Interview

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.

For nearly ten years, Niedziółka has primarily worked with embroidery thread that she applies by hand to stretched canvas. The canvas functions as a support, manufactured by a machine with a regular horizontal and vertical structure, on which the irregular manual stitching of the embroidery can be seen. In their visual appearance, Niedziółka’s works oscillate between textile picture and tapestry. The hatching – in the sense of stitches made close together, most often in a vertical row – is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of these works in which threads are woven into the canvas in a flat chromatic gradation.

In their materiality and treatment of color, Niedziółka’s works strive toward immediate sensations: They want to be beheld, for it is only when beholders move in front of the picture that the threads can unfold their entire chromatic spectrum. Seen from the front or from the side, these stitches appear either as separate units or as one dense color field. What appears flat is sometimes revealed to be a loop extending out from the surface; and we can discern how parts of the canvas have been treated with a pigment pen or with ink and wax when we look very closely and recognize their different textures.

Her works may therefore explicitly present themselves as pictures, yet their materiality deviates from that of conventional pictures. There is a temporal aspect to be found in the meditative time spent making each work, and there is a chromatic aspect – a curious shimmering of colors that is activated when we move around while looking at the work. And then there is the aspect of the pictures’ appearance, which we can only identify at second glance as embroidered compositions that are non-representational but are always charged with multifaceted associations.

Armendariz was born in El Paso, Texas. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2008, Armendariz received the Artpace Supplemental Travel Grant for travel to Mexico City, and in 2013, he was selected to participate as the Artist-in-Residence in the Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency Program in partnership with Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.

In 2017, Armendariz was selected to be the first Artist-in-Residence for the DoSeum in San Antonio, Texas. In 2017 and again in 2022, Armendariz was a selected to be an Artist-In-Residency at Anderson Ranch, Snowmass Village, Colorado.

His artistic and conceptual aesthetic is heavily influenced by growing up near the U.S./Mexico border. Images that have cultural, biographical and art historical references are carved and burned into the surface of his paintings, drawings, and prints. Greek and Mesoamerican mythology plays an important part in the artist’s exploration of the complex relationship between humans and animals. As a figurative artist, Armendariz enjoys playing with traits of human anatomy and identifying possible connections with characteristics found in animals that allow a deeper understanding of humanity.

Armendariz’s artworks can be found in prestigious collections, including the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX and The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX.

Trudy Benson received her Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in 2010 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007.

She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria; Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; SUNNY, New York; Massif Central, Brussels, Belgium; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; and Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France.

Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna, Austria; Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY; m.simons, Amsterdam; Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; and Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany.

Benson’s work may be found in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, New York; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; Portland Museum of Art, ME; Saatchi Gallery, London; Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; and the Susan and Michael Hort Collection, New York.

The artist lives and works in Newburgh, NY.

In a departure from her first exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery in October 2021, Benson’s compositions have turned to emphasize fine line work made with an airbrush. From afar, warped planes buzz with motion; when the viewer steps closer, densely-scribbled marks are revealed as the source rather than solid blocks of color. The paintings are rendered in color combinations from monochromatic palettes to power clashing hues, creating harmony in the unexpected.