The thirteenth New York iteration of the scrappy, curator-led Spring Break truthful (till 9 September), has taken up residence on the tenth ground of a Hudson Sq. property at 75 Varick Avenue, simply on the sting of Manhattan’s more and more dominant Tribeca gallery district. The Spring Break aesthetic ethos, recognized for its blaring color and do-it-yourself spirit, is again in true kind this yr, main guests by means of a labyrinthine loop of thick paint, daring sculpture and distinctive interventions into the occasion’s buttoned-up company environs.
The truthful’s founders, Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori, describe its 2024 theme, INT./EXT. (inside /exterior), as a “peanut butter and jelly sandwich of tactility and intangibleness”, a possibility to make use of artwork as a bridge between types, classes and visible planes. It’s becoming, then, that a lot of the work on show at Spring Break has a Surrealist edge, imbuing creatures with human qualities whereas monster-ifying the figural establishment. Most of the stands and installations characteristic yearnings for brand new, outdated or different worlds past this one, spanning previous, current and funky, far-flung futures.
Terra Keck, Out of Time
Terra Keck, Arcturus, 2024, $1,200 Courtesy the artist and Subject Tasks, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
Tucked away in a darkened, teal cubicle lies Out of Time (stand 30), a solo show by artist Terra Keck, co-curated by Lisa Schilling, Jacob Rhodes and William Chan of Subject Tasks Gallery. The challenge includes a suite of 20 small, back-lit “eraser drawings” by the Brooklyn-based artist, who makes use of the language of subtraction to create twinkling, tantric meditations on the existence of UFOs. “I skilled as a print-maker, so I discover a completely clean web page extremely unnerving,” Keck tells The Artwork Newspaper. As an alternative, she works backwards. “All the marks you see are executed by selecting up pigment with an eraser,” Keck explains. She isn’t considering aliens from a “army industrial advanced or conspiratorial perspective”, however as an alternative takes a hopeful place, contemplating the opportunity of intergalactic guests as an indication that people are well worth the go to. Her items meld visible references to Nineteenth-century mysticism with allusions to crop circles, lending the drawings a folkloric timbre. Keck’s works vary from $600-$5,000.
Sarah Angèle Wilson, Mom Nature’s Bitch
Sarah Angèle Wilson, WET, 2024, $6,000 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
The Canada-born, Brooklyn-based artist and illustrator Sarah Angèle Wilson makes a splash within the Workplace Hours part of the truthful, specifically curated by co-founders Kelly and Gori. Wilson’s shiny, chimeric aid sculptures go off the wall with acidic insistence, combining the physicality of Baroque-era wrought iron with a juicy business patina. “I carve the sculptures out of XPS foam, after which work into them with clay and wooden, so they give the impression of being monumental, however they’re truly tremendous gentle,” Wilson tells The Artwork Newspaper. The artist, who has made illustrations for the likes of The New York Occasions and Barron’s Journal, interprets her knack for composition into cool-girl coats of arms that replicate a fierce post-digital femininity. Wilson’s items on view on the truthful vary in value from $1500 to $6,000.
Benny Or, Silent Echoes
Benny Or, Yokeback 1: Silent Echoes, 2024, $8,000 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
Benny Or’s sombre, spare show (stand 5) facilities the Chinese language Ming Dynasty yoke-back chair as an emblem of unearthed private, cultural and non secular histories. Curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, Silent Echoes could also be Or’s debut as a painter, however it’s not his first flip as an artwork world denizen. A celebrated title in leisure manufacturing design, Or boasts a CV that features shoppers like Billie Eilish and Disney on Ice, and is not any stranger to experiments within the Metaverse as a self-styled “artwork influencer”. The primary-generation Canadian artist was moved to color as a method to channel his great-grandmother, whom he found was a robust shamanic healer in pre-Communist China. Utilizing stark, contrasting hues, he invokes the toppled chair motif as a gesture in the direction of narratives arrested by geopolitical upheaval. His items vary in value from $1,800 to $8,000.
Robert Hickerson & Henry Crawley, PiLE
Robert Hickerson, Lemon Sculpture, 2020, $1300 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring/Break Artwork Present
Photographic collaborators Robert Hickerson and Henry Crawley have joined forces for a queer horror fantasia in PiLE (stand 43), a challenge that explores late-stage capitalism from the vantage level of corrosive objecthood. Crawley images meticulously cultivated miniature tableaux that depict what he calls “a world you’ve forgotten in a nook”, and Hickerson’s photos, dripping with Nineteen Eighties kitsch and limned in harsh neon drop-shadows, articulate the psycho-sexual vicissitudes of the slasher movie, a style that exploits the anxious in-betweenness of social illness. Each spooky and contemplative, PiLE doesn’t sacrifice interiority in its seek for prurient enjoyable. Hawley’s and Hickerson’s works vary in value from $850 to $1300.
Sarah Kayafas, They Cannot Cover The Solar
Sophia Kayafas, I Hate You, I Love You, 2024, $10,000 Courtesy the artist, by way of Spring Break Artwork Present
Monsters abound within the Greek American artist and musician Sophia Kayafas‘s solo presentation, curated by Christina Lucia Giuffrida (stand 40). Kayafas’s muscular, reality-bending work don the dual mantles of historic melodrama and mythological storytelling, casting the artist because the protagonist within the wrestle towards custom. “She’s from a really conservative background,” Giuffrida tells The Artwork Newspaper, “and these work are all in regards to the methods wherein she noticed herself out of that house.” Whether or not barely escaping from the gaping maw of a titanic fish or defeating an enormous dragon-snake creature, Kayafas’s painterly stand-in prevails with tactile vulnerability to spare, a testomony to the artist’s virtuosic hand (she teaches drawing on the Pratt Institute). Her work ranges in value from $750 to $10,000.
Spring Break Artwork Present, till 9 September, at 75 Varick Avenue, Manhattan
