Artist of the Month: Anne Polashenski

Anne Polashenski is the new BRIC Contemporary Art Artist of the Month! Read more about her work on the BRIC website.
Each month, BRIC Contemporary Art selects an Artist of the Month. Artists are featured here as well as on the Gallery’s e-blasts. Winners will be selected from the BRIC Contemporary Art Artist Registry, which is [...]

Claudia Vieira

Brooklynline (ARCHITECTURAL TOPOGRAPHIES, 2002–present) is the eighth segment in a larger series involving the inscription of topographic lines upon architectural space.

Il Lee

In the last two entries for this blog I’ve kept from disclosing my taste, perhaps in the interest of Rotunda, but more for my own sake (since these words are easily Googled). My desire is to keep these comments from swinging in a particular direction, primarily because I’ve been employed here to garner [...]

Anita Pantin

Video art has always been an art of reorganization, or decomposition, of primary aspects of artistic experience — in process, presentation, or interpretation.

INTRODUCING OUR FEATURED ARTIST BLOGGER

  We’d like to introduce Christopher Balla, currently writing our featured artist highlights.  A resident of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, Christopher has written for gallery publications and several online venues, such as Fluent Collaborative.

HONG CHUN ZHANG

Hong Chun Zhang’s descriptions of hair in charcoal, here in a diptych of two scrolls (“Twin Spirits I”), are large and realistic portraits of Zhang and her twin sister, impressive in technique and imposing scale (each four by ten feet). And as the only representational drawings in “Infinite Line”, their content, and concepts, enter with greater force. Zhang has a clear desire to establish these works contextually. Hair is unusual; while the rest of the visible body is built and destroyed vertically, layers sloughed and rebuilt, hair speaks in linear narrative, growth inscribing history. Zhang’s body of work is primarily dedicated to her own cultural history, family and ancestry, and these drawings are a frontispiece, working as resounding physical records.

In the gallery Gallery I was reminded of a chapter in Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film Kwaidan, a retelling of Japanese folk tales. “The Black Hair” is a story of a selfish and cruel samurai, who leaves his wife to seek wealth, but eventually returns to her and her exceptional black hair full of guilt for his misdeeds. Naturally fate steps in: he finds her a ghost with the same perfect locks, who then kills him in revenge for his cruelty. The narrative is centered on the wife’s hair, which is the cause of his obsession, torment, love, and death. Zhang’s work likely has nothing to do with Kwaidan, but like Kobayashi’s ghost-hair, her use of disembodied hair is weirdly resounding. H; hair detached from a feminine self serves only to amplify femininity — in sexuality, and strength — through absence. It’s this sort of conceptual subtlety that makes Zhang’s work far more earnest than surreal.