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Piero Gilardi “Tappeto-Natura”
Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, May 7, 2022–January 9, 2023
Ai Wei Wei: According to What
Perez Art Museum, Miami, Dec 4 2013 to March 16 2014
Tammie Rubin: Points of Origin
C24 Gallery, New York, New York, January 11 – 8 March 2024
From C24’s Exhibition Description:
Rubin’s conical sculptures reference hoods, headdresses, and helmets, and manifest power, awe, anonymity, horror, and magical thinking. The sculptures have a wide range of references from Catholic capirote hats, Ku Klux Klan hoods, and West African & Aboriginal headdresses, to dunce caps and medieval helmets. Suspended somewhere between familiarity and uncertainty, these sculptures capture the duality that is at the heart of Black life in the United States.
-C24 Gallery
Tanel Veenre: BeforeAfter
Ornamentum, Hudson New York. June 24 – July 16, 2023
Tanel Veenre is an Estonian artist focusing on jewelry and wearables that he crafts from wooden organ pipe components, reconfigured into sculptural form. According to wikipedia he is a “jewelry artist,” an awkward phrase trying to describe the in-betweenness of his work. This show at Ornamentum in Hudson mixes elements of craft, jewelry, art, and even a bit of musicianship — apparently the pipes all still produce tone if you blow through them.
He comes from a family of artists and musicians, and if I have the story correctly these pieces are reconfigurations of a wooden organ that his father gave him as a gift.
I am pleased with Veenre’s choices to forgo emphasizing or fetishizing the joinery of the pieces, which is a notorious tempation when working with wood. Instead, the pipe components are reworked with collisional butt-joints and moments of hinging. The effect gives a feel of accidental form and beauty.