Spring/Break Art Show has come and gone again, its lingering scent of artistic innovation hovering over the garden path of the art world at large. A week and some change has passed, and looking back, now is the right time to finally point to what worked and what, well, didn’t.
Eschewing the trade-show quality of other art fairs like ADAA’s The Art Show and the Armory Show, Spring/Break continues to provide respite for art lovers seeking to evade canonized art world tropes. However, despite the rich feast that the show offered guests at this year’s iteration, the jarring contrast between provocative and thought-provoking exhibits against the carelessly cavalier scene found at some of the show’s sites made the experience as a whole a bit hard to digest. Feeling fatigued after a 3 hour tour of the show’s many interlocking nooks and crannies, I did feel relieved to have felt trade winds bringing fresh air in through the fantastically uneven mix of artworks that comprised Spring/Break Art Show 2016.
Recapping Spring/Break, the focus is on three recurring trends and six eye-catching artists whose work sparked consideration and conversation: keep an eye out for these emerging styles and this brave new world of tastemakers.
Six Artists to Watch:
As usual Spring/Break art fair had an overwhelming array of artists peering out at guests from every available orifice. Distilling it down to six artists who made an impact, we can start with Anne Vieux, who showed with Cuevas Tilleard projects. Vieux has rendered her distorted reflective abstract visionary artworks open to quixotic symbols designed to create, as the artist notes, “a functioning closed system.” At once familiar and exotic, Vieux’s works create a pleasing yet distorted aesthetic that transports the viewer to art world nirvana. Ben Pederson is one artist who appeared everywhere there was air in this year’s Spring/Break: his daring neon sculptures plunging into heretofore unknown depths of hybrid forms and LSD abstraction madness. Hints of recognition are borne between the sighs of abstract squiggles present in his hanging and floor bound sculptures, eerie stalactites and stalagmites of kaleidoscope forms. Another master of the jarring play of forms is Ketta Ioannidou, whose careful patterns demonstrating an absence of color in a densely polychromatic space both captivated and inspired. Iaonnidou shared space with fellow artist Fanny Allié, whose grasp of the delicate power of the hand- rendered miniature was evident through her miniscule collages on found cardboard. Allié’s work speaks to the need for human-scale art to remain within an art world ever obsessed with the abstract and immersive. In Sarah G. Sharp and Parsley Steinweiss’ exhibit Original Copy, artist duo LoVid managed to render abstract terms in human language, with hand-crafted soft sculptures printed with stills from videos created using analog processes. The mix of processes was both witty and wonderful, the artists’ hand manipulating analog video that was then hand sewn and stuffed. More overtly digital were works by Kat JK Lee, whose “Navelgazers” piece featured found web imagery with a tongue-in-cheek look at their significance when printed as a flat “installation”: the artist’s own curation, complete with access to a code giving viewers a glimpse at a related .gif file. This 1-2 combo of digital and real, combined with careful revelations of our collective fantasies regarding pop culture, reveals Lee as a keen observer of contemporary social constructs.
