New York Postcard: Culture + Mythology

Our man on the scene, George Shaw…

Installation view

Antidote

A Woman Wearing Copper Bracelets

Antidote 2

For her presentation at the Diane Tanzer + This Is No Fantasy booth at Volta NY, the Australian photomedia artist Petrina Hicks shows three elegant new works alongside a suite of recent iconic images. Formal composition, a rich palette, and polished look frame allusions to ancient history, culture and mythology. Although her works tend to be imbued with a push/pull energy between their seductive look and disturbing content, this time around Hicks’ new works appear to refocus more sharply on archetypal ideas of femininity and feminine power.

Images courtesy Diane Tanzer + This is No Fantasy

This is not a fountain

Seven Billion Light Years series

Pure (I)

Hamid Ka Chimta

With large-scale assemblages, painting, photography, sculpture, film, and a floor installation made out of mud and cow dung in which household objects have been partially buried, Subodh Gupta’s monumental exhibition Seven Billion Light Years at Hauser & Wirth sheds light on the “diurnal scrapings” of life in India. Utilising the commonplace tools and utensils for cooking and eating to create works and focus on his country’s current disparities – traditional and contemporary, material and divine – Gupta deftly evokes the challenges of sustaining the second largest population in the world.

Installation view

American Bison

Great Auk

In his Armory Show exhibition at Pier 94, Brandon Ballengee transforms the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth into a space of mourning for extinct animal species with his evocative Frameworks of Absence salon installation. Ballengee obtains historic prints that correspond to the time each particular species ceased to exist and removes the animal from it. He then takes the cut out images from all the prints on show, burns them, and places the ashes in small funerary urns which are then installed in memoriam on a nearby wall.

Images courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts