Karim B. Hamid: The End of Play and Infancy
Until 16 June at Alchemy Gallery, 55 Delancey Street, Manhattan
In its inaugural exhibition, Alchemy Gallery presents a series of voyeuristic paintings and collages by the American artist Karim B. Hamid, who describes his work as “psychic archaeology”. Hamid’s paintings masterfully synthesise figuration and abstraction, visualising elongated moments drawn from pornography and other sexualised glimpses of the human form. His influences—Francis Bacon, Andrei Tarkovsky—are clear but the work is distinguished by its composition, comprising layers of canvas and paper on board made complete by its imperfections and that accentuate the bulbous but sinuous outlines of its subjects, which at times glaringly acknowledge the viewer. “There is an attempt to capture a kind of psychic element of the person or thing being observed,” Hamid says. “I refer to the type of image that occurs in the blink of an eye. In that stretched moment, there is a confusion in the mind’s eye about what it wants to see, or what it can see.”
Sky Hopinka, Kicking the Clouds (2022). Courtesy Broadway Gallery.
Sky Hopinka: River Child
Until 4 June at Broadway, 373 Broadway, Manhattan
The artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation) presents two new compelling video works in this exhibition, the two-channel video The Island Weights and Kicking the Clouds (both 2022). The latter, arguably the centrepiece of the show, comprises atmospheric footage, from clouds to forests, overlaid with a recording of the artist’s grandmother on the challenges of learning her ancestral language from her mother, in which she also recalls her mother’s penchant for gambling, echoing some of the ills that plague Indigenous communities. Hopinka’s elegiac documentaries, both hypnotic travelogs, are complemented by a series of photographs that are hand-inscribed with poetry that reference both personal and wider political concerns.
Becky Suss, 8 Greenwood Place (my bedroom), 2020 Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Becky Suss: Greenwood Place
Until June 18 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street, Manhattan
There is no place like home, they say, and no place more comfortable than your childhood bedroom. For most of us it is the place where we discovered who we wanted to be and started building the roadmap on how to get there. In Greenwood Place, the artist Becky Suss explores the memory of her childhood bedroom through different stages of her life. Through intricate details and a purposely two-dimensional perspective, Suss blends memory, fiction and history onto large canvases that, while personal to her own narrative, invite the viewer to explore memories of their earlier selves. Early during the global covid-19 pandemic, Suss moved her studio into her childhood home, in which her parents still live, so they could help her with childcare. Working in the space where she grew up gave Suss the chance to surround herself in memory and further build on the themes of domesticity and interiority so prevalent in her practice.