Final Week, Closing Brunch Sat Oct 19, 11a-2p: “Totem” Nancy Azara, Amy Brener, Matthew Craven, Melanie Daniel, Jeffrey Gibson, Emily Noelle Lambert, and Trish Tillman Asya Geisberg Gallery, 537B W23rd St., NYC an exploration of both the aesthetic qualities of totemic sculpture, as well as the symbolic, narrative, and trans-cultural borrowing of indigenous motifs endemic to much current art and culture. With a combination of sculpture, painting, and works on paper, the exhibition finds traces of a notion of totem whether in material or narrative choices, in works by seven artists from diverse origins. Jeffrey Gibson draws on his Native American heritage, and confounds the conventions of strict identity politics by combining it with Modernist abstraction, while Matthew Craven jumps across nations and cultures, disrupting strictly “authentic” narrative implications. Trish Tillman investigates her newly-discovered Native-American heritage for its suggested personal mythology, and conflates it with her pre-existing interest in the shamanistic rituals of everyday life. Melanie Daniel and Nancy Azara explore the narrative power and traditional totem’s use of figurative and animal parts, as symbolic, repetitive, and non-mimetic strategies. Amy Brener and Emily Noelle Lambert create towering, stacked forms in freshly distinctive approaches and materials.