Press

"I don’t know much about New Jersey. I’ve driven around, past, and through it. Like most, my understanding of the state is clouded by pop culture and over generalization. The Boss, the mob, Trenton makes the world takes, Jersey Shore. I know as a state it’s green and often treated like the ugly sibling of New York. It’s probably safe to say that the state of New Jersey has a vulnerable identity often misinterpreted by outsiders. In “Everything is Regional” by Tyler Haughey we explore motels, coastal enclaves, and parts of New Jersey that have not been frequented in mass for a long time. We see the decadence of American tourism and the subsequent abandonment of a once fantasized locale for more idyllic destinations."

"Sears Peyton Gallery has only three works in their booth. When they are as large and luminous as Jason Frank Rothenberg’s images of the natural world, three is all you need. Pushing the limits of his medium format negatives, the image quality falls apart in places, allowing the film grain to mix with the dirt streaked windows of the greenhouse. Rothenberg strikes a balance between inviting and ominous."

"The paintings in “Playing Field” have a spread, out, dynamic quality that makes me think of a freeze frame at a sporting event, as if the figures are engaged in some sort of physical interplay with a set of rules and a clear boundary line. I have always explored various groupings and densities of forms as a way of creating a visual story and dynamic tension in my paintings. In this body of work, I have moved away from more complex, interlocking color zones to more solid, simple backgrounds. With a simplified color “field,” I have been able to highlight the drama, movement and interrelatedness between forms."

"A major element of early feminist art criticism came down to detective work. Outing the male gaze in paintings of female subjects was akin to using black light to reveal traces of blood at a crime scene. Form, facture and viewpoint served as evidence in a forensic process – manifestations of objectification, voyeurism and idealization were exposed.

"Nowadays, the crime scene is complicated, especially where female authorship is concerned. In paintings of women by women, thanks to a sense of intimate self-knowledge, what has begun to emerge are emphatic – indeed, empathetic – attempts to maneuver the inherent theatricality of being subjected to the gazed. The subject can become complicit and resigned to being a displayed object, or lay out an elaborate performative trap in which the unaware spectator devours the bait. Two current shows present different but equally intriguing examples of such maneuvering: Suzy Spence’s A Night Among the Horses, ongoing at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea, and Heather Morgan’s Heavenly Creatures, at David Schweitzer Gallery, last month, in Bushwick."

"Suzy Spence is not afraid to go where our darker thoughts wander when we think of the regalia and and ritual of the hunt. Amidst the overt presence of violent death, the gnashing of the hounds' teeth, and the sweaty flanks of the steeds is the other primal urge of sex.

"Both males and females don the plumage of pink coats and top hats in an aristocratic dance of seduction, but in this case the artist has chosen to lampoon the male gaze by pushing the fetishization of the woman hunter into the wider zone of sexualized object. The Optimist (2017) and Untitled Riders (2017) present huntresses in various states of dishabille, while Death by Black Horse II (2017) doubles as both a bloody trampling of a rider and a retelling of Pasiphae and the bull. The loose and fluid brushstrokes of the monochromatic flashe works lend a witty spontaneity reminiscent of Thomas Rowlandson's pithy caricatures, while the polychrome pieces are darker and a bit more stiff-upper-lip."

https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2018-menswear/comme-des-garcons-homme-plus/slideshow/collection#21

"Luxuriance is more than a painterly quality in the work of Suzy Spence. It is a symbolic form. Bravura paint handling conveys the very sense of sport that is her motif in images of the hunt. Riders throw themselves with panache into the chase without attendant loss of elegance or control. Their very sweat is decorous in an almost heraldic balance of vitality and poise. There is a corresponding dialectic in Spence’s attitude towards her subject matter. Her catalogue essayist, Amy Rahn, deftly describes the feminist and class critique at the heart of her gender-bending approach while equally acknowledging her personal investment in riding, her participation in the culture that she observes. “The way these paintings slip—between genre and critique of genre, between a love of the sartorial poses of foxhunting and a critique of their masculine power, and between portraiture and figurative painting—give us a glimpse of something dark and rich that hammers the ground between critical thought and sensuous painting.” The full throttle romance of “the drag” (the term for hunting with a substitute fox segues sexily into the fey innocence of Spence’s idealized sorority of latter-day Artemises) speaks to an artist who hunts with the hounds and runs with the hares." 

"As politicians and pundits debate the virtues and vices of securing national borders, the works in Maysey Craddock’s fourth New York solo exhibition consider instead the fragility of less contrived boundaries—the wild natural shores between land and sea. Coastlines, rivers, and deltas, shaped and reshaped by the sea, by storms, and by humankind, are the abstracted subject and conceptual ballast of Craddock’s recent works. In these paintings, delicately traced tree limbs and ragged alluvial trailings overspread pieced paper surfaces stitched together with silk thread. As the national conversation on border security devolves into the simplistic rigidity epitomized by “the wall,” Craddock offers instead a view of natural borders as radically provisional and delicate—spaces alive with ceaseless adaptation and regeneration."