Author: jameswagner

Helen Garber Young Americans 2004 oil on panel 35.5″ x 29.5″ [installation view]

31 Grand has come to Manhattan! No, the space is still anchored to its eponymous address, but the two gutsy Williamsburg gallerists in charge have been chosen to mount a show, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, in the 19th-century main, or Grand salon of the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park.
The “clean white space” was already a cliché decades ago, but there’s still more than a little usefulness in being able to show art for the first time in a way which neutralizes its immediate environment.
Megan Bush and Heather Stephens made no compromises in introducing their aggressive aesthetic to the ancient club’s dark brown walls, spaces which on Tuesday night seemed to be anxiously awaiting the return of familiar portraits and landscapes. Maybe I would have been more comfortable with how this odd room worked with this show if I had at least an ounce of the Goth in me [that is, other than my Germanic origins], but I think sometimes serious darkness needs some lightness to be seen. Having already come across the work of most of these artists inside white walls in Brooklyn, I have to say that much of what is being shown at the Arts Club this month would be a challenge anywhere.
That’s of course what attracts me. This provocative show would be an eyestopper if it were hung on flowered wallpaper above textured wall-to-wall capeting and lit by bridge lamps. It shouldn’t be missed as installed in the Tilden Mansion.
In addition to this and other paintings by Helen Garber, the installation includes exciting work in a number of media by Claudine Anrather, Maureen Cavanaugh, Mike Cockrill, John Copeland, Jan Dunning, Jon Elliott, Magalie Guerin, Jeph Gurecka, Carol “Riot” Kane, Jason Clay Lewis, Francesca Lo Russo, Vincent Skeltis, Adam Stennett, Barnaby Whitfield, and Jeff Wyckoff.

[the image shown above is from the artist’s series, “Love Letters From Crawford”]

Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev Into the Future 2005 video [still from installation]

Plus Ultra’s current show may be introducing many New Yorkers to the contemporary art of Central Asia for the first time, but the quality of the work of Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev should ensure the door will never be closed again. From the press release:

Collaborating for many years, the husband-wife artists are renowned for their documentary-style video installations and photography exploring the ramifications of political upheaval and modernization.
Working in their hometown of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which has been the center of change and protest since the collapse of the Soviet Union and recent overthrow of the widely criticized administration of former Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev, Kasmalieva and Djumaliev exhibit here their 2005 dual-channel video installation “Into the Future.” Filmed in Siberia, “Into the Future” offers a direct and thoughtful verification of the effects of change and transformation. Through the juxtaposition of slowly changing images of industrial wastelands and the matter-of-fact recording of people boarding a ferry, they offer a complex, non-ironic look into that ambiguous point at which the future becomes the present and how we cope with that.
In addition, Kasmalieva and Djumaliev present a selection of photographs from their “New Menhirs” series. Referencing the giant stone structures (or “menhirs”) that jut out of the ground, marking prehistoric burial grounds, throughout Central Asia, this series catalogs desolate, often destroyed landscapes of factories and their surroundings. Standing, like menhirs, as monuments to a lost epoch, the ghostly structures in these images symbolize the contemporary stagnation that has replaced the brighter future they once promised.

For a broader sample and an exciting look at the sophistication of what is being done in this part of the world page through the catalog lying on the counter, “In the Shadow of ‘Heroes'”. Djumaliev edited it for Art East and the 2nd Bishkek International in 1905.

Chad Silver Milkshake 2006 video [stills from installation]

My apologies to anyone who ran into me last night at the Affordable Art Fair reception: I was feeling a bit indisposed and I suspect I came off distracted at best.
I don’t remember much but there are at least a few images I would have retained even if I hadn’t been able to get my camera to capture them digitally. One of the works I would like to engage under better circumstances is this 4-minute sound video by Chad Silver shown by Gallery Boreas. The anxious young man pictured is listening to a disembodied voice whose aberrant yet harmless suggestion he eventually adopts shortly before the credits roll.
The Fair continues through Sunday.

[detail of gallery installation, including a portion of Hewitt and Keegan’s shared “Desk Reflection”, Hewitt’s “Make it Plain (4 of 5)” and a portion of Keegan’s “Skypocket”]

Wallspace has installed an inspired, minimal show of extraordinary elegance. In the gallery’s two spaces, which together mount only nine works, the walls and floors are shared by Leslie Hewitt and Matt Keegan, and at least two or three of the pieces are likely to totally escape the notice of visitors not clued into their conceits.
I found that a cold call had its own rewards, but following it up with a look at the press release provided some enlightenment – and additional provocation. The first lines of the text:

“From You to Me and Back Again” is a project proposed to Wallspace by Leslie Hewitt and Matt Keegan that explores the “nature” of the photographic medium.
Incorporating the floors, walls, and the corners where they meet, Hewitt and Keegan use the gallery space as a site to continue a five-yearlong conversation about photography, its abstractions, politics and subjectivities.

This is the kind of show in the kind of space which just might save Chelsea from SOHOification. A lot of us want to be surprised and excited in between too many sessions nodding at the almost predictable and the pretty slick – even when much of the predictable and the slick is also very good.
Exit is an exciting and very young and very shy, skateboarding and bike-culture-centered, Chicago-graduate-art-school-dropout, Brooklyn artist interested in fashion and birds, with a particular and very fashionable obsession with bird flu. All of the beautiful drawings in the current show at Magnan Emrich Contemporary on 28th Street deal with the impact of the long-predicted epidemic upon a world dominated by Miuccia Prada, Anna Wintour and their peers.
Very cool stuff, and totally infectious.


[installation view of a portion of the gallery’s East Wall]


[installation view of a portion of the gallery’s East Wall]


[detail]

Yasser Aggour George and Abe 2003 C-print 30″ x 38″

It’s a wonderful riff. Frederieke Taylor Gallery has mounted a [is it ever going to be possible to write, “strangely compelling” again?] show with the title, “Paradise Lost”. The press release explains that the installation was:

Curated by artist Dan Tague, one of many artists forced from their homes by Hurricane Katrina. Temporarily relocated to New York, Tague has put together a show in an attempt to process this disaster. Combining artists from the Gulf Coast with artists from New York, this exhibition seeks to establish a dialogue about the loss and recreation of a paradise. Artists include: Yasser Aggour, Christine Catsifas and Kyle Reidel, Michelle Elmore, Sarah Emerson, Amy Finkbeiner, Rebecca Fuchs, Daphne Loney, Mike Peter Smith, Dan Tague, and Letha Wilson.

The above image by Yasser Aggour appears on the announcements for the show, and it managed to mesmerize me in a smaller format even before I realized the conceit involved. Somehow I had missed the title and the clearly plastic heads. I had taken the picture literally, believeing that it recorded the affection sustained by an elderly couple, a bit eccentric to be sure, but obviously proud of their public nudity.
Barry and I acquired a magnificent piece by Aggour shortly after September 11. A brilliantly-transparent, chartreuse resin frame molded from a baroque form encloses a photograph of a Jewish Virgin and child in a creche found in officially-atheist Cuba; the artist’s family is from Egypt. I would worry that I’m making too much of these things except for the fact that the piece was included in a shamefully under-subscribed benefit for the Palestine Ambulance Society at White Box. Apparently even the art world thought it was the “wrong” cause, but Aggour’s work immediately became and remains one of our great treasures.


Yasser Aggour Untitled (Cuban Virgin) 2002 digital print with polyester resin frame [collectors’ installation image]

[image at the top from Frederieke Taylor]

I know I’m supposed to call it a musical, but I hate musicals, and so at least for now, I’ll call it opera. We were there because we have a subscription. This thing is at the Atlantic Theater (we never, ever miss one of their productions).
“Spring Awakening” is a wonderful new piece of musical theatre, a rich collaboration between Steven Sater, Duncan Sheik, Bill T. Jones, Michael Mayer, a briliant production team and an absolutely superb young cast. It opens, what, tomorrow? Okay, any day now.
I don’t know; it may already be sold out, but if you can get a ticket you won’t be sorry. Most of us will never be able to spring for the price they’ll be charging once it gets to Broadway.
“Awakening” makes the plot of “Rent” look like a bourgeois distraction from the proper agenda of a progressive society, and yet the Benjamin Franklin Wedekind play on which it is based is 115 years old. The villains are the tyranny of the state, family, schools, religion and any authority which represents its establishment as the primary argument for its legitimacy.
Notes: The title of both the original play and the Atlantic’s production is a euphemism for puberty, and Wedekind himself was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote it, his first major work. The notorious German playwright was also responsible for the story on which Alban Berg’s magnificent, iconoclastic and very sexy opera “Lulu” was based.
The music of this new work is of an entirely different order from that of Berg, but it’s dynamite, and that’s both an emotional and a considered response from someone with no patience for the conventional banalities of a form which strangely persists in its rejection of real innovation – and life.

[image from the Atlantic Theater]