Bill Viola: James Cohan Gallery

Bill Viola
James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street New York NY 10001

October 23 - December 19, 2009

This was hands-down the best show I saw last night, and at least in the last couple weeks.  I don't usually like video art, but Long Beach native Bill Viola has managed to contemporize the space and role traditionally filled by painting with video in a manner that is both beautiful and meaningful. In 2006 I was lucky enough to stumble upon his installation at the Church of San Gallo in Venice and found the slow-motion videos of people emerging and re-submerging from a wall of water really powerful. Some of his work from that body were present in the gallery as well as what seem to be other bodies of work. One especially noteworthy piece was a large (three-projecter) black and white projection piece that took advantage of the noise of low-light video recording to create some haunting, close to home yet otherworldly images that emerged and re-submerged into the flickering digital noise.

http://www.jamescohan.com/

Mathew Ritchie: Andrea Rosen Gallery

Mathew Ritchie
 Oct 23rd- Dec 22nd.
Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 W 24th St.

I saw Mathew's show last year at Andrea Rosen and was disappointed as his writing makes me want to like his work. This year he bested even that. I mention this show as an example of a show where the artist has access to the best materials, manufacturing processes, institutional support and, I'm sure, plenty of assistants. Yet it failed to capture my friend, a wonderful art historian, or my interest to look at anything besides the people who were present. Which was impressive enough to have me write this post.

http://www.andrearosengallery.com/exhibitions/2009_10_matthew-ritchie/

Victoria Campillo: {CTS} creative thriftshop

 Victoria Campillo
Run Dates: October 23rd- November 17th 2009

{CTS} creative thriftshop @ Dam Stuhltrager Gallery
38 Marcy Ave. Brooklyn, NY. 11211
Hours: Tuesday through Sunday Noon-6pm

This was an enjoyable show at a surprisingly empty opening in Williamsburg (i.e it was just us). The show consisted of photos of a man's boxers/shorts/dresses with his hands hanging to the sides, as you can see from the image above. Each has an artists name printed in front, at right about the models crotch level.
It was interesting, from a MFA graduates perspective, to see how the names and the style matched up to my own understanding of the artist's practice. What brought the work past a kitchy mining of other artists look was the inclusion of a small spiral bound book that combined a small image with a short blurb about the artist named. I like the research put into each little statement. It made the work an honest investigation into artists, coupled with a bit of humor in the imagery, as a path for the viewer to learn from the artists investigation. It also is a good visual refresher for your art history.

http://www.creativethriftshop.com/

Hugo Crosthwaite: Pierogi

Escape Rates Escaparates
16 October - 15 November 2009
Opening Reception: Friday 16 October 2009 7 - 9 pm

Hugo Crosthwaite is a California trained artist (BA from San Diego State University's School of Art, though lives and works in NYC).  He has a complex mix of photo-realistic yet expressive characters that reside in spaces that are themselves a mix of specific localities (taken from photo-references no doubt), icons, abstraction, and just as often empty fields. It looks like he works with charcoal and/or graphite to model the figures and black acrylic paint to fill in the large zones of dark tones, though on reading his materials it seems he accomplishes it all with charcoal and graphite. I wouldn't be surprised if he painted a powdered charcoal for the blacks, as they are very intense.

The characters seem to be involved in different corporeal actions with one another. A reaccuring motif was of one grown character emerging from the crotch of another. This pseudo-birth, reminded me of Odd Nerdrums use of shock imagery, but also of Jenny Saville's tortured portraiture of women. He claims a major influence to be the Tijuana bibles from his birthplace of Mexico (short, often crude and sexually explicit comics). Sexuality and violence do seem to figure strongly in many of his images, though often the images are just juxtaposed in unsettling combinations.


http://www.pierogi2000.com/index.html

PIEROGI | 177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 T. 718.599.2144

Red Book: Rubin Museum

I visited the Rubin Museum for the first time today and it was great visit. The main reason for my visit was the so-called Red Book. A secret(ish) project of the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. A beautifully hand lettered and illuminated manuscript that although show to friends and associates of Jung's during his life time, was fiercely guarded by his family. (One story is that although the worlds best reproduction facilities existed in Los Angeles CA, the family absolutely refused to let the book go to the United States. So instead they shipped all the machinery to Zürich, where one of the aristocratic family members would literally sleep next to the book on a bedroll in order to never let it leave his sight.) The work is a incredible project at many different levels, which Jungians love to analyze.

Besides the exhibit on Jung's work the Museum focuses on Himalayan art, of which it has an impressively well constructed exhibit. I managed to get into a tour, which a recommend highly as the tour guide was incredibly versed in all matters of the works(I'm pretty sure he was a Buddhist at some level). One floor dealt exclusively with Mandalas which I had only passing knowledge of. The diverse collection, coupled with informational chart and even some amazing computer graphics really opened up a amazing world of this iconic art, meditation and teaching tool.


The Rubin Museum of Art is located in the Chelsea district of New York City at the corner of 17th Street and 7th Avenue.

http://www.rmanyc.org/

Regina José Galindo: Exit Art

Regina José Galindo
October 2 - November 21, 2009
Opening: Friday, October 2, 7-10pm

Exit Art is putting on a series of performance art. It has a large collection of Regina's video's being projected in the upper level. The lower level has another show America For Sale with photos, paintings, and video relating to our current economic situation.

Regina's work, Crises: Cloth consisted of audience members paying five dollars for an article of clothing, which they would remove themselves from her body as she stood still in the gallery. The work was very reminiscent of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece though much less edgy with potential violence (which was strange as Regina's larger body of work was very much about different types of violence).
The best part of the evening for me was when the man who took the shirt 'of her back' while at the same time exposing her breasts (as another lady had previously purchased Regina's bra and took it off under her t-shirt) asked for change. At the time I didn't realize she had set a specific price for the garments (five bucks), so it seemed very New York to take the most pivotal piece in the show while at the same time asking for the rest of your ten or twenty back.

http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/main/index.html

Cave Painting: 511 W 25th St.

Cave Painting: 511 W 25th St. October 2nd-312t.

Rich Aldrich Untitled 2006/2007


I stumbled upon this space by accident. There was no signage expect for a golden stenciled grasshoper. I believe it was in the basement of the Paula Cooper space, but I could be totally wrong about that. In any case the space itself was awesome. A long concrete room with various pipes projecting into it, an uneven floor and an authentic patina of time starkly separated this space from the standard white cube space dominating the art world. Though as often is the case in space so interesting. It often superceded the work. The show was ostensible a survey of the present state of abstract painting (and went along with a book called Painting Abstraction, to be published by Phaidon Press). Though it looked more like a survey of young hip painters. (All human created imagery is abstraction from nature, some of the paintings in this show had characters upon a painty ground. Not something I would classify as predominantly an 'abstract' painting. )

I had hoped to show an image or two but the show has no web-presence. So I am putting images pulled from Google.

David Ratcliff Mirror
(I liked this one mostly because it reminded me of my own work.)

Verne Dawson Jonah and the Whale (Overboard) (2009)