untitled (clover) 2008
Just west of the East River shore in Brooklyn Bridge Park a large lawn supporting several huge patches of clover was dotted with raindrops this past Sunday.
Author: jameswagner
a guide to “Democracy in America”*
a clutch of some of the pink and yellow [g a y] balloons which accompany Sharon Hayes’s “Revolutionary Love 1 & 2: I Am Your Worst Fear, I Am Your Best Fantasy”, spotted hanging out at the bottom of a dark corner of the hall just outside the room where the sound and video piece is installed
I didn’t have time to do a full post on the show tonight, so I decided that I’d put up just one image and make a very strong recommendation that everyone who can do so make her or his way to the Park Avenue Armory tomorrow (actually that’s today, Saturday) for the last day of Creative Time’s essential contribution to the moment we’re all sharing right now, questioning the idea of “Democracy in America“.
It’s an awesome show, it’s not going to be forgotten, and you know you’re going to want to have been a part of it – especially after the news that an important and not unrelated show at the Chelsea Museum has been [summarily ?] pulled.
*
This headline is the title of the exhibition catalog, edited by its curator, Nato Thompson.
Triangle Arts Open Studios this Saturday in DUMBO
a view of John Wallbank‘s studio showing rich, evocative shapes fashioned from scraps
It was a tremendously rejuvenating afternoon, and it continued into early evening. Barry and I both feel refreshed and renewed from an interaction yesterday’s with a number of charming, smart, creative people and their art, after a rather slow summer and continuing dramatic reminders of the hideous knavery and incompetence which describes the alternate universe of the business and political world. (Yes, we’re all entitled to call it a depression, even if for now it only describes our psychic state.)
At the invitation of the organizers, Barry and I spent hours walking through the workshops of dozens of artists from all over the world who had been invited to participate in a two-week program sponsored by Triangle Arts Association. This coming Saturday their Front Street Brooklyn studios will be open to the public, from 1 to 6 pm, as part of DAC’s Art Under the Bridge Festival. I highly recommend a visit. This is an extraordinary group of artists: We weren’t able to make it to every studio space in the time we had, but there certainly were no disappointments yesterday.
The images which surround this text represent only a peek at what I saw in some of the studios. I’ve indicated the name of the artists, but of course what you see here does not necessarily represent finished works, and for that matter, it may not be what you might find set up for visitors on Saturday.
Sun You’s shimmering wall assemblage, in the form of a triptych, moves with the viewer
two sketches by the painter/printmaker Bertrand Bracaval explore and expand his themes
Suhee Wooh‘s improvisatory paintings may begin with barely-discernible human shapes
Valerio Carruba‘s pencilled frontispiece to his series of anatomy drawings
Maya Attoun‘s assemblage relates the body to the domestic materials which define it
This is the complete list of artists in the workshop this year:
Maya Attoun (Israel)
Bertrand Bacaral (France)
Astrid Busch (Germany)
Jillian Conrad (USA)
Valerio Carrubba (Italy)
Sungjin Choi (Korea/NY)
Alessandro Dal Pont (Italy)
Ann Gollifer (Botswana)
Alice Guareschi (Italy)
Minji Kim (South Korea)
Ethan Kruszka (USA)
Francis Okoronkwo Ikechukwu (Nigeria) [unfortunately unable to secure US visa]
Dan Levenson (USA)
Ghassan Maasri (Lebanon)
Maggie Madden (Ireland)
Kabelo Kim Modise (Namibia)
Liz Murray (England)
Klaus Pamminger (Austria)
Keun Young Park (South Korea/USA)
Emma Puntis (England)
Paul Santoleri (USA)
Justin Storms (USA)
Nicholas Tourre (France)
John Wallbank (England)
Suhee Wooh (Korea/NY)
Sun You (Korea/NY)
Brooklyn Edison Company
untitled (B E CO) 2008
Midori Harima at Honey Space
I’m not sure what’s going on here, but the presentation is certainly wonderful. There’s no information inside Honey Space, the alternative Chelsea room which displays this sculpture, and nothing on its site. Midori Harima has an installation at Honey Space on Eleventh Avenue right now. It’s a trompe-l’�il carousel, its surfaces shaped from paper. It’s vaguely three dimensional and vaguely life size, almost colorless and almost immaterial. It’s totally surrounded by black velvet curtains and levitates inches above a shiny floor. The only light in the room comes from the projection which nearly brings this gloomy merry-go-round to life.
Thinking about it afterwards I mused that I would like to hear music of some kind while standing in front of this ghostly apparition; maybe the artist could have furnished some distant achingly-sad ambient sound. But now as I look at the image I’m uploading here I realize instead that the work inspires the viewer makes her or his own music. The fact that it might be only an unspecific, vague collection of distant tones would probably just about perfect.
surf’s up in Bushwick?
A surfer colony in Bushwick? Who knew? Yesterday afternoon these surfer dudes were busy loading a number of boards into and onto this beach buggy on Bogart across from Grattan.
blindness in Williamsburg
untitled (Blindness) 2008
I just found this a few minutes ago while looking at my gatherings for my day in Bushwick and Williamsburg. I probably shouldn’t admit it, since I like the image so much, but it was just one of those captures I manage to dredge up while carrying my feather-triggered camera around dropped more or less at arms length. The wall is on Metropolitan Avenue just east of the BQE.
modernist building abandoned on Metropolitan pavement
Earlier this evening I spotted this canvas leaning against a light pole on Metropolitan Avenue near the BQE overpass. It’s a painting of a modernist steel and glass building, and it’s been carefully pressed into the shape of the architectural image it outlines.
I like it as sculpture, especially with that broken lower stretcher rail which added a bend to the right of the center. Maybe it’s still there.
“Park(ing) Day NYC”, a little like Brigadoon?
park yourself down where iron monsters usually lie
I went down the block to our local Whole Foods market yesterday afternoon, and as I turned the corner onto the avenue from 24th Street I stopped in my tracks. I must not have been reading my emails with any care, because I was taken entirely by surprise to find one of the 50 sites of what was the second “Park(ing) Day NYC“. The “Seventh Haven” chapter had unrolled some real turf and living potted plants onto what is normally a vehicle parking lane. From this refreshing green oasis they greeted passersby and invited them to share their outdoor furniture and reading materials, the greenery and the ease.
“Brigadoon” is the story of a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every hundred years. These little parks may appear with greater frequency, but they are no more permanent than a view of that enchanted Highland valley – in the New York case, even for the cheery inhabitants we might meet there.
It was almost exactly one year ago that these activists had first introduced us to the possibilities which would open up if we took a hard, humanistic look at our current transportation priorities. Sadly, the “park” I saw yesterday looked no more permanent than the one I had seen the year before. I’d like to believe we might expect more from our City planners than to simply continue countenancing these annual exercises.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at John Connelly
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung untitled 2007 oil on canvas 11″ x 14″
This was my favorite of a small, diverse group of paintings in the Molly Zuckerman-Hartung installation, “An Erotics“, in the Tunnel Room at John Connelly Presents. Since it was also the last one I saw, and since I liked it enough to take away this image, I’m thinking I should go back to check out the other canvases a second time. The evening I was there I felt I was being hurried on to the next venue, and I hadn’t even read the short press release, where Zuckerman-Hartung’s evident indifference to the convention of showing a distinctive style (or “brand”) is more than affirmed by the artist herself.