Category: Culture

Sarah Oppenheimer’s construction, “554-5251” completely transformed the main gallery space at P.P.O.W. last month. We had first seen her handsome work in March, 2005, when it represented this gallery at ARTROCK.
From the press release:

In her upcoming exhibition at P·P·O·W, Sarah Oppenheimer continues to explore the malleability of the constructed environment. Oppenheimer engages with the problem of ‘mutable architecture’ as explored by the work of architects such as Yona Friedman, Peter Cook/Archigram, and Cedric Price. Rather than create utopian prescribed spaces, Oppenheimer considers the building material as a socially engaged starting point. She begins with the typical 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood and by using CNC routing to bend it, she transforms the once contractor cladding into a stable structural support.

John Shimon & Julie Lindemann Barry (in Ghostly Prince Costume), Ladysmith, Wisconsin 2003 pigment print on canvas (from 8 x 10 transparency) 50″ x40″ [installation view]

Although John Shimon and Julie Lindemann’s show at Sarah Bowen closes tomorrow, I’m sure they’ll be back.
The work is very strong on its own, but what distinguishes these artists’ accomplishment from so many other documentary or pseudo-documentary projects are the substantial clues located in the press release. In the end however it may be the sensitive, multi-media installation itself which reveals the most about what the separate images may only imply.
Excerpt from the press release:

Sarah Bowen Gallery opens the fall season with an exhibit of photographs and projections titled “It Takes One to Know One” by Manitowoc, Wisconsin artists John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. As a collaborative team, their work elegantly captures the flavor of the landscape and the quiet, melancholy realities of American rural and small town life. Their highly stylized photographs simultaneously evaluate and elevate their subjects as portraits of obscure Midwestern denizens, unnervingly comfortable with their small town identity, are rendered in inappropriately substantial platinum.
As photographers, the artists establish a subjective historical view; they become involved in situations, and respond to them. Their early captivation with Depression-era FSA photos, Edward Steichen’s masterful gum prints, anonymous snapshots, and Robert Frank—who gave them the impulse to photograph everything in their path—has led them to a “new timelessness” in contemporary imagery and themes. Prints from large-format negatives rendered in gum-bichromate and platinum-palladium will be shown with tintypes, film shorts and full-color inkjet prints. The installation outlines the artists’ exploitation of and preoccupation with process to unfold an anomalous narrative, swollen with experience.

Shows like this are the best kind of advertisement for the importance of the outer-borough gallery scene and for the fertility of creative communities beyond what we think of as our cultural capitals. Who knew what treasures were hiding in Manitowac or Sheboygan County, Wisconsin? This area in the northeast of the state is the American Heimat for both of my parents’ huge extended German families; although I believe none of them have made a splash or a ripple in the visual arts, maybe I should have stayed in better touch with my 95 first cousins – or at least their progeny.

Timothy Marvel Hull The Mask of Katherine 2006 gouache, graphite, ink and ribbon 15″ x 19″ [installation view]

The world which surrounded the early twentieth-century mystic G.I Gurdjieff is only the starting point for a beautiful multi-media installation by Timothy Marvel Hull at Klaus von Nichtssagend. This wonderful Williamsburg show closes this Sunday, but for those who won’t be able to get to Union Avenue there are some great images on the gallery website.


Timothy Marvel Hull [detail view of installation on north wall]

Scott and Noah

We stopped by the very informal K48 benefit held at John Connelly Presents last night, just in time to catch these two provocateurs blocking some of the hot merchandise lining the walls. Shoulda taken more pix, but another, temperature kind of hot got to me.
Lyon is camped-out, literally, inside a gallery space on Bond Street until October 24. He’s making stuff while we watch; he loves visitors. We haven’t gotten down there yet ourselves, but hope to visit soon.

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]

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.

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

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 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.