jameswagner – Page 108

“Dangling Between” opens at Dam, Stuhltrager

Who are all these people?
[if you have trouble seeing the images above go here]

The slide show images are of Friday’s opening reception for “Dangling Between The Real Thing And The Sign In The Window“. They were all shot before or after the happy crowd grew too dense for me to be able to pull my bulky camera up to eye level.
Those determined enough to make it through the pack found the work shown below.
Except for the night shot of Dessel’s work, which was taken the evening before, these images [documenting the installation but not the individual pieces] were captured very early yesterday afternoon and include most of the work in the show. Because of the configuration of the rooms I’ve had to add two thumbnails at the bottom, the first showing a still from Ina Archer’s very animated “Ants” titles video and the second a bad representation of Jacques Vidal’s intense ink and graphite drawings.
The show continues at Dam, Stuhltrager until November 13 with an amazing show of Loren Munk’s work in the front room (which we did not curate). Barry and I will be putting together a dedicated website for “Dangling Between” in the near future.

Jaishri Abichandani

Ina Diane Archer

Peter Corrie

Susan C. Dessel

Nicolas Garait

Joy Garnett

Jacques Louis Vidal

[Archer]

[Vidal]

“Dangling” opens in two days

Some of you may already be tired of seeing this image, but as I’m one of a very select number given the responsibility for publicizing this show please humor me. Genuine pictures of the installation will have to wait until the installing has been done.
“Dangling Between The Real Thing And The Sign In The Window” finally opens on Friday [see the link to the left for the press release]. I expect so many gazillions of creative, smart, cute people to head for Dam, Stuhltrager that night that Barry and I will have to retreat to the garden for some air, where Susan Dessel’s installation will remain through the run of the show inside. Loren Munk‘s work will be installed in the front room during the same month. If you can’t make it on Friday, please stop in later in the weekend, or on any of the next four. The show closes on the 13th of November. After the opening reception the gallery will be open on Fridays from 3 until 8 and Saturdays and Sundays from noon until 6. You can also make an appointment.
Come and say hi. We’re going to try to amaze you.

Kim Jong-il a Republican?

Atomic Bomb.gif

North Korea threatens war against U.S. [AP]

Oh great. It seems the Republicans have somehow managed to persuade Kim Jong-il to save their hold on Congress. Get ready to be whipped up over another war just weeks before the election. I used to think only Trey Parker and Matt Stone could come up with the kind of scenarios we now regularly watch unfolding from the White House.
On a serious note, could the evidence for this administration’s repeated foreign policy failures be any more clear? Five years ago North Korea’s nuclear program was under lock and key and its main nuclear center was watched 24 hours a day by UN cameras. Bush has refused to talk to North Korea since he took office.

[image from solarvoyager]

Dan Rushton in Moti Hasson at ART (212)

Dan Rushton Skulls, Branches, Forms and landscape 2006 acrylic on panel 81″ x 108″ [large detail of installation]

Dan Rushton Shape, Branches, Flowers 2006 acrylic onpanel 22″ x 30″

Dan Rushton Shapes, Branches, Skulls, Forms 2006 acrylic on panel 36″ x 48″ [installation view]

I saw these three Dan Rushton paintings at ART (212). I know the fair is long gone, but these images aren’t, and the artist responsible for them is expected to have a solo show this year at Moti Hasson. They will grace that gallery’s new large, ground-floor space in Chelsea.
If you have been somewhat familiar with Rushton’s painting up to now, you’ll have to agree this new work is clearly on a “hole nuba lebel”*.

*
thanks, Eugene

only in America: of the government by age of consent

I find it absolutely incomprehensible that in the end, after all the horrors of the last twelve years of Republican Congresses, the last six with a totally disastrous Republican administration, we might see the Republican ascendancy overturned because my fellow Americans are upset about another sex scandal.
I am amazed every time I open my laptop or newspaper, or listen to the radio, and find the story still continues. A middle-aged man who works in downtown Washington flirted with a “child” who was in fact of legal age in our nation’s capitol at the time he was the object of the older and more powerful man’s unwelcome attentions and poor judgment. Okay, it was several children, but it is for this that the Republicans must apparently now pay, not for their lies or their incredible venality, not for the deaths of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East or elsewhere, or for our fall (rise?) to the status of rogue terrorist nation, and not for the destruction of our ancient liberties or for the cynical incitement and manipulation of the fears of ordinary people all across the land.

Incidently, the idea of maturity or specifically the practical or legal “age of consent” is more a game of numbers than a science. Peter Tatchell, who has an argument with the laws of his own country, Britain, points out:

Already, 20 European countries have ages of consent lower than 16. The minimum age is effectively 12 in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Malta. It’s 14 in Slovenia, Iceland, Montenegro, Serbia, Italy, San Marino, Albania and, in certain circumstances, Germany. All these laws apply equally to hetero and homo sex.

Amelia Biewald of Magnan Projects at ART (212)

Amelia Biewald Sergeant Bayberries in the Bayou Moss 2006 bleach on velvet, upholstery materials, acrylic, resin and wood 36″ x 46″ x 6″ [large detail of installation]

I haven’t seen Amelia Biewald‘s current show at the gallery, but I found this piece and a much smaller, related work which Magnan Projects showed at ART (212) both very fair lures for a visit to 10th Avenue.

Michele Zalopany at Esso

Michele Zalopany Line Up 2006 pastel on canvas (triptych) 88″ x 156″ [installation view]

[detail of above]

Michele Zalopany Jimmy Hoffa Bar 2006 pastel on canvas 30″ x 40″ [installation view]

Michele Zalopany 5774 Coplin 2006 pastel on canvas 30″ x 30″ [installation view]

Michele Zalopany was born in Detroit in 1955, in one of the last years of that city’s unprecedented period of prosperity, one whose height would soon be matched by the depth of its descent into economic and social disintegration. Most of the people and things she captures in the beautiful, sad pastels currently being shown at Esso had either disappeared or been transformed into the mythic even before she found them. For someone who grew up in the city half a generation before the artist did, and who left for good around 1962, coming across these paintings was like opening a trunk in the attic which had belonged to a favorite uncle or aunt.
Excerpts from the gallery’s press release describe the artist’s inspirations:

Through her labor intensive pastel paintings, Michele Zalopany speaks of mysterious objects as a keen observer of the seemingly irresolvable problematic of the racial divide. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she bears witness to the disintegration of what was once the fulcrum of the American economy, as a result of the historic dilemma of institutional racism.
Her paintings’ photographic realism uses a fictitious model, closer to an excuse to raise a question rather than make a statement, although many of the places, people and things are, or were, real.

Adam McEwen at Nicole Klagsbrun

Adam McEwen Dresden (Phosphorbrandbombe) 2006 phosphorescent paint and chewing gum on canvas 90″ x 70″ [installation view]

Adam McEwen Dresden 2006 acrylic and chewing gum on canvas 90″ x 130″ [installation view]

[detail of above]
I’m not even going to start addressing this show in writing myself. I could go on forever about the subjects which inspired Adam McEwen’s “8:00 for 8:30“, installed at Niclole Klagsbrun this month, historical crimes of necessity with which I am probably too much engaged. I’m going to turn the task over to João Ribas, writing in The New York Sun because he pulls together their different strings with intelligence and sensitivilty while never losing sight of the art which holds them together in this very smart exhibition. An excerpt:

The ability to deal out inhumanity with equanimity is at the core of British-born artist Adam McEwen’s second solo show,”8 for 8:30,” at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. A timely meditation on the cold rationality of the military-industrial complex, Mr. McEwen’s shrewdly political show asks more questions than it tries to answer.
Yet by looking at the horror of the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany, and the post-war American boom that was its euphoric aftermath, the show makes the case that the link between profit and obliteration applies today more than ever. First raze, then rebuild, and as Kurt Vonnegut likes to say, so it goes.

political art, some in very popular editions, at Jim Kempner

Ligorano/Reese Memory of Truth 2006 digital print on Duratrans 96″ × 113″ [large detail of installation as seen from inside the gallery]

Where our nightmare began, five years ago.
Jim Kempner has just taken down one of the most political shows of the season, an exhibition of editions in every price range, curated by Marshall Reese. Yes, it was also art. Ligorno/Reese were also responsible for “The State of Things”, a disappearing ice sculpture which spelled the word, “democracy” . It was installed in the gallery garden last April.

post card and press release for our show, “Dangling…”

Barry and I now have both post cards and a press release for our show in Williamsburg. The release includes information on each artist, even if we can’t give too much away before the opening. We’re having a great time with our first outing as curators. We hope to see some of you there on the 13th.

[the images above, details of work in the show, are arranged alphabetically by artist]