Interview

Sydney Licht draws inspiration from the common, disposable detritus of everyday life and creates still lives centered around takeout containers, department store boxes, sugar packets and other disposables.  Licht tells the domestic experience of society’s materialism via modern takes on the still life.

“For centuries, still life paintings have portrayed items from the realm of the domestic….food, utensils, dishes, flowers and other elements that celebrate the table and the communal dining experience,” Licht says. “Today, as technology impacts our lives more and more, few of us have the means or the desire to spend hours preparing and presenting a meal served on china dishes with silver place settings.  Instead, we order online and our food arrives ready to be microwaved.  During the Covid era, communal dining experiences were more likely to occur on a computer via Zoom than in person sitting around a table together.  All of this begs the question, has the shelf life of the still life as we’ve known it reached its expiration date?”

As part of his practice, Ziemba collects various objects, such as medical skeleton models, traffic cones, paint buckets, inflatable flamingos, or kettlebells, and assembles them in his basement studio. The basement serves as a stage for his paintings which in turn become documentation of the arranged eclectic elements. His works are carefully rendered with consideration to the objects and the space which surrounds them. Balancing between Ziemba’s close observation and saturated imagination, his paintings record time.

On view at Art Cake is a selection of intimately scaled oil paintings made by Ziemba. Many of the paintings illustrate urban environments or landscapes in Florida created from direct observation, en plein air, or photographs taken by the artist. Other paintings were developed from drawings the artist made during a recent trip to Crete, Greece.

Each of the paintings, measuring eight by ten inches, illustrates scenes within nature and contains a prominent horizon line and vast depth of field to emphasize the nature of light as it travels through space. Like his earlier works, Ziemba introduces inconsequential ephemera that disrupt the harmonious landscape. For the artist, the addition of these elements, whether it is a suggestion of an emotional pair of eyes, a finger pointing, a piece of trash, or a referential object, is partly a graphical device meant to draw the viewer’s eye across the composition and partly a way to allow each element to reify itself in a way that is meant to surprise even the artist. In some paintings, such as Beach Hat (2022), however, the element is so prominent within the detailed landscape that it becomes the subject of the painting.

The solo exhibition at Art Cake is on view, September 1 through October 8th, 2022, will be a selection of the artist’s most recent paintings.

Page presents Gaby Sahhar, the New York debut of the London-based artist. Released explores alternative forms of knowledge-making through queer shapeshifting. Soaked in a kaleidoscopic palette of India and alcohol ink, Sahhar’s new works draw on processes of articulation within LGBTQI+ communities that resist academic domination. Such tools of thought migrate across borders, slipping into the pores of the public sphere, shifting into a collective body.

Gaby Sahhar (b. 1992, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. Sahhar received a BA from Goldsmiths, London in 2015. Solo exhibitions include MAC VAL, Paris / The Kooples Art Prize (2023); PAGE (NYC), New York (2022); and Sweetwater, Berlin (2019). Group exhibitions include Fragment Gallery, New York (2022); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2022); and Museum of Moscow, Russia (2020).

Ryan Sarah Murphy is a New York City-based artist, represented by C24 Gallery. Her body of work, which includes sculptures, videos and drawings, provides a multi-dimensional deconstruction of the intuitive, creative process, as expressed through different mediums and technologies. Murphy’s sculptures are generated from the random discovery of discarded pieces of cardboard that she findsthroughout the streets of New York City. Initially drawn to these materials because of their color, she strips them of any identifiable markings such as logos or lettering, then cuts and layers the torn pieces into raw, elegant constructions that allude to cross sections of buildings or overhead maps. The works act as visual meditations on geographical location, placemaking and spatial awareness, fueled by the pure, energetic power of color combinations and their visceral impact. Her solo exhibition, Structural Integrity, is on view at C24 Gallery through September 23d. Her work will also be on view in the Gallery’s booth at Art on Paper from September 8th – 11th.