Tourniquet: An Essay by Cassandra Stanton

Cassandra Stanton’s essay, Tourniquet, takes the form of four enigmatic vignettes wrapped in intimate dialogue with William Downs’ Grizzly Grizzly exhibit, Standing on the Verge of… Stanton’s prose construct a torrid, sometimes grotesque, relationship between characters that ostensibly occupy a landscape shared with the hallucinatory parade of figures and spirits in Downs’ immersive wall drawings. […]

Pareidolia for Relational Survival: Sculptures by Michelle Marcuse

This essay by Laurel McLaughlin is the fourth in a series of essays archiving one year of Grizzly Grizzly exhibitions, in celebration of our 10th year as an artist collective. Throughout the year, we will be collaborating with exhibiting artists and emerging and established writers to produce essays that critically reflect on the exhibitions and […]

Destructive Plasticity as Creative Force, Thinking with Plakookee’s Eternal Cleanse: An Essay by Roksana Filipowska

We are pleased to have Roksana Filipowska join us again with her second essay for Speak Speak. In this recent piece on Eternal Cleanse, Filipowsaka focuses her studies in plasticity to reveal “the flickering ontologies and cognitive slippages” that result from PLAKOOKEE’S November exhibit at Grizzly Grizzly. This piece is the second in a series […]

Zoë Charlton: Luster, An Essay by Victoria Sunnergren

Zoë Charlton’s exhibit, Luster, was developed while in residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation and was first exhibited at Grizzly Grizzly in January, 2018. Inspired by the African masks she uses in her large-scale drawings and collages, Charlton expands her intersecting interests in cultural identity, race, commodity and cultural tokenism, with a […]

Leroy Johnson: Dogs/Walls/Dark Energy, An Essay by Olivia Jia

Olivia Jia’s essay on Leroy Johnson’s Dogs/Walls/Dark Energy is the first in a series of essays archiving one year of Grizzly Grizzly exhibitions, in celebration of our 10th year as an artist collective. Throughout the year, we will be collaborating with exhibiting artists and emerging and established writers to produce essays that critically reflect on the exhibitions […]

Daniel Gerwin’s Online Conversation with Seth Koen and Skirmantas Pipas Regarding Their Exhibit at Grizzly Grizzly

Daniel Gerwin leads an online interview with exhibiting artists Seth Koen and Skirmantas Pipas. Their conversation reveals underlying connections through drawing, subtlety of form, and the quiet activation of space that was a hallmark of their exhibit last July, Formal Wonders & Wandering Forms. Daniel Gerwin: Skip, your watercolors look a lot like studies […]

Two Spiders: An Essay by Jeanne Vaccaro on Chris Bogia and Jesse Harrod’s Exhibit at GrizzlyGrizzly

Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you. To feel others is unmediated, immediately social, amongst us, our thing. —Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Hapticality, or Love” In The Estrangement Principle poet Ariel Goldberg writes of their “routine obsession” with “collecting the […]

The Golgi Apparatus: An Essay by C.J. Stahl on Tyler Kline’s Exhibit at Grizzly Grizzly

Philadelphia based artist and curator C.J. Stahl immerses himself in Tyler Kline’s April exhibit, The Golgi Apparatus, exploring the interconnectedness between the artist’s materials and practice, his collaborators, the collective, and the sharing of a creative act. In preparing for this post, I thought that I would do all the things that one does to […]

Come and Wrap Around Me: Alan Beyersdorf Muses About Grizzly Grizzly Exhibit “Sadly, Occupied”

Philadelphia based writer, Alan Beyersdorf, contemplates the work of Gary Kachadourian and Michael Siporin Levine in Grizzly Grizzly’s March exhibit, Sadly, occupied. In his braided essay, Beyersdorf explores the efficacy of communication, thinking and the recognition of objects, meditation, Ohio, and memories of smoking cigarettes in his ‘97 Chevy Lumina. Come and Wrap Around Me There’s […]

The Illusionist: An Interview with Brent Wahl by Robyn Wise

Brent Wahl, the multimedia artist behind the February exhibit at Grizzly Grizzly, Think Much, Cry Much, on working both against and within the photographic tradition, his perverse urge to conceal things, and the poetry of rocks. Since the early nineties, Philadelphia-based artist Brent Wahl has been sounding the conceptual depths of photography and sculpture with […]

speak speak

essays and conversations with Grizzly Grizzly exhibiting artists