SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 17, 2016 | 2 – 4 PM Socrates Sculpture Park

Ghost Card is an interactive card-game-turned-performance that will reveal storlines and movements based on the crowd-sourced personal narratives of Socrates visitors. Throughout the afternoon, a troupe of hungry ghosts will transform these tales through a platform of contemporary dance and a host of irreverent storytelling tactics. Combining movement, voice, and media to engage participants in collective meaning-making and constantly shifting perspective, Ghost Card echoes diverse and shared narratives while wrestling with the absurdity of our universal but often isolated human experience. Join artists Megan Weaver and Hassan Christopher and their team of performers for this haunting maze of surreal delights!

Performers: Alex Bianchi, Yuki Fukui, Beth Griffith, Naomi King, Katrina Leung, Skye van Rensselaer, Enzo Sariñana

More info at: http://socratessculpturepark.org/program/ghost-card-performance/

Elisabeth Condon BIRD AND FLOWER solo painting show
September 7 – October 16, 2016

Lesley Heller Workspace 54 Orchard St New York, NY

Hours: Wed – Sat 11 am – 6 pm: Sun 12pm – 6 pm

Info on show: at lesleyheller.com

Front Gallery
For immediate release:

Elisabeth Condon: Bird and Flower
September 7 – October 16, 2016

Lesley Heller Workspace presents Bird and Flower, an exhibition of new paintings by Elisabeth Condon. This is the artist’s first solo show in New York in five years and her second with Lesley Heller Workspace.

Condon initiates each canvas with poured color to generate contingent and unexpected compositions. Her recent paintings interlace these pours, which are inspired by watercolor and Chinese splashed ink technique, with birds, flowers and plant forms culled from upholstery fabrics, wallpaper patterns and traditional Chinese scroll painting.

Bird and Flower refers to the classical Chinese painting technique of the same name, defined as much by its subject matter as by its reliance on the contour line achieved through a process of copying, tracing and refining. The bird-and-flower technique provides a departure point from which Condon explores her own process and imagery. Condon traces fabric and wallpaper samples, projecting and altering them; combining mechanical or objective modes of representation with more subjective gestures resulting in a merger of spontaneous and stylized methods. The fabric and wallpaper patterns evoke the harmony and beauty of Chinese bird-and-flower painting, while the pours and imagery beneath suggest alternative realms. The paintings’ compositional rhythms mimic Condon’s practice of Chinese idioms, as if amplified in color; their Tree of Life patterns show time’s passage with flowers and birds at various moments of bloom, perch and flight.

Gathering influences that range from Yuan Dynasty landscape, ancient textiles, Van Luit wallpapers, Marimekko sheets and her mother’s decorating samples, Condon continually mines multiple paint applications within a synthetic landscape, creating imagery that feels—much like life today—equally artificial and real. Her riotous, yet joyful paintings balance a sense of control with abandon through the intersection of nature, culture and transcendence.

Elisabeth Condon (born Los Angeles, CA) has developed an extensive body of work that exploits the spill of poured paint as a central landmark in her compositions. Condon has been working with Chinese imagery for over a decade, making numerous trips to China to study traditional painting techniques; most recently a six month intensive in 2014. Her paintings combine references to Chinese scrolls, American postwar abstraction, landscape, and wallpaper patterns, infusing them with a glam rock aesthetic.

Condon is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Hanban Confucius Institute’s Understanding China Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, Florida Individual Artist Grant, 2015, New York Studio School Alumni Association’s Mercedes Matter Award and the 2015 New York Pulse Prize and various university research grants.

Exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Art in St. Petersburg, FL; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Shenghua Art Centre, Nanjing, China; Tampa Museum of Art, FL; Ft. Lauderdale Museum, FL; 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, NY; Hollywood Art & Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Albany Museum of Art, Albany, GA and the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT. Public collections include the US Embassy Beijing, Swatch Art Peace Hotel Traces
Collection Shanghai, The Sweeney Print Collection at the Museum of Fine Art in St. Petersburg, FL, Girls
Club, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and the JP Morgan/ Chase Collection NY.

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For more information or to request images, please email info@lesleyheller.com or call 212-410-6120.

Info on Elisabeth Condon: at https://westbeth.org/artist/elisabeth-condon-painter/

In an article entitled 7 Intriguing Artistic Eyes at the New York Studio School Alumni Exhibition, art reviewer, Adam Lehrer features Jayne Holsinger, as well as 6 other artists in his column.

…the New York Studio School Alumni exhibition doesn’t feel like a traditional “art school exhibition.” Partly that is because this isn’t a student exhibition, but an alumni one. Some of the artists featured have been well-established in their practices. By exhibiting alumni that have been working professionally for decades alongside recent alumni that are seeking gallery representation facilitates a reciprocal relationship between the past and present. The younger artists benefit from having their work exhibited with work by established artists, and established artists get a fresh critical lens applied to their work. The program apparently does an excellent job at phasing out its students’ bad ideas and aesthetic missteps. Lesley Heller of Lesley Heller Workspace, Andrew Arnot of Tibor de Nagy, Miles Manning of Elizabeth Harris Gallery, and Larry Greenberg of Studio 10 selected 60 pieces from 157 NYSS alumni. Some of those pieces were indeed interesting, others less so. Nevertheless, it was an intriguing exhibition in its connecting well-established and emerging artists around the shared experience of an education.

Read the full Forbes article here