Cool Hunting

Ruth Marshall
The highlight from Scope was undeniably Ruth Marshall and her acumen for craft-work combined with a nutty sense of humor. When the Australian born artist isn't at her day job sculpting exhibits at the Bronx Zoo, she's still committed to her love and fascination for animals. Presented by Dam, Stuhltrager, these knitted animal pelts are a delightful comment on both the trophy and the...

Eric Doeringer: Contraband
New York art magazine and exhibition space Animal commissioned Eric Doeringer to make a piece for their most recent issue/show. He came up with Contraband, a series of sculptures made out of items whose possession, sale, use, and/or transportation across state or international borders is illegal. Each item is bottled, labeled and shrink-wrapped in red plastic. The series contains 24 items ranging from hallucinogenic...

Tamara Kostianovsky: Actus Reus
"Actus Reus" is the debut solo exhibition of Tamara Kostianovsky, an Israeli artist raised in Argentina and currently living in Brooklyn. The show consists of life-sized animal carcasses painstakingly reconstructed using second-hand clothing, which are all former pieces from the artist's actual wardrobe. The patchwork constructions adopt a remarkably grotesque quality, hanging from meat hooks in an antiseptic gallery space. The exhibition's Latin title...

Joseph Conforti
Joseph Conforti is a master of repetition. A raku ceramicist based in New York City, he creates hypnotic wall sculptures comprised of individual panels, each of which contains hundreds of ceramic pieces. Raku, for those unversed in ceramic speak, is a traditional form of Japanese pottery dating back to the 16th Century. It involves low temperature kiln firing, followed by a combustible immersion that...

Mark Andreas: Reactive Sculpture Series
After exhibiting up and down the eastern seaboard, Brooklyn-based sculptor Mark Andreas has crossed the East River to make his Manhattan debut. Andreas' Reactive Sculpture Series includes the hulking 400-pound Seed Spreader (pictured), an intimidating machine equipped with three-foot spinning blades. It brilliantly expresses the fear associated with the industrialization of mass food production that, in the words of the artist, “conceptually speaks to...