Brainard Carey

A scientific-like methodology and an interest in the phenomena of the very obvious and the banal, (and often overlooked,) define Marianne Nielsen’s ceramic works. She strives to obtain a visual understanding of what is commonplace, the minutia that surrounds us. How do we perceive hairstyles? How and why does a form become iconic in our common language? For instance the profile and nature of a mountain? What do we read into the shape and color? In flowers? In her works, it is neither the figuration nor narration, as such, that are in focus; instead, it is our own experience and discernment of the subject that is being investigated. Nielsen places our stylistic concepts under a magnifying glass, revealing our re-fashioning of nature into artifice via design and use of color.We become witnesses to a kind of form-grammatical development, as in her close reading and depiction of plant structures. It is not a scientific botanical dissection in a lab, but rather a creation of visual form and rhythm, and interpretation and an ornament.

This is an interview with the curator Andrew Castrucci.  CO₂ Blues, scheduled since mid-2023, is the first exhibition of the enigmatic art of Melvin Way (1954-2024) since his passing, and the third solo show of his work with the gallery. It serves as a retrospective for a visionary who was one of the most admired self-taught artists in the contemporary art arena.  Way’s mostly small-scale drawings are strange and alluring concoctions of science and art that seem intent on revealing the secrets of the universe.  They contain chemical and mathematical formulae, musical notes, abstract designs, and cryptic words and phrases.  It is hard to look at one without becoming entangled in trying to figure out what it means. “I felt like I was seeing another kind of infinity, thought made visible, wild nerves, optical barnacles coming to hermetic life, delirium legible,” wrote New York Magazine’s senior art critic Jerry Saltz in a 2015 review in Vulture.

The exhibition includes some of Way’s most memorable creations including forays outside of his better-known ballpoint pen drawings, especially a selection of the artist’s xerography— he routinely carried his original ink drawings on his person for months at a time and was reluctant to release them for sale because they functioned as protective amulets. His raincoat pockets might be filled with as many as two hundred drawings. At times, his sweat, or a hard rainfall, would cause the ink to bleed, adding complexity to the already dense works. Andrew Castrucci, his lifelong advocate, has likened this process to a kind of baptism, a rite of passage before the works headed off into the world. Before the artist did surrender his works, he often made Xerox copies of them which inspired a new approach—Way then added blue and/or black ink to the copies.  These xerographies comprise a small but significant portion of his oeuvre.

Polly Shindler (New Haven, 1977) received her M.F.A. in Painting from Pratt Institute and her B.A. in History from University of Massachusetts. She has shown throughout the U.S. as well as internationally at Rafael Pérez Hernando Gallery in Madrid and Cristea Roberts Gallery in London. She recently had her first solo presentation at NADA Art Fair in Miami and will have her first solo exhibition in April of 2024, both with Deanna Evans Projects. Current shows include Feels Like Home at JDJ gallery, May You Live the Rest of Your Life at BravinLee Programs and Cool and Collected at Kenise Barnes Fine Art.

Previous solo shows include Time Management at Freight + Volume, Retreat, at Ortega y Gasset Projects and at the project space Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery, NYC. Art Fairs include SP-Arte representing Gisela Projects, São Paulo, BRA, Art Estampa representing Rafael Pérez Hernando Gallery, Madrid, SP, Untitled Art Fair with Pratt Institute Fine Arts and Art on Paper Fair representing 3 Walls, NYC. Polly was awarded the Martha Boschen Porter Grant, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation in 2023. Her painting Green Rocking Chair shown in Still Lives, a group show at Underdonk in Brooklyn, was featured in “Goings on About Town” in the New Yorker in September 2018.

She was granted a yearlong curatorial residency at Trestle Projects in 2015. Shindler has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center in 2013, the Wassaic Project in 2020 and 2022, and Provincetown for the DNA Residency in 2021 and 2023 and Yaddo in 2024. Two of her paintings were cover art for published novels, Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny and A Likely Story by Leigh McMullan Abramson. She lives in Millerton, NY in the Hudson Valley with her dog, Owen.