Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Entering Tommy White’s cave-like Crown Heights studio, you’re struck by the fathomless matte black on his canvases, fate knocking at the door. It can serve both to seduce and to dare, drawing you in and pushing you out.
Tag: Springs Projects
A group apart at Springs Projects
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There are a fair few viable organizing concepts for group art exhibitions. One particularly challenging one is to present viewers with a tour d’horizon of emotions and attitudes that seem to prevail at a given historical moment. The key to optimal execution, of course, is to avoid both the obvious and the obscure. In “Each Own” at Springs Projects, curators and gallery co-founders Cate Holt and Tommy White strike the right balance, strategically deploying the work of six exceptional…
Mark Fingerhut and the sneaky internet
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Burgeoning technological innovation over generations has brought out the millennial optimist in many, but, especially outside the bubble of the tendentious capitalists eager to cash in on their investments, it may have unloosed the Luddite paranoiac in more. “Goings On,” a pastiche of Mark Fingerhut’s cheerfully invasive videos deftly curated by Lonesome Dove and recently screened at Springs Projects in Dumbo, speaks to both – the one in knowing condescension, the other in sardonic affirmation. Blasts of images that rankle sometimes owing to their content, sometimes because of their staccato presentation and creepily fluid mutability, make a case for the digital matrix’s weird agency and, beyond that, its insidious seductiveness.
The enduring elasticity of painting
Contributed by Sharon Butler / After a lengthy stretch during which emerging painters have leaned into commercial preferences for the traditional, many seem to be breaking free from the market’s emphasis on imagery and narrative. Painters with a penchant for experimental, near three-dimensional approaches have bounced back into the conversation they commanded in the early 2010s. Three current exhibitions, all curated by artists, reflect various aspects of this phenomenon.