Category: Culture

This collage (an exquisite corpse?) was spotted this afternoon near the Bedford L stop.

installation view of Linda Ganjian’s assemblage of ten separate sculptures at Annina Nosei

Her medium is somewhat less than digestible here, but Linda Ganjian‘s little sculptures in “Everland,” the David Gibson-curated show currently at the Annina Nosei Gallery are very easy on the eyes and great fun to contemplate.
They’re also unforgettable: I recognized the work immediately when I walked into the space. Ganjian was a delicious part of Parker’s Box anniversary show, “I Am 5” last month. There, in a delightful move made even more fun for its element of risk in a small crowded temporary gallery space, she had added to her Polymer clay pieces some work which actually was edible. I’m very happy to say that I sampled the right ones.

detail of work in installation, “A-Z Advanced Technologies,” by Andrea Zittel

Especially now that Roberta Smith has a review [scroll down] of both Michael Ashkin‘s and Andrea Zittel’s excellent shows in the NYTimes, I’m keenly aware that there are almost no on-line images of Zittel’s work from the collection she calls “A-Z Advanced Technologies” currently installed at Andrea Rosen. So here’s a small tease, in the form of an image I captured a week ago.

Well, actually the move is only conceptual.
CRG Gallery’s principals asked (were asked by?) the two young’ns who work in the gallery, Alex Dodge and Glen Baldridge, to curate a show on their own and the wonderful “Greater Brooklyn” currently filling the handsome space is what they got. Their press release tells us that all of the work is by unrepresented artists living and working in Brooklyn and “the surrounding boroughs.”
I really like to visit shows like this, and I really, really like to be able to blog about them, so here’s a selection of some of the more photogenic pieces.


George Boorujy Lincoln 2004 ink on paper 38″ x 33″ on the wall, Eric Doeringer “Untitled (Blue)” 200 mixed media 49″ x 30″ x 100″ on the floor [installation view]


Marta Edmisten “Peter” 2002-2005 clear vinyl, paper and polaroid, dimensions variable [installation view]
See below for detail images, but go to the link above for the full scoop.




Joy Curtis Counter 3d (1 of 15) 2002 formica and adhesives on particle board 25″ x 28″ x 13″ [installation view]


Keiko Narahashi Untitled (small red & white) 2005 oil, gesso, parchment, muslin and polystyrene 7″ x 8″ x 3″ [installation view]


Ian Pedigo Fragments 2005 painted wood and cardboard 30″ x 10″ x 10″ [installation view]

Key statement from the curators, who manage in a single paragraph to explain the how and why of intelligent life and good art in the city’s current cult of youth and outer boroughdom:

Greater Brooklyn was conceived as an exhibition focusing on unrepresented artists living and working in Brooklyn and the surrounding boroughs.
Each summer hundreds of new artists, “fresh” from art school in some form or another, find themselves amongst their fellow classmates, cheap beer in hand in post-graduatory spirit, gazing at the Manhattan skyline from the rooftops of recently converted industrial buildings. Each year a little more distant and each year a few stops further along the subway lines. What was once dubbed “The City of Lost Souls” by a certain visitor to the Yale graduate program has become home, over the past few decades, to thousands of artists. A perennial phenomenon of the aspiring defined by proximity and necessity or by ambitions and a means toward them, ever growing and perhaps now after some 30 years of settlement this vast refuge of cultural producers is nearing something close to equity in terms of supply and demand. Only recently, in a commercial climate that seems to be constantly redefining the viability of newer and often younger artists, does it seem that there are fewer and fewer artists that can be called anything but emerging or emerged for that matter. Still, as always, there remain those that have yet to become noticed or “emergent”, and those that, after many years of making art, could still be called unknown by some notion of locality.
Greater Brooklyn seeks to find a different means of surveying new work by artists in New York. Inspired by a time when entire exhibitions are sold through emailed reproductions of artwork, the selection process involved an open-call to artists in the form of an email invitation distributed and redistributed as an undeterminable form of chain-networking. This resulted in hundreds of submitted applications and hundreds more digital images of the applicant’s submitted work. No studio visits were made. Instead the exhibition was curated entirely on the basis of digital reproductions and submitted samples of writing. 30 artist’s works were selected that represented unique and innovative approaches among largely unknown and unrepresented artists.

This is the complete list of artists in the show, which closes July 22:

George Boorujy
Josh Brand
Joy Curtis
Eric Doeringer
Marta Edmisten
Joel Edwards
Elise Ferguson
Bella Foster
Anthony Fuller
Allison Gildersleeve
Jerry Gunn
Joseph Hart
Jacob Hartman
Alex Hubbard
Butt Johnson
Theodore Kersten
Andrew Kuo
Jim Lee
Eddie Martinez
Brian Montuori
Keiko Narahashi
Ian Pedigo
Zak Prekop
Noam Rappaport
Gretchen Scherer
William Touchet
Michael Vahrenwald
Mandolyn Wilson Rosen
Sam Wilson
Erik Wysocan

Richard Prince My Religion 2004-2005 acrylic on canvas 107″ x 156″ [detail]


Richard Prince Continuation 2004-2005 fiberglass, bondo, acrylic and wood 44″ x 69.75″ x 82.5″ [detail of installation]

Maybe it’s just because I somehow came to his work late, but I really enjoyed Richard Prince’s current show at Gladstone Gallery – even if it seems like a recapitulation of the recent past.
Have to admit however I still don’t get the nurses thing; glad there’s only one here.

Grace Graupe-Pillard Soldier/Rockefeller Center NYC (lightbox still from the series, “Interventions”) 2003-2005 [large detail of installation]

I saw Grace Graupe-Pillard’s installation at The Proposition almost a week ago and I was impressed, but I first looked at my digital pictures only this afternoon – while listening to Beethoven. The memory of her work compelled me to click onto an online version of the video projection show (with its own soundtrack, arranged by Elizabeth Grajales and Billy Annaruma) and it looks even better than I had remembered it – always a good sign I think.
Clarification: While the soundtrack of the gallery version of the video was composed by Grajales and Annaruma, the online version was composed by Deb King
The artist’s statement:

In 2003, shortly after the onset of the Iraq War, I began working on a series of photographs entitled INTERVENTIONS focusing on the horror and human cost of wars being fought in “far-off places.” These photographs depict images of soldiers, car-bombings, ruins, explosions, and refugees, which I have digitally embedded into the familiar streets and parks of New York City, Baltimore and the New Jersey wetlands. Using the computer and digital filters, the “implanted” imagery borders on the abstract, with heightened color and kaleidoscopic patterns portraying the ordinariness of our everyday “reality” blown apart.
INTERVENTIONS attempts to make visually evident the ongoing tragic repercussions of war in our own “backyard,” as well as the equally powerful manipulation of the electorate through the “politics of fear.”

a look at the Sculpture Center’s immediate neighbors on a quiet Sunday afternoon, perhaps a good part of the explanation of its relatively edgy appeal for artists and visitors; I imagine it’s even more interesting during the week

The L train to Williamsburg wasn’t available last Sunday (the MTA is figuring out how to get a creaky subway system to run without conductors or even, ultimately, trainmen). We had gotten to the 14th Street station before we found out that Manhattan had been cut off from the Brooklyn mainland, so we turned around and headed for Queens and a visit to the Sculpture Center.
The current show, “Make it Now: Sculpture in New York,” includes very recent work by 28 New York-based artists and collaboratives.

The artists in the exhibition include Frank Benson, Nicole Cherubini, Andrea Cohen, Charlie Foos, Luis Gispert, Guyton/Walker, Dave Hardy, Rachel Harrison, Leslie Hewitt, Klara Hobza, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Nancy Hwang, Gareth James, Vincent Mazeau, Corey McCorkle, Robert Melee, Navin June Norling, Ester Partegás, Seth Price, Matthew Ronay, Bryan Savitz, SOL’SAX, Jean Shin, Gedi Sibony, Lisa Sigal, Roberto Visani, Phoebe Washburn, and Fritz Welch.

It’s an extraordinarily diverse survey, and some of the pieces are pretty wonderful.
What follows are images of a small sampling of the work, their selection at least partly dependent upon how well a piece photographed.


Phoebe Washburn Poor Man’s Lobster 2005 wood, painted gravel from courtyard, mixed media 15′ x 18′ x 14′ [large detail of installation]


Leslie Hewitt Grounded 2004 cast iron railing with Sankofa detail, brick, cement, particleboard and housepaint 5′ x 4′ x 6′ [installation view]


Nicole Cherubini A Pair of G-Pots with Lions 2005 ceramic, luster, fake gold and silver jewelry, chain, crystal ice, white, red and brown rabbit fur, rhinestone brooch, marbelized formica, black Plexiglas, blue foam, tar gel, plywood 36″ x 68″ x 53″ [installation view]


Lisa Sigal Purves Gardens 2005 sheetrock, joint compound, insulation board, house paint 15’7″ x 35′ [large detail of installation]


Robert Melee [large detail of installation of, from left to right, Poplar Blinds, Him and Her] all 2005


Fritz Welch under guests to drift living 2005 wood, paper, vinyl, fiberglass, plastic, graphite, iodine, paint, bones, dust, glitter, fabric, string, dimensions variable [small detail of installation]


Charlie Foos Monument with Anthem 2005 video loop, tape player, pedestal [still from video on monitor; detail of installation visuals]


Nancy Hwang Impromptu 2005 video recordings of conversations (on site), conversations in the green room (on-site), Village Voice back-page ad (off-site), and audio recordings of piano (off-site) [detail of installation visuals]

Tobias Putrih Anthology/Courthouse 2005 monofilament and rear projection screen, dimensions variable [detail of installation]

Every time I go back to Max Protetch Gallery after having missed a show or two I have to wonder how I could have so deprived myself. Always imaginative, usually totally new, invariably very smart, sometimes complicated, often very minimal, Max’s shows are generally pretty idiosyncratic, but they’re never dull and they’re often totally breathtaking.
The current show of scupture and video by Tobias Putrih covers most of this ground at once. The image above shows part of one of two pieces in the space which use reconfigured movie screens sized to match those in New York’s famous Anthology Film Archives. From the press release:

The sculptures soar through the gallery space, formal meditations on the dual nature of cinema as both a physical and ephemeral experience.
. . .
[The screens] are no longer sites for projection, but projections themselves, free to define physical space.

Reuben Lorch-Miller Untitled (Helicopters) 2004 video projection [still]

There was a time when my relationship to the helicopter was very simple. I absolutely loved these machines, and of course like most little kids I wanted one of my own.
Even if they had been used during the Korean War their role seemed to be fundamentally that of angels of mercy as they facilitated the evacuation of the wounded. Then, I think sometime during the horror of the Viet Nam years, I became aware of the concept of the helicopter gunship and the discovery deeply disturbed me: Helicopters were being used in anger. More recently these great noisy dragonflies have assumed an impossibly heavy role in several particularly indefensible contemporary wars in the Middle East, where they strike indiscriminate terror among both civilians and combatants whom we or Israel have labelled as the enemy.
Even here in a fundamentally peaceful Manhattan, while residents are not the target of helicopter-borne rockets and machine guns, we are all regularly assaulted day or night by the frightening whup-whup-whup of these almost unequivically sinister and fundamentally military flying machines as they pass or hover low above our homes, often shinning high-powered searchlights on apartments below.
Sometimes they come in packs and they stay in packs, and it is that very scary phenomenon which Reuben Lorch-Miller addresses in a powerful and strangely beautiful video currently being shown at Schroeder Romero* in Williamsburg.
I have to point out that although in the video the helicopters are for the most part only hovering in place, a still image like the one above is almost meaningless, especially without that nightmare sound. See the artist’s site to download an excerpt which includes sound.


Heidi Schlatter Partridge Nest 2005 Duratrans in light box 16″ x 20″ [installation view]

In the main gallery Heidi Schlatter is showing rich lightbox photographs of staged deaths recorded in almost-ordinary landscapes. In each of these sets there seems to be something off – these are places neither quite natural nor obviously designed. The press release explains:

Heidi Schlatter’s solo exhibition features lightbox images of rural locations in Switzerland and New York State, which draw connections between the natural landscape, photography and advertising. The recognizable logos in these oxymoronic scenes of faked deaths and accidents contrast the pervasive cultural optimism of branding and product placement with a sense of dread and doom.

* apparently because of a glitch, at the moment the gallery website does not include the current show
[image at the top from Schroeder Romero]

Jenny Saville Shift 1996-1997 oil on canvas 130″ x 130″ [large detail]

She doesn’t need this humble blog to attract attention; she’s already there. But after a visit today to, well . . . okay, I’ll admit it, the vast halls of Gagosian, I couldn’t resist broadcasting this gorgeous detail – even if it’s a very poor substitute for being there with the paint.


Jenny Saville Shift 1996-1997 oil on canvas 130″ x 130″

[lower image from Gagosian gallery]