At first glance, photos from Sally Gall’s Aerial series at Chelsea’s Winston Wachter Gallery create happy confusion; abstract shapes and vibrant colors lure us into trying to understand what’s being represented. After a longer look, what appeared to be sea life or flowers resolves into items seen from below on a clothes-line. Even after the ‘ah-ha’ moment of identification, Gall’s images continue to entice as colorful and complex abstractions. (On view in Chelsea through March 5th).
Growing up in Kabul and in Central Asia, recent Yale grad Hangama Amiri was drawn to bazaars and their abundance of textiles, as well as her uncle’s tailor shop. Now in the US, Amiri has sourced similar materials from Afghan-owned businesses to create cloth collages picturing products and places in South Asian diasporic communities now on view at Albertz Benda Gallery. “Fabric as a medium really is associated with memory,” she explains in a statement released by the gallery, “…fabric captures smell, and time, lot of bodily attachments – we are all wearing fabrics. It is also a fragile medium, so it really touches and resembles all those notions of memory I am talking about and it really reconnects with what I am trying to convey in my art”.
Made over months if not years, Peter Sacks’ multilayered works at Sperone Westwater are composed of layers of typewritten text, cardboard, paint, textiles from around the world and more. Describing the mind as sedimentary in a 2019 New Yorker profile, Sacks layers meaning below the surface of each artwork, burying layers of imagery to convey the concept that more lies below, unseen. Here, a piece from his ‘Above Our Cities’ series turns the skies into a colorful riot over the relatively small skyline below. Is this a celebration? An apocalypse? Both? (On view on the Lower East Side through March 20th).
Nancy Shaver marshaled work by twenty-four artists to create ‘Quilt,’ a wall collage of Shaver’s own fabric panels and works in other media which spreads out over Derek Eller Gallery’s walls like a kudzu of patterns and pop culture references. (On the Lower East Side through Aug 19th).
Columbian artists Diego Alvarez and Maria Paula Alvarez treat wood as if it were paper in both meticulous lattices that mimic Bogota’s fencing and this cedar oak plywood sheet that drapes over a Plexiglas shelf like a piece of fabric. (At Magnan Metz Gallery through May 21st.)
