Author: jameswagner

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Jennifer Toth Fertility 18″ x 21″ [installation view, showing a bird shape extending above the top edge of the piece]


Jennifer Toth [installation view showing “Commitment Phobic” on the left and “Inner Artist on a String” on the right]


Jennifer Toth Temper Tales Two 20″ x 22″ [installation view]

Jennifer Toth‘s paintings should have been running off the walls inside Holland Tunnel‘s gallery shed. They’re that good. It turns out that Barry and I had seen her work several years ago in a show curated by Orly Cogan at Paul Rogers/9W.

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Tom Billings Our Founding Fathers 24″ x 18″


Holland Tunnel has a remarkable show, “Ménage à Trois“, of paintings by Tom Billings, Jacques Roch and Jennifer Toth. It continues through the rest of this week. Unfortunately the gallery seems to have lost its website and I didn’t leave the little garden shed on South 3rd Street with any more information about the show or the artists. Worse still, I can’t find anything on line about Tom Billings.
Finally, I don’t seem to have gotten an image of Jacques Roch‘s work in this show, but I’ll try to make up for it, with the gallery at least, by doing a separate post showing works by Jennifer Toth.

Roz Chast Cremaster Cycle Cartoon T-Shirt t-shirt

Not exactly Matthew Barney’s show, but rather “The Matthew Barney Show“. It’s a group exhibition currently at Jack the Pelican which has been curated by Eric Doeringer. This rich installation is probably more fun than any of the eponymous genuine originals, regardless of how seriously, or unseriously, you take Barney’s work. Doeringer has asked some 30 of his colleagues to create or contribute work referencing the Cremaster phenomenon, and the result is a scary delight.
You have to have seen at least some of the Cremaster videos to get the full effect, but even a cult novitiate will understand most of the symbolism in this collection of bootleg send-ups and tributes.


Liz Magic Laser Back to Nature #19 Lambda print


Carolyn Sortor Creamistress 6 DVD


Dan Levenson and Sean Meyer Kremaster video


Dax van Aalten The Mammarymaster Cycle video

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Liu Wei It Looks Like a Landscape 2004 digital B/W photography 60″ x 24.5″ [installation view]


Max Protetch has mounted an extraordinary show of recent Chinese photography. It will be up for another week, but China will be here forever. Don’t miss out on seeing the work now. Otherwise it will be that much harder to catch up next time. These artists aren’t going to wait for us to decide they’re there.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Double Fantasy II (sex) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics, projected video output, approx. 7′ x 11′ [large detail of installation]

The show closes in two hours, but the gallery will still have some good images after today, and maybe a piece in the office. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be back again. I’m referring to Jennifer and Kevin McCoy and their Postmasters show, “Directed Dreaming“.
From the Press release:

The title of the exhibit refers to practice of willing oneself to dream about specific situations in order to resolve conflicts in one’s waking life. The works in Directed Dreaming fuse cinematic, personal, and historical images to become visual records of those conflicts, with the question of resolution left open to the viewer.
The McCoys’ sculptures are fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements. Camera views are sequenced to create live cinematic events. By exposing the image making apparatus along with the projected results, the work explores both time-based and physical reality.

I thought the smaller works with simpler mechanisms were just as effective as the larger, multicamera, multimedia installations which make use of several rotating sets and soundtracks. Either approach seems essential to the artists’ exploration of anxiety, but I have to admit that the the big guys really are spectacular.

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Rico Gatson Auction Block 2006 latex paiont on plywood, lights 25″ x 48.5″ x 24.5″ [installation view]

The show is “African Fractals“, the artist is Rico Gatson and the gallery is Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Great. The symbols and references are many, but Gatson’s art makes them a scary one.

Valerie Tevere UNITED STATES 1996 bluprint posters [large detail of installation]


Pedro Lasch Crumbs: Drawing on a Limited View of New York City’s Cultural Wealth 2000 [large detail of installation]

With its current exhibition, “When Artists Say We“, Artists Space would almost certainly take the prize for the current show which asks the most from its visitors. There are well over a hundred artists represented, “as colleagues, as collaborators, in collectives, as friends, as critics, as bystanders, and as allies”, but it’s not always a particularly visual experience. Whoa!
Think art school lecture hall, with some very interesting visual aids. The press release includes this note:

The needs that drive artists together are manifold: a discourse that educates, a horizon that widens, a complexity of knowledge, the ability to fail, or a larger capacity to remember critically and productively within their own field and beyond. But artists are also driven by the need for shelter, protection, and support. Such relationships are grounded in structures and language that are inherently self-critical and rarely reflected upon when art is shown. When Artists Say We takes up this task by trying to present some of the forms such collective exchanges have taken in New York City over the last thirty years.

Because we had to be elsewhere at a certain hour and because of the impressive steam heat pouring into the space while we were there, we didn’t stay as long as I might have otherwise. Or were those just excuses? I did see, or read, some very interesting work. The two images shown above can’t possibly represent this huge show as a whole, but these are just a few of the pieces which do good double duty as art which works well both conceptually and aesthetically. I’m also realizing only now as I write this that, in spite of the fact that they were each created at least a few years ago, they are both particularly topical today.
The printed statement below the identification label for Tevere’s work reads:

These posters were wheat-pasted on buildings, sidewalks, bus stops, and construction scaffoldings in San Diego and Los Angeles during the Republican Convention (San Diego, CA) and Republican election of 1996.

The statement below Lasch’s label is more elaborate, but definitely worth a read: