Jeremy Wade
EMPAC, Troy, NY

In a style simultaneously reminiscent of Frank Zappa and Nintendo, Jeremy Wade explores the constant onslaught of media and consumer culture in our daily lives through the persona of a child. (review)

The first covers a topic that has been running useless circles around my head since I first started working with advertisers: the relationship (and potential relationship) between true creativity and commercial agenda (perhaps they can can be symbiotic, after all?) Interesting so far. I hope it’s enlightening.

I also received this one.

The former is a commentary on how to salvage creativity and convey a message while working as a commercial artist. The latter suggests bypassing commercial agenda and conveying a message any way you wish. Hmm…

I was impressed with these two artists ability to use shape and negative space to create vivid portrayals of misogyny, racism, and violence. Mini-narratives lay everywhere, in text, in image, and sometimes in texture, hidden under a monochrome layer of paint. These paintings and objects were beautifully tied together with videos by Walker using silhouette puppets, paper sculptures, and other media. This exhibit was aesthetically and conceptually intricate and provocative.

“Exploring vocabulary of the romantic sublime, including paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, and informed by the artist’s own climb up to the 22,800 foot summit of Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, high altitude features breathtaking panoramas. Picturing spaces in society driven by networked financial data, these virtual landscapes are a meditation on the global market structure, its sophistication, and vulnerability.” (from press release)

Daniel Borlandelli creates beautiful, colorful organic, abstractions informed by plant life. Carter Hodgkin uses computer generated collision simulations to create beautifully crafted geometric pieces. Carter Hodgin creates organic abstractions that luminate like the inside of an oyster shell and bring to mind satellite veiws of earth and sky. Each peice aproaches the depiction of the natural world in interesting, emotive ways. More info here.

Sometimes I’m a little critical of the value of Photography as fine art, until I see a show like this. Actually, every time I walk in to Hasted Hunt I feel this way.

Mark Cohen shows how content, composition, and color can be perfected to create an evocative, poignent series, depicting everyday moments of everyday life. Cohen depicts the good along with the bad; the ugly and the mundane made are beautiful through a lense of nostalgia.

Using images and artifacts that seem as if they could have come from my grandparent’s attic, Jerry Meyer created muli-layered and multi-textured light box collages that combined perfect amounts of nostolgia, humor, craft, and aestetic. These pieces create disjointed narratives, allowing us glimpses of the lives and minds of unknown characters, but leaving ample ambiguity for viewers to derive their own meaning from the works.

Discovering the work of Nam June Paik while in college, among other discoveries, such as Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Corridor, Rhizome, and  Eyebeam, launched me into my current obsession with Digital Art as Fine Art. There is nothing more satisfying to me than manipulating reality through technology, and manipulating technology for the sake of art. Therefore, I was immensely happy to find that James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea was showing his TV sculptures. This show was the best eye candy I have seen in a while.

Though I loved everything there, my favorites were TV Bed, Living Egg Grows, and Watchdog II.

TV Bed consistes of an angled metal bed frame holding a bed of televison monitors, depicting images of a cellist, crawling soldiers, toy soldiers crawling on a nude, a nude cellist, crawling soldiers carrying cellos, a woman playing a soldier like a cello, a woman playing a stack of TVs like a cello, and other combinations of cellos, soldiers, women, and TVs, combining imagery of war, sex, and entertainment into a colorful, quickly changing collage of footage. A nude wooden doll and and soldier doll carrying a cello are positioned as if they were crawling up the bed.

Living Egg Grows is a series of angled televisions ordered smallest to largest with a video of a nude woman in an egg shape, interspersed with glowing white eggs, and ending with three smaller stacked eggs, seemingly narrating the birth and reproduction of a woman through television.

Watchdog II is a humorous TV sculpture of a dog, with a video camera on its tail providing sideways live feed for its snout. The televisions feature colorful distorted video, and loud speakers are transformed into the dog’s ears.

And, it wouldn’t be a Nam June Paik show without Enlightenment Compressed, or TV Buddha, where a Buddha figure sits on part of a monitor and meditates on live feed of himself shown on a small television in front of him.