| Broadthinking at Broadway Gallery in SoHo is a compilation of installations by 11 individual artists metamorphing natural or waste products into another form of existence, giving new life through use of the materials and ideas. As artists, they are able to manipulate, control, recycle materials into other products that motivate viewers’ conscience to their own wasteful environments that they inhabit. For example, Broadway Gallery is one of the last bastions for art and artists in the neighborhood that in turn had gentrified the area from empty warehouses, and presently is transformed into a shoppers’/consumers’ haven. Each artist tackles the problem in his or her own way. Miwa Koizumi’s Pet Project successfully makes floating jellyfishes from water bottles, dancing transparently with their shadows. |  |
Chris Twomey
Broadthinking at Broadway Gallery in SoHo is a compilation of installations by 11 individual artists metamorphing natural or waste products into another form of existence, giving new life through use of the materials and ideas. As artists, they are able to manipulate, control, recycle materials into other products that motivate viewers’ conscience to their own wasteful environments that they inhabit. For example, Broadway Gallery is one of the last bastions for art and artists in the neighborhood that in turn had gentrified the area from empty warehouses, and presently is transformed into a shoppers’/consumers’ haven.
Each artist tackles the problem in his or her own way. Miwa Koizumi’s Pet Project successfully makes floating jellyfishes from water bottles, dancing transparently with their shadows. Joel Simpson’s Photonic Structural Movement video depicts two dancers undulating with a fabric screen while black and white photos of natural pattern, forms, and objects such as rocks, water pipes, liquids, architectural details, wood, and ice are projected on this moving screen. Peggy Ciphers’ Channeling lays out many drug paraphernalia like pills, tea bags, joints, colored liquorices, cigs, tobacco, and coke lines, on the floor in a yin-yang wave but using a rectangle instead of a circle shape where a chair is placed as well as a music stand with classical music sheets that focus on a highly abstract textured painting hanging on the wall, suggesting the co-dependencies for the final painted product. My own work Tsunami 3000 uses crumpled tin foil with images of human/animal morphs embracing, and a video loop of a coyote man with dolphin which references scientists who do DNA research to redefine an improved generation for the year 3000. Gulsen Calik’s Dystopia is a metallic rusty Tonka truck covered in grey green “fungus” growths contrary to her nude painting Everyone’s Muse that has a triangular-shape moss growth in the woman’s pubic area and Mesopotamia, a shelf of encased cultural growths that are metastasized in encased objects such as toy horses, illustrating dystrophy. Alyssa Fanning’s Flux: Printed and Drawn Matter is composed of meticulous detailed linoleum prints with graphite pencil and Bristol paper of New Jersey’s Van Buskirk Island, an outdated water purification plant, torn, re-collaged, glued, and curled, suggesting deconstruction and reconstruction waste. Kim Holleman’s Model of Future Utopian Garden, Blue & Tan creates two encased, miniature paradise islands elevated in a sea of liquid waste and a miniature architectural flocking covered “Green House” furnished with glass shards, computer fan, and light fixture. Pale Infinity and Flash Light live in cyberspace on the Internet as Second Life via Multi-User-Simulated-Environment (MUSE) developing their own fantasy homes and environment. Liz N Val is a couple whose tongue-in-cheek art World on the Tip of my Finger and How to Rape demonstrate their illicit/unnatural juxtapositions. Elizabeth Riley’s Luncheon on the Grass oversees the gallery with cloud-like conduit pipes encasing plastic pink drop cloths with projected green light, creating a mood of detritus. Kathleen Vance’s Infused consists of sprouting wires attached to electrical fixtures, suspended from the ceiling, emulating a Frankenstein-ish effect from inanimate to animate life.
Overall, the female artists in the show outnumbered their male counterparts, where they culminate in making social commentaries of their urban, unnatural environment in a patriarchic society, keeping intact their broadthinkings that encompass everything. I find women as nurturers, natural creators, and protectors, miniaturizing everything and attempting to neutralize in order to forestall destructive elements.
