The thirteenth New York iteration of the scrappy, curator-led Spring Break honest (till 9 September), has taken up residence on the tenth ground of a Hudson Sq. property at 75 Varick Road, simply on the sting of Manhattan’s more and more dominant Tribeca gallery district. The Spring Break aesthetic ethos, recognized for its blaring color and do-it-yourself spirit, is again in true kind this 12 months, main guests via a labyrinthine loop of thick paint, daring sculpture and distinctive interventions into the occasion’s buttoned-up company environs.
The honest’s founders, Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori, describe its 2024 theme, INT./EXT. (inside /exterior), as a “peanut butter and jelly sandwich of tactility and intangibleness”, a possibility to make use of artwork as a bridge between kinds, classes and visible planes. It’s becoming, then, that a lot of the work on show at Spring Break has a Surrealist edge, imbuing creatures with human qualities whereas monster-ifying the figural establishment. Most of the stands and installations function yearnings for brand spanking new, outdated or different worlds past this one, spanning previous, current and funky, far-flung futures.
Terra Keck, Out of Time
Terra Keck, Arcturus, 2024, $1,200 Courtesy the artist and Area Tasks, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
Tucked away in a darkened, teal cubicle lies Out of Time (stand 30), a solo show by artist Terra Keck, co-curated by Lisa Schilling, Jacob Rhodes and William Chan of Area Tasks Gallery. The venture encompasses a suite of 20 small, back-lit “eraser drawings” by the Brooklyn-based artist, who makes use of the language of subtraction to create twinkling, tantric meditations on the existence of UFOs. “I educated as a print-maker, so I discover a completely clean web page extremely unnerving,” Keck tells The Artwork Newspaper. As an alternative, she works backwards. “All the marks you see are completed by selecting up pigment with an eraser,” Keck explains. She just isn’t involved in aliens from a “navy industrial advanced or conspiratorial perspective”, however as an alternative takes a hopeful place, contemplating the potential of intergalactic guests as an indication that people are definitely worth the go to. Her items meld visible references to Nineteenth-century mysticism with allusions to crop circles, lending the drawings a folkloric timbre. Keck’s works vary from $600-$5,000.
Sarah Angèle Wilson, Mom Nature’s Bitch
Sarah Angèle Wilson, WET, 2024, $6,000 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
The Canada-born, Brooklyn-based artist and illustrator Sarah Angèle Wilson makes a splash within the Workplace Hours part of the honest, specifically curated by co-founders Kelly and Gori. Wilson’s shiny, chimeric reduction sculptures go off the wall with acidic insistence, combining the physicality of Baroque-era wrought iron with a juicy business patina. “I carve the sculptures out of XPS foam, after which work into them with clay and wooden, so they appear monumental, however they’re truly tremendous gentle,” Wilson tells The Artwork Newspaper. The artist, who has made illustrations for the likes of The New York Instances and Barron’s Journal, interprets her knack for composition into cool-girl coats of arms that mirror a fierce post-digital femininity. Wilson’s items on view on the honest vary in worth from $1500 to $6,000.
Benny Or, Silent Echoes
Benny Or, Yokeback 1: Silent Echoes, 2024, $8,000 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
Benny Or’s sombre, spare show (stand 5) facilities the Chinese language Ming Dynasty yoke-back chair as a logo of unearthed private, cultural and non secular histories. Curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, Silent Echoes could also be Or’s debut as a painter, however it’s not his first flip as an artwork world denizen. A celebrated title in leisure manufacturing design, Or boasts a CV that features purchasers like Billie Eilish and Disney on Ice, and isn’t any stranger to experiments within the Metaverse as a self-styled “artwork influencer”. The primary-generation Canadian artist was moved to color as a way to channel his great-grandmother, whom he found was a robust shamanic healer in pre-Communist China. Utilizing stark, contrasting hues, he invokes the toppled chair motif as a gesture in direction of narratives arrested by geopolitical upheaval. His items vary in worth from $1,800 to $8,000.
Robert Hickerson & Henry Crawley, PiLE
Robert Hickerson, Lemon Sculpture, 2020, $1300 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring/Break Artwork Present
Photographic collaborators Robert Hickerson and Henry Crawley have joined forces for a queer horror fantasia in PiLE (stand 43), a venture that explores late-stage capitalism from the vantage level of corrosive objecthood. Crawley images meticulously cultivated miniature tableaux that depict what he calls “a world you’ve forgotten in a nook”, and Hickerson’s photos, dripping with Nineteen Eighties kitsch and limned in harsh neon drop-shadows, articulate the psycho-sexual vicissitudes of the slasher movie, a style that exploits the anxious in-betweenness of social illness. Each spooky and contemplative, PiLE doesn’t sacrifice interiority in its seek for prurient enjoyable. Hawley’s and Hickerson’s works vary in worth from $850 to $1300.
Sarah Kayafas, They Cannot Cover The Solar
Sophia Kayafas, I Hate You, I Love You, 2024, $10,000 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
Monsters abound within the Greek American artist and musician Sophia Kayafas‘s solo presentation, curated by Christina Lucia Giuffrida (stand 40). Kayafas’s muscular, reality-bending work don the dual mantles of historic melodrama and mythological storytelling, casting the artist because the protagonist within the battle in opposition to custom. “She’s from a really conservative background,” Giuffrida tells The Artwork Newspaper, “and these work are all concerning the methods through which she noticed herself out of that area.” Whether or not barely escaping from the gaping maw of a titanic fish or defeating a large dragon-snake creature, Kayafas’s painterly stand-in prevails with tactile vulnerability to spare, a testomony to the artist’s virtuosic hand (she teaches drawing on the Pratt Institute). Her work ranges in worth from $750 to $10,000.
- Spring Break Artwork Present, till 9 September, at 75 Varick Road, Manhattan
