A Review of Nicolas Party's DEAD FISH at Karma Gallery

Nicolas Party's DEAD FISH 

Karma Gallery

Reviewed by Marley Kinsman 

    After nearly two months of consecutive gallery visits there is one exhibition which still sticks with me- Nicolas Party's Dead Fish at Karma Gallery. In an effort to create something thrilling, something never before seen, artists lose their sanity and often end up painting an entire canvas one color. A self proclaimed "masterpiece", which is, in my opinion, garbage. Nicolas Party however, is bringing something refreshing to the table through reproducing not only paintings by the masters, but his own previous works as well. He primarily focuses on making smaller scale recreations of his own oil-on-copper paintings, but in his masterful recreations he uses the pastel-on-linen medium. He stays true to the beauty of Francisco Goya's Still Life with Golden Bream (1808-12), while giving it a slightly more modern and vibrant look. This is to me the most classic piece in Dead Fish, which provides a lovely contrast to Party's entrancing portrait work. 

These pieces are abstract in not only their shape but in their color as well. The archway into the room and the limited view of his huge mural on the back wall draws the viewer into the space, and the sudden YET SUBTLE salmon pink walls are a shock to the eye. It feels like stepping outdoors into the light after being in a dark room for hours. Exciting, yet overwhelming. The wall color affects how we view the works on the wall as well, slightly changing how each color interacts within any given piece. One easter egg I noticed was the fact that if you take an image on a phone, the pink fades away. It is a phenomenon you can only experience in person- which draws me back to the eras of the original state of these masterful painting, primarily the Renaissance. This is a unique way to create something you can only view in its fullest in person, like in Renaissance days.

This show is one of the most successful galleries featuring reworked and/or archival media in a long time. It is clear that Party is dedicated to his work in ways so many artists dream to be. His research and methodology is thorough and concise, creating not only a meaningful project but also just a beautiful selection of work. I hope to see more from Nicolas Party and from Karma in the near future. 

Review of Studio Museum

    The now-reopened Studio Museum in Harlem has a massive array of artwork spanning medium and time. When you first enter the museum, you are surrounded by beautiful portraits by prolific artists such as Gordon Parks to Deana Lawson, looking down upon you in the salon-style hang. However, what the Studio Museaum has in specialty of artworks apart of the collection, it lacks in the quality of presentation. 

    I have never before thought that an artwork looked better online until my visit to the Studio Museum. After viewing Carrie Mae Weems' Untitled (Black Love) triptych, I could only say I was disappointed to finally see one of my favorite artworks in person. This amazing triptych features high-contrast deep-black silver gelatin prints; however, the glass used to frame it only veils the image. The reflections created through the mixture of glass and light clouds the image, destroying the tonal range, hiding the subtleties of the carefully made silver gelatin print.

    For a museum with the stature to gather such a spansive infamous collection, I assumed that they would have the resources to present the work better. There are museum-grade glasses made to prevent this one issue, leading me to believe it comes down to an issue of finance. I trust this issue is not from a lack of care, which is clearly present in the curation and grouping of these artworks. Highlighting a sense of community and appreciation that the museum is clearly striving for.

    -Lewis James

Review of Lotty Rosenfeld's Disobedient Spaces

    The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia’s show “Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces” is a

retrospective for the Chilean activist-artist. Archival documents are presented in tandem with

photography, drawings, and video installations highlighting Rosenfeld’s feminist interventions

and championing of the “No +” movement. The video installations included are the most

compelling use of gallery space, standing large and small across the rooms.         

    One piece displaying ants crawling up a wall in single file pushes the viewer to

contemplate the natural impulse towards obedience and order. Another large wall displays a

video of surveillance footage at a bank with an either erotic or painful moaning loudly playing

overhead. The use of sound mixed with this ominous video fills the viewer with an enthralling

and sickening anxiety. Rosenfeld’s video installations convey a terror and deep discontent with

the Chilean government in a manner that transcends historical knowledge. Instead she allows her

audience to step into the headspace of the people, particularly the women of Chile.

    The gallery space highlights her interventions, and her work with other feminists of color

via photography documenting the events. Lotty Rosenfeld’s retrospective proves her

effectiveness in feminism and activism in Chile aside from the birth of the “No +,” as her video

imagery proves to say so much and crowds the gallery space with the justifiable anxiety of her

nation’s people and women around the world.

When approaching Kathy Butterly’s exhibition High Vibration, I felt as if I had entered a small garden of flowers. The square bases resemble stems, while the irregular forms above unfold like different blossoms. Each “flower” seems to generate its own miniature world, inviting viewers to move slowly through the space and observe the differences between each sculpture.

Each sculpture is cast in porcelain and placed on a handmade ceramic cube. Their shapes and colors vary greatly, and the texture of the glazes differs from piece to piece, ranging from the ultimate monochrome to richly detailed and complex treatments. Some surfaces appear smooth and quiet, while others feel more energetic and layered.

Rather than casting molds from found objects, Butterly develops her own vessel forms. She pours liquid porcelain into plaster molds and repeatedly reshapes the surface by hand, almost as if drawing lines in three-dimensional space. This process allows the forms to feel both controlled and spontaneous at the same time. The final shapes appear through glazing and multiple firings in the kiln, where the colors and textures gain their final intensity over time.

The placement of rounded vessels on top of cubic bases suggests a visual tension between organic form and geometric structure. However, when this same tension is repeated across many sculptures within the gallery space, the effect becomes somewhat diminished. The sculptures begin to produce an unexpected regularity. The lower cubes start to read primarily as pedestals, supporting structures rather than active elements of the composition. Because the cubic forms are relatively small compared to the circular ones and the display height is quite low, viewers must bend down to observe them closely, making the cubic bases easy to overlook.

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces Review

One might assume that Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery would extend the university’s ongoing suppression of student led activism protesting ICE raids and the genocide in Gaza. However, Lotty Rosenfeld’s retrospective, Disobedient Spaces, presents an uncensored point of view: political activism and collective art action are powerful tools to combat authoritarian systems of oppression. 

Born in 1943, Rosenfeld grew up in Santiago and lived through the U.S. backed 1973 coup and the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The exhibition highlights the evolution of her work from early etchings to her videography and public art action. It opens with an eye-catching red wall with oversized prints taken from video footage of her pivotal work “Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento” in which she laid white tape and bandages across traffic lines to create, as the title suggests, crosses on the pavement. Rosenfeld continued to speak out against Pinochet’s dictatorship with the art collective CADA, whose “NO+” campaign invited the public to finish the sentence “No More…” in their own words. 

Seen today, Rosenfeld’s interventions feel simple yet radical. A strip of tape laid on the pavement is a visual interruption of authority. Disobedient Spaces reminds visitors that small acts of resistance, particularly those carried out in the street during times of heightened military presence, can build visibility, solidarity and community under systems of oppression. 

- Nicole Bunis

Review of "Papunya Tula: Meeting Place for all Brothers and Cousins" at Foreign & Domestic (Group A)

    Papunya Tula: Meeting Place for all Brothers and Cousins features a group of Aboriginal artists from the Western Desert of Australia. The approach of the series is to repeat abstract patterns, using organic lines and geometric shapes to depict the beauty of nature in their ancestral homeland. The color palettes are mostly red, black, and earth tones, representing the red sand desert. Although the Papunya Tula movement is a contemporary art movement that incorporates techniques from other styles, its subject matter, colors, and patterns clearly drew inspiration from the ancient rock and cave paintings in Australia. 

    The design of the exhibition provides an opportunity for each artist to express their style. Sally Nakamarra paints colorful grids representing the rockholes and soakage water of Watunuma. Yalti Napangati paints short red strokes on black canvas, representing the sandhills and the rocky hills. Aubrey Tjangala paints black on black, depicting body paint designs associated with the Dreamtime water. Adrian Jurra Tjungurrayi paints organic dotted lines representing the bush carrot plants. Angus Tjungurrayi paints monochromatic lines of the salt lake site of Wilkinkarra.

    This is my favorite exhibition because it honors the effort in preserving their ancestral Dreamtime culture before colonization, especially when their culture is not well-known in the world. The downside of combining contemporary art with regional culture is that it becomes hard for audiences to understand the meaning behind the series. But overall, I appreciate having the opportunity to learn more about marginalized cultures from different parts of the world.

Review of "Disobedient Spaces" at the Wallach Gallery, Ksenija Carleton (Group A)

      

    “Disobedient Spaces” – showing at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery till March 15^th, constitutes the first US retrospective of the Chilean artist, Lotty Rosenfeld. Remembered as one of the most influential feminist artists from Latin America, Rosenfeld’s practice began in the early 1960’s, and matured into primarily video and performance based work following Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Censorship, state violence, and female oppression were central themes in Rosenfeld’s work, which was in direct conversation with the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship. Indeed, Rosenfeld explored artistic intervention as a means for political resistance.

The retrospective is organized into eight sections that follow a loosely chronological and largely thematic structure. The Wallach explores Rosenfeld via her early works on paper; videos; screen-prints; significant interventions like A thousand crosses on the pavement (1979-80), Una Herida Americana (1982), No+ (as a member of the group CADA); and her decades long collaboration with Palestinian-Chilean artist Diamela Eltit. The sections tend to bleed into each other at the Wallach, where the circulation also feels unspecified. This frames Rosenfeld’s artistic production as a politically and thematically unified body of work, which consistently committed itself to social justice, equality, and liberation of the oppressed.

In the wake of Columbia’s fierce repression of student protests in 2024, and compliance with Trump’s efforts to overhaul academic freedom, the Wallach’s exhibit, by illustrating how the militant potentials of artistic intervention were effectively harnessed by Rosenfeld, serves as an act of resistance in itself – a rebuttal to the institution it is housed by.

                                                                                                                            Ksenija Carleton