The blogging intern: Maddie's first Post

Steel Life, 1985-91

My semester begins in Chelsea

I am here in New York for a semester, “abroad” from my school, Ohio Wesleyan University (also known as owu) and I am doing internship with Austin Thomas. It has been really interesting to actually be living in the city, considering my whole life I have lived only 45 minutes outside of the city in Connecticut. But it has been amazing to have this opportunity to be able to be here all the time and the ability to go explore something new or different each day, which is unlike having to make sure you catch a train home.

Friday and Saturday of this past weekend I went out exploring into some of Chelsea’s art shows. On Friday I went to two different galleries one was Melvin Edwards: Sculptures in the Alexander Gray Gallery and the other was right next door in the Andrea Meislin Gallery, which right now has Selections from the ICP Class of 2010 called Significant Surfaces.

Melvin’s sculptures ended up being surprisingly intricate even with the largeness of the scale, with pieces of steel intertwined and coming out in different directions it has endless angles to look on from. And they bounce from being abstract forms to seeing known symbols such as hammers and other known tools. Overall it very industrial in the usage of the steel and the rough feeling of the material that gave you the feeling of hard working factory person. While still keeping making your mind wondering about each piece with works and different types of known symbols such as a mug.

Now in the Significant Surface show there were 14 different artist being represented, there was one that really caught my eye that brought me back to thinking of school, and that was Nitasha Dhillon’s work. She takes pictures and cuts parts of it out, into squares and rectangles that draws your eye to the negative space (literally) and then pushes your eye to the color. Teachers always want you to use negative space in a useful way and Dhillon did just that. It is a different and intriguing way, because you don’t ever see any of Dhillon’s full photographs you just get bits and pieces of it and you then have to try and understand and recognize.

On Saturday I went with a bunch of kids from our program house and my advisor here in New York; Emilie Clark to see Erica Svec’s new Show and to hear about her experience as an artist. I ended up thoroughly enjoying her work, it is incredibly colorful and I love color. She does painting with oils and acrylic on a large scale, and they are semi abstract but usual relate to something figurative which you can usually depict with the cast shadows that align different objects. It was very incredible I really enjoyed seeing all of the pieces I have seen thus far.