any one of the elements of those everyday things is changed, denied, or disconnected, including myself.
Things From The First Floor is on view through December 4 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Nina Glikshtern's recent figure drawings.
The artist states:
These are drawings made during and after the peak of NYC’s COVID lockdown. Through a more clued-in artist than myself, I found a network of Zoom-based figure drawing groups hosting get-togethers daily. Most of the groups I draw with are based in New York, often featuring models who work as circus and cabaret performers in normal times. My fellow artists in attendance hail from all over the world, sometimes waking up at the crack of dawn in Australia to attend an afternoon session in New York, or giving us East Coasters a peek at a still setting sun in the West.Figure drawing is something I did primarily while in school and let fall by the wayside after graduating. Usually, it requires attending an event in person. Unlike so many other things we’ve lost out on during the pandemic, web-based socializing has made it more accessible than ever. These drawings are the product of my own personal tiny silver lining to this strange and scary moment.
Nina Glikshtern's drawings are on view through October 23 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
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Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Corona Penumbra.
During the quarantine, many artists sequestered in the company of their creative pursuit, cultivating their practice as a tool to find solace and meaning in the midst of loss and the rupture of normalcy – all while maintaining the through-line of personal growth and the refinement of voice.
This exhibit presents a sampling of such work made during the stay-at-home order by Ninth Street Espresso employees, Kevin Cabano, Nina Glikshtern, Joshua Chang, Cooper Ronan, Elizabeth Hatcher and Mark Roth.
Corona Penumbra is on view through September 18 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents a selection of new watercolors by Marisa Malone. The artist states:
“These paintings emerged during three months of lockdown. One a day, eighty-six in total, they became a foundational part of tracking the long, blurring days spent at home. Providing routine, focus and a lens to view familiar surroundings anew, everyday objects and scenery became central figures. Their unrefined and imperfect nature offer an intimate and tender quality and suggest having less to do with outcome and more with process."
The exhibit is on view through August 7 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Small Paintings by Peter Stankiewicz.
Peter Stankiewicz’s work presents visual art as a musical metaphor and the painted object as a contemplative realm.
Comprised of paint airbrushed onto plastic surfaces, these newest paintings further the artist’s exploration of color harmonies and color contrasts - and the moods each suggests. The works’ intimate scale invites inspection, offering the viewer a prospective field for the exercise of imagination.
The matte finish seems to draw the light (and, with it, the viewer’s eye) into the material, rather than keeping attention at the surface. Stankiewicz states that he prefers to use an airbrush “for the effects it can create: soft, diffuse or faded atmospheres and layers of color - and for the absence of any immediate trace of the human hand.”
While evidence of the painter’s hand may be veiled, the works convey an appearance of being acted upon by outside forces - such as weathering, oxidation and wear. This situates each work in a world whose aspect we are left to determine by the recording of its effects.
As images, the paintings depict the artist’s own foray into the same field for the exercise of imagination that he extends to the viewer. For Stankiewicz, this is a field of visual reward and particularities. He states: “I like dark colors, earth tones, the colors of rainy days, twilight, and the light before dawn. I like the colors of bricks, stones and wood, the various colors of the bark of the plane trees in the city, the colors of rusted steel.”
Small Paintings is on view through March 19 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Imaginary Splat: by Eugênio Marino.
Eugênio Marino’s work, while embracing a healthy dose of cartoon art and pop culture, and exhibiting a studied interrogation of the usual suspects of European and American modernist schools, tells stories that are wholly and exuberantly his own.
Whether fleshing out themes of heroes and villains (replete with hi-tech gadgetry) or depicting recurring scenes from his Utopia (simply known as Love World) - where cats are central figures alongside other animals and imagined figures and landscapes - Eugênio strives, on a daily basis, to realize his visions through an ever-evolving sense of beauty and humor.
This fantastic, serial high-stakes pictorial narrative is paralleled by the artist’s pursuit and commitment towards a more refined technical command as he pens a bold line wrought with conviction and seemingly equal parts care and panache.
Imaginary Splat runs through February 14 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist Friday, January 17, 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Since Summer (2019) by Nathan Stapley.
New Yorker, Nathan Stapley, a lead artist for Double Fine Productions, makes his sixth annual appearance at Adjacent To Life. In this collection of en plein air gouaches, the artist continues to document East Village and Greenpoint activity and vantages. Employing an attuned sensitivity to light and its effects, Stapley creates both a portrait of the neighborhoods’ familiar locales and that of a painter dedicatedly refining his capacity in the service of perceptual delectation and accuracy.
Since Summer (2019) by Nathan Stapley runs through January 13 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life presents The Things They Love by Angela Lau.
With these newest works, Lau pays tribute to the passions of the coterie of beings with whom she shares her apartment and life.
A lifelong New Yorker, Angela Lau was born and raised in Lower Manhattan. She currently resides in the East Village amongst plants and with her two cats and the grumpy elderly dog of her studio mate/partner.
The artist states: “The Things They Love is an ode to the creatures we love and their relationship to the common things we use everyday.”
The Things They Love runs through December 6 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Art On The Job: Drawings of a 32 Year Old Man.
These drawings represent captured moments of reflection by a 32 year-old man in the midst of his workday.
Drawn in brief respites of downtime, they verify that even while one labors there can appear interludes ripe for contemplation, delight and bemusement.
Stealthily preserved by admiring co-workers, these drawings weren’t created with an eye toward public display. Void of presumption, they exist as intimate documents of a life being lived and are a reminder that at every stage in every supply chain is a person like this particular 32 year-old man who is similarly investing their one life’s energy in the next step of the process.
Art On The Job: Drawings of a 32 Year Old Man is on view through October 25 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Inhabited: Paintings by Alexandra Peace & Sarah Hombach.
Whether depicting her friends or passersby, Alexandra Peace scribbles her way to an image with frantic affection. When drawing strangers, she enjoys the opportunity to “create intimacy out of a moment without familiarity” – her work permits a similar intimacy to its viewers. Her loose, somewhat turbulent process is readily legible, inviting us to participate in the vicarious pleasure of each scratch, stroke and squiggle. Peace views her work as practice of “reining in chaos,” creating portraits and scenes that are at once tenderly messy and masterfully precise.
Sarah Hombach’s work seeks to represent the way a body might be experienced from its inside. The anatomical impossibilities in her figures – and the equally impossible worlds these figures populate – continue this project of portraying things psychically “inside out.” Informed by her dreams and daily settings, Hombach uses painting as a means of furnishing her own interior life; she externalizes her emotions and circumstances by giving them an architecture, curtains, garnishes, weather. She combines these with swooshes of the fantastic in faith that viewers may cobble together her personal iconography, as well as lift her little oft-gawky figures to the level of heroes.
Inhabited is on view through September 29 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). The opening is Thursday, August 22, 7-9 pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents The Walk: Paintings by Ray Sumser.
Ray Sumser’s latest body of work is a rapturous experiential account of the California landscape. Painted in bursts in the artist’s Larkspur studio, The Walk consists of 47 oil paintings informed by the hills of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Mount Tamalpais State Park.
In these works, the artist furthers his exploration of the agency of the brushstroke while affirming his abiding interest in the gestural mark as a vessel of information.
In earlier iterations of these concerns, Sumser personified his brushstrokes into recognizable comic characters. Together these marks in the form of cartoon personas comprised teeming visual encyclopedias of the popular animation landscape. This fractal compositional strategy – where scrutiny of the minute yields expansive returns – subsequently evolved into more abstract assemblages of brushstrokes that evoked emergent body parts – many graced with eyes staring back at the viewer as if to draw equivalence between the seer and the seen.
In The Walk, Sumser vastly expands the carrying capacity of his brushstrokes.
Working in concert with one another to cohere into a legible macro vista, each stroke is independently redolent of the experience of moving through the landscape.
Sumser’s brushstrokes now operate as a transcription of an observer’s immersive experience, each reveling in the landscape’s particular vantages, character, form, fellow beings and sun-suffused atmosphere – all while simultaneously transmitting the charged moment of creation in the painter’s studio life.
The artist puts it this way:
“Perspective changes constantly. A landscape appears one way and is altogether different in closer relief. Never static, it moves with color and emotion, light and rhythm. The landscape accommodates and shapes the imagination with an abundance of information all pointing to beauty.”
The Walk is on view through August 16 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, July 12, 7-9 pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Apu: Photographs by Alejandro Cortes.
Documentary filmmaker Alejandro Cortes’ new series of photographs emerge from a recent shaman-assisted pilgrimage to Peru. Shot on 35mm film, the resultant body of work stands as a love letter to our planet and the people whose lives are dedicated to its protection.
Cortes states:
"My artistic career is fueled by a constant need to understand and explore the human condition through my lens. For this series, I embarked on a journey through Peru, looking to connect with Pachamama (Mother Nature) and the Inka culture. In the process, I met a shaman named Kucho, whom I followed on a mystical journey to the Apu Machu Picchu. During this experience, I was reminded that wisdom hides in nature, and beauty in simplicity.”
Apu runs through July 11 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents From the Palette of Awe: Collages by Daniel De Raey.
Daniel De Raey’s ongoing series, The Spanish Papers finds its originating moment when the artist was unexpectedly delivered to the Romanesque galleries of the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya. In the presence of Medieval masterpieces drawn from chapels throughout the Catalonian countyside he became rapt. It wasn’t the religious intent, formal composition or representational sophistication that held his fascination, rather it was the details – small passages and chips of paint, minute confluences of color and texture. He spent an afternoon fully absorbed, taking hundreds of photos of such details.
It was an event that had no precedent in De Raey’s experience and one that would not be repeated until years later when he finally revisited the images from that singular afternoon and began to make collages from the resultant prints.
As he constructed the collages he was astonished to realize it was impossible to make a mistake in terms of color composition. Color-wise any component from any photograph could compellingly co-exist with any other. Again he was rapt.
This prompts the tantalizing question: What is the through-line connecting the Romanesque artists, De Raey’s transfixed afternoon in Barcelona, and the present collages?
After long contemplation the artist concluded that it is the experience of awe. Because De Raey wasn’t invested in the cultural content or stylistic intent of the art objects - but instead focused on the hand of its makers and the wear of the world upon the works - he tapped into the unfiltered earnest reveries of the original craftspeople. Thereby unwittingly verifying that awe is tangible and transmittable across the centuries.
A long time resident of the East Village, Daniel De Raey is a photographer, mixed media collage artist and an active member of The Art Students League of New York,. A work from The Spanish Papers was awarded best in show at the League's 2018 Concours show. Another work from the series earned the artist a 2018 merit scholarship at the League.
From the Palette of Awe runs through June 7 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Fractal Flâneuse by Lauren Kushnick.
She states:
“Buildings say so much about ourselves. I love walking through cities and unearthing people’s stories through the textures and layers of life etched on a faded facade. My process begins with a long meandering walk in search of interesting moments where color, pattern and chance combine. Once found, I enjoy manipulating each image to fold space upon itself until the essence of the place is emphasized. The moment when a hard surface becomes malleable is truly satisfying.
“In this collection I have tried to strike a balance between recognizable environments and fractal-like abstractions of urban life. As a native New Yorker, most of these images are drawn from my walks around NYC, but I have included a few works from further afield. No matter where you are from or where you live, I hope these images help you to find balance in the chaos, embrace the random, and encourage you to take a good long walk.”
Fractal Flâneuse runs through May 3 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist Reception: Thursday, April 11, 6:00-8:00pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Order of Things paintings by Johanna Okovic Goodman.
The encaustic paintings of Johanna Okovic Goodman’s Order of Things series represent a concluding synthesis of the fascinations and concerns of her long career. Compelled by the essential nature of human touch, she arrived at the wax medium for its capacity to memorialize the transience of touch by retaining the mark of its maker.
For Okovic Goodman, this abiding advocacy of the primacy of touch extends to the magnificence of the natural world and its inhabitants. In this formulation our respective life experiences might be thought of as having been molded by the touch of the world.
An inveterate traveler, Johanna threw herself into the world as a means to tutor her senses – often seeking vast, open landscapes. A formative instance was her tenure living with the Zayanes, a Berber population living in Morocco. There she learned that art is a way of life and came to feel at home with their architectural forms and the desert expanse.
A unification of open space and architectural forms situated in a manner that creates a language that “speaks to the essence of touch” defines the Order of Things series.
Johanna Okovic Goodman passed away in 2017. Born in Pittsburg, she eventually relocated to the desert of the American Southwest. She attended The Carnegie Institute of Art and received a BFA from Moore College of Art. Her greatest acclaim came through her sculpture, most notably her signature chairs which were created in the form of famous people. This culminated in a commission from the Tyson Foods family for a chair sculpture of President Bill Clinton that currently resides in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Order of Things runs through March 29 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception Thursday, March 14, 6:00-9:00 pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents I’ll Play the Head at the Start: Collaborative Drawings by Angela Lau and Mark Minnig.
With respectively well-developed practices of illustration and animation, Angela Lau and Mark Minnig challenge and amuse one another in this series of freewheeling collaborative gameplay. Fun, surreal and gently profound, the evolving process operates as a strategy to reinvigorate their disciplines and to celebrate the residents and tenor of their Chinatown and East Village neighborhoods.
The artists put it this way:
“This collaborative work started organically with drawing on each other’s work with the idea of finishing one another’s sentences. It became a fun and loose way to practice thoughtful but also thoughtless drawing. It is similar to the drawing exercise of the Exquisite Corpse, where one artist draws a component of a body and hands it blindly to the next. The result, especially when artists have different styles and abilities, vary from humorous, beautiful and abstract to just plain grotesque.”
I’ll Play the Head at the Start: Collaborative Drawings by Angela Lau and Mark Minnig runs through February 24 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents In My Room: Paintings by Nathan Stapley.
Stapley, a lead artist for Double Fine Productions, makes his fifth appearance at Adjacent To Life. In this newest cycle of gouaches, the artist continues to document scenes of his daily routine in the East Village and Greenpoint. Employing a honed sensitivity to light and its effects, Stapley creates a narrative portrait of not just favored locales, but the biography of his eye’s perceptual enchantment.
In My Room: Paintings by Nathan Stapley runs through January 18 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents I Ate the Tender Heart of a Lettuce and It Gave Me an Unprecedented Strength: Cyanotypes by Michaela Coffield.
With these works Portland-based Michaela Coffield furthers her ongoing collaboration with the sun, producing an intuitively-coherent narrative series of cyanotypes that verify the pursuit of delight is no trivial matter and that the imagination is an evolving habitable realm.
The artist states:
“What do you make when it’s Summer and you’re out of school? Something that isn't for your teachers, or classmates, or an institution, or your thesis. Something that’s for you. Something you can make outside in your backyard that doesn’t require fancy things like presses or looms or mountains of research, just sun print paper, tracing paper, ink and the radio.“In the Summer, I make sun prints because the Sun is out. In the Summer, I think in blue.”
I Ate the Tender Heart of a Lettuce and it Gave Me an Unprecedented Strength: Cyanotypes by Michaela Coffield runs through December 7 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Staten Island Encounters: Photographs by Olga Ginzburg.
Belarus-born, New York-based street and documentary photographer, Olga Ginzburg captures the uncanny in the unremarkable and the majesty of the quotidian.
Empathically intimate, Ginzburg’s images aren’t voyeuristic glimpses, rather one notes the ease of the photographer within the environment and the natural rapport she has with the subjects. This is a function born not only of Olga’s innate predilection, but also the particularities of her formal concerns and personal narrative.
While fully welcoming of technical advancements, Ginzburg particularly enjoys shooting in film for its dialogue with the medium’s history and a film camera’s ability to cast her in a more “meditative” state while working.
This component of valuing tradition – a confidence that precedent can sustain - is paralleled in her own biography, where after years of living in Manhattan and working and studying abroad, circumstance redelivered her to the South Shore Staten Island neighborhood of her formative years. Her immersive reacquaintance with the streets, people and landscape of her youth is the subject of this exhibit.
With this body of work the photographer also demonstrates another more abstract kind of homecoming: that of letting her originating artistic inspirations inhabit and flourish within her imagination.
In an interview with the online photography magazine of the land & us, Olga describes the initial sensation of the emergence of her artistic interiority this way: “Without realizing it, I started to look at the world differently. I became more curious and observant. I walked around imbued with Kertész’s lyricism, Brassaï’s misty romanticism, Winogrand’s bravado and sense of the absurd, [Boris] Mikhailov’s irony, [Milton] Rogovin’s humanity, Frank’s unsentimental poetry etc.”
In her mature work these exemplars - coupled with the persisting thrill of their discovery - are sustained as components of an integrated point of view – a neighborhood unto itself. In acceptance, Ginzburg’s work confirms that fidelity to one’s nature and loves can yield a singular vision under surprising circumstances, including that of an unanticipated adult return to one’s teenage home.
Staten Island Encounters: Photographs by Olga Ginzburg runs through November 2 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a finissage for the artist on Friday, November 2, 6-8 pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Resonant Gestures: Paintings by Sarah Hombach, Alexis Ayala and Mark Roth.
A writer, Sarah Hombach has recently plunged into painting as a means to explore arenas of experience where the insufficiency of words can be glaring. Compelled by the language of gesture, the figures that populate Sarah’s work represent “a means of embodying a certain feeling or interpersonal phenomena.” Because they are depicted from an emotional standpoint, representing “how the body is experienced from the inside,” the figures are liberated to inhabit impossible anatomies and express themselves in potentially fantastic gestures. Influenced by Medieval art and its emphasis on frontality, Hombach explores awkwardness and the inability of people to occupy the idealized position many painters put them in. This concern arises out of the experience of her particular body and perceived sense of strangeness. In this way her painting practice functions as a tool of self-acceptance for herself and the viewer, proffering the vision of “a joyful exalted awkward person.”
Artist Alexis Ayala’s paintings are respectfully informed by the values of graffiti that inspired him during his formative years growing up on the West Coast. Lex’s aesthetic is grounded in a love for streetwear and fashion along with his Mexican heritage. Ayala’s studio practice is one of developing intimately meaningful iconography that is resonant to streetwear’s strategy of reshuffling cultural signifiers. These new works represent a straddling between typography and easel painting’s concerns, stretching to embrace inclusion of brushy gesture and depictions of illusionistic depth. Hands, apples, eyes, cigarettes and letters comprise an expanding universe and grammar of the artist’s narrative. By bridging graphic portrayal and painterly expression, the work fuses the dual strains of typography and Abstract Expressionism – doing so with a bit of sign painter’s labor thrown in to acknowledge and embody the virtue of craft.
Mark Roth’s newest paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature. Roth states:
“I find the resilience of Bigfoot to be compelling. I believe it speaks to the persistent yearning to see primordial nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own. I love the thought of a person scouring photographs to verify that the world still contains the unknown awaiting discovery. It’s the yearning of blobsquatches that I find so moving. For me this is encapsulated not so much in the blurry purported Sasquatch but in the encircling line drawing attention to the creature. The circle is the essential component of the blobsquatch for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. So, with this as inspiration, I dedicated myself to the search for evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of The Met.”
Included here are faithfully replicated passages from Dosso Dossi and Balthus that incontrovertibly capture a Sasquatch “tree peak” and a striding Squatch in a posture akin to that of frame 352 in the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film of 1967. The encircling line repeats so that the composition assumes a target shape, utilizing the notion that the bullseye represents an apogee of yearning - in this case, to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.
Resonant Gestures: Paintings by Sarah Hombach, Alexis Ayala and Mark Roth runs through September 28 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artists' Reception: Tuesday, September 11, 8:00-10:00pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Chalo chalo (चलो चलो): Photographs by Ryan John Lee.
New York based photographer and filmmaker, Ryan John Lee is a studied practitioner of street photography. He states:
Street photography is a lifestyle, with my camera as a silent, omnipresent partner. I approach street photography in two ways: hunting and waiting. I hunt for potential moments and respond accordingly to photograph their image. Additionally, I wait for ideal photographic scenarios (a beam of light, an interesting composition), and I linger until a subject approaches and interacts–sometimes for hours.
This body of work documents the photographer's 14 day exploration of street life in Rajasthan, India. The exhibit's title, Chalo chalo (चलो चलो) translates from Hindi to “let’s go” - a constant cry of anyone walking and/or driving in the streets of India.
Chalo chalo (चलो चलो): Photographs by Ryan John Lee runs through August 24 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday July 26, 6-8 pm.
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Colorful Grit by Jake Keene.
Drawing on his practice as a filmmaker, the photographer presents images that function as single frame cinematic narratives. He explains:
“As a filmmaker who's always been obsessed with story, images, and aesthetics, I ventured into photography a year ago as a way of practicing cinematography. Over time, I developed a style built heavily on contrast. That’s the theme behind Colorful Grit: the melding of conflicting contexts — the real and the cinematic, the vibrant and the dirty — until all lines are blurred and an entirely new context appears.”
Keene’s work has been recognized in Somewhere Magazine, Abandoned Gallery, Our Magazine, Stellare Magazine, Paradise Magazine, Pellicola Magazine, Blue Hour Magazine and will be featured on the cover of the forthcoming album from Air Review.
Colorful Grit runs through July 20 and is on view at the Adjacent To Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Lontano by Ashley Mendolia.
Lontano - which translates to Far Away in Italian – finds Queens native Ashley Mendolia showcasing her ongoing exploration of the photographic process of film soup – a technique wherein film is soaked in a variety of liquids before being put into the camera to shoot.
In this series, the 35mm film was steeped in hibiscus tea, red wines, and vinegar. The soup affects the final image in unanticipated ways, frequently adding a scrim of color that evokes what the artist describes as “far feelings, distant dreams and fading memories.”
Mendolia states, “The exciting part of shooting 35mm film soup is that you don't know how the soup will really react with the film and image until it gets developed. So the narrative can change. The real world can become fantasy life or a dream... one in which you wish you could be in.”
Lontano runs through June 15 and is on view at the Adjacent To Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday May 17, 6-8 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents In The Habitat of the Great Bears: Photographs of Eco-conscience and Holiness by Denis Ryan Kelly Jr.
Denis Ryan Kelly Jr. has spent a lifetime traveling to and photographing many of the world’s most historic and spiritually resonant sites. He has produced visual essays on such locations as Machu Picchu, Ireland’s Crough Patrick, Chartres Cathedral in France, Kyoto’s Nanzen-ji, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and the Lakota Territories.
Out of respect for such charged and exalted subject matter, he approaches his work as a documentarian, artist and earnest pilgrim, remaining open to experiencing and perhaps communicating the transcendent potentialities harbored in humanity’s collectively recognized hallowed sites.
This show finds Kelly transposing this orientation from cultural interpretations of the sacred to that of untrammeled wilderness. Taken in the temperate rainforest of Alaska’s Sheet’-ká X'áat'l (Baranof) Island, the works suggest that it is the forest – nature – that offers the unfiltered cathedral from which religious expression derives.
Kelly ventured alone into the domain of the coastal brown bear equipped with a camera he constructed to yield a particular perspective. Oriented in the vertical format, the camera creates an 8”x10” film negative which affords sumptuous levels of detail. The lens produces a field of vision of about 115 degrees with heighted resolution in the center and softened focus in the periphery.
The artist selected for these attributes because they parallel those of human visual perception: attention to detail, sharpened focus in the center of vision, a wide field of view, the vertical orientation of a biped…
Thus these works are as much a depiction of the profundity of the pristine natural world as they are of our own unique perceptual apparatus – which, of course, is an expression of nature as well. Biologically, we remain wilderness. Taken in the context of Kelly’s oeuvre this prompts a tantalizing notion: to perceive is to gain access to the unmediated divine.
In The Habitat of the Great Bears runs through May 11 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
This exhibition is dedicated to all stewards of the Earth, especially the Tlingit and Haida people for taking care of this land since time immemorial.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Metropolis by John Okemah.
Working with 35mm film, New York based photographer John Okemah documents the world’s teeming conurbations while investigating the “relationship between light and architectural forms.”
Metropolis runs through April 6 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Notes and Chords by Peter Stankiewicz.
The show finds sculptor Peter Stankiewicz returning to painting after a hiatus from the medium and debuting his first sculptural reliefs. Composed of plastic airbrushed with acrylic paint, the works derive initial inspiration in the dazzle patterns deployed on ships during World War I.
Stankiewicz states:
"As I worked I ended up liking simpler designs with just a few blocks of color. Some of them began to look to me like piano keys, and I started to think of the idea of just a few notes or a chord sounding over a quiet background. I think the hard geometric edges of the shapes help emphasize the quality of the colors, leaving only simple proportions and a little paint texture as the other elements involved."
Notes and Chords runs through March 2 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents New Paintings by Nathan Stapley.
Stapley, a lead artist for Double Fine Productions, makes his fourth appearance at Adjacent To Life. In this newest cycle of urban scenes, the artist foregrounds the craft of painting while continuing to investigate the evocative nature of light.
New Paintings by Nathan Stapley runs through January 19 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Otis March: Drawings by Mark Minnig.
Otis March is animator Mark Minnig’s friend, companion, muse and dog. Art has always been an important part of their interaction. In the ongoing creative collaboration Otis has contributed as muse – an active instigator of artmaking.
These sketches represent a small fraction of the drawings Otis has inspired. Integrated into life and Mark’s various modes of production, the drawings are a revelation of an artist’s process, representing a development of vocabulary, contemplative focus, a refinement of skills of observation … and affection.
A longtime New Yorker by way of Baltimore, Mark Minnig played in the bands Kid Casanova, The Thumbs and The Fuses. He is currently working towards an MFA in Computer Arts at SVA. Otis can frequently be spotted exploring the East Village and has inspired his own popular hashtag: #otismarch.
Otis March: Drawings by Mark Minnig runs through December 8 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Chioke Nassor's Look at me/Don’t look at me!
Nassor states, "Look at me/Don’t look at me! is a series of portrait photography that explores what it means to expose yourself, and how sometimes obscuring part of yourself can reveal the truest truth. I’m fascinated by taking portraits of people that attempt to capture who they feel like inside. I also find that my portraits end up reflecting a lot about how I feel inside, too."
Chioke Nassor writes and directs for film, TV, and the web. His previous work includes writing and directing short films for NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers, the feature film How to Follow Strangers, the TV on the Radio Documentary "Minor/Major" and his web series Chioke Nassor's Storytime.
Look at me/Don’t look at me! runs through October 27 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Ephemeral Encounters: Street Photography by Ryan John Lee.
New York based photographer and filmmaker Ryan John Lee approaches street photography as a lifestyle of hunting and waiting, striving to "highlight the calm within the chaos of the urban landscape.”
Ephemeral Encounters: Street Photography by Ryan John Lee runs through September 22 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday August 24, 5-8 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Landscapes: Paintings by Mubarak Nasser Al-Thani.
Mubarak Nasser Al-Thani is a Doha-born Qatari painter. For the last few years he has resided in New York City while he completed an MA in Urban Planning at NYU.
Inspired by cities, skylines, horizons, people and their interaction, Mubarak was first introduced to the American landscape via the Roadrunner cartoons. Ever since, the country – its people and landscape – has suffused his imagination.
During his tenure in the U.S., he made efforts to explore, taking road trips to visit iconic locations and to delve into the expanse of the land. In some ways, he became an aficionado of the best aspects of America, an enthralled enthusiast, especially appreciating “the balance between the vastness and emptiness and its crowdedness.” He states, “I think America is under appreciated in terms of its beauty … and it’s diverse as %$@#!”
The paintings in this exhibit are, what might be thought of as, personalized distillations of American icons. In their graphic attentiveness and focus on brilliant, carefully-calibrated color combinations, the works are reflective of his ongoing formal concerns and predilections. In this way, he contributes an individualized vision to images collectively valued, thereby enacting a hard-won and, at times, besieged American ideal.
Landscapes: Paintings by Mubarak Nasser Al-Thani runs through August 18 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
In recognition of the protean creativity of younger artistic contributors, Tinsquo’s curatorial project Adjacent To Life is pleased to present Coffee and the Weather Report: Painting and Collage by Pre-K Emerging Artists. The artists are all students at New York’s PS 15M.
Coffee and the Weather Report: Painting and Collage by Pre-K Emerging Artists runs through July 14 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Black Moby Dick & 9 Untitled: The Wall Sculptures/Assemblages of Damien Olsen.
Damien Olsen scavenges industrial ephemera and subjects the objects to transformations that “detach them from their meaning” and give them a new purpose. Often appearing as ruins or a “glamorizing of aging,” the works embody the geological process of reintegration of the specific into the whole, presenting decay as a generative process.
Rooted in the free-associative strategies of the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, Olsen finds particular humor and challenge in the indeterminacy of their approach. He says, “my own art makes me laugh and it can torture me because I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
In the spirit of unedited transmission, following are a few choice quotes from a recent studio visit:
“I don't like the idea of imitating nature, but we are nature. We are nature and the nature that we produce is art. It's important for me to make acts of animality, things of which only nature is capable.”“It takes a lifetime to get rid of how you've learned to draw and paint - to make work like an animal commanding you from a place of silence.”
“The boxes are like houses for objects. They turn owners if they can survive the claustrophobia of being in a box. They become the master of the house.”
“Louise Nevelson is my artistic grandmother and Max Ernst is my grandfather. So then the question is who are my parents. I don't know. I think I'm an orphan.”
Black Moby Dick & 9 Untitled runs through June 9 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist Friday May 12, 6-8 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents 2017 Drawings by Anselm Dästner.
East Village artist Anselm Dästner perambulates and paints, capturing and rearranging neighborhood landmarks and events that speak to his role as an observer of the urban fabric and a father in that context.
He states:
“I have always been drawing while traveling, and while my daughter was a baby I found myself walking around the Lower East Side with a baby sling. In it she was taking afternoon naps and I continued drawing the street corners that we passed. At night I would continue to color the drawings with watercolor and acrylics.”
2017 Drawings runs through April 30 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Birds and Babes: The Curation and Collection of Jhovana Samano.
Jhovana Samano’s artistry resides in her aesthetic and cultural appreciation. She is an archivist and champion for marginalized and archaic modes of expression and design.
Scouring thrift shops, street markets and Ebay she rescues objects of uncanny beauty or strangeness, delving deep into the various mediums that at any given time fascinate her: needlepoint, silhouettes, paint-by-numbers, pin-ups, velvet paintings, figure drawings, skeleton keys, mid-century serving platters and cut glass.
As an ecosystem of objects, she thinks in terms of groups and likes to have things match. “Things have to get along,” she states. The impulse derives from an assertive sense of inclusion and indicates the progressive thrust underpinning her project – as she says, she endeavors to “go out of my way to mix and match patterns because it proves they can get along together.” Her work verifies that difference and chaos can harmonize.
Birds and Babes: The Curation and Collection of Jhovana Samano runs through March 24 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Sonata for Psyche Tattooing: Allegro, Adagio and Allegretto by Robyn Thomas.
Emerging as part of Robyn Thomas's practice-led research in the expression of the multifacetedness of identity through the objects and acts of painting, Sonata is a self-portrayal. Like its musical cousin this physical manifestation of a sonata is brought to life each time it is played through the distinct interpretation of its performer(s) – artist, curators or spectators - in the space in which the work is performed. The performer(s) are provided a basic structure of 84 notes cut from each section of the three movements painted on paper and mounted on birch wood panels to be arranged and re-arranged following the tune resonating between the work and performer(s).
Sonata for Psyche Tattooing: Allegro, Adagio and Allegretto runs through February 17 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents 2016: Paintings by Nathan Stapley.
Stapley, a lead artist for Double Fine Productions, makes his third appearance at Adjacent To Life. Expanding the scope of his previous two exhibits - which featured scenes from New York’s East Village and his daily bike commute, respectively – 2016 presents an interpretive documentation of the artist’s travels throughout the year: from Morocco to San Francisco and Costa Rica to Brooklyn.
Employing his signature color calibration and attentiveness to light’s effects, the postcard-sized gouaches capture the evanescent specifics of time of day, season, temperature and latitude.
2016: Paintings by Nathan Stapley runs through January 15 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Fifty percent of sales donated to Natural Resource Defense Council.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Pleasure, incomprehensible: Embroidery by Hannah Duke.
Embroiderer Hannah Duke explores and expands upon the assumptions surrounding the “craft” of needlework. Embracing embroidery’s wedding of beauty and utility, her work explores the medium’s historic role as a form of inter-generational knowledge-transfer – while simultaneously investigating contemporary issues and expressions of gender, sensuality, time, mediation and personal narrative.
Pleasure, incomprehensible: Embroidery by Hannah Duke runs through December 2 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Some Places (continued): Paintings by Nash Hogan.
Nash Hogan’s paintings constitute visual-memory mash-ups distilled from urban walkabouts. As he puts it, “I work from photos that I take while wandering. From multiple 4x6 inch snapshots, I layer and intersect multiple viewpoints of a single area to recreate a time and place.”
Some Places (continued): Paintings by Nash Hogan runs through October 28 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents the work of photographer Ted Philips in the exhibit Resilience: Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia in the late 1990s.
Philips states,
In the 1990s a series of wars tore the former Yugoslavia apart. Horrors unseen in Europe since the Second World War left a diverse, multi-national country divided into ethnic enclaves. When I first came to Bosnia in the summer of 1996 the war in that country had been over for eight months and the healing and reconstruction was just beginning. People who had endured the deaths of loved ones and a way of life began to pick up and rebuild. The wars were not over and soon fighting flared in Kosovo. When NATO intervened in 1999, the government of Slobodan Milosevic began a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing to drive the Albanian majority out of Kosovo. As they poured into the refugee camps of Macedonia, I found people who reminded me of my neighbors, my co-workers, my family members. They were ordinary people living through extraordinary and painful times. When the fighting stopped, I went into Kosovo to document the destruction as well as the endurance of the people whose lives had been turned upside down.
A journalist and photographer, Phillips is a staff reporter at Newsday in Long Island. His work has been published in amNewYork, Time Out New York, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, Architectural Record, New York Sun and other publications.
Resilience: Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia in the late 1990s runs through September 16 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents East Village in Motion: Paintings by Jake Nelson.
In works of kaleidoscopic complexity, painter Jake Nelson addresses the tangibility of memory in a transient world as he bids farewell to his eventful tenure in the East Village and the neighborhood’s vanishing landmarks and institutions.
East Village in Motion: Paintings by Jake Nelson runs through August 19 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Throughout the duration of the exhibit Jake will frequently be found painting en plein air across the street in Tompkins Square Park.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents CatArt: Feline Aesthetic Ethology.
Artists: Carolee Schneemann, Kitch, Vesper, La Nina, Rose McShane, Katkin Siobhan Meow, Jupiter “Joe Peters” Meow, Sir Kiwi Bristlewhiskers Meow, Knuckles Brohain Suzdal Meow, Cat, Ezmerelda, Mimi, Raul, Prima, Duetta, Quattrina, Cinquella, Chase Chivers, Samoa Moriki
Curation and Artistic Design: Ananya Mukherjea, Jeffrey Bussolini, Mark Roth, Al Huckabee, Ellie Irons, Siobhan Meow, Lissette Olivares
CatArt: Feline Aesthetic Ethology presents art made by felines - art fashioned in their singular idiom, reflecting their particular concerns and pleasures. This highlighting of cats engaged in the exploration and manipulation of materials challenges the notion that art-making is a uniquely human activity and intimates that human art-making found its genesis in the observation and imitation of animal behavior and enthusiasms.
This area of investigation, here newly coined Aesthetic Ethology, is in dialogue with Post-Humanism – a reappraising movement in philosophy that seeks to decenter the human and embrace the agency of other beings, systems and forms – and Ethology – the science of animal behavior. The installation’s accompanying texts situate the works in these fields of inquiry.
Legendary Feminist icon and artist Carolee Schneemann has long recognized the aesthetic behavior and self-integrated gaze of the feline. Here she offers images of paintings made by Kitch in 1957 and 1967, a photograph taken by Vesper in 1998, and premieres new assemblage, scatter, and toilet paper interventions by La Nina.
Other cat-produced works on display emanate from the collective in residency at the Center for Feline Studies: Cat, Ezmerelda, Mimi, Prima, Duetta, Quattrina, Cinquella, and Raul. CFS is a research facility initiated and operated under the auspices of Ananya Mukherjea and Jeffrey Bussolini. Here cats are studied in situ as they engage each other, their human subjects and the domestic environment. Observation has demonstrated felines taking part in processes of ordering, disordering, marking, and interaction that profoundly alter the lived environment and indicate intention, aesthetics, and gesture.
Mukherjea is a sociologist and gender studies scholar who has a long interest in human-animal interactions. She researches urban ecology, environmentalism, and infectious disease epidemics
Bussolini is a noted translator of continental Philosophical Ethologists, instrumental in introducing to the English speaking world the work of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini. The collection of portraits by Siobhan Meow, Samoa Moriki and Rose McShane represent a human/feline collaboration wherein the cats, as autonomous sitters, actively engage in interaction and social dialogue with the painter that forges the images we see. In this sense the paintings are the marked records of a material engagement in time, space, and affect in which the cats entrust the painters with the transmission of their unique personality and life experience. Siobhan Meow is one of the original squatters of Umbrella House and still part of that vibrant social and political collective in the East Village. She has long and deep social roots with feline-kind and has a sustained artistic practice centering on collaboration with and depiction of cats. Samoa Moriki is a Japanese born American outsider artist, Lower East Side punk musician and performance artist and co-founder and guitarist of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Rose McShane is a Cooper Union trained painter who turns a deeply social eye to animal portraiture, seeking to come to know the sitting subject and portray their unique personality and character as an interactive dialogue. Chase Chivers, whose landscape photo here is the contemplative focus of Quattrina, is a skateboarder, painter and photographer. An East Village habitué recently relocated to London, his exhibits include solo shows at Ed. Varie and Adjacent To Life. CatArt: Feline Aesthetic Ethology runs through July 1 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). The opening reception is Friday June 3, 6-8 pm and continuing offsite.
Posted by Shark Roth at 08:57 AM
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents MELT by Tatawa.
With “fragmented marks, wandering lines and graffiti-like stains,” London-based Tatawa’s carefully color-calibrated mixed-media paintings honor the artistic self she discovered while living in New York City.
MELT by Tatawa runs through May 27 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Cartoon Catharsis: New Paintings by Ray Sumser.
With spontaneity and a buoyant directness, Sumser’s new Cartoon Catharsis series “represents a return from the precise composition” of his epic cartoon character universes to the “rough experimentation” of painterly invention.
Cartoon Catharsis: New Paintings by Ray Sumser runs through April 29 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 31, 6:00 - 8:00 pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents fixer: Photographs by Anna Grevenitis.
In daily introspection, Grevenitis makes images of her daughter and son and the people and places in her life. This close observation, reflecting upon her intimate environment, becomes a contemplation of what constitutes meaning and what mechanisms generate and substantiate it. The on-going series, fixer, explores the particular idea of fixing time and memory through images.
fixer: Photographs by Anna Grevenitis runs through March 25 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Stele: Monotypes by K.J. Schumacher.
With the series Stele, Nashville artist K.J Schumacher has generated monotypes (oil printing on Rives paper) from broken and discarded acrylic plates retrieved from the print shop at the school where he taught for seven years.
In dialogue with the formal concerns of 1950’s New York School abstraction and the Minimalism that followed, he explains:
“I’m using a primary color scheme and slightly offsetting subsequent prints to build the image and produce a more three dimensional effect, underscoring the objectification of the acrylic plates. I make a distinction with these works; this is not using the plates to make a mark, rather it is using ink to record the found objects (plates). I also chose primary colors to underscore the notion of “building an image” as a way to refer back to my teaching studio.”
Stele: Monotypes by K.J. Schumacher runs through February 19 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Daily Operation: Paintings by Nathan Stapley.
In a complementary exhibit to his show last year featuring gouaches of East Village landmarks, Nathan Stapley - a lead artist and illustrator at Double Fine Productions - returns with a neighborhood portrait of a uniquely intimate nature: his daily operation. Nathan states, "these paintings represent the things that I see everyday, from my apartment on 8th Street to the commute to my studio in Brooklyn."
Daily Operation: Paintings by Nathan Stapley runs through January 15 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Title: New Images by Orange.
The images of Lower East Side artist Orange evidence the pursuit of curiosity. Inspired by shapes and cultural ephemera valued by the artist, the works are intuitive assemblages of visual source material.
Orange puts it this way:
“The great painters and musicians are those that go somewhere else and bring back souvenirs for the rest of us. My images are intended as an appreciation of them.”
Title: New Images by Orange runs through December 11 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 19, 6:00 - 8:00 pm. The framed images are available for a $100 donation to Faerie Camp Destiny.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Transcendents: Psychedelic Ink Portraits by Vedran Misic.
With Transcendents, Sarajevo born Vedran Misic, presents a collection of intricate visionary portraits of cultural icons that are studies of the “wonder of a human body and the mystery of the life force itself.”
Transcendents: Psychedelic Ink Portraits by Vedran Misic runs through November 6 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Underwater Exposures: Photographs by Sandra Clopp.
Diver and photographer Sandra Clopp has traveled the globe exploring the “other planet” of the underwater world.
Culled from thousands of photos, the exhibit offers a selection of the "vast variety of sea creatures and environments that span the 71% of this Earth that is covered in water" - from manta rays, bull sharks and tiny pygmy seahorses to orange tannic water stained by fallen leaves in the Florida Springs.
Underwater Exposures: Photographs by Sandra Clopp runs through October 2 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents On Top of Spectre Mountain: The Cyanotypes of Michaela Coffield.
The artist writes,
Spectre Mountain is an independent ecosystem with vast mountain ranges connecting sea, cave systems, and looming icebergs. Humans have not set foot on Spectre Mountain for centuries but the ghostly landscape can be seen on moonlit nights through a powerful enough telescope."
On Top of Spectre Mountain: The Cyanotypes of Michaela Coffield runs through August 28 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Pocket Retrospective: The Postcards of James Himber's Legascenic View.
For years the Ninth Street Espresso on 9th and Ave C served as a second studio for painter James Himber. An iconic, beloved and modest presence, most days he could be found ensconced at the corner table painting watercolors, sketching or working his way through John Richardson’s multivolume Picasso biography.
The intensity of his focus was palpable – as though Painting for him was a matter of life and death. Sadly this literally was the case. His adoption of Ninth Street as a second studio was the result of a terminal medical diagnosis and the consequent commitment to use his remaining life energy in the service of Painting. For five years he toiled with death as a rapidly advancing certainty.
On June 21st last year he passed away.
From a formal painting perspective, his work explores the vexing fluidity of the line between abstraction and naturalistic depiction. Seated in symbolic and/or surrealistic narratives, his subject matter is that of a freewheeling revelation of psychological dilemmas that endeavor to place himself and the viewer in a challenging, often discomfiting position. James put it this way: “Art is where intellectualism ends and emotionalism begins.”
At one point, as part of his art practice - and life’s assessment - he began printing postcards of his paintings. He would carry this collection with him – a retrospective companion, a measure of progress and documentation of a life’s investment.
This show presents some of those postcards.
In the final year of his life his work was recognized and actively championed by Saatchi Art Online. As such, a good bit of his final life force was spent deaccessioning scores of paintings from his studio to points all around the globe. He considered this concluding act of aesthetic disbursement to be his painting legacy.
He is missed.
Pocket Retrospective: The Postcards of James Himber’s Legascenic View runs through July 17 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Places In Time: Paintings by Kori Burkholder.
Places In Time runs through June 19 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC). A reception for the artist will be held Friday May 29, 6:30-8:00pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Collaborative Works: Paintings by Casey Shaw & Kori Burkholder.
The exhibit runs through May 15 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC). A reception for the artists will be held Friday April 17, 6-8:00pm.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Transverse Impressions: Images of Glacier National Park by Robert Massman.
The images in this show were created using a Mamiya RZ67 with Polaroid back and Polaroid 679 film transferred onto cold press Canson paper.
Robert states: “I’ve always thought nostalgically about Glacier National Park. As a child, I remember spending a lot of time looking at photos my dad had taken on his trips there.”
“Transverse Impressions refers to the quality the images capture. They are in a place between two points: experience and reflection. Reflecting on time spent looking at photographs in my parents’ albums, and the experience of being there.”
The exhibit runs through April 10 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Wide Open Space: Photographs by Joe Leonard.
Wide Open Space is a collection of photographs taken during Joe Leonard’s 2012 trip to Chile’s Patagonia Gulf of Corcovado region, while visiting the Melimoyu property. Joe feels that helping to preserve wilderness like this is very important for us all. You can find out about what the good people of SNP Patagonia SUR are doing to maintain this region’s diverse ecosystem by visiting patagoniasur.com.
Wide Open Space runs through March 6 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents East Village Illuminated: Paintings by Nathan Stapley.
Through careful color calibration and attentiveness to light’s effects, painter Nathan Stapley’s postcard-sized gouaches capture the evanescent specifics of time of day, season and temperature - while presenting New York’s East Village in the complementary roles of icon and home.
East Village Illuminated runs through January 30 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life presents Aspiration, a two-part exhibit of Michael Sean Edwards' photographs.
past future past: the East Village 1978-1980 features images from Mr. Edwards' recent book of the same title. The works document the eye of an "entranced" young photographer, serving as a harbinger of the artist who would emerge and a record of an iconic era of the East Village.
His newest and ongoing body of work, The Tension of Reflexive Identity, finds the photographer performatively shooting consecutive shots of 35mm film that together form a single image exploring notions of identity and the transcending or maintenance of boundaries.
Aspiration is Mr. Edwards third show at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). It runs through December 19.
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Urban Extracts: Photographs by Matthew Borenstein.
Matthew Borenstein's photographs are a meditation on the beauty and transience of materiality. Shadows and raking light assume the solidity of architecture while projecting a destiny of increasingly acute angles, twilight and the promise of tomorrow.
Urban Extracts runs through November 14 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Traces: Paintings and Prints by Kaitlin Pomerantz.
Absence fills Kaitlin Pomerantz's paintings, implying tales, lives and loves removed, relocated or forgotten. What remains is an arena of opaque nostalgia that also reveals a witty parallel narrative of Painting's resilience. With earnest irony, Pomerantz's act of painting a vacated picture asserts Painting's continued, albeit problematized, mysterious power: absence becomes a presence.
Traces runs through October 10 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Defiant Flowers: Paintings by Stacy Harshman.
East Village artist Stacy Harshman paints ecstatic emanations that mirror the generative processes of nature.
While her method of gestural improvisation parallels that of the New York School Abstract-Expressionists, she complements the ponderous swagger of those earlier painters by embracing delicacy and the unapologetic pursuit of beauty as a value unto itself.
The incorporation of literal blossoms acknowledges that it “takes a lot of guts to be a flower.” To stand on display, freely offering beauty to all is a defiant show of confidence and strength, and an advocacy for the greater good.
Defiant Flowers runs through August 29 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Efflorescence: The Collages of Kennyray Scallon.
East Village collage artist and graphic designer Kennyray Scallon redeploys the familiar imagery of our mediated environment to create a personal vision of a teeming world of ever-transmuting possibility. The environment depicted might be regarded as a synaptic landscape, a neural net that reveals a thought in the process of becoming.
Scallon works in an organic, intuitive manner. Images emerge like a flower unfolding. As in nature, the process is fractal, generating worlds within worlds, thoughts within thoughts until they attain the fullness of manifestation.
Efflorescence runs through July 18 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Building upon his work as an art director for film and television, Charlie Kulsziski's exhibit, Scenes From The Forest, presents montaged cut and pasted paper 3D constructions that are "like sets from a scary puppet show or story book."
Scenes From The Forest runs through June 13 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Drawing on his professional experience as a movie editor, photographer Michael Sean Edwards presents Short Films, his second Adjacent to Life exhibit. Consisting of two or three consecutive frames, each work elevates uncanny moments of narrative happenstance in a meditation on the editing process and the physical structure film.
Short Films runs through May 9 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, NYC).
Picasso is said to have explained that he’d sometimes leave a painting unfinished in the corner of the studio. Weeks, months or even years later, he’d unearth that canvas to discover it magically resolved, as if on its own.
The paintings displayed here reflect a similar dynamic. While I’ve always considered them resolved, a critical transformation has occurred during the many years since they were archived in my studio.
This aesthetic alchemy is driven by a multi-fold mechanism. Partly, the works stand as irreproducible relics of an aspirant artist in the thrall of the New York School painters. The doors to that former self now closed, they also retroactively connect-the-dots to subsequent evolution.
Picasso might have considered this art of recovery the aesthetics of self-compassion - increased self-acceptance on the part of the painter leads to a tempered critical eye. Could Picasso’s tale have been a wink and nod to the retrospective gaze as another tool at the artist’s disposal?
In Retrospect: Paintings by Mark Roth runs through April 4 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life, presents In Queens: Paintings by Richard Schaad
Richard Schaad explores the condition of privacy within a public setting. This cycle of paintings focuses on scenes from a recent annual Columbian Festival in Queens, New York.
The show runs through February 28 at Adjacent to Life’s pop-up gallery, housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life, presents Chicken Portraits: Drawings by Nina Glikshtern.
With meditative focus, Nina Glikshtern confers upon the under-recognized chicken an honor historically reserved for political leaders, royalty and other figures of status. She draws upon her training as a medical illustrator to craft intricate, accurate portraits of heritage breed chickens.
It’s a measure of respect appropriate for a creature that is heir to the dinosaurs and integral to the development and functioning of civilization.
The show runs through January 24 at Adjacent to Life’s current pop-up gallery, housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life, presents You Want It - You Got It: Magic Paintings by John Tebeau.
With You Want It, You Got It, Tebeau highlights the particular universal truths that make certain pop culture icons immortal. Executed in a style that honors their popular origin, he constructs these paintings to function as transformative assistants, where the viewer may welcome the “magic” represented in each icon into their own life.
The show runs through December 6 at Adjacent to Life’s current pop-up gallery, housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life, presents Artists in Resonance: The Paintings of 137ac.
137ac is a collective of people who have taken license to paint as if it can heal them.
They are self-taught artists who have known each other for the past decade. In a studio on West 14th Street, they inspire and challenge each other to fully develop their skills.
"These are people whose primary language is art," says Annatina Miescher MD, founder of a non-profit building support for the collective.
Each participant in 137ac has had to confront profound challenges in life, born of biography, identity, economic privation or behavioral health issues.
For this reason the collective's work is often framed as outsider art. But given the accomplishment evident in the respective visions expressed in Artists in Resonance, it's clear these artists are practiced at inhabiting process. It could be argued these are the works of insider artists - living inside Art - in its promise and authenticity.
This is their fourth show.
In 2012, Bjarne Melgaard created collaborative paintings with 137ac for his exhibition A House to Die In at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He has also curated their work for shows at Ramiken Crucible, NYC and a pop up gallery in Chelsea, Dans Ma Chambre.
The show runs through November 1 at Adjacent to Life’s current pop-up gallery, housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Habeas Corpus: Photographs by Michael Sean Edwards.
With Habeas Corpus, Edwards exhibits large-scale prints repurposed from negatives he took in New York from 1978-1980. As Edwards states, “These photographs were not intended to be memories, but inevitably, given the passage of time, they are. They are also artifacts, and I thought it might be interesting to present them that way. There are several histories involved. The places, the mechanisms, the images I made, and my relationship to all of them.”
The show runs through Sept. 27th at Adjacent to Life’s current pop-up gallery, housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Life Imitating Art Imitating Life: Photographs by Val Clark.
With Life Imitating Art Imitating Life East Village photographer Val Clark displays unmanipulated photographs of the physical environment that, seen through her lens, uncannily mirror the look and sensibility of legendary painters.
She describes the experience of encountering these serendipitous moments as a kind of “déjà vu harkening back to an iconic painting or signature style of a favorite artist. (Yet) all are literally what they seem to be as well – a slender moon casting a mystical glow upon a lone sapling in Tompkins Square Park; the late afternoon light on the brick of a New York City block in Greenwich Village that Hopper would have loved and painted…”
Val Clark’s work illustrates that, ultimately, a painting comes to fruition less on a canvas than in each viewer’s perception. To see is to paint.
The show resides at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Righteous Gangsters: The Fingerprint Art of Jennifer Hannaford.
Hannaford’s production includes a wide range of subjects (her friends in the Bureau are partial to the John Dillinger part of the spectrum). But it is the equalizing humanity of the mugshot that ultimately fascinates Hannaford. As she says, mugshots
“capture the individual in a most vulnerable moment, unscripted and beyond choice. While these images are necessary for documentation for criminal records, they reveal more. An entire range of unmasked emotions is accessible. Some images depict the individual not wanting to be arrested and booked for their actions, while others depict one taking that risk to make a statement.”
An artist’s gestures and method of paint-handling constitute a kind of signature. Hannaford literalizes this evidence of the artist’s hand in a way that would hold up in court – by using her own fingerprint.
She has a Masters in Forensic Science and has processed crime scenes and conducted latent print comparisons for the Oakland Police Department, the State of Vermont, the City of Boston, New York and other agencies throughout the country.
Righteous Gangsters presents a selection of individuals whose entanglement with the law raise issues of conscience, artistic freedom and the obsession with celebrity. Lenny Bruce and Lili St. Cyr ran afoul of the law in pursuit of creative expression, Civil Rights Freedom Rider Margaret Leonard was fighting for justice and Jim Morrison could be viewed as having being arrested for the crime of being famous.
By definition of her professional responsibilities, Hannaford brings a level of attention to the environment that enables her to see things that elude most of us. This is at play in her use of the fingerprint as drawing tool – it allows her to highlight and “explore the blur between the easily discernible and the nearly invisible.”
Assuring due process, she is the master of the positive ID.
The show, Righteous Gangsters: The Fingerprint Art of Jennifer Hannaford resides at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B).
Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo's curatorial project, presents Downstate: Photographs by Jeb Allred.
Without drawing a distinction, Allred’s work wavers between contemplation and isolation.
You can find the installation at Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo's pop-up gallery currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B). It's on view through May 17.
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Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo's curatorial project, presents Please Sign In: The Fractal Drawings of Ray Vuoso.
Ray Vuoso crafts churning, fecund worlds in rigid, regimented environs. Using crayon, oil pastel and earnest investment, he creates works that seem to transcend scale: they read, alternately, as microscopic investigations of cellular life and as satellite views of teeming landscapes.
Please Sign In reveals Vuoso’s personal aim to cover every inch of paper with every visual idea he can conjure. This impulse derives to some extent from the unique scenario under which he works.
“For nearly 30 years I’ve worked as a security guard. The last few, I mostly work the nightshift in corporate lobbies. It’s a good job, gives me time to think and that turned into time to make art. I never set out to, it just happened on its own – doodles turned into faces, mostly in the newspaper margins. Eventually, I started bringing in my own paper and it went from there.”
Slowly evolving and obsessively rendered, the works are done on the sly with frequent interruptions. Vuoso recounts he chose his paper size because he could slip it into the desk binder if he had to conceal it rapidly.
“I like art. It’s relaxing and it’s a good place for my ideas. To my friends, I joke I’m a corporate lobby artist … but only literally.”
You can find the installation at Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo's pop-up gallery currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B). It's on view through April 6.
Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo’s curatorial project presents Chips By Rose: Paintings by Rose McShane.
Using ink and an etching scribe, Rose McShane lovingly paints magnifying glass-worthy portraits of animals on vintage clay poker chips.
Each of the individuals in Rose’s ever expanding animal registry greet the viewer with eyes that glint with humanity. In Rose’s world the attributes of “humanity” – feeling waves of joy, the pursuit of curiosity, awe, the urgency to love, feeling empathy and grief – are not species-specific but a source of commonality across the entire fauna spectrum.
McShane was trained as a fine art printmaker and spent a career as an industrial printer. When changes in the industry devastated her field of employ she turned to her own inner, inexhaustible resources and began painting these chips. Selling at flea markets, street fairs and online, she has created for herself a second career born of her passion for art and the animals she loves.
The installation resides at the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B). Drop by for some heartfelt espresso with art to match. It's on view through January 11.
Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo’s curatorial project presents Beat Cathedral of the Street: Photographs by Tom Martinez.
Martinez cleverly embeds words and phrases from Beat poet, friend and true survivor A. A. Pritchard into painterly, yet journalistic, images that remind “if we remain open at the deepest dimension of our beings, we will see the sacred light of life and love breaking through, often in the most unlikely places.”
The installation resides at the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B). Drop by for some beatific espresso with art to match. It's on view through October 26.
Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo's curatorial project, presents Noise Riot: The Gig Posters of Matthew Hart.
Durham-based printmaker Hart creates handcrafted, limited edition rock posters that reflect an idiosyncratic aesthetic of the grotesque. “Noise Riot” presents works made between 2002-2006 for the North Carolina clubs: the Nightlight, the Cave, the Cat's Cradle, Hell & the Local 506, as well as San Francisco's legendary Bottom of the Hill. These scenes nurtured such notable artists as Deerhoof, Felt Battery, Hale Zukas, the Hospitals, Megafaun, Peaking Lights, VHOLTZ, XBXRX & the Yellow Swans.
Rabidly collected by enthusiasts of the era, Matt’s prints retain their iconic status as emblems of a noise riot whose feedback now reverberates across the nation.
The installation resides at the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B). Drop by for some rockin’ espresso with art to match. It's on view through September 21.
Adjacent to Life, Tinsquo's curatorial project, presents the newest work of photographer Noel Worden. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, June 28, 6-8pm. A limited edition catalog accompanies the show.
Inside The Arctic Circle is the result of Worden's excursion to the Canadian Arctic as a working member of the Environment Canada scientific team. For six weeks, he collected data about a colony of Lesser and Ross Snow Geese, returning with images which evidence a remote climate and the persistence of life.
The installation resides at the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B). Drop by for some untamed espresso with art to match. It's on view through August 4.
For more on Worden's work and the curatorial project visit Adjacent to Life, the blog ("follow" and "like" us on Tumblr).
The freshest installment of our curatorial project, the pop-up gallery Adjacent to Life, presents paintings by Aleksandra Shineleva.
Aleks addresses the challenge of uniting accurate physical representation with a true-ringing disclosure of her subject’s interior life.
Zoomin' In resides in the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B: 10B to regulars). Drop by for some revelatory espresso with art to match. It's on view through June 22.
For more on Shineleva's work and the curatorial project visit Adjacent to Life, the blog ("follow" and "like" us on Tumblr).
The latest installment of our new curatorial project, the pop-up gallery Adjacent to Life, presents paintings by Rachel Taylor.
With expansive spills and unforced accidents of ink, coffee, paint and other ephemera, Rachel depicts the fluidity of life's processes and the impermanence of description.
Swamp Bobbin resides in the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B: 10B to regulars). Drop by for some essential espresso with art to match. It's on view through May 11.
For more on Taylor’s work and the curatorial project visit Adjacent to Life, the blog ("follow" and "like" us on Tumblr).
It’s show number two for our new curatorial project, the pop-up gallery Adjacent to Life. This go features photographs by friend of TINSQUO, Chase Chivers.
Derived from travels afforded through Chivers’ participation in the international skateboarder community, his work demonstrates that solitude crosses all frontiers, no visa required.
Loneliness Now Boarding resides in the pop-up gallery, Adjacent to Life, currently housed at Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B: 10B to regulars). Drop by for some serious espresso with art to match. It's on view through March 23.
For more on Chase’s work and the curatorial project visit Adjacent to Life, the blog ("follow" and "like" us on Tumblr).
TINSQUO is moving beyond the digital screen to a space adjacent to Life. In fact, that's what it's called and it begins now!
Adjacent to Life: a curatorial project of TINSQUO.com launches today. The “freaky sad" paintings of James Himber inaugurate the proceedings.
His exhibit, Existential Shipwrecks, portrays castoffs and waifs - misfits struggling to locate their place in the world and on the canvas.
The show resides at Ninth Street Espresso (341 East 10th Street at Ave B - "10-B" for regulars). Drop by for some intense espresso with art to match. It's on view through February 9.
For more on James' work and the curatorial project visit Adjacent to Life, the blog ("follow' and 'like' us on Tumblr).