Speaking in Tongues

Originally published July 8, 2009 by New York Press

Summer in New York is long, slow, hot and brutal—especially for art galleries. Many of the people who might actually buy something are out of town, and the traditional tourist is not known as a big art consumer. Few artists or galleries want to commit the time and money to a one-person show. Hence the rise of the phenomenon known as the “summer group show.” Galleries come up with overarching themes that give them good excuse to mount large group shows that often have a little of something for everyone. They’re lots of fun, but rarely earth shattering.

Heist Gallery on the Lower East Side is hoping to change that. The Essex Street gallery has decided to devote its entire summer to shows about New York City. Entitled “The City’s Summer Heist,” the programming involves a series of quick hit two-week exhibitions that will alternate between solo and two-person shows, mounted both inside and outside of the gallery itself and will include video, photography, performance, sculpture and painting that all relates to summer in the City. The summer programming began on June 30 with site-specific video installations by Liz Magic Laser. The display consists of three performance-based video and photographic works set in bank vestibules. She has produced a version of the Bertolt Brecht play Man Equals Man in the vestibule of a Chase bank branch. Man’s relationship to ATM? It will be interesting to see what it all means.

The second show is a twofer. Tim Hailey and Milton Carter do not explicitly work together, but the curator has paired them, in a series of events woven together by their fascination with motorcycle culture and promises the project will “thrill and shock” gallery viewers (not to mention the neighbors). Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines! Personally, I think Evil Knivel jumping the fountains at Cesar’s Palace represented the ultimate motorcycle art, but perhaps Tim and Milton can top it.

Installation number three is a multimedia and video performance TV show by Jennifer Sullivan. She will set up what looks like a nutty TV studio in the gallery and produce a daily program that will star both her and her artwork. The gallery press release promises “possible disaster.” Heist’s owner Talia Eisenberg says, “We don’t know exactly what the show entails because we are giving her full creative reign starting from day one through the end of the second week.” So far, the gallery programming seems to promise both thrills and danger. I guess that’s all part of life here in Sin City. Stay tuned.

The fourth and most intriguing exhibition is in more traditional-looking media and depicts radically different visions of the city. Tim Feigenbaum’s “Trainset Ghetto” will attempt to create a cinematic, hyper-real miniature environment based on 1980s-era decaying New York City—using model railroad supplies he has created an empty film set of our town. Eerie, beautiful lighting gives these pieces a surreal glow. Marissa Blustones’ large paintings depict a dream-like vacation from the city that becomes a nightmare. Semi-clothed figures dot a rural landscape that seems ready to explode upon impact. Lush and colorful, these scenes are truly terrifying. The moral of the story is never leave the city! It’s a jungle out there.

Originally published Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by New York Press

LET’S GET THE obvious question out of the way: A “snatch block” is the part of a crane that the hook is attached to. Given that the co-owners and curators of Snatch Block Projects are hard-core steel welders, this seemed like a natural name for their new art venue. Not commercial, not even alternative, it is “a place and a chance to do whatever we want,” curator John Clement explains. And so they have. You get off the L train, far beyond Bedford Avenue and you walk and walk and then walk some more. You pass a couple of chop shops, a tortilla factory (buy a bag fresh off the grill from the loading dock!), over the English Kills Canal, past the local strip club and you reach a Victorian firehouse.

This mini-universe contains the studios of curators John Clements and Arthur Mednick, four other artist studios and the Snatch Block Projects gallery space. It is out there.

The gallery’s inaugural show is the New York City debut of a young artist from Houston, Ariane Roesch. Titled The Rescue at the Firehouse, it is a site-specific project about dreams and submarines.

Using electroluminescent wire, a very cool new technology, Roesch has created a magical room. As far as I can tell, these are like neon lights, a thin rubber tube that creates thin glowing lines of color that seem to vibrate in the air. They are beautiful all by themselves and even more so in the hands of the artist. She has used these to trace the progression of a dream. Hidden in a closet, the silkscreened image of a sleeping woman on a pillow is the starting point. The wires emerge from her pillow and traverse the gallery, stopping to lead in and out of “pumps and valves” (also silk-screened images). The evocation goes nicely with the original intent of the site. Though the artist was reluctant to assign a meaning to the piece, my suggestion of a dream seemed to sit just fine with her. The room is dark, the glowing wires, red, yellow and orange snaking around the architecture make you keenly aware of the space. It’s a project that is simultaneously simple, direct and, on second glance, meditative and complex.

The Firehouse—the name of the building housing the gallery—is a beautiful piece of Victorian architecture in the middle of the most industrial of urban neighborhoods. Mednick and Clements envision the space as an exhibition space for innovative and non-commercial projects and have plans for presenting four to six projects a year, though what comes next is still being planned. It is a welcome new venue in New York and well worth the hike to visit.

> The Rescue at the Firehouse

Through June 30, Snatch Block Projects, 1196 Metropolitan Ave. (betw. Varick & Stewart Sts.), Brooklyn, 917- 400-0877

Originally published Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by New York Press

In the No, a thought-provoking exhibition at Edlin Gallery, challenges some of our basic assumptions about outsider artists. The mythology is that outsider artists exist in a state of “not knowing.” They live in a kind of innocent ignorance about the mainstream art scene and often about the world at large. The question becomes how much does our fascination with the artist’s own back-story affect our response to the work.

The six artists featured are all in one way or another “outsiders,” but to varying degrees. The question nags as one looks at the work: Is this work somehow more worthy because the artist is untrained, but naturally savvy? Or is that piece more or less “outsider” because the artist is art-school trained but mentally ill? The exhibition demands a self-reflective response from the viewer—do these things really matter when faced with a work of art that packs an immediate and emotional punch? Maybe.
The gallery does not offer answers to these questions, but it presents a brave and intriguing exhibition flor a venue where such notions of authenticity are its stock in trade. It is also presents an opportunity to seethe work of five diverse but equally interesting artists, none of whom I had ever seen before.

The work of Thomas Chapman faces this issue straight on. Easily the most compelling and interesting work in the show, it is also the work of someone with an extensive art-school background. I’m not sure that I buy the argument that he is attempting to “unlearn” his art-school training, but the work is terrific. Crazy-shaped canvases covered in debris, old carpet, paint and signs, they are a cacophony of modern urban life. A bombardment of images and color can be found all around the sides of the canvases. I find the abstracted pieces more interesting than the ones that address narrative. A modern-day Madonna and child appears contrived, especially when placed next to the abstract pieces that jump off the wall.

George Widener seems to fit the more typical profile of outsider artist. An autodidact living in rural North Carolina, he draws on stained napkins with a fine pen. Exquisitely intricate pen-and-ink drawings portray a world of infinite order and detail. In mapping a world of the mind, they are as elegant and sophisticated as the previous work is raw. These pieces certainly don’t need the title of “outsider art” to be valid statements. But then again, does being “outsider” make them more valuable?

Charles Steffan began art school in 1949, but he was forced to leave due to the onset of mental illness.He continued to make art until his death in 1995. The drawings on huge sheets of brown wrapping paper are both a verbal diary of day-to-day life and a visual window into the artist’s interior life. A mundane description of shoveling snow is juxtaposed with a gargantuan Cyclops figure whose deeply creased and reptilian skin (as well as his sharpened teeth) belie the gentle description of a snowy day.

Strolling through Chelsea or the Lower East Side you can encounter dozens of highly trained and over-intellectualized artists who work with forced and pretentious naiveté. It is a startling contrast to enjoy the work of those who not only walk the walk but also talk the talk.

Through June 20, Edlin Gallery, 529 W. 20th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-206-9723. Call for gallery hours.

Originally published Monday, March 9, 2009 by New York Press

The work of Penny Rockwell, currently showing at Pavel Zoubock Gallery, is harrowing, intimate, sad and beautiful. She has documented with painful honesty the progression of a psychotic break that she suffered in the early 1990s, one fueled by paranoid delusions that electrical plugs were evil animated beings that were after her. After 10 years of therapy—and medication—she has attempted to recreate and communicate the absolute terror of this experience.

The exhibition is divided into three parts: The first, entitled “Evidence,” is a dense wall full of realistic and sinister drawings of industrial equipment, lamps and tools—all with prominent and menacing plugs. They are a studied and desperate attempt prove that the world is full of danger.

The second part is in a different drawing style and represents a small dark woman (or women) being chased and engulfed by plugs that are stylized with long fanglike prongs. The plugs are wildly animated. Snaking through rooms and up stairs, relentlessly pursuing the small cartoon women.

Some of the drawings depict an insanely detailed household; furniture and the ever-present plugs swirl into one and domesticity runs amok. The thing that saves this work from being just therapeutic is that the drawings are incredibly beautiful.

In black and white with a few strategic hits of color, they are skillfully composed and drawn. This is what makes this work transcend that of other “outsider” artists, who too often make work that needs a strong back-story in order to click. Often I feel drawn into the world of an outsider artist with a twinge of guilt—Rockwell’s work, however, gives me no such pains. The story of her descent into this mad world is both sad and interesting, and reading her narrative adds another valuable layer of understanding to the show, but it isn’t necessary. The work stands on its own as contemporary drawing, full stop.

The third section of the exhibition documents the artists’ stay in Bellevue. A dense cacophony of figures crowds into the drawing entitled “Untitled (Plugs)” Up, down, naked, eating, screaming, yawning—the full gamut of human behavior is crowded into this one dense drawing. Another depicts a snaking line of every variety of naked female waiting to bathe in one big, old-fashioned bathtub while a uniformed nurse screams for order.

Throughout all of the work, there is a powerful underlying sense of formal design and layout, bringing order to the madness of these drawings. There is structure beneath the work, perhaps the same structure that enabled Penny Rockwell to eventually find her way home.

Penny Rockwell: Plugs, Through Mar. 14, Pavel Zoubok Gallery 533 W. 23rd St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-675-7490.

Originally published Tuesday, December 30, 2008 by New York Press

By Melissa Stern

The current exhibition at Hebrew Union College Gallery seems particularly apt for 2008. Envisioning Maps is a giddy investigation of maps and more interestingly, the underlying concept of “mapping;” getting lost, getting found and staking out a place to belong in the world. Whether it’s a historical scarf mapping the invasion of Normandy or Paula Sher’s staggering, insanely wordy map of Israel and its neighbors, the desire to know where one is resonates loudly in a world where we don’t seem to know where we are going.

This is an exhaustive and surprisingly edgy exhibit. Thirty-three artists from a variety of backgrounds and geographies have each contributed artwork in a wide range of media. It all makes for an exhilarating and challenging show. The minute you walk in you are hit by Mike Howard’s giant (9’ x 14’) painting, “Leon Trotsky Murder Scene in Mexico City.” Boom! Curator Laura Kruger has just informed you that she intends this exhibition to examine the map as both political and personal animal. Nothing is neutral in this exhibition, and I like it like that. Many, but not all of the pieces refer to some aspect of the place of Jews in the world—a loaded subject if ever there was one. Kruger has managed to walk the line between disparate

politics, preferring to work with artists who approach the subject in a very personal and emotional way, rather than throw down an ideological gauntlet.

Karen Gunderson’s poetic portrait of the night sky takes on a deeper resonance when we read that she has recreated the constellations of Oct. 1, 1943, the night that the Jews of Denmark were due to be rounded up and deported to concentration camps. She depicts the sky looking north, towards Sweden, which is where 95% of the Danish Jews were smuggled to safety. It’s a work that succeeds at once as painting, as conceptual art and as a souvenir of history.

Imperialism, pollution and racism are addressed in various works, but always in a way that emphasizes their personal impact. Doug Beubhas studded a globe with matches; the world is literally ready to catch on fire. Paul Weisman’s woodcut of the toxic cloud that drifted from Chernobyl over Europe is at once formally beautiful and chilling. William Kentridge’s map entitled “Budapest/Soweto” connects the expulsion of one set of undesirables with the treatment of another.

One of the most chilling maps in the exhibition is “Neu-York” as envisioned by Melissa Gould. A lithograph map of New York City has been altered, painted over and renamed as if the city, having been taken over by the Germans, is now a mini-Berlin. It hits home when you try and find your home and realize that you now live on Adolph Hitler Plaatz.

Some of the most interesting works in the show are the historical novelty maps. The aforementioned scarf depicting the invasion of Normandy, “Our Way,” a board game for 1945’s immigrants to Palestine and an intricately detailed woodcut from 1581 entitled “The Entire World in a Cloverleaf” are each fascinating examples of how maps have been used by artists, politicians and visionaries to help us find our way in the world.

Through June 26, Jewish Institute of Religion Museum at Hebrew Union College, 1 W. 4th St. (at Broadway), 212-824-2205; times vary, FREE.

Originally published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 in New York Press

By Melissa Stern

A bizarre menagerie of creatures has come to roost at Greenwich House Pottery. A venerable institution not known for experimental or conceptual exhibitions, its current show will certainly change the view of GHP as a “pottery school.”

The exhibition entitled “Synthetic Experiments” is a two-person show by Chad Curtis and Greg Stewart. It is a mixed-media show, involving some, but not much clay that purports to examine both the notions of “mutation” and “synthesis.” It’s an interesting and somewhat difficult show that requires explanation to make it all work. I have to admit to a gut negative response to visual artwork that relies on words to clarify its intent. I think that a viewer should be able to understand or at least respond to the show without reaching for the artist statement to make sense of it all. One artist’s work is about mutation—the possibility of biologic change. The other’s is about synthesis and the combination of disparate elements into a new whole. Taken together, I suppose, they are meant to represent the primary two forms of change in the world.

Nonetheless, the sculptures of the two artists look great together and terrific in the elegant parlor gallery. There’s an odd, toy-like quality that is quite compelling. Bright color and the use of what looks like the lining of old sleeping bags lends the sculptures an appealing juvenile air.

The pieces by Greg Stewart—mutated deer-like creatures with lumpy bodies made of intricately patched fabric and objects—are the less accessible of the two. Fiberglass deer heads, face down to the floor, their stuffed bodies pierced with wood and fake apples: These pieces challenge you to like them. The use of deliberately tacky genre fabrics that make up the bodies are the most visually interesting part of the sculptures. The patchwork of flannel flying geese, moose and hunters in camouflage makes a coherent and compelling statement.

In contrast, Chad Curtis’ work is elegant, funny and more accessible—at least on a surface level. His sculpture assemblages of brightly glazed cast ceramic animals stand like bizarre trophies proudly perched on top of elaborately constructed bases. The contrast of materials—shiny and matte, wood and plastic—makes the artist’s point about “synthesis” in a very direct and effective way. They are quite formal in conception and construction, beautifully constructed.

A computer produces Curtis’ drawings, mechanical silhouettes of animals and machines on layersof velum or board. The velum drawings are pretty, but they’re cool emotionally. They sneak up on you and are easy to dismiss because of their beauty; the content resonates after you leave the gallery.

Taken together, the two artists’ work is provocative, visually compelling and thought provoking. The show itself is an encouraging departure for Greenwich House, one that its curators and organizers should take pride in and seek to emulate in future.

Synthetic Experiments – Through Nov. 27. Greenwich House Pottery, 16 Jones St. (betw. Bleecker & W. 4th Sts.), 212-242-4106; hours vary.

Originally published Wednesday, October 8, 2008 in New York Press

By Melissa Stern

“SELF-PORTRAIT (OCTOPUS Head)” doesn’t sound like it would be beautiful. But thanks to the beautiful, nutty work of Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based artist Kako Ueda, a human head,grafted onto an octopus’ body and either eating or expelling agiant frog, is delicate and beautiful; it’s man and nature in tenuous harmony.

In “Totem,” up through Oct. 18 at George Adams Gallery, Ueda takes the somewhat crafty artform of paper cutouts and turns it into something totally contemporary. The process is labor intensive in the extreme. She hand-draws imagery onto sheets of paper and painstakingly hand-cuts each piece into lace-like creations. Pause too long to muse over this perfection, though, and you might miss the delicious weirdness of the content. It’s the tension between pieces that look machine made and the personal, surreal content that makes the work so enchanting.

Often Ueda layers the cut sheets of paper to create a slim dimensionality in what are essentially flat works. Occasionally she adds touches of watercolor or colored pencil.

The exhibition consists of seven pieces, all of which loosely explore the relationship between nature and culture; one of those big subjects that so often succumbs to cliché. Giant bugs, lizards,body parts and humans all vie for our attention. The natural world seems constantly on the verge of taking over man’s place in the universe.

The most ambitious piece in the exhibition is “Totem” (pictured) an installation that covers an entire corner of the gallery. In shocking red and measuring 139 inches by 111 inches, it depicts acut paper narrative with collage elements.

The balance between densely filled and empty space is elegant and carries the narrative along the walls and onto the floor.

The imagery—men, women, bugs and horses—is augmented by clouds, birds and stars, giving this piece a different sense of context than the others.

Ueda’s vision and craft is solid and original, bucking the trendiness of Chelsea’s art scene. It’s a very individual vision that transcends the personal to resonate as a larger comment on man andthe natural world. That’s certainly a rare find in the concrete jungle.

Through Oct. 18, George Adams Gallery, 525 W. 26th St. (betw. 10th and 11th Aves.),

Originally published June 18, 2008 by New York Press

Chelsea, home to some of the most self-important, pretentious, even grim artwork these days, is currently host to an exhibition that is so beguiling and delightful that even the gallery guards are smiling. The Gagosian Gallery is exhibiting the current work of Robert Therrien, a Los Angeles sculptor whose art has long defied both categorization and fashion. The gallery has been invaded by banal but gigantic objects. Stacks of oversized plastic dishes in the pale colors of old lunchrooms are piled 8-feet high. Towers of pots, pans and bowls come in three sizes: miniature, normal and enormous. They are perilously balanced as if a chef gone mad has left them like totems throughout the gallery.

A nearly 9-foot-high array of folding tables and chairs occupies its own room, making the viewer feel like a tiny player in a strange, big-screen movie. The scale of the room is a little bit too small for the 19 huge sculptures that nearly burst out of the confines of the space. The impeccable fabrication, all done by commercial manufacturers, adds to the surreal nature of the entire exhibition.

Packed with these objects, the gallery is now a giddy space: at once mythic, meaningful and silly. Therrien has taken the most ordinary objects in our lives—dishes, pots, pans and folding chairs—and transformed them into something of monumental scale and meaning. The objects, reminiscent of childhood, are both reassuring and scary. Like a dream that teeters between humor and nightmare, they leave the viewer in a strange liminal state. A slightly different view of “home” is expressed in No Title (Red Room). No less than 888 red objects are arranged in a painstakingly insane kind of order. Red sneakers, crayons, shirts, owls, cutlery, lanterns are just a few of the objects that live in a closet, a secret universe behind Dutch doors. To view it is to peek into the intimacies of a mind laid bare. It is fabulous.

The funny thing is this: Although there is much genuinely serious content in the work, it is also delightful. Gallery-goers wander around and through the giant card tables and chairs and then tiptoe around the stacks of dishes, as if afraid to make them fall.

The two guards at the gallery were obviously delighted with their job as caretakers of this giant dream, the day I visited, engaging with viewers as they urged them to resist the desire to climb up on the chairs. One guard told me that this was the best exhibit he had ever seen. “This guy, he takes you in his hands, and rolls your mind around, and throws you out like dice,” he said. “Who knows what you’ll be thinking.”

Robert Therrien is a slight-of-hand artist of the highest order, and having your mind shuffled by him is a strange and delightful experience. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Through July 11. Robert Therrien at Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-741-1111.

Originally published February 27, 2008 by New York Press

Whenever I visit Williamsburg I feel transported to a different time and place—a rough-and-tumble college town somewhere in America about 10 years ago. Sometimes annoying, often refreshing, it’s always a relief from Manhattan. The same is true for the gallery scene. The artwork runs the gamut from the silly and insignificant to the occasional diamond in the rough. On Friday afternoon I discovered a real jewel.

Ch’l Gallery, an elegant space on Grand Street is hosting two solo exhibitions. A drawing show by Kevin Bourgeois in the front of the gallery is interesting but not a mind blower. Yet, peeping around the partition wall, I saw the welded steel sculptures of Arthur Mednick. A quiet surprise, these works are simultaneously contemplative and exciting. Mednick’s biomorphic sculptures are both referential and abstract, a tough act to pull off. The soft curves of “Unnamed #1,” for example, could either be the intersection of legs to body on a young woman, or simply an exploration of form and curve.

Not understanding how this unusually fluid metal work was actually fabricated—the gallery could offer a little more background on both the artist and his technique—I did a little research and, indeed, acquired knowledge of Mednick’s process that adds the extra punch. He laminates multiple sheets of steel to form large, solid blocks that are then carved in a seemingly effortless gesture into soft animated forms. If that weren’t enough, he then puts the sculptures into a kiln and fires them so that the sheets of steel de-laminate slightly along the edges. The deep, shimmery black surfaces are fixed with a clear gloss that enriches the color and gives the pieces an elegant finish. At the end of the process, it’s hard to believe that the work is metal. An extremely challenging and arguably nutty process, it results in absolutely gorgeous sculptures.

Not everyone hits the mark. “Groove,” a commentary on Mondrian, seems earthbound compared with the exuberance of “Splort #2” and “Splort #3.” “Bound Up” feels very different and seems like it may be from a different body of work. But for the most part, Mednick’s work resonates with a deep, flowing and unabashed beauty. Old-fashioned in concept, there’s not a trace of irony or cynicism in this work, and that, like the best of Williamsburg, is refreshing indeed.

Through March 10. Ch’I Gallery 293 Grand St. (betw. Roebling & Havemeyer Sts.), B’klyn, 718-218-8939; www.chicontemporaryfineart.com

Originally published February 6, 2008 by New York Press

What do you do when you read the press release for an exhibition, study the catalogue with Talmudic intensity and still can’t figure out what the purpose of the show is? Such was the case for me upon seeing Nina in Position at Artists Space in Soho. The exhibition seems to embody everything that is pretentious and laughable about the contemporary art scene. Obtuse and self-serious, the first line of the press release—“Nina in Position presents diverse artistic strategies that complicate the legibility of lack and difference in America”—should have been a tip off. Some of those words just don’t make sense together. Perhaps a metaphor for the exhibition?

The show is chock full of “blue-chip” contemporary artists but is weighed down by too many big concepts that just don’t make for a coherent exhibition. The juxtaposition of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of two bare-chested men dancing together with Lisa Tan’s silly sculpture of three houseplants (“dimensions variable”) is supposed to illustrate “sculpture’s mercurial qualities by examining materiality, transience and the process of making.” I don’t think so.

Individually, there are some interesting sculptures. Michael Queenland’s surreal and vaguely sexual mixed-media pieces stand out as genuinely intriguing. An elegant assemblage of materials by Jack Pierson is quite affecting.

Mostly, however, all of this super-trendy contempo art looks ho-hum together. It’s like a shopping list of “hot” ideas: You’ve got your piece about race (Barkey Hendricks), your gay piece (Mapplethorpe) and your transgressive materials piece (Anya Gallaccio’s sculpture of blood, glass and rock salt). Nothing looks fresh. In the always- contemporary words of Gertrude Stein: “There is no there, there.”

Nina in Position through March 29. Artists Space, 38 Greene St. Fl 3. (at Grand St.), 212-226-3970; Tues., Thurs. & Fri. noon-6; Wed. noon-8; Sat. noon-5, free. del.icio.us digg NewsVine