Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, many galleries are taking a well-deserved break after a shitshow of a year. A few, though, are curating through the heat and hanging new shows. At Karma, Jane Dickson holds forth with a series of amusement park nocturnes. 5-50 presents in “Becoming Otherwise” – paintings by Jocelyn Fine, Will Hutnick, Geist Topping, and Peter Schenck that crackle with energy in LIC. Deanna Evans Projects’ “ExtraOrdinary” features unsettled scenes of American home life by Lisha Bai, JJ Manford, and Ann Toebbe. At Margot Samel, Glasgow gallery Kendall Koppe presents Laura Aldridge, while Essex Flowers mounts “Overhang 2,” a ro art services pop-up riffing on the idea of summer group-show abundance and community. At The Hole, on Bowery, don’t miss “Herbivore,” which includes work by Bushwick stalwart Ben Godward.
Tag: 5-50 Gallery
Jan Dickey: The art of breakdown
Contributed by Lucas Moran / In art, limitations often define, shape, and mold strengths. We can embrace drawbacks and spin them into gold. An impoverished de Kooning, living off ketchup packets and free coffee, turned to house paint to create some of his most compelling work. A bedridden Matisse cut paper. Scarcity, oppression, impairment – these forces have shaped the course of art history. Rather than relying on convention, Jan Dickey – investigator, tinkerer, and forager as well as painter – has immersed himself in studying how things break down, bond, and hold together. “The High Collapse,” now on view at 5-50 Gallery, is the culmination of that endeavor….
Hannah Antalek’s crystal ball: Magical and disconcerting
Contributed by Heather Drayzen / “Superseed,” Hannah Antalek’s debut NYC solo exhibition at 5-50 gallery in Long Island City, draws on our species’ overall apathy about the environment. A surreal, dream-like sensibility informs a bio-luminescent vision of nature, cumulatively derived from dioramas she constructs from recyclable materials. She pulls us into a magical but also disconcerting world. Seminal Landing, the largest work, projects a haze of cobalt blue and violet that feels both subterranean and post-apocalyptic. Antalek’s signature “daisy dupe” swollen flowers are clustered together – glowing pearl yellows, tinged with pastel pink, in lilac shadows – as they reach towards twisting branches, dripping goo, and unexplained crystalline forms nestled around them.





















