BELL and GANASSI

Bell and Ganassi

Bell and Ganassi

ARTIST BIO

LAURA BELL

At Douglass College, Rutgers University, Laura Bell studied with Fluxus artist Robert Watts, who gave her a deep appreciation for the spontaneous and serendipitous, and with clay sculptor Ka Kwong Hui, whose sense of the relationships of forms went far beyond the ceramic studio. She received a 2020 “Bronx Recognizes Its Own” (BRIO) painting grant from the Bronx Council for the Arts, has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony, and has participated multiple times in the Governors Island and Aqua Art Miami art fairs. Her paintings and mixed-media work have been shown in New York, Provincetown, New Haven, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere. She lives and has her studio in the Bronx.

IAN GANASSI

Ian Ganassi has worked as a writer, teacher, and percussionist. His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Survision, Home Planet News, Meniscus, Offcourse, BlazeVOX, Clockwise Cat, Otoliths, The Yale Review, and New American Writing. His poem “Blunt Trauma” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his translations from Virgil’s Aeneid have appeared in New England Review. His first poetry collection, Mean Numbers, was published by China Grove in 2016; his second poetry collection, True for the Moment, was published by David Robert Books in 2023. A third collection, By This Time, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June 2024. He is a long-time resident of New Haven, Connecticut.

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LAURA BELL AND IAN GANASSI

Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi THE CORPSES March 26 - April 30

Madison Ave New York

Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi

THE CORPSES

March 26 – May 3, 2024

Laura Bell, a painter based in the Bronx, and Ian Ganassi, a poet in New Haven, met as artists in residence at the Millay Colony. In 2005, Ian mailed Laura an unfinished poem and handwritten phrases on a piece of printer paper stained with coffee rings, and in an accompanying letter asked her to do something to it. This became the first move in what evolved into their ongoing collaborative collage series, “The Corpses,” titled after the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse. With each mailing, words, images, and objects are added and new pieces are started; at any point, either of them can call a work finished. At first it was assumed that Ian would contribute text and Laura visuals, but this division soon dissolved, with Laura adding lines cut from ads or subway handouts and Ian melting crayons and experimenting with paint. They each had already been using collage methods in their own bodies of work, Ian with overheard and appropriated lines in his poems and Laura with photos and laser prints in the grounds of her paintings. 

Pop culture, politics, religion, and poetry make appearances, and recurring images and phrases create echoes and connections. A collage might go back and forth many times or make only one circuit between New Haven and New York. The pieces can be minimal or layered; early ones tended to be more spare, later work often gathered more objects, but over the years this has also followed an ebb and flow. Some pieces develop themes or function almost as diaries (a hospital glove, a postcard), and time frames can be felt in political or current events references. The gathering of materials has become a consuming habit for both of them, combining found objects, text, drawings, ads, photos, fabrics, and all manner of mixed media—a painterly, visceral process, the anti-Photoshop. “The Corpses turned us into scavengers,” Ian has said. “We ended up trying to get the whole world into them.” 

The process has retained its initial sense of play, while also reflecting battles over the obliteration of a passage of paint or text or the declaring of a piece finished. The series quickly demanded a level of intention equal to the work they were publishing and exhibiting individually. Called “joyously Fluxus-like” by Robert Shuster in the Village Voice and described by writer H. Byron Earhart as going “beyond collaborative to a kind of conspiratorial imagination,” “The Corpses” has evolved into more than a decade of personal and material call-and-response. At present, there are more than 300 finished works. A new batch is usually in progress or in transit.

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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINK and THE CORPSES


JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINK and THE CORPSES


Madison Avenue  New York
Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu, PINK and THE CORPSES
October 5 – October 31, 2023

R.C. Baker
Eric Brown
Deborah Buck
Bell and Ganassi
Jaye Moon
Mr.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu

We are pleased to announce the group exhibition Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu, PINK and THE CORPSES, which runs from October 5 through October 31, 2023.  The exhibition marks the New York premiere of Janet Taylor Pickett’s works, previously only shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art in California, that probe a personal and collective past to posit a distinctly Black mythology of Self.  

This is also the debut of Zhang Hongtu’s never-before-seen Shan Shui Paintings from his personal collection.  Zhang’s Shan Shui series spans several years and explores the categories of “East” and “West” in a distinctive manner, reflecting his life in two cultures. He reimagines the work of seventeenth-century Chinese artists in the vibrant colors and brushwork of Monet and Vincent van Gogh.

On view includes works by R.C. Baker, Eric Brown, Deborah Buck, Bell and Ganassi, Jaye Moon, and Mr. selected from the online exhibition PINK and THE CORPSES.

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Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

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Pitches & Scripts

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January 20 - March 11, 2023
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Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

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Summer Exhibition
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