Viviane Rombaldi Seppey and Esperanza Cortes at Smack Mellon

Installation view of Viviane Rombaldi Seppey's Voice at Smack Mellon, October 2019. Gallery Link

I worked in the studio next to Seppey's last year at UCross Foundation, and saw first-hand the spell her work casts.
One meticulous work followed by the next culminates in installations. 

She creates labrynths with careful cutouts from the phone directories that used to be delivered to one's door.

Collages take different shapes but always suggest a form of disorientation--not violent, but slightly askew.

This is the condition of the nomad, which Rombaldi-Seppey understands well, a traveler who lives in four countries. She brings collage to life in a collaboration of instruments with composer Benjamin Velez, in which viewers turn a crank to run a series of notes through. They were absorbing to play, so no photographs. 

In the words of Hyperallergic, Esperanza Cortés ' exhibition, Canté Jondo/Deep Song, "wrestles with the violence implicit in mineral mining." Her glittery, seductive objects, from restored chairs to flowers to waterfalls of shimmering gold, seduce and therefore blind us to deeper layers of exploitation beneath shining surfaces.

Gallery Link

Cortés refashions glamor, reworking familiar objects to heighten our awareness of them. As we contemplate their multiple origins, we begin to wonder at their histories. 

A 2018 Guggenheim recipient, Cortés is "a former Afro Latin dancer, her work seeks to underscore and use sacred space, the patterns of dance, music, and fragments of histories as departure points to investigate and build the structure and space of the installations." This explanation provides insight into her command of scale in the Smack Mellon installation.