The Drop / Exhibition 2012+ Opening

I'm back from NYC now, so I can get back to normal blog business. Saturday night's opening of The Drop/Exhibition 2012+ went really well, there was an absolutely huge turnout. I'm happy that I had work in the show. There is a Flicker Pool of images here.

This is Yoko Ono's piece, visitors are meant to write something they want on a paper tag and hang it from the tree.

Scene from the VIP area

Very tall women standing under Paul D. Miller A.K.A. DJ Spooky's banners

Exhibition 2012+ co-curator Mie Iwatsuki with Chuck Close, it was pretty cool to see him there.

My installation, two prints and two banners from To Know the Spiders

I gave out around 70 Ecologies of Decay catalogs and probably 100 To Know the Spiders posters, I wished I had brought more with me.

After the opening I went with a friend to a small party down on the Bowery. Someone there was doing a series of long exposures, painting with lights around the models.

Ecologies of Decay Opening

Ecologies of Decay opened on Friday night. There was a great turn out, thanks to everybody who came out. The three of us were really happy with the way the evening unfolded. I was going to take pictures during the opening so that I would have good shots of people in and around the work, but I got so caught up in talking that I didn't snap a single pic, luckily J-M and Colette took some (see below). Our catalogue for the show came back from the printer just in time (more about that publication tomorrow). There is also an article in the Buffalo News today.

Dennis Maher: Profanation

My installation: Abandoned House/Decay Community / Secondary Occupants Collected and Observed.

Jean-Michel Reed: Night Fires

photo by Colette

photo by Colette

Photo by J-M Reed

Photo by J-M Reed

Tom Holt: Test for Echo

Yesterday I went to my friend Tom Holt's opening at the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls (NY). I'm a big fan of Tom's work and Test for Echo did not disappoint. Unfortunately Tom doesn't have a website to link to at the moment. Some iPhone photos:

a vitrine full of sketchbooks

Tom Holt and unicorn

Commune at Black & White

CHITRA GANESH

ODED HIRSCH

me

I'm going to New York tomorrow morning. I have several things to do there, one of them is to attend the opening of a group show called "Commune" at Black & White Gallery. I have a couple pieces in the show, it looks like it is going to be really cool. Here is the press release info.

May 21 - June 27, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 21, 2009 , 6-8pm
Black & White Gallery
636 W 28th St.,Ground Floor, New York, NY

BLACK & WHITE GALLERY is pleased to host COMMUNE – group exhibition organized by the independent curator and critic Dominique Nahas.

COMMUNE brings together twenty four nationally and internationally recognized artists whose diverse and surprising works examine networks of forces brought to bear by exchange through the social bond, be it through family, fellowship of friends, lovers, school affiliations, secular and religious organizations, class structures, collectives, and nations

NORIKO AMBE, ERIK BENSON, BRIAN BRESS, OSVALDO BUDET, CAROLINA CAYCEDO, JARED CLARK, BLANE DE ST. CROIX, OANA FARCAS, CAOIMHGHIM O FRAITHILE, CHARLEY FRIEDMAN, CHITRA GANESH, ODED HIRSCH, HIDENORI ISHII, STEVE KEISTER, JULIA KUNIN, OLIVER LUTZ, JULIAN MONTAGUE, MAURIZIO PELLEGRIN, JOHN POWERS, MICHAEL REES, PETER ROSTOVSKY, JULIANNE SWARTZ, JACQUES LOUIS VIDAL, ROBERTO VISANI

I’ve established deep personal and professional bonds with each artist in COMMUNE. They are my friends. Organizing the summer show COMMUNE at Black & White Gallery for me has been akin to the creating of a fantasy island. On this island distinct artworks co-exist in mutuality, as visions of possibilities and impossibilities are marooned, fated to converse, to sing and laugh together, endlessly, communally.

Dominique Nahas, April 2009, New York

Sign/Age

I'm in a group show that opens on Thursday at Armand Bartos Fine Art in NYC. I'll be flying down tomorrow for the opening. The list of people in the show is absolutely insane, I can't believe that my name is on a list like this, it seems like a joke.

Arman
Mike Bidlo
Philip Lorca diCorcia
Wiliam Eggleston
Martha Friedman
Ralph Goings
Julian Montague
Claes Oldenberg
Thomas Pfannerstill
Daniel Pflumm
Danica Phelps
Michael Spano
Brian Ulrich
Andy Warhol
Tom Wesselman

Here is the long descriptive text from the gallery evite, it sounds like it's going to be a great show:

SIGN/AGE: Lost in the Supermarket
November 21 - December 19, 2008
Opening reception: Thursday, November 20, 6-8PM

Opening next week is the second in our three part SIGN/AGE series. Assembling works by artists from the Post-War period to the present, these exhibitions mine ideas and images from the rich arenas of advertising and consumerism. Since the Fifties, signs have become extremely complex, functioning not just to fulfill needs but to create them. Signs are designed to sell, and people are lined up to buy, because without our products who are we? Lost in the Supermarket includes works by artists that are in direct conversation with our consumer-based culture, taking on the subject from all angles.

Arman's Consumer Cascade installation is thirty shopping carts nested basket to basket, instead of end to end, forming a tidal wave sized arc that cascades down the gallery wall.

Mike Bidlo replicates a pair of Ballantine Ale cans, originally cast in bronze, and revives a joke by Jasper Johns on Leo Castelli in response to the oft quoted line by deKooning that "you could give that son of a bitch [Castelli] two beer cans and he could sell them."

At the height of the Jesse Helms era, Philip-Lorca diCorcia won an NEA grant and conceived of a project colloquially known as The Hustlers, and so doing tested the limits of public funding. Avoiding any real obscenity, he found his colorful subjects working the streets of the sunset strip, and hustler or not, paid them to take their picture. The work is titled according to each man's name, age and place of birth.

William Eggleston traveled across the country during the Seventies, taking pictures of the faded roadside. The saturated color of his dye-transfer prints exaggerate the bye-gone era effect in this photo of a steak billboard, blistered and peeling; advertising what, we are unsure.

Martha Friedman sees pattern and form in everyday objects. She breaks down the pattern and distorts the form, creating elegant and absurdist sculptures rich with historical references. For this exhibition we have two food works that transform ordinary supermarket items. Noodle is an oversized macaroni necklace so large you feel like the shrunken Alice in Wonderland, and Bangers is a bronze piece of linked sausages, stacked like Brancusi's Endless Column.

Since the Sixties, Ralph Goings has been making sincere still life paintings of diner counters, including catsup bottles, metal creamer pitchers, salt and pepper shakers, and the great American donut.

Moving beyond natural science's preoccupation with the biological, Julian Montague's Stray Shopping Cart Identification System has created a classification for further understanding of these stolen and repurposed urban vehicles.

Claes Oldenburg undermined the inhumane mechanics of industrial production when he opened up The Store. At this hand-made emporium you could buy anything from lingerie to lunch, all of which he produced with humble materials. Constructed with plaster and tempera we have several food items from that era.

Based in Kentucky, Thomas Pfannerstill whittles the detritus of modern culture into trompe l'oeil sculpture. Each piece is a one-to-one scale sculpture in wood, replicating trash from the street, including the story of its finding on the back of the work.

In this series of light boxes, Daniel Pflumm strips recognizable logos of their type, robbing them of their corporate brand identity. The process results in bold arrangements of hard-edged color, not unlike Ellsworth Kelly's shaped canvases.

We have two works from Danica Phelps' ten year project that recorded her daily activities, including red and green hash marks, representing every dollar earned and spent.

American culture is intricately connected to motorized vehicles. Michael Spano's most recent series, Auto Portraits, capture commuters in the sanctum of their cars, stuck in traffic, surrounded on all sides by the billboards, stores, and trucks, that keep the wheels of commerce greased.

Turning his camera on the big box store, photographer Brian Ulrich investigates the consumer landscape we inhabit. In the large-scale prints from the Copia series, products are stacked in modernist grid formation, and shoppers stare blankly at the endless merchandise in front of them. It is a symbiotic relationship that both buyer and inventory demands a purchase be made in order to be deemed of value.

Responsible for mechanizing the art-making process with his silk-screens, Andy Warhol replaces content with dollar bill signs, eliding his work with value, as if by repeatedly drawing this symbol of US currency he could mint money.

Tom Wesselmann's Still Life #48, with a three-dimensional Formica shelf, lifts a jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise and a perfectly ripe beefsteak tomato to iconic status.

These are the two pieces I have in the show.

Getting it Together

I'm over half way done making the 36 banners I will have in the show.

A scene from the studio.

I need to cut roughly 150 Helvetica characters out of black felt.

The TKTS specimen notebook

Sorry the posting has slowed down a bit. I'm in the final stages of getting To Know the Spiders together and it seems to be taking up all of my mental space. I'm on schedule but I still have a couple of crucial decisions to make and quite a bit of cutting and ironing to do.

The Finished Product

I'm still a bit out of it from the events of the past 12 days, for last two nights on the project we went without sleep. I will have more posts about the past week a little later...

Jennifer Steinkamp at the Albright-Knox

Last night we went to the opening of Jennifer Steinkamp's show at the Albright-Knox. None of the above images are actually from the exhibit, but they are the same or similar pieces. Before last night I was only familiar with her tree projections. The installation of the show is incredible, the Albright has a number of large high ceiling rooms (25 ft high I'm guessing), which are fully taken advantage of by the artist. In some rooms the projections go from the floor to ceiling and somehow project around the doors and windows. The visitors become part of the work as their shadows are cast on to the walls when they walk past the numerous projectors. This is most effective in the piece entitled Jimmy Carter, (see a smaller version above) which consists of four walls of undulating flowers. I am not sure how one is supposed to take the title of the piece, is it a joke about the ineffectiveness of his presidency or a sincere tribute to the man? It is hard to know which is worse. While I found the exhibit an inspiring demonstration of the potential of projections, I didn't really like the visual content of the pieces. Most of the forms have a 3-D metallic quality that I associate with the self consciously "digital" graphics and art of the late 90s (to be fair some of the pieces are from 1998). After going through the Steinkamp show we sat down in front of a Jeremy Blake dvd piece (it looked a bit like the wavy colors he used for the covers of Beck's Sea Change album) and I found myself wishing that I could see that piece filling an entire room.

Albright Opening

The opening for my show (Other Orders) at the Albright-Knox Collectors Gallery happened last night. There was a steady flow of people through the show over the course of two hours, many of them familiar faces. There seemed to be a strong response to the paper cuts, particularly from the over fifty crowd. A lot of people will see the show over the next six weeks. Hopefully there will be some sales.