Swoon & Tennessee Jane Watson
May 30th – July 12th, 2008
Honey Space
148 11th Ave, New York, NY
Swoon and Tennesse Jane Watson put this show together to raise awareness for femicide in Juarez, Mexico. Silvia Elena was one the first of hundreds of young, poor women to be sexually assaulted and brutally murdered on their way home from long days working in local factories. The murderers are suspected to be prominent, wealthy men, and the police are suspected of aiding them by being indifferent to the murders or by torturing innocent people until they confess to the crime.
In the main room of the gallery, a shrine was set up on a table, with newspaper clippings and pictures of some of the girls on the wall behind it. To see the main installation, a visitor would have to climb down a ladder through a hole in the floor into a sub-level of the the building. There, among dirt and cinder blocks, one could fine Swoon’s ornately detailed paper cutout portrait of Silvia Elena, lit by candles and adorned with donations. The portrait was accompanied by the voice of her mother, speaking in Spanish, and by the sound of dirt being shoveled off a grave. The sound of the dirt was especially eerie: alone in the sub-level of the building, it sounded like somebody trying to dig their way in or out of the room.
Having to enter the exhibition by climbing into a hole in the ground put the viewer outside of their comfort zone. The sub-level area outlined the isolation of these girl’s deaths, left alone in the desert. Some girls were not found for years; many were never found at all. The mother’s voice conveys the pain that these murders cause not only to the girls, but to their families, who are powerless to seek justice.
Neo Rauch
May 12th – June 21, 2008
David Zwirner Gallery
525 West 19th Street, New York, NY
“Ambiguous and sometimes menacing, the stories [Rauch's] paintings tell are retro-futuristic fantasies of a world at once strange and eerily familiar, recognizable not from experience but perhaps from dreams (Carnegie International).”
What I loved about these paintings was the absolute confusion of styles and content. At first glance I thought they were brightly colored realist paintings. Upon further inspection, I noticed that many of the characters looked like they were from the 1950’s, and that many of them were acting out very odd scenes. Slowly I began realizing the extent of the idiosyncrasies in perspective, and almost Dali-like surreal qualities of some of the pieces. I was thoroughly confused as to what was going on, and I loved it. The paintings were realistic, cartoonish, surreal, dark, and comical all at the same time; and they seemed to reference every art movement recorded in history.
According to the press release, Rauch does not rely on existing imagery or preconceived notions for his paintings. The paintings unfold themselves on the canvas, inspired by dreams and experiences, and structured from the artist’s fascination with the figure, work related props, and the properties of paint itself.
Jack Strange
June 19th – July 31st, 2008
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street, New York, NY
“In his sculptures, drawings, collages and videos, Strange recontextualizes and re-imagines the functions of everyday objects and ideas in a manner that is humorous, clever, surprising and at times revelatory. Creating unexpected relationships between commonplace materials, Strange offers a perspective on their uses that can open up new worlds of meaning. A comparison to Surrealism might be appropriate based on this description, but the unusual juxtapositions in Strange’s work are oddly comfortable, and somehow appropriate. While the viewer acknowledges the silliness of combining a lighting fixture and a coat hanger to make a face, as in ‘Another One Again,’ installed in the side gallery, the materials are easily recognizable in their new incarnation. Sometimes, in Strange’s words, ‘the logic of no logic can be quite logical after all.’ With this sophisticated yet direct approach, Strange makes work that transforms the mundane into the marvelous while both formally and thematically addressing issues of creative identity, repetition, perspective, language, technology, biology and nature (ArtSlant).”
Though every piece was intriguing in its own way, what particularly stuck out for me was ‘For The Greenmen (With The Curst Sons, Alpha, Giovanni Manzini and Mr. Clack).’ Four monitors hung along a wall, displaying a looped clip from Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk” film. Each monitor had a different soundtrack, which he commissioned from musicians, including a 14 year old DJ, a classical pianist, a hillbilly rock group and an electronic noise artist. It was interesting to hear how changing a soundtrack can completely change the mood of a movie, and brought to mind William S. Burrough’s ‘The Invisible Generation,’ which describes in comical detail how what we see can be determined by what we hear.
Titi Freak
May 16th – Jun 14th, 2008
Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, New York, NY
Always a fan of street art, as well as of mixed media, I was very impressed by both style of the work and the presentation of the show. The paintings became part of the wall, seemingly haphazardly placed everywhere, and then integrated through extra scraps of wood and designs painted on the walls. The characters of the portraits stare at the viewer with emotive yet directionless gazes, mostly dressed in street clothes. Hamilton Yokota, the Brazilian artist better known a Titi Freak, incorporates aspects of both his Brazilian and Japanese heritages, creating images inspired by pop culture, street art, and Japanese woodblock prints (Press Release).
Mat Collishaw
June 19th – July 31st
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (Gallery 1)
521 West 21st St. New York, NY
Mat Collishaw’s exhibition, Deliverance, immerses the viewer into a large dark room, accompanied only by the whir of rotating overhead projectors, delivering frequent lightning like flashes. The flashes create eerie greenish white images on the walls; bright at first, then slowly fading. The images are of people in turmoil; dirty and disheveled, running, holding one another, and crying (Video).
The gallery walls are covered in phosphorescent paint. Where the projectors shine light, the paint glows in the dark, then slowly fades. Collishaw likens this to how the mind perceives images of tragedy in the media; striking one’s perception, then quickly fading from memory (Video).
This clever use of images, space, and materials was very effective. The viewer is consistently bombarded by images. No character can be studied in depth; images of real people in real danger transform into a fantastical dreamscape. As in the media, because of the constant bombardment, and the glamorization of content, what we see does not seem real… even though it is.
Dario Escobar
May 22nd – July 3rd, 2008
Josee Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th St., New York, NY
“In Play Offs, the artist pursues his ongoing investigation of the semiotics of the object in the arena of sports. Confiscated, manipulated and reconfigured, sport objects stop being part of identifiable structures to become symbols that question the dynamics of power and challenge notions such as competition, success and failure, virility, social status, and national pride.” – Play Offs 2008
In this exhibition, Guatemalan Artist Dario Escobar transforms recreational objects into sculptural forms, in most cases rendering their former functions obsolete. Several crippled skateboards adorn the floor in various contortions, accompanied by tennis balls turned to disks, a flaccid-looking baseball bat, two carved decks of cards, a deformed ping-pong raquet, bike tires clinging to the walls like vines, and pool queues forming a skeletal tepee surrounded by scattered pool balls. Two walls display groupings of baseball bats, individually lacquered with automotive paint, simulating flames commonly painted on cars. On another wall hang framed oil stains collected from leaking cars.
Escobar transforms objects that are revered by society for the excitement and trill of competition, agility, and speed, depriving them of their use and inviting the viewer to look at them objectively.
James Mollison
June 12th – August 16th, 2008
Hasted Hunt
529 West 20th St., 3rd Fl. New York, NY
This show was great on several levels; the photography was beautiful, the content of each body of work was interesting, and the juxtaposition of the two series in the same room added a funny twist
The Disciples is a series of photos taken outside of concerts, of fans of various artists. The top image above is of Klaxons fans. The middle image is of Jimmy Buffet fans. Also included were fans of Marilyn Manson, P. Diddy, Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, and others.
What resulted was a strange classification of radically different types of people, each forming a group identity through clothes and posture. The large size and amazing detail in the images, combined with the subjects’ straight-forward gazes, is confrontational. The frame and the white background distances the subjects from the viewer, making them look a little like specimens in a sterile white room; yet their outlandish attire brings hilarity to the images.
Also being shown was Mollison’s older series, James and Other Apes, which is a series of close-ups of various primates, showing in detail the emotive qualities apparent in their faces. This creates an interesting web of comparison; between the different groups of disciples, between the different apes, and between the disciples and the apes.
Laurie Simmons
May 17th – June 28th, 2008
Carolina Nitsch Project Room
534 West 22nd St. New York, NY
This show was a collection of black and white photographs taken by Laurie Simmons from 1976-78. This series of images, each 5 1/4 by 8″, depict scenes in and out of doll houses, playing with perspective so that at times it is difficult to ascertain what is life-sized and what is not.
These depictions of dolls and doll houses are at the same time nostalgic and a bit disturbing. The dolls, all female, go about their business, reading a newspaper, sitting on couches, chairs, and counters, loading a chair on the back of a miniature pick-up truck and then awkwardly sitting on that as well; forming a non-linear, fragmented narrative, left up to the imagination of the viewer.
The black and white nature of these pictures, as well as the subject matter of child’s toys, brings an essence of innocence to the series. However, the figures’ stiff postures and strange positioning at times seems almost sinister. One image depicts a doll laying on its back in a kitchen. A few others include white chalk lines drawn on the floor, reminiscent of those drawn around bodies in crime scenes, but at the same time reminiscent of a rug found in other images of similar scenes.
With these images Laurie Simmons explores nostalgia and memory. She includes life-sized images of the home as well as doll house images, sometimes intermixed. This tests our awareness and helps us to identify with her characters. The dolls remind us of childhood and play, but the scenes are lonely, rigid, and a little sinister. This creates in the mind a feeling of loss; an empty feeling left by bittersweet memories long gone.
Clifford Ross
May 3rd – June 21st 2008
Sonnabend Gallery
536 West 22nd St. New York, NY
This show stuck with be because it far exceeded my expectations of what it would be like when I walked in the door. Upon entering, a viewer would see a few black and white photographs of landscapes; pretty, put not monumental. Moving further into the gallery, black and white nature photographs were transformed with simple color filters and inversions, looking a bit like the work of someone playing with Photoshop for the first time. Again, pretty, but not monumental.
However, as I walked further into the gallery, magic started happening. The black and white images became infiltrated by colorful variations of the filtered images, some seeming to fly across the images in a 3d flutter of rectangles, others creating rigid patterns reminiscent of the graphic qualities of Japanese woodblock prints, creating a fantasy landscape full of twists of color and precise geometric image manipulations. I was very impressed by the masterful technique, amazing detail, and playful sense of motion of these prints. Through his work, he seems to digitize nature, and let it disseminate and fly away, piece by piece.
Later researching Clifford Ross, I was even more impressed. These images were shot with a camera that he created himself, which was able to capture so much detail that government scientists are interested in using it for spy technology.
Clifford Ross is an artist who not only uses technology as a tool, but creates his own. In striving to reproduce the awe-inspiring presence of nature that can only be felt by being there, Ross has mastered photographic technique; and, not happy with what was available, created a few of his own.
C.E.B. REAS
March 6th – April 12th, 2008
Bitforms Gallery NYC
529 west 20th street, 2nd floor, New York, NY
In April I had the pleasure of seeing the work of one of my favorite digital artists, C.E.B. Reas, at the Bitforms Gallery in Chelsea. C.E.B. Reas, co-creator of the open-source programming language Processing, focuses on the process and algorithms of digital creation.
In this exhibition, Reas incorporated both method and final product in the display of his work. “Process 18″ and “Element 5,” depicted above, were explained thoroughly in writings on the wall next to the pieces:
PROCESS 18
A rectangular surface filled with instances of Element 5, each with a different size and gray value. Draw a quadrilateral connecting the endpoints of each pair of Elements that are touching. Increase the opacity of the quadrilateral while the Elements are touching.
ELEMENT 5
F2: Line
B1: Constant linear motion
B5: After moving off the surface, enter from the opposite edge
B6: While touching another, orient toward its direction
B7: Deviate from the current direction
In this way, both process and result become part of the exhibition. At right, a two-dimensional black and white linear structure reveals the behaviors applied to geometric elements. On the left half, the same geometry creates a warm three dimensional textures. Embracing both the qualitative nature of human perception and the quantitative rules that define digital culture, organic form emerges from precise mechanical structures.
The exhibition also included several prints of still images of his work, further demonstrating how such precise, analytical geometric functions can create very organic abstract pieces, much like that which could be painted by hand.
Reas’s work is an amazing example of what can be achieved with the intersection of art and digital technology, using algorithms as a traditional artist would use paint.
