The inaugural edition of PHOTOFAIRS New York, a new contemporary art fair dedicated to photo-based works, digital art, and new media, took place on Manhattan’s West Side. Three galleries — Postmasters, bitforms, and Von Lintel Gallery — exhibited works that pushed the boundaries of lens-based media with a focus on the digital.

For the art fair’s latest iteration, SPRING/BREAK Art Show has returned to its past. Rather than introducing a new theme this year, applicants were able to choose from the fair’s previous themes for their curatorial projects. While one could imagine that such a setup might result in a rehash of past fairs, this year’s SPRING/BREAK is anything but ossified. Alongside many familiar faces are projects by artists and curators making their SPRING/BREAK debuts.

Seungjin Lee is an artist and performer who makes work based around a concept that he calls DigiAna: art that embraces both digital and analog processes. Roman Kalinovski, senior editor of Arcade Project, sat down with Lee to discuss the nature and origins of his DigiAna concept and how his artwork expresses this vision of digital and analog synthesis.

Artist Daniel Giordano, based upstate in Newburgh, has three overlapping solo exhibitions: JDJ Gallery in TriBeCa, Turley Gallery in Hudson, and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Each show offers a different perspective on Giordano’s diverse and materially complex oeuvre, featuring bodies of work that draw from the artist’s life and surroundings while allowing each piece to take on a life and meaning of its own.

Both artists in Sapovnela at 11 Newel Gallery – curated by Tessa Krieg – mobilize the unseen and uncontrollable in creating their work. Leila Spilman uses natural decay and supposedly supernatural electrophotography to make prints of great material and historical complexity. Ryan DaWalt harnesses magnetism and ultraviolet light, resulting in paintings that glow and wire sculptures held in tense equilibrium by unseen forces.

In addition to showcasing a variety of approaches to color in sculpture, I would argue that there is another undercurrent running through this exhibition. Much of the work either responds to or actively attempts to undermine classical and modern aesthetics' mathematical purity.