APPROACHING CRITICAL...

Welcome, I am Mark, and I like to talk about and make art. In general, I see art as an ecosystem of humanity in superposition that responds, redirects, and represents the issues we face. If and when we confront the architecture of our issues properly and in a timely manner, we can adapt as a culture without hierarchical commandments. Many people suggest that art is completed by the viewer, and in this dialectic I believe that means the reader creates actions in their lives that carry the torch presented to them forward in their interactions and lives.

This is what I am tuned to respond to. I hope that artists who address our authentic needs as a global civilization and question what it means to be human or alive in this pocket of existence are promoted in the arts through opportunity and/or money, and those looking purely to play the game of celebrity or wealth are promoted to other games that can more easily maximize their interests. In this article, I have drawn some connections between what is being shown in the fairs and what I read as the undercurrent flowing through the business and science communities and into the art world.

Wednesday was the opening night for the 15th SPRING/BREAK in 2026. This Art Show carries thick art-making vibes every year, and while other fairs may be predicting economic value or market directions, SPRING/BREAK is concerned with the state of the arts at this moment. By my estimation, it is always good fun, though sometimes slightly cramped. These are typically the artists unstuck by general modes of production and therefore often find unique conclusions to the delusions of one’s creative process. I’ve often heard artists refer to this show as the “curator-driven art fair,” promising copious corridors of solo shows, two- & three-person shows, as well as, group exhibitions in 141 spaces at the post-CBS offices on 555 57th Street in New York City.

A few near the entrance took my mind in for a dance in their parlor before I was ready, which took me a little while to reclaim. Fernando Orellena, is one of a few artists who likely caught you at the door, and his work addresses a shifting landscape of semi-recognizable forms. At first I thought they were clocks. However, these works restate themselves to the viewer at different times along an unintuitive scale, questioning an artwork with an implicit array of outcomes as opposed to an explicit vista, and attract a functional discourse that doesn’t rest easily on either extreme.

Sammy Bennet’s curatorial presentation Regolith, featured works in pulps and plasters that edited the artists’ experiences from the iconic environments we typically exist in by reconfiguring artifacts that negate function or direct storytelling methods, directing us to interaction as a subject of materials subject to change. Alex Diamant worked in several capacities in service to others’ visions, and on these surfaces he questions industrial production as a distraction from our intuitive interaction with the raw materials, where mystery and communication become the subject on a surface of pulp that doesn’t cling to preconfigured processes or typical art theory. Bradley Milligan also finds himself in a state of labor that is carefully reconfiguring a focus for an altarpiece where the devotion is not made to a figurative representation but to the act of labor itself, both in the previous states of being and congregations, as well as, the one presented to the audience of art. Maggie King Johns also finds a path to the viewer’s completion of her offerings in plaster that reference signifiers from across our life experiences, from candy to language to spiritual confrontation, remaining in a form that is plausibly reconfigurable.

Also returning to the Robert Morris vibe I caught a few times earlier in the Art Show, was Kathy Levine‘s painting on pulp cast directly onto a fallen tree in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in which she just went to the object and brought her paper-pulping materials and worked on it for the day, and the painting on the surface was like an organically aligned comic strip that pulled in characters from that day and is divided by the way she masterfully directs atmospheric light around the surface to tell many aspects of the story entangled by the one object.

Nikolina Kovalenko’s titles move my attention around between long periods of time and motionlessness in objects that aren’t necessarily from this plane of existence. A vivid reach between what appears to be a pomegranate shell with the seeds missing (which was Hades preferred method for trapping people in the underworld) and the foreign or alien depictions that realistically reflect luminous depictions of still lifes and even a scaly snake body intertwining in her compositions has me wondering about possibilities beyond our observations or perhaps between our inspections of self.

Sonjia Redfern and Sarah Boyle made an excellent pairing of looking out into the unknown and snooping into the casually un-omitted. “Dark,” being a term in physics that just means “we do not know [how/why]”. From this standpoint, we see diptychs from Sonjia that juxtapose an aerial earthly view and a cosmic vista, combining media that describe both scenarios with the same sensitivity, and seem to exclude the “dark forest theory” in place of a presentation of life. Quite comically presented, though masterfully rendered in tight geometries reminiscent of a possible later career in Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro portfolio (if he’d survived his scandalous life long enough)-- Sarah invites us to question our perception, especially in terms of hierarchies, as Sarah grants us a view from above of another person’s belongings, stature, or decisions in the frame of their apartments, sensitively yet unapologetically surveilled.

I also gleamed a collection of enjoyment from the following artists’ skills including: Ingrid Dinter‘s virtuosic play with representing bent light and holding the opacity of paint as form instead of submitting to hyper-realism within the same composition. Czare Santos’s Fragments of Now series, Angel Duran’s glowing street scenes, Tara Lewis‘ paintings fusing rebellious and academic inspirations, and Alessandro Keegan‘s reminder that the occult is not so much dark as it is just usually left unacknowledged.

With my mind and heart completely filled with art for one day, I met a few friends for dinner who also attended the fair before they left for the afterparty somewhere downtown. I was still confused about the next assignment, and I didn’t want to be tired the following day.

UHAUL ART FAIR.

I am glad I got my sleep; the fleet is expanding. Showing the potential to one day continue to Union Square, range from the Meatpacking District to Hell’s Kitchen, or perhaps even overrun multiple floors on one of the local storage facilities. This fair is a set that exposes the public theater of the art fair format in broad daylight, with the rigor of 90s alternative music as a channel that disrupts the established /contemporary pop/ of Chelsea, within steps of Harper’s, Dia, Mathew Marks, Hauser and Wirth, etc., and only a few blocks from hundreds of other frequented galleries.

The trucks are set with uniform lighting solutions, a variety of installation methods, and unique hanging solutions that aim to obliterate the context we have been trained to swallow for success. If the viewer does complete the art then it is on you to appraise the works-- I didn’t find it fair to divide the experience. It was not unusual to see a few bastions of reconfigured spaces there, like A Hug From the Art World and 95 Gallon, alongside many large galleries interested in younger markets, and decentralized spaces or nomadic art hero/ine(s) that I had not met before, each eager to expose and invite you into their art world. Prices range from accessible to well considered, mostly on the lower end of the art market’s sweet spot.

I think it is a testament to the art that can hold its own in architecture outside of the images we have seen that are pristine whitewall, brand-burnt scenes, or AI perspectives. Honestly, all art fairs are an “Endurance Project” of the physical artwork, the presenter’s social skill, and the viewer’s ability to play and call on the unique find they have made.

Amidst the sidewalk commotion and eavesdropping on passenger-seat portfolios, I was reminded that it is not always easy to fall in love with a photograph that an interested collector sends you of their mother’s recliner, asking if you think the work would fit above it on the panel wall or if it would look better above their favorite couch. Depending on how interested you are in the upcoming weeks’ menu, you may find yourself a little extra motivated to meet someone halfway and commission Claude to position your work in their image. Whereas it is the dream of everyone in the arts that the work they are associated with ends up in their favorite museum. If it does, it often waits a decade in a crate before it catches hundreds of thousands of eyes (on the internet, judging if they will see it in person). Why not let someone love the work for a few years before that next chapter, and take a friend out to a movie?

THE ARMORY FAIR.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Armory this year at the Javitz Center. Sometimes I do not. Any fair can seem repetitive if you go every year, and I was very glad to see this Edition of the young galleries (12 and under), the Platform, and FOCUS, curated by Jovanna Venegas of the Sculpture Center, which was an articulation of Caribbean culture and art to expand the narrative of well-established or meteoric risers only. Based on what I have been seeing and my worldview that keeps my eyes and mind fresh, the younger galleries were tying in well with the loose patterns I have been weaving/seeing in life and the art world. Many variations that fit also caught me off guard. Most commonly, I find that art with a leg in history or a contemporary context while finding its character in the world-building of its own making. Works are not the hyper-polished and inarguable endpoints of series that were fashionable in the last decade and are instead acting as a generation of works within a development of understanding a strange new world. I may be elucidating an indistinguishably fine point to some, but it seems that in a world that has withstood the rising action of AI, we are no longer being showered with the oddity of its outcomes but are finding the ways in which this mode of development is perhaps or sometimes a more authentic approach to the artist’s process. I am referring to observation, deconstruction, abstraction, and metaphor, as well as the strategic implementation of visual dialog and media selection, among several echelons that no longer identify as a single type of art maker-- even if one is currently painting, all avenues are open should the right idea or impetus announce itself.

Along these lines, I found myself most interested in the Flora, or the still lives, as the structure of language learning, and, in close proximity to that, in chromatic abstraction and its role in how we imagine what we think we see.

A masterful approach was brought to my attention on a multi-tiered platform from Bank/Mabsociety, presenting Shuyi Cao, who fuses shells, branches, and plastics that she collects along her path of daily life, whether at the shore, a restaurant, or along her present destination, to create sculptures that seem to resemble life but also rebel against some of the organizing principles we are used to. Are they an ecosystem adapting to an odd environment or sculptures that reference a link between flora and fauna? I am still not sure. A contrasting expression that shares a similar gap between references are the paintings of Minako Iwamura, where vibrant fields resembling flora reveal sacred geometric patterns like seeds suspending two separate varieties of existence at JDJ’s booth.

Gracelee Lawrence, Antoinette Grassi, and Sarah Tompkins each resonate between the aforementioned lines in disparate approaches that fell on widely different conclusionary aesthetics and find a chromatic common ground at Patrick Mchail Gallery, where their use of reflected light inspires within their own spectrums and together hits notes that are strange, calm, dangerous, exciting, and exotic showing just how well each of these artists with exaggerated vibes plays so well with others to create a space of many experiences like any home or place of business would contain.

An intersection away, at Kaliner Gallery, Marykate Maher’s UV-printed abstractions reference orientation and navigation, in objective images that seem to begin to coordinate into recognizable systems but leave us mostly with the language of the artist devoid of a point of reference. Bringing us to a state of pure inquisitive observation. 

After we collect our gaze, we can follow Brianna Bass at Red Arrow Gallery as she paints polychrome gradations where the paint plays both the illusion and the interference as it exists in aligned patterns with little globules flowing along the boundaries of their differentiations. Nearby, at Max Estrella, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer plays on a similar dynamic in his reconstruction of a black hole with a security camera that records and distorts the viewer’s information within the cloud of binary light amplifying our image to unbelievable scales between its focus and its apparent horizon. This metaphysical view is brought to the personal by Kandy G Lopez who plays with moiré patterns in her composition to disrupt our spatial perception and present subjects, which, like the reconstructed carpet medium, are friendly, imperfect, in progress, and exceptionally unique.

Hopefully, no matter what path in life you have chosen, we can all recognize that these artists’ worlds are very similar to the other worlds we interact with, either personally or collectively. So before we awaken from this dream and reconsolidate into the recognizable cycle of stresses, ethical quandaries, demands, and products we have to wrestle with in our daily lives— allow the many environments and grand collection of images offered in these experiences to operate for us as conscious moments of visual parables that arose as solutions to artists asking themselves the same questions we ask ourselves and following them through to a declarative situation, albeit using a quasi-familiar language. If one of these images returns to you, I hope you will look it up, find it, and appreciate it as a visual parable to your own reflection of life, and either research the artist’s journey, delight in the abundance of possibility delivered through these peripheral scenes, or perhaps even give their dealer a call and dig a little deeper into where a certain path may lead