DAVID GIBSON WRITING

Approaching the art of Dike Blair is no ordinary task. His work is monumental and oblique, sleek and detail oriented, and it maintains its distance from any standard aesthetic response. The works in Blair's recent solo exhibition were two sculptural installations paired with a series of gouache paintings. Hard Shadows (2012) and Dance Dance Dance (2011) are comprised of a pair and a trio of packing crates, which are painted white and then used as both the container and the support structure for a set of abstract gouache paintings on paper. The psychedelic qualities of his paintings alternately reference transcendental mysticism, Modernist architecture, and the suggestively idealistic abstract imagery most commonly associated with iTunes Visualizers, which set whichever music is being played to a randomly generated depiction of imagined cosmological phenomena.      Blair is interested in creating a visual event that transforms into a visceral one. As we look at the gouache that

  Peggy Bates is a New York based artist with a history of successful solo exhibitions, participation in international art fairs, grants and awards, works in select corporate  collections, and effusive critical praise and context in nationally recognized media sources such as The New York Times, Art in America, Vanity Fair, and Elle. Bates has been exhibiting in New York since the early 1990's. Her work has been highly exposed by her participation in several art fairs such as Art Miami, Art Wynwood,  AQUA Art Miami, Scope, and the Pool Art Fair. Recently she was selected to participate in "70 Years of Abstract Painting" at the Jason McCoy Gallery. Bates is often referred to as a 'material painter'--someone for whom the paint itself is the primary motif, alternating between formal and symbolic qualities, which are orchestrated through a rigorous practice and a deft understanding of how the elements of color, mass, transparency, and gesture can express both a brea

There exist certain elements of painterly description which are so central to the rigor of artifice that they have flowed from one art form into all the rest, even into contemporary technology which allows us a further degree of reflection upon the idiosyncrasies of the natural world such as digital media. Such elements are so essential to the practice of art that we cannot imagine art not having them, nor a world that can be described without them. Most central among these is Color. Just to say the word itself is to speak volumes, while at the same time to be separated from adequate knowledge as needed to explore its capacity for meaning. In the paintings of Dee Solin we encounter an obsessive engagement with color that operates in the stylistic milieu of painters like Julian Stanczak, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alfred Jensen, and Bridget Riley. Each of these artists attended to color and structure not as naturally opposed aspects of the same experiential, phenomenological univer

The downtown art scene in New York City has a long and illustrious history that can hardly be contained in any one exhibition. Yet The New Museum’s “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery 1969–1989” makes it possible to say a great many things. Organized by Ethan Swan, “Come Closer” is about the many individual forms of expression that included the active and sometimes volatile Downtown New York scene of the 70s and 80s. It is also about the individuals who made these statements, about the timbre of their shared existence, and about how we may celebrate of the real and mythical proximity between them.   The exhibition actually emerged out of a more extensive project called the “Bowery Artist Tribute” which so far has comprised three printed publications, a film, and an interactive website from which anyone can travel along the lengths of the Bowery, starting at Canal Street and ending at the corner of 4th Avenue and 10th Street, clicking links along the way to read h