Asya Geisberg Gallery opens its fifth solo exhibition of work by Melanie Daniel
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Saturday, November 2, 2024


Asya Geisberg Gallery opens its fifth solo exhibition of work by Melanie Daniel
Melanie Daniel, Tube Sock Sexy, 2021. Oil on canvas, 24" x 19".



NEW YORK, NY.- Asya Geisberg Gallery is presenting “No Man’s Land”, the fifth solo exhibition of Melanie Daniel. As Robin Laurence states in her “Border Crossings” article, Daniel “takes on the dismaying subject of global climate change in a strangely oblique and highly imaginative fashion. Daniel has created futuristic narratives in which human beings struggle to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of environmental disasters; their efforts however, appear to be doomed by the benighted optimism or sheer absurdity of their undertakings.” In her newest series, the artist is still plunging into her idiosyncratic vision of these potential after-effects on people not unlike herself, but the pandemic has provoked a wider net of anxiety about the unplannable. Daniel’s itinerancy has girded her approach to painting: with roots in western Canada, she has studied and lived in Israel, and after several years in the US, with the pandemic brewing, Daniel found herself in a holding pattern of not knowing which border she could cross, when, to return where – a “no man’s land”. The alternating absurdity, nihilism, and angst associated with the pandemic, climate change, and our sense of descent into doom are all alluded to by new symbols, including already nostalgic video game icons of dinosaurs, skulls, and cavemen, or a “Game Over”.

In the painting “Still Falling 4U”, a hyper pink and orange ground curves into a gray sky, bringing to mind acid rain, post-nuclear fallout, or the apocalyptic endless smoke of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”. A woman sits staring past a tree with the painting’s title carved into it – a teen romance of the “before-time” – her eyes blank, perhaps hoping for the understandable past to return, or the vague mist of the future to coalesce. Daniel’s painting strategies disrupt narration while allowing for a cohesion bred out of cacophony, like camouflage. All the elements that have circulated in Daniel’s oeuvre are present– a lone figure in a vast yet manic forest, vividly erupting marks, demarcations, and disrupting polygons, narratives that skew from opaque to the “now” with spray-paint or graffiti. A tree’s outline unfurls into a sock, and its trunk weaves a pattern that echoes the woman’s dress. One leg, curved as if made of rubber, has lost the color and substance of the rest of her body. Like the myth of Daphne transforming into laurel, the woman starts to dissipate into the forest, losing her identity.




“No Man’s Land” is also a parable of women’s primacy in bearing the toll of forced interiority and powering through with urgent resilience. Daniel’s small paintings of women in glass bottles, started before the pandemic began, are prescient. A combination of confinement and protection, the hermetic glass spheres surround each vulnerable tube-socked woman as they gamely carry on their daily tasks. In “Mighty Real”, giant women take over; in “Still Falling 4U”, the elastic limb signifies bending into any shape required.

As the artist states, “I think of the past year and its perpetual changes, hardships and lessons. It was futile to look back, for no past markers or experiences were befitting, and impossible to look forward, to plan for any future; to be shielded by familiarity and habit. We all looked up, down, inside, or mostly sideways to our immediate surroundings, our immediate people. I'm especially drawn to the women, mothers, sisters, friends who sacrificed so much to preserve life's momentum, who were creative and resourceful, when all the usual models were absent. I think of icons falling, and people redefining what mattered to them.”

After studies in Canada, Melanie Daniel completed her BFA and MFA at Bezalel Academy, Israel. Daniel has had numerous exhibitions in Israel and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv, Ashod Museum of Art, Israel, Shulamit Gallery, Los Angeles, Kelowna Art Gallery, BC, and Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, among others. Her work is included in collections such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Harvard Business School, and the Brandes Family Art Collection. She has received press in publications such as Border Crossings Magazine, Young Space New York, Maake Magazine, Artnet, Newsweek, Frieze, Haaretz, CBC/Radio Canada, The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay, and the Artists Magazine. Daniel is the recipient of a PollockKrasner Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, the 2009 Rappaport Prize for a Young Israeli Painter, a Creative Capital Grant, and the NARS Foundation Residency in New York City. She recently completely a position as the Padnos Distinguished Artist-in Residence at Grand Valley State University, MI.










Today's News

May 24, 2021

Exhibition presents ten prints from Frank Stella's celebrated "Imaginary Places" series

The art of the sneaker

Venice Architecture Biennale explores post-pandemic living

"Hands and Earth" exhibition celebrates Japanese ceramics

Institut, the first art world-led platform for NFTs, launches in July 2021

Miles McEnery Gallery now represents artist Trudy Benson

How plywood from last year's protests became art

Indiana Jones hat and Star Wars droid for sale in Hollywood

Exhibition at Museum der Moderne Salzburg features around sixty works by Yinka Shonibare

Museum of Arts and Design invites visitors into miniature world created by collector Joanna Fisher

Dale Chihuly launches a unique garden experience of breathtaking, majestic glass artworks in Singapore

Kathleen Andrews dies at 84; Helped give Ziggy and others their start

Caravane Earth Foundation presents a bamboo Majlis to the gardens of the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore

Federer serves up memorabilia treasure trove

The Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair to be held 18-20 June

'We always rise.' A Black-owned bookstore navigates the pandemic

Extraordinary Beethoven, and an adventurous streak

Mary Ahern, who produced early TV and then preserved it, dies at 98

Roger Hawkins, drummer heard on numerous hits, is dead at 75

Three dramas explore the margins of the digital form

Thierry Goldberg opens an online exhibition of works by Francisco G. Pinzón

Asya Geisberg Gallery opens its fifth solo exhibition of work by Melanie Daniel

Magnificent Victorian East End butcher's shop display model to be offered at auction

Important 'Batte of Britain' medals awarded to spitfire ace fetch £110,000 at Dix Noonan Webb




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful