FRIEZE NEW YORK

Material tactility, its possibilities, limitations, and transformation form the core of Kelly Akashi's practice. Originally trained in analog photography, traditional processes and the materiality of documents continue to inform and fuel her sculptural explorations. Working in a variety of media, such as wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, copper, and rope, Akashi investigates the capacity and boundaries of these elements and their ability to construct and challenge conventional concepts of form.

Throughout her career, Sandra Cinto has developed a rich vocabulary of symbols and lines to create lyrical landscapes and narratives that hover between fantasy and reality. Using drawing as her point of departure, the artist renders intricate and mesmerizing environments of turbulent seascapes, violent rainstorms, and celestial skies that frequently engage with the surrounding architecture to a disorienting effect, creating the illusion of a weightless, spiraling universe. Evoking stories of human hardship and redemption, these fantastical landscapes serve as a metaphor for the human odyssey, while also pushing the limits and possibilities of drawing.

As the light in the center passes through color-effect filter glass panels it casts kaleidoscopic shadows on all of the surrounding surfaces, creating an immersive environment. The work functions both as an elegant autonomous sculpture and an encompassing light installation transforming the space it inhabits.

Currently, Olafur Eliasson has a major solo exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Life, on view until July 11, 2021. 

Remarkable in execution and detail, Composition with Thin Blue Vertical was created within an intimate logic that has now become signature to Manders' practice. The work appears to be soft clay mid-way through the process of becoming a sculpture. The artist freezes a very specific moment in time, highlighting the fragility of every moment that passes. The manipulation of material generates a sense of puzzlement and awe, masterfully creating a sense of timelessness— while the sculpture seems to be just made, it is at the same time enigmatically atemporal.

Sherrill Roland’s work 168.804, 2021, gives visual form to vivid memories of the ten months he spent wrongfully incarcerated. In this white steel sculpture, Roland recalls the experience of spending day after day in prison, when he would often pass the time by tracing the outlines of the white cinder blocks, which measured 8 x 16 x 8 inches and formed his two-man cell. Running his fingers horizontally and vertically, back and forth along the spaces between the blocks, he would take note of the difference in texture; the soft, smooth mortar contrasting sharply with the cold, hardness of the cinder blocks, providing a rare source of sensory stimulation. The repetitive, tactile action became a form of meditation that offered a mental escape to the freedom beyond the physical confines of the prison cell.

In 168.804, Roland recreates the idea of the soft area between cinder blocks by filling the steel channels with acrylic paint mixed with Kool- Aid, a beverage readily available in prison. This colorful, sweet drink brought back memories of Roland’s childhood when it was served at family gatherings to kids, a time of innocence which he often reflected upon during these moments of meditative escape. By tracing these areas around the cinder blocks, he was able to imagine leaving through the cracks and returning to the free world outside, demonstrating the power of touch and action to transport our minds elsewhere.

Copper Tapestry (iSBX 275 Graphics Card, Intel, 1983) is a continuation in a series of works where the artist introduces non-traditional materials into the process of tapestry weaving. Thin strips of copper traverse a linen warp to create an intricate design - a representation of an iconic 3D graphics card from the mid 1990s - a milestone in the development of computer graphics. More than two centuries ago, weaving production was accelerated by the improvements in technology possible through the Industrial Revolution, and Saban’s loom operates on a similar system. The artist's computerized loom operates following a binary code - and similarly the looms of yesteryear followed a comparable binary system. Saban’s choice of subject matter therefore is not coincidental. Complex computer systems that infiltrate many aspects of our daily lives rely on a basic programmed language that is, at its essence, not so dissimilar to the analogue language of weaving. And so the confluence of process and content comes to the fore - Saban’s tapestry, made using proto-digital technology, depicts a graphics card - the very advancement that translated computational information to images in a digital space. Saban here is interested in the pursuit of reality in the depictions of the world on a computer screen through persecutive and dimensionality - as always the artist is working at the edges of two and three dimensional space.

Analia Saban has a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York on through June 19, 2021.

Composed of orbits held purely by their mutual tension, this sculpture examines the variations in speed and geometry of the trajectories of the celestial bodies and their relationship to one another in space and time. This work illustrates Saraceno’s fascination with naturally occurring systems of interconnectedness and constantly shifting structures, at once seemingly fragile, yet also a tightly coiled center for potential. Callisto 4.5 is titled after the second largest moon of Jupiter, which is about 4.5 times farther than Jupiter's closest large moon.

Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sze expands upon the never-ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. This work evokes the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture. Sze expands her work by embedding her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of a painting and into the digital realm through the interplay of cloth, ink, wood, paper, metal, paint, found objects, light, sound and structural supports—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. Her practice fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world.

Sarah Sze has an exhibition and permanent commission opening at the Storm King Art Center this summer, June 12 - November 8, 2021.

Throughout the past two decades, Gillian Wearing’s films, photographs and sculptures have investigated public personas and private lives. The photographs, adding to her ongoing series of self- portraits that feature the artist dressed and masked as art historical figures who have been particularly influential to the artist's own practice. For Julia Margaret Cameron, Gillian positions her with two muses, touching on Wearing’s ongoing interest in identity and public versus private personas. The artist refers loosely to this series as her “spiritual family”.

This work will be included in Wearing’s upcoming exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York, on view November 5, 2021 - April 3, 2022.