Grifter

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Grifter is an artist run space located in 2 Bridges, Manhattan, visit us at 75 East Broadway, unit 221, New York, NY, 10002 grifter.space@gmail.com

♦😎 ỖƤ€η ωєＥкⒺήĐ ΔғŤｅŘภ𝕠𝔬ｎⓢ + вʸ άⓟⓟ𝕠Ɨ𝐧𝓣ϻ𝔢𝐧Ｔ ඏ😺

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ᴛᴀᴜꜱꜱᴇɴ ʙʀᴇᴡᴇʀ + ꜱᴀʀᴀʜ ɴꜱɪᴋᴀᴋ

𝘑𝘰𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘢 𝘤𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘣

𝕄 𝕒 𝕪 / 𝕁 𝕦 𝕟 𝕖 𝟚 𝟘 𝟚 𝟙

Grifter is pleased to announce ‘Joy was not made to be a crumb’ a two person exhibition by Sarah Nsikak and Taussen Brewer.

Inside Grifter, hand-sewn quilts by Nsikak hang intermingled with large scale ceramic sculpture and ornaments by Brewer. While Nsikak works exclusively with repurposed vintage materials, Brewer builds by hand, her every touch visible on the surface and shape of her vessels.

Narrative imagery unfolds like a gift, textile and clay creating a joyful diorama. Brewer has worked collaboratively with her students to create charms that adorn the title piece of the show, a diaphanous engagement with nature through craft and community. Bulbous sprouts, clouds abutting a square frame, and vessels within vessels suggest little pieces of other artworks that have been contemplated and devotionally placed on a shelf.

One of Nsikak’s wall works depicts a woman gazing into a flower, the other, a loose grid, is filled with objects suggesting shapes as feeling or meaning. Yellow ocher and gingham are reminiscent of a beautiful dress worn to a picnic. Nsikak’s technique, an homage to her Nigerian heritage is both practical and beautiful, a celebration of doing, making and being. The humble acts of sewing and building, with materials dug from the earth or excised from the fashion industry gives way to a deeper intuitive logic and morality. The story is a bit of everything, all at once. Birds singing, cats meowing, vines growing, and things continuing with and without us.

Sarah Nsikak (b. 1991) is a Nigerian American textile artist based in New York, NY. She received her BFA and her MA in Art Therapy from Oklahoma University. Her work has been featured in Vogue Magazine, NY Mag and Harper’s Bazaar. Upcoming exhibitions include the Pearlman Foundation in Tiburon, CA and V. V. Sorry Gallery in Mexico City.

Taussen Brewer (b. 1990) is based in Alfred, NY. She received her BFA from Alfred University in 2020 and is the recipient of several awards, including the Lisa Elwell Ceramic Artist Endowed Encouragement Award. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Wellsville Creative Arts Center. Brewer has volunteered with community arts organizations and gardening groups The Nursery in Oklahoma City and at Dog Park in Alfred NY.

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𓂀 𝕃𝕀𝕊𝔸 ℂ𝕆𝔹𝔹𝔼 𓂀

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ℕ𝕆ℝ𝔸 ℝ𝕀𝔾𝔾𝕊: 𝔽𝕆ℝ𝕋ℝ𝔼𝕊𝕊 𝕆𝔽 𝕊𝕆𝕃𝕀𝕋𝔸ℝ𝔼

𝕋𝕀𝔽 𝕊𝕀𝔾𝔽ℝ𝕀𝔻𝕊, ℂ𝕆𝕄𝔼ℝ 𝔾𝔸

March 20 – April 17, 2021

Tif Sigfrids is happy to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Nora Riggs entitled “Fortress of Solitude”. The show is presented in collaboration with Grifter (NYC) and will open on March 13th. This is the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery.

If you really want to know a person you must excavate the bits and scraps of their everyday life. Embedded in them like markers on a watch dial are the clues and triggers of every moment. Some flare and stir up with alacrity, others bare the full saccharine weight of dread and longing. But every thing that passes our sight is ripe with the opportunity for reflection on what has passed and how it will repeat some in shadow form of the same experience. Raising a child emphasizes this aspect with incredible clarity. A mixture of exhaustion and reflection prep the mind for reminiscing upon all things great and small. Typically when saying an artist “works from life” it is taken to mean that they are sitting at an easel with something like a bouquet and various objects laid out in front of them or maybe in a straw hat in some pastoral wonderland trying to capture what is in front of them.

However, Nora’s “working from life” is a constantly evolving archeology of the everyday objects that hold all of our memories. She is a hoarder of memories. In still lifes whose faces are carefully messy with objects, no hier- archy is present. Instead we can do a continuous pirouette of associative roll calls. In “Still Life with Dutch Boy”, a hammer peeks up from the bottom next to a clock, surely we could use some of the scattered nails to hammer down this incessant speeding lurch forward in time, maybe slow down the march to the end. There’s a fresh bowl of pasta brain-like, only waiting to get cold and stale. Probably going to need glasses soon to see this up close. That apple core is laid on its back assuming its position waiting for the inevitable. The dreaded driver’s license,

if you ever want to realize how old you’ve gotten just take a look. This is not a grim stroll towards death, it’s an accounting of time. Something all the more glaring as you watch your child grow. Repeating your childhood in some altered form, a mixture of what you’ve learned and what they innately refuse to go along with. The severed ponytail in “Still Life with Contents of Purse”, snaking its way through a field of peppermints and pills is both the memorial of the her once luxurious casual mane that in middle age couldn’t possibly keep up and the nightly braiding of a daughters hair at bedtime. Everything has weight. We could spend all day diagraming this site of a life stilled. Adding to the circular reading of objects with their clues and references is the muscular working and reworking of every moment. Indeed that paint itself is catching on, building up the intense architecture of her investigations.

I would describe Nora’s artist hand as having the deft nimbleness of Fred Astaire with the punching power of Mike Tyson. I wouldn’t be surprised if her paints and brushes cowered as she entered the room and breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the day. A champion thumb wrestler, she captures and pins representation. The images feel so deeply embedded so full of minute force that they seem to still contain all the oxygen and air in the vicinity, so that the atmosphere in the paintings aren’t drawn or painted but exist within. The same can be said for the people whose every expression and every molecule has been wrestled into place. These paintings aren’t casual, they beautifully tread the line of showing all the delicate reflections a mind can place within things and images while simultaneously holding the evidence of Nora’s brute force of control and mania. The results of this balance are paintings filled with studious contemplation upon the frailty of existence, renderings that are simultaneously rigorous and funny, compositions that leave a trail of breadcrumbs literal and figurative and all in all make the viewer feel lucky for happening upon them.

-John McAllister

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𝑅𝒪𝒮𝒮 𝒞𝒜𝐿𝐼𝐸𝒩𝒟𝒪

𝔖𝔦𝔩𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢 ℭ𝔥𝔬𝔦𝔯

𝔐𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥/𝔄𝔭𝔯𝔦𝔩, 2021

There weren’t any buildings because the climate was so agreeable. The air, warm and damp, smelled of decaying vegetation. It was often said: this place has the allure of Florida. Our little group walked slowly towards the amphitheater where the show would be, but it wasn’t really a place, more of a situation. It became clear that out destination was hazy, unfixed, hard to pin down. I began to feel like a half of a second banana.

Eventually, we boarded an airplane, the kind used for big trips. Instead of normal seats there were sofas, plush chairs and low lamps. The captain, partially shaved and unfamiliar with the route, decided to “stay low” flying no more than thirty feet above the ground, which was thrilling. We all agreed the view was so different at the height, you could really “feel” the terrain. We landed on an airfield near a tidal river that sends silvery fish inland to spawn every spring.

Easier done than said, I thought boarding the escalator that took me from the forest floor up to a private nook in the canopy. Everything started to feel like something by that painter who never strains for effect, yet somehow pools limitless depth and cartoons from cereal boxes with equal conviction. We angled into town like hermit crabs (it wasn’t much of a town, just a loose collection of fire pits and a mature allée). There were a bunch of skinny kids riding around on dirt bikes, all over the place, like they owned it. We slept out rough on the ground in sleeping bags. In the morning, with bleary eyes, we wrestled with our flies. The types of trees we could name were alder, sassafras, sumac, redwood, boxwood and fruit trees. We tried, without success, to live off the land.

It became clear this was a labyrinth or some sort of shopping mall. I tried to find the concierge to see about getting someone to freshen up my drink. The light drew us in and menaced us playfully. The wind grew hot and dry. The forest and the sky turned red, was it a miracle or warning? We savored it like a ruby. Never great a taking a hint we stuck around and as the sun set in the east we turned and asked all the old questions; Is this route called 1-A? what is buried behind that old diner? And when will we ever find our way home.

-Wallace Whitney, March, 2021

Ross Caliendo (b. 1988) Pittsburgh, PA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Exhibitions include No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Phil Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Fisher Parrish Gallery, New York, NY; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA. Caliendo’s work has been covered by, Arazi Club Magazine, Columbus Alive!, and New American Paintings.

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✴ 🎀 𝒜𝓁𝒾𝒸𝒾𝒶 𝒢𝒾𝒷𝓈🌺𝓃 🎀 ✴ : 𝓑𝓪𝓬𝓴𝓻𝓸𝓷𝔂𝓶 𝓲𝓷 𝓪 𝓢𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓬𝓮
January/February, 2021

Grifter is pleased to announce Backronym in a Sentence, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn based artist Alicia Gibson.

A symphony of poetic phrasing loops, hanging in the air, attached by color which is breathing. So much fluorescent transcends the imagery, a color sensation that challenges dimensionality. Shadows increase the weight of letters, outlines appear to be drawn around gravel, curved around natural splatter. A spill over words in a joking sense.

Witty nods to pop culture, pulp fiction, admiration, fantasy, pleasure, amusement, and fear. A hierarchy of experience that starts with a very particular kind of everydayness. The artist is a woman, the artist is an American. The artist collects craft supplies and objects of questionable beauty, marketed towards the American girl, traces of the 90s and the 2000s.

Inside the paintings, tiny flowers have migrated from a country store to create a border around a note-to-self using crude language. The quality of materials is varied the way raspberry jam differs from sand castle. Tiny, trivial treasures like plastic gemstones, glitter, seashells, stickers and costume jewelry decorate lists of things to do, make sense of, and remember.

Alicia Gibson received her BA from Boston College, a Post-Bac from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and an MFA from Hunter College. Solo exhibitions include Friend from Foe at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2017), Backseat Bingo at Marvin Gardens, New York (2017), and Purgatory Emporium at CANADA, New York (2016). Group and two person shows include; Howard’s, Derek Eller Gallery, Lyles & King, Stems Gallery, Rachel Uffner Gallery, Adams and Ollman, and Venus, Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze, The New York Times, MOMUS, Hyperallergic and Art News.

Alicia Gibson Knows What You’re Thinking (and Feeling, Too) By Dan Nadel

There are cool symbols and there are true symbols. Every now and then the two values converge, and we get, let’s say, Nirvana. Alicia Gibson’s symbols, the stuff of her pictorial vocabulary, are not cool, but they are deeply, wonderfully, nauseously true. Unicorns, peace signs, “OMG,” butterflies, and glitter—we think we put these aside when we grow up, along with our diaries, third base, and every other awkward part of our lives. We filter them into something else—we aestheticize and rename those feelings. World and identity creation take over, and even—or especially—in the contemporary art multiverse, we pull back into acceptable taste. Then we adopt symbols that we can digest more easily, either because they’re already neutral and absorbed, or because they’re plain ol’ kitsch. That’s the easy way out. Gibson, not one to do anything the easy way (there’s probably a painting with that title) doesn’t give us that out. For her, as for all of us, we grow up, but the feelings—elation, hope, degradation, depression, happiness, bliss—remain forever. And if the feelings remain, why not reuse the vocabulary with which they were first expressed?

Call it the 1980s and ’90s notebook aesthetic. Or tie it to Lisa Frank, if you must. But Gibson is not a nostalgist. She deploys her iconography masterfully. Crucially, she is a painter invested in the physicality of paint—in the melding of subject matter and materials. When we look at, say, Mel Bochner, the only other true painter/poet of our time (accept no substitutes) we get a chuckle from his mid-century-modern verbiage, but rarely ever think about the diamond-hard precision of his hand, his masterful attention to the chromatic potential of painting, and his vicious sense of humor. Gibson’s painterly cohort also includes trauma-maestro Sue Williams, greatest living heroic painter Katherine Bernhardt, and fearless identity explorer Robert Colescott. All are committed to both the religion of paint and the unmitigated truth.

And like all these painters, the loudness of Gibson’s symbols and colors can distract from the thousands of tiny decisions in each painting. “Put It in Painting” is a painting- as-note-to-self—words, kindergarten buildings, big old drips, and spiral notebook paper arranged in harmony, as though natural companions. Incredibly, a painting called (and emblazoned with the words) “Cumface Killah,” is actually a tender, beautiful picture. There are plumes of sky-blue pigment all underneath those words, and a delicate ribbon rings the bottom of the image. What a thing—savagery and beauty all at once, doing the compositional push and pull. Other paintings, like “Difficult 2 Deal,” take a collage approach, using a flag-like arrangement of elements to contain Gibson’s inimitable, frenetic linework, and a deluge of phone numbers and notes that, honestly, we shouldn’t read. Every now and then, however, a still life emerges from the paint space. So, “Swarovski & Limoges II” and “Fuck Fragile” remind us that this master of the poetry of emotional and psychological well-being lives here, among us, and can site and paint the real objects from which her symbols are abstracted. Those paintings are unexpectedly gratifying. They remind us that we’re in the hands of a painter committed to her subject matter, spitting it to the stratosphere with a yelp, or bringing it to the ground with a caress.

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𝙈𝘼𝙍𝙄 𝙀𝘼𝙎𝙏𝙈𝘼𝙉: 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙩 𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙥𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 in 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙙

ℕ𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕞𝕓𝕖𝕣 13 – 𝔻𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕞𝕓𝕖𝕣 26, 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟘

Grifter is pleased to announce Internet Shopping in the Time of Covid, an exhibition of new work by Chicago based artist Mari Eastman.

In her first solo show in New York in many years, Eastman embraces the shopping mall context of Grifter, mixing consumerist attitudes with expressionist renditions of historical paintings. Brushy thin layers give the appearance of soak stained paint and quick lines of image produce an overall textile effect. Working from images of beauty, Eastman paints a Matisse still life and a woman in a trench coat plucked from fashion photography. This allusion articulates how our gaze falls on a masterpiece no differently than if it fell on the pages of an airline magazine.

Eastman contemplates the supposedly reassuring qualities of painting. Her casual confidence is convincing due in part to great color instincts and an overall range of textures, from raw canvas to impasto. A professor of art, Eastman foregrounds materials and the sculptural qualities of painting. Academic discourse mixes with playful interrogation, creating a loving analysis of mainstream art and its frequent remoteness from reality.

Shopping mall aesthetics are extended by hand-painted sweatshirts featuring poetic phrases and imagery that hang alongside the paintings. Eastman suggests a mixup between the wily genius of shopping and the sincere emotional reaction we have come to expect when encountering great works of art. The sweatshirts in their everydayness are a soft armor, suggesting an outward form of self-reflection.

Mari Eastman holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles), The Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach), the Berkeley Museum of Art (Berkeley, CA), Cherry and Martin Gallery (Los Angeles), Spruth and Magers (Munich), Barbara Gladstone Gallery (New York), and Maureen Paley (London) among other venues. Her work has been included in such publications as Modern Painters, The New York Times, and on the websites Artforum.com and Contemporary Art Daily. Her artwork has been featured on a limited edition collection with the Los Angeles-based designers, Rodarte. Eastman lives and works in Chicago and is on the faculty of the School of The Art Institute Painting and Drawing Department.

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፠A፠m፠a፠n፠d፠a፠ ፠B፠e፠r፠o፠z፠a፠ ፠F፠r፠i፠e፠d፠m፠a፠n፠,፠

፠f፠a፠l፠l፠ ፠2፠0፠2፠0፠

Amanda Friedman
Everyday Drawings and Pyramids

SETTING:
Exhibition on view at Grifter, 75 East Broadway, Unit 221, NY, NY
September 11 to October 31, 2020

Under the Manhattan Bridge within a grotto made of flattened paper pyramids and many marks.

CHARACTERS:
Everyday Drawings, standard
Everyday Drawings, subgroups = Calendar and Performance Proposal (Helen Rides 6)
Pyramid Painting, singular
Pyramid Paintings, plural, two-sided = Grotto
Mourning Doves, from The Fire Escape Café
Blue Moths, slippage between systems, cosmos, times = Present
Several Solos
A Few Duets
Clay Castle Memory
New Planets, in this world

ACT 1:
Scene 1 — 9/11, Opening
Windows are walls. There are at least two see-through doors at this corner.

Scene 2 — 9/17, New Moon
New Planet/s Rising, Set intentions

Scene 3 — 10/1, Hunter Full Moon
Pyramids Fall, Fly, Overlap, Flip

Scene 4 — 10/16, New Moon
Many To No Days, Set intentions
Nights and days bleed together. Pyramids prop up days.

Scene 5 — 10/29, 10/30, 10/31 Blue Full Moon
Shapes and shapes, the moon and shapes, singing makes me feel better.
Shapes and shapes, the moon and shapes, singing makes me whole.

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☺👽 𝓷σｒά 𝓇ί𝓖𝕘𝐬 ☆😲

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🐌 🎀 𝑀𝒶𝓀𝑒 𝑀𝑒 😍𝓃𝑒 𝒲𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝐸𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 🎀 🐌

<< march, april, may, june, july + august 2020 >>

Maija Peeples Bright, Hilary Pecis, David W. Cummings, Mira Dancy, Nora Jane Slade, Brianna Rose Brooks, June Culp, Mari Eastman, Josh Abelow, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Nora Riggs, Annette Wehrhahn, Clayton Schiff, Annelie McKenzie, Ryan Johnson, Heidi Jahnke, Brook Hsu, Sophie Larrimore, Keke Hunt, Alicia Gibson, Rachel Eulena Williams, Bella Foster, Caley Feeney, Jennifer Sullivan, Jake Manning, Alexandra Lakin, Alex Chaves, Marisa Takal, Howard Fonda, Al Freeman