Antemag
Spiritual Awakenings: Langdon Graves’ “Month’s Mind” at VICTORI+MO
December 29, 2019

In Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the story’s protagonist, Mrs. Alving, is a woman driven nearly mad by the profligates of a husband since deceased. Her suspicions, agonies and fears manifest into lingering presences that she summarily labels as ‘ghosts’. “I am inclined to believe that we are all ghosts,” she mutters to a family confidant. While for Ibsen these ‘ghosts’ allude to one man’s sins, ghosts have remained a frequent reference point in literature throughout the centuries, as ghosts and hauntings have persistently crept into society’s consciousness. Every culture has held onto their own form of ghost stories. Yet, can ghosts remain congruent to our present reality in which data and security camera leave little room for subjectivity and conjecture? Read full article>

Bedford + Bowery
Weird New Yorkers, Deathly Drawings, and More Art This Week
November 18, 2019

Everyone thinks about death at some point in their lives, but for certain people, mortality is especially on the mind. In a satisfying coincidence of last name and content (and no, I’m not just saying this because it’s my name as well), artist Langdon Graves explores death, the supernatural, and mourning rituals in her latest show at Chelsea’s Victori + Mo. Deriving influence from 19th-century Spiritualists, folk tales, and her own experiences with loss, Graves’ work is surprisingly playful and dreamy. Rather than dark colors, she prefers to play with soft mint greens, gold accents, and deep reds, resulting in a grouping of drawings and sculptures that are stylishly minimalist and just morbid enough to be intriguing. Read full article>

Artnet
Editors’ Picks: 15 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week
November 18, 2019

With roots in Medieval English tradition, a “month’s mind” is a requiem mass celebrated 30 days after a person’s death, traditionally accompanied by a feast. For the Virginia-born artist Langdon Graves, the mass encapsulates her fascination with mourning rituals, ghost stories, and the allure of occult beliefs and their relationship to grief. Here, Graves’s delicate drawings and sculptures pull from the artist’s own family stories, entwining personal narratives with flowers, votive offerings, and other funerary symbolism. She casts the narratives in relationship to 19th-century Spiritualism and folklore to ask the overarching questions about our contemporary relationship to death and mourning. Read full article>

Elephant
Why We Should All Know More About Lesbian “Herstories”
October 8, 2019

Despite many positive steps in gay rights movements over the decades, it has been noted that lesbians are often excluded by both mainstream and phallocentric queer culture. Artist Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is reclaiming the word, and used lesbian “herstories” as the basis of a superb body of recent work. Words by Emily Gosling. Read full article>

juxtapoz
Mirage Mirage: Brian Willmont's Solo at VICTORI + MO
September 29, 2019

Employing trompe l'oeil techniques, Willmont seamlessly blends abstract and decorative elements with iconic symbolism. Referencing the pop aesthetics associated with commercial airbrush technique, Willmont creates original paintings through a continual process of addition and subtraction, simultaneously informed by repetition, the handmade and the digital. There is a transformation that happens as Willmont alternates between digital renderings and analog processes within a single work. Read full article>

Sound & Vision podcast
Interview with Brian Willmont
September 26, 2019

Available on iTunes and Spotify. Listen to podcast episode here.

Art Verge
Brian Willmont’s Post Analogue Paintings Explore the Potential of Digital Culture
September 24, 2019

Brian Willmont concentrates on combining digital and analog practices in his body of work. The American artist uses editing programs that incorporate forms based on the digital imagery from software such as photoshop and from traditional hand-painted techniques such as painting, spraying or drawing. In his recent series of work, Willmont infuses retrofuturistic elements into his computer-generated paintings to introduce a more intense and remarkable painting experience. The retrofuturistic aesthetics of the ‘80s contain new visual technologies that represent the nostalgia as seen from the fresh perspective of this young artist. Willmont states that in his latest works, Crybaby (2019) or Isolationist (2019), he incorporates human figures to make them more “personal” and “more about the human aspect—how the times we’re in affect your core, not just your perception of things.” Read full article>

Artnet
Editors’ Picks: 20 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week
September 16, 2019

In his second solo show at the gallery, Willmont is focusing on how modern desires are filtered through everyday technology, expressed with trompe l’oeil techniques and his skillful blend of abstraction and decorative elements with symbolism. His paintings are created with a continual process of addition and subtraction as he mixes handmade with digital imagery. Read full article>

In New York
Moonstruck
July 15, 2019

Just in time for the anniversary of the moon landing, Frank Zadlo’s second solo exhibition, “Ad Astra,” at Victori + Mo gallery (242 W. 22nd St.), through Aug. 18, features the artist’s series “Moonscapes.” Long inspired by the aesthetic possibilities of concrete as a medium, Zadlo’s moonscape paintings are made of hand-dyed linen, concrete and silicon carbon. The concrete pours look like images of the moon’s surface as seen from a spaceship. Read full article>

Artnet
Editors’ Picks: 19 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week
June 24, 2019

New York-based artist Frank Zadlo presents three new series of works for his second solo show at the gallery. “Moonscapes,” made of hand-dyed indigo linen, concrete, and silicon carbon, a material used in sidewalks, reference the history of landscape painting. The works are part canvas and part sculptural vessel with concrete pours in suspended animation. For the artist’s “Flat Screen” sculptures, Zadlo pours wet concrete into television screens, forcing material transmutations. The show is bookended with two related works, a sculpture made of three blocks of broken concrete resting on each other on a hand truck in the front room and colored powder-coated steel sculptures in the backyard. Read full article>

Pulse Art Fair
Interview: Phoenix Lindsey-Hall
May 18, 2019

PAF: Could you revisit your piece Never Stop Dancing that was featured at Pulse Art Fair 2017? How did the piece develop over time and how did you end up choosing the materials you used for the work? PLH: When I heard the news about the Pulse nightclub shooting, I went straight to the Stonewall Inn. By the front door there was a growing pile of flowers on the sidewalk. Here, I found a small note accompanying a bouquet that simply said, “Never Stop Dancing.” Those words where the inspiration and ultimately the title to my work in memory of those who were lost. Read full article>

Them.
This Art Exhibition Transforms Lesbian Archives Into a Powerful Ode to Queer History
May 8, 2019

“Never underestimate the power of a dyke.” That bold phrase appears on the back of a woman’s T-shirt as she stands with a group of fellow queer women in a photograph by Cindy Clark of Women’s Quarterly Journal, which has been enlarged and emblazoned on wood by artist Phoenix Lindsey-Hall in her exhibition Shame is the First Betrayer. More than just a glimpse of a radical lesbian past, this rallying cry for queer women’s strength perfectly describes Lindsey-Hall’s show, opening this Thursday at the New York gallery VICTORI + MO. Read full article>

Bedford + Bowery
Miniatures Through Magnifying Glasses and More Art This Week
May 7, 2019

Art gallery Victori + Mo, which previously occupied a space within Bushwick’s 56 Bogart, is moving to Chelsea. The first exhibition in their new space, opening Thursday, is by multidisciplinary artist Phoenix Lindsey-Hall. The show takes its inspiration from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, specifically sections of the archive’s collection containing people’s personal belongings. Typically, these items stay in an archival setting, accessible only for people who already had the idea to go hunting for them. In Lindsey-Hall’s work, they come alive, as the gallery will be filled with replicas and reproductions of specific items that lesbians and queer women throughout the past decades possessed, whether that be everyday objects or treasured possessions. Read full article>

Artnet
Editors’ Picks: 11 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week
May 6, 2019

Having closed its Bushwick location in 2018, Victori + Mo opens its long-awaited Chelsea space with a solo exhibition of work by Phoenix Lindsey-Hall. The show marks the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery; in 2017 Lindsey-Hall memorably filled the Bushwick space with 49 porcelain disco balls in tribute the Pulse nightclub shooting victims. In the new show, the artist continues to mine queer identity and experience, but, in these mixed media works, there is a new emphasis on the personal object as a historical and cultural signifier. The artist has spent the past several years exploring the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the world’s largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities. For this exhibition, Lindsey-Hall has selected photographs, personal notes, and other objects from the archive, and incorporated elements in novel techniques, silk screening photographs and texts on ceramic, metal, wood and fabric. Read full article>

ArtNet
Here Are 22 Unmissable Spring Gallery Shows in New York, From Joan Mitchell’s Big Moment to Jeff Wall’s Spooky Surrealism
May 1, 2019

As Frieze New York touches down on Randall’s Island, galleries all over the city are breaking out their big guns in hopes of luring out-of-town collectors to their spaces. Here are some of the week’s biggest openings, plus a selection of shows we’re looking forward to later in the month.

Brooklyn’s VICTORI + MO has moved to Chelsea, where the inaugural exhibition features work from Phoenix Lindsey-Hall based on five years of research in the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The artist has incorporated text, images, and objects from the archives into mixed-media artworks that tell stories of everyday life from the lesbian community of the 1950s through the ’80s. Read full article>

The Art Newspaper
New York’s scrapped L-train shutdown is an ‘emotional rollercoaster’ for Brooklyn-based galleries
January 31, 2019

The verdict is in: as of 29 January, the L train line connecting parts of Brooklyn and Queens to Manhattan in New York will remain open, with reduced service, while it undergoes repairs. When New York’s Metro Transit Authority (MTA) announced in April 2016 it would need to close the line for an extended period of time in order to rectify the damage sustained from Hurricane Sandy flooding in 2012, many businesses—including those in the bustling art districts of Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn and Ridgewood in Queens—made other plans to cope with the disruption. Read full article>

Artnews
VICTORI+MO Gallery Will Move to First-Floor Location in New York’s Chelsea Neighborhood
January 28, 2019

Victori+Mo, a gallery previously based in Brooklyn, is relocating to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The outfit’s new 750-square-foot space on the ground floor of a townhouse at 242 West 22nd Street will open on March 14 with an exhibition of work by Phoenix Lindsey-Hall. Cofounded by Celine Mo and Ed Victori, Victori+Mo has been housed at 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick since it was established in 2015. The gallery’s roster includes Amie Cunat, Langdon Graves, Leah Guadagnoli, Amanda Martinez, and Samuel Stabler, among other artists. Read full article>