Miriam Schaer

"No More Dishes To Wash", Unique Artist Book Sculpture

2013

"Kryptonite Wares" is a clever and humorous collection of both superfluous and everyday objects purchased from the Dollar Store. It is a wry comment by the artist on the overabundanc...

“Cordial“ is a wall relief panel by artist Heather Nicol, and measures 16x19x4“. Part of a body of work known as Brief Lives, this particular piece is comprised of wallpaper, spray paint, wood, the artist's aunt's pearls, crystal and red resin (solid), mounted on board. It fixes to the wall with a custom-fit wooden cleat. Reflecting on domestic materials and their relationships to display and social identity, Cordial celebrates and questions feminist reclamation, nostalgic tenderness and the histories embedded in the objects, while carrying on their aesthetic traditions through transformation into works of art. Heather Nicol is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes immersive sound installation, small-scale discrete object making, and independent curating. Her large site-specific interventions explore the architectural, sonic, historic and operational conditions across a wide range of locations. These include concourse atriums, rail terminus, lobbies, a theatre, a public school building, a theme...

“Parlour“ is a wall relief panel by artist Heather Nicol, and measures 17x19x4“. Part of a body of work known as Brief Lives, this particular piece is comprised of wallpaper, fabric, wood, nails, glass, silver platter, plastic wrap, butterfly specimen, mounted on board. It fixes to the wall with a custom-fit wooden cleat. Reflecting on domestic materials and their relationships to display and social identity, Parlour celebrates and questions feminist reclamation, nostalgic tenderness and the histories embedded in the objects, while carrying on their aesthetic traditions through transformation into works of art. Heather Nicol is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes immersive sound installation, small-scale discrete object making, and independent curating. Her large site-specific interventions explore the architectural, sonic, historic and operational conditions across a wide range of locations. These include concourse atriums, rail terminus, lobbies, a theatre, a public school building, a theme...

In the mid 1990s Richard Klein started working with found glass objects, including bottles, drinking glasses, ashtrays, and eyeglasses. Initially, Klein rejected any object with commercial or advertising content, but in 2015 he became fascinated with the promotional content that was screen printed on ashtrays from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. This period was before smoking was looked at as being primarily a negative habit, and iconic American businesses, including Howard Johnson’s, International House of Pancakes (iHop) and Holiday Inn, all produced promotional ashtrays printed with their graphic identity. By the time Klein became interested in these objects, the businesses had either ceased to exist, or had changed their logos, and many of their signature buildings, which where examples of classic, “Pop” roadside architecture, has been torn down or repurposed. The artist wanted to connect the glass objects with the business’s sites that were still recognizable and spoke of their history, so he began researching where original buildings still stood. Klein then embarked on a series of road trips to photograph these sites with the intention of combining the photographs with the promotional glass objects. This led him to as far south as Maryland and as far north as upstate New York from his home in Connecticut. In the case of Holiday Inn, it wasn’t their buildings, but their iconic illuminated sign that appeared on ashtrays, so he sought out a standing example of the sign he could photograph. As it turned out all had been removed years before from the hotels' properties and the only working example was indoors at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. He did, however, find out that there was one still standing, surprisingly, in Beruit, Lebanon. He found an image of it on the web and used it to make Holiday Inn (Beruit). In 1973 Holiday Inn changed their tagline from “The Nations Innkeeper” to “The World’s Innkeeper” as they expanded overseas, including the Mideast. For the hotel chain it was bad timing: the disastrous Lebanese civil war began in 1975. In the war, the different Lebanese militias involved in the conflict, including the Nasserites, Christian Phalangists, and the Lebanese National Movement engaged in what came to be called “The Battle of the Hotels” where they each occupied a major high-rise hotel in central Beruit. The Phalangists commanded the Holiday Inn, which they used to fire with both light arms and heavier weapons at the militias in neighboring hotels. Klein used the photo of the heavily damaged Holiday Inn sign as I thought it spoke in a curious, offhanded way about American cultural imperialism in juxtaposition with an ashtray that proclaimed Holiday Inn to be “The World’s Innkeeper.” In the work Holiday Inn (Nocturne) the artist utilized a found, 35mm slide of a Holiday Inn sign at night at an unknown location as the basis of the photograph in the work. Richard Klein is a Connecticut-based artist, independent curator and writer. As an artist, he has exhibited widely, including the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase; Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Hales Gallery, London; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; James Barron Art, Kent, CT; The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Exhibit by Alberson Tulsa, OK; Incident Report/Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY; ICEHOUSE Project Space, Sharon, CT; Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, CT and with ODETTA Gallery at the Equity Gallery in New York City.. Reviews of his work have appeared in Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, and The New Yorker. In the summer of 2024 he will be the first Artist-In-Residence at Peck Ledge Light...