Contemporary Art and Culture
Microscope, Underdonk
“Scrapbook Performances” is an admirably extensive, broadly politically engaged series of evenings of performance art programmed by Microscope Gallery in relation to their current group show of video art, “Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together).”
Performances have been scheduled for basically every Monday and Friday for several weeks already, and there are still several more weeks of gatherings to come.
The grouping of mostly floor-bound sculptures in “Ground Histories”, the current group show curated by Will Corwin at PS122 Gallery, not only pulls our attention to the ground, but also makes us aware of what is underneath its surface – archaeological artifacts, graves, excavated memories. In the east room a triangular layout consisting of Will Corwin’s altar-like sculpture, Heidi Lau’s arched-shape ceramic sculpture sprawling, and David Goodman’s forte-like structure, create a sense of both tension and connectivity. Made of plaster and sand, painted with terra cotta and white tempera hues, and tied with rough ropes, Corwin’s “Jaw” is a rectangular free-standing sculpture that draws literally upon teeth and invokes the idea of the archaic – an architectural ruin from an unidentified culture, or an archaeological artifact with an enigmatic ritual significance. The tooth, a pivotal element in both forensics and bioarcheology, can be read in Corwin’s sculptures as a loaded metaphor for what it means to be human.
Continue reading “Ground Histories at PS122”The Chimney, Ulmer Arts, Transmitter, Century Pictures, CLEARING, Superchief
The Chimney
The Chimney has two strong exhibits for you to visit sooner or later. One is on-site at the Chimney’s home outpost, the other not too far away in an outpost you might call new or newish — historical emphasis on -ish.
At the gallery’s home space is “Twilight Chorus,” where a duo of cleverly brick-niche’d, collaged-in assemblies lingering in the circumstantial hinterlands scan as a scrapbook-like index of the trappings of street art, potentially hinting at rather immediate exteriors. Objects elsewhere place you in the landscapes and atmospheres of paintings by many a surrealist. Works tucked into yet other nooks unfurl in extended intimacies, and chromatically order, reflect and unfold like mascara compacts and make-up tables.
Many objects rich in reference and reminiscence in this also somewhat quietly rambunctious group show. Taken all together, it’s like an immersive diorama à la Miró.
Continue reading “Nota Bene with @postuccio [vii]”
The group show “Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum” at CUE Art Foundation raises questions on the meaning of visual formulae in contemporary art without falling into the trap of formulaic. The genesis of this three-person sculpture group show started with an open call in which the curators Mira Dayal and Simon Wu asked savvy art viewers to suggest “formulas,” that is, combinations of materials and tropes used, or perhaps overused in art today. Out of the 67 formulas submitted, the curators selected the ones they both found intriguing and invited Nikita Gale, Amanda Turner Pohan, and Laurie Kang to come up with responses to formulas that invoked the hard and soft, technological and biological, individual and institutional. Gale’s body-like textures, Pohan’s sleek kinetic sculptures, and Kang’s architectural steel structure, all merge industrial off the shelf materials with invisible elements such as sound, vibration, and sensitivity to light. Like the relationship of body and mind, their fragmented materials assume meaning through the hidden forces that seem to operate them.
Continue reading “Formula 1: A Loud, Low Hum at CUE Art Foundation”Knockdown Center
Wonderfully striking in bright luminosities, diagonal analogousness, situational room-to-room parallels, transporting suggestiveness and subtly warmed circumstantial frigidities are the two installations ‘contained,’ in a way, by “A Continuous Stream of Occurrence,” an exhibition that opened a few weeks ago at Maspeth gem The Knockdown Center .
At top is Luba Drozd‘s room. It both looks and sounds like a veritable spatial knot of brilliantly site-specific polyphonia involving significant degrees of multidisciplinarity, multimateriality and strata within circumstantial strata of shadow-play. It’s a tough but fun knot to look at and into, and listen closely to, to begin to untie just how it works with totality and relative simplicity, though not in ways simplistic in the least.
Rather than necessarily site-specific or sonic, the active state of William Lamsom‘s installation in the adjacent gallery is like that of a shimmering, gradually phase-changing antechamber to Drozd’s comparative cavern; they scan instantly as visually coherent in many satisfying and still individualizable ways. Entering Lamsom’s room alone is like stumbling into an abandoned research lab in a yearless future. Seeing the rooms in tandem is like being dropped in some nicely mysterious nook on Krypton and having no idea why.
Great installations, great show. Curated by a duo going by the ‘name’ XP (@xaviacarin & @parkcmyers).
Continue reading “Nota Bene with @postuccio [iv]”All photos courtesy of Alexandra Brock
Sat March 2nd from 2-4PM at Pelham Art Center
Hyperaccumulators are plants capable of growing in soils with very high concentrations of metals and are known for extracting contaminants; thus, helping the ecosystem. This duality of destruction and restoration underscores “HyperAccumulators” – the current vibrant group show at Pelham Art Center. In their upcoming artist talk, curators Alexandra Brock and Elizabeth Saperstein will lead the panel on how contemporary artists interpret connectivity between nature, toxicity, and possible regeneration. And not merely in nature. As curator Alexandra Brock says, “we have become ‘HyperAccumulators’ dealing with the everyday environmental and political climate we are living in. The artists are taking in all this- and helping us return to a better state.”
Continue reading “HyperAccumulators at Pelham Art Center”Five Myles
No matter how banal it might seem to say that Barbara Campisi‘s “Sound of Light” — the artist’s massive and joyfully interactive, labyrinthine installation at Crown Heights gallery Five Myles — is lit, it’s still a fully legit thing to say: it’s both lit and LIT. Lit up in both senses was also Campisi’s packed opening, during which visitors were invited to ‘draw’ their own light doodles all throughout the translucent-panel maze of sorts while listening to live music, encountering meandering dancers, and constantly running into strangers who didn’t feel like moving — not out of confusion, but because they were just fine and dandy right where they were, playing around with LEDs like all adults should do more, as every single kid in attendance that night would’ve surely agreed.
Continue reading “Nota Bene with @postuccio [iii]”SRO Gallery
Dozens of warmly chromatic landscapes with hints of fantasy and abstract intrigue are on view in “Unextinguished,” a kind of amuse-bouche of a genre-specific group show that opened at SRO Gallery a couple weeks ago. It features a great many paintings, and a great many relatively literal as well as apparently non-objective takes on landscapes by Sahand Tabatabai, Sheila Lanham , Cathy Diamond , Moses Hoskins, Cathy Nan Quinlan and Cecilia Whittaker-Doe. If you need a respite from the drudgery of winter (I always do), head over to SRO.
Continue reading “Nota Bene with @postuccio [ii]”
In Size Matters artist and curator William Norton brings together seventeen visual artists and four performance artists from Japan, China, the USA, and the UAE, for whom the notion of scale is central. The curator questions in what ways does scale impact form? How does it affect meaning? And more specifically, how is our perception of scale affected by cultural differences between Asian and Western cultures? Continue reading “Size Matters”
“Amulets Ethereal,” the thought provoking group exhibition curated by Jenny Mushkin Goldman at Barney Savage features works by Kharis Kennedy, Adam Krueger & Tableaux Vivants, Victoria Manganiello & Julian Goldman, Qinza Najm, Cheryl R. Riley, and Ashley Zelinskie. The artworks in this show run the gamut from manipulated found objects, like Cheryl Riley’s old farm tools and Qinza Najm’s carpet, to fabricated sculptures like Ashley Zelinskie’s 3-d printed futuristic cyborgs and Victoria Manganiello / Julian Goldman’s computerized weaving; from wearable art like the sewn tattooed silicon mask by the duo Adam Krueger and Tableaux Vivants to Kharis Kennedy’s mysterious painting of a masked figure with a goat. Collectively the artworks are recontextualized as open-ended ritualized objects and images endowed with the questionable power to shield the viewer from the most tenuous of perceived dangers. Continue reading “Amulets Ethereal at Barney Savage”