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).
Long walks through New York, Paris and London yield source material for Mary Lum’s complex photo and paint collages, now on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery in Chelsea. Titled 11th Avenue, this piece features slices of urban architecture and facades that dynamically multiply the grid. At center, Lum seamlessly turns a photo of metal piping into a flattened piece of paper that in turn guides our eye up and over a grey wall – all moves that keep our sense of space shifting in an engaging way. (On view through Feb 26th).
Bay Area artist Lucy Puls has returned over the course of her decades-long career to the question of what society values and what it discards. Her photos of bank-owned homes, printed on huge sheets of fabric-like paper and hung high on the walls of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery feature images of places once personally meaningful and now neglected. Weighed down by discarded household items, in this case a metal folding chair, images and objects speak to the passing of time, to change and moving on. (On view in Tribeca through Jan 22nd).
For the last exhibition of its forty-year history, Helene Winer’s and Janelle Reiring’s legendary Metro Pictures Gallery is showcasing new work by Polish artist Paulia Olowska that celebrates exhibition and educational spaces run by women. This large painting checks in with Seurat’s 1880s scene of Paris leisure, La Grande Jatte, while having been directly inspired by a photo by fashion photographer Deborah Tuberville. Harnessing imagery meant to encourage consumption, Olowska sells the idea of new creative communities while aiming to increase representation of women in art history. (On view through Dec 11th in Chelsea. Masks required).
Selling off unwanted furniture and household decoration takes a new twist in one of Matthew Brandt’s latest series, ‘Rooms,’ at Yossi Milo Gallery, for which he acquired chandeliers, then hot-fused photos of the room in which the chandelier hung to the individual pieces of the chandelier. Literally bearing witness to their past, the lights feature windows (as seen here), furnishings and other signs of life from the past owner. In this piece, ‘May’s Living Room,’ pictures of the past environment recall a pointillist painting crossed with a geometric abstraction. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 11th).
