Within a few minutes of looking at Meckseper’s sculptures, videos, and photographic works, you’ll notice her ongoing exploration of American consumerism and politics focuses this time on car culture and it’s connection to the oil industry and related domestic and foreign policy decisions.Manipulating found and appropriated objects and images, the artist offers a range of works in a direct and multi-reflective mode.
Dark from the outside, the gallery space immediately envelops you as you step through the door.Shiny reflective surfaces surround you including a sensational gridded mirror ceiling and gleaming slat wall.The dominant chrome look suggests car dealerships and discount stores.The dark fluorescent lighting along the floor’s edge adds an odd and disquieting tone to the environment.…read more
A visit to British artist Richard Hughesí exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery slowly reveals that all is not what it seems! Hughes, 34 years old, has established a reputation for meticulously crafted replicas of ordinary objects. He likes that the inordinate amount of time he puts into painstakingly recreating the item is invisible.
In the center of the gallery sits the fabricated foundation of a razed house. It evokes a mood of abandonment and loss. Look carefully to discover that in each room of the former home a letter appears shaped by stains and tears in the carpet and flooring. Can you see what it spells out? “The End” with the toilet hole providing the period! …read more
Marquetry master Alison Elizabeth Taylor takes on the potent subject of foreclosure in her third solo show at James Cohan Gallery. Taylor has made a name for herself by bringing the Renaissance craft of marquetry or wood-inlay into the 21st century. A medium originally associated with wealth and luxury, Taylor creates an inherent tension by often choosing bleak or banal subjects for her socially conscious paintings.
Take time to marvel at Taylor’s ability to use the grain and tone of the wood veneer to create highly realistic depictions. In an interviewwith Kurt Andersen on WYNC’s Studio 360, Taylor mentioned there are easily 40 different types of wood veneer in a small work. …read more
In the unique 2-story space of Lehman Maupin Gallery, you can view Korean artist Lee Bul’s latest sculptures from above and below and discover the fascinating complexity of her architecturally inspired works. Suspended from the ceiling and combining stainless steel, aluminum, mirror, wood, glass beads, and more, the striking hard-edged sculptures suggest many forms including buildings, spacecrafts, satellites, and origami. Make sure to look up close at the sculptures and you will be surprised at how intricately crafted they are and the numerous decisions being made per square inch with the selection and application of materials.
American artist Roni Horn follows up her 2009-2010 retrospective Roni Horn aka Roni Horn organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Modernand currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, with the first exhibition in the US devoted solely to her drawings. As large as eight by ten feet, six complex “pigment” drawings from the series called Else are on view for the first time at Hauser and Wirth New York. The power of these works lies not just in their enveloping scale and space but also in Horn’s sensitivity to material and touch and balance between conceptualism and intuition.
Christian Boltanski presents No Man’s Land commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory for it’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, NY’s newest monumental art space.This installation is the second in Boltanski’s ongoing series that began with Personnes that was on view at the Grand Palais in Paris from January-February 2010.
Although the Holocaust is often referred to in Boltanski’s work, he says No Man’s Land “can equally suggest ‘natural’ events such as the recent disaster in Haiti and how these events affect us as both individuals and as a community of human beings.”For many visitors, it’s the tragedy of 9/11 that comes to mind.…read more
Don’t miss Alix Pearlstein’s latest videos Talent (2009) and Finale (2009) on view at On Stellar Rays til this Sunday, May 23rd.Don’t just take my word for it, go to the gallery website and read critics praise in New York Times, The New Yorker, Village Voice, New York Magazine, and more!
As Nate and I experienced when we first saw her work at The Kitchen in 2008, you quickly become drawn in by the familiar yet unusually choreographed human drama played out in an new context: the black-box theater merged with the white cube gallery space.…read more
In Vaga Lume, Valeska Soares’ installation currently on view at Eleven Rivington, thousands of individual light sockets and bulbs are screwed into the gallery ceiling with long beaded chains hanging down almost to the floor. The installation fills the gallery space completely and viewers can walk through pulling the chains to turn the lights on and off. The viewer becomes a performer activating the artwork and creating a continually changing lightscape. Don’t miss the opportunity to travel through the uniquely enveloping installation and take note of your multi-layered response to the shifting environment.
According the gallery press release, Soares describes the physical experience of the Vaga Luma as “almost like being in the middle of a waterfall, looking at constellations in the sky.” The press release also reveals thatVaga Lume in Portuguese refers to a light that is subtle, wandering, vague, and transient.
A poetic quality runs through Soares work. In the spring of 2008, I was walking by Eleven Rivington and glimpsed through the window 2 pillows on the gallery floor. I was surprised by the immediate flood of feelings including love, desire, and loss elicited by the sculptures. What caused my response: the indentations suggestive of someone’s head on the surface of the pillows? the close proximity of the pillows? the vulnerable placement on the floor? I learned that the piece is called Duet and the pillows are hand-carved marble. Mostly importantly, I discovered the vision of Valeska Soares a New York-based Brazilian artist who uses a spare language of minimal and repeated form with a twist of romanticism and theatrical sensibility.
Images: Duet, Un-rest, and Timeline, courtesy Eleven Rivington and ArtSlant.
Check out Soares’ recent show passa tempo at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery to see her ongoing use of found or collected items, for example book pages and foot stools. Consider that the objects bring along their history and are re-cast into new situations which create meaningful sculptures that address complex issues, such as the passing of time, in an intellectual and simultaneously visceral way.
Valeska Soares
Vaga Lume Eleven Rivington- 11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side
until April 10, 2010
Currently there are 3 shows in Chelsea where we see artists pushing materials and forms in new directions with exciting results.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins proposes combining glazed ceramics with fabrics and then combining the ceramics and other hand-made sculptures with furniture.
For 50+ years, Ken Price has been exploring the possibilities of ceramics without heeding the prevailing trends of the art world and today offers hand-painted blobby sculptures that dazzle the eye.
In an “aha” moment in the studio, Jedediah Caesar realized that he was more interested in working with found objects themselves rather than constructing something from them which led him to invent a new sculptural material.
Visit the new PLAN “By Any Means Necessary” to read more about these artists and get a guide to viewing these works in person. The PLAN includes detailed information, links to articles and source materials, more images, and questions for viewing.
In LIVESupport, Nari Ward’s 1st show at Lehman Maupin Gallery, a white ambulance stands as the centerpiece of the show. It’s instantly recognized as a vehicle that offers “life support” and yet you will quickly realize the ambulance is filled with smoke (thanks to a smoke machine running on a cycle). The smoke along with the ambulance’s flashing lights introduces an ominous note. Does the tension between the rescue and sickness aspects of the ambulance reflect the current state of affairs with regard to health care?
Notice that Ward has masked the ambulance’s identifying labels by applying white vinyl over them. The masking encourages you to peer closer at this at once familiar and now newly-made strange vehicle.
Ward pointed out in an interview at Lehman Maupin Gallery with Naomi Beckwith, Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH) that the rest of the exhibition plays with issues of “blackness” in contrast to the whiteness of the ambulance. Ward covers the surfaces of both found and made objects with black stencil ink. He described how he likes what the ink does to the surfaces of the objects and how it makes the viewer slow down and see a familiar object in a new way.
In the Role Playing Drawings, Ward masks or silhouettes parts of the images to create new narratives. Ward found the cards in the trash of an elementary school across the street from his home in Harlem. In the 1960s, a child’s psychological state would be judged on the story they told about the picture. What stories do you imagine as you look at these images? How would your psychological or emotional state be judged?
From the beginning of hiscareer, Ward has been interested in the found object. Born in Jamaica in 1963, Ward came to NY to study art and received his BA from Hunter College (1991) and his MFA from Brooklyn College (1992). Squatting in an apartment building in Harlem, Ward became interested in the debris on the streets of his new neighborhood. He did a residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem, culminating in Amazing Grace which included 300 abandoned strollers he had collected from the streets of Harlem and then installed in an unused firehouse in his neighborhood.
In his first stand-alone video Father and Sons, Ward addresses the complex situation facing African-American police officers dealing with young men of color. It’s filmed at Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network House of Justice, a space Ward said he is enamored with and features a police officer who’s actually retired and the father of the 2 young men in the video. The audio includes the reciting of one’s Miranda Rights (which Ward’s brother, a lawyer, had printed on the back of his business cards) and the supportive words spontaneously spoken by the dad/police officer encouraging his son during filming “you can do this”. By turns tender, tense, and ambiguous, Ward’s video offers a potent and open-ended narrative. What’s your interpretation of it?
As you look at the other works in the exhibition that incorporate a variety of existing objects including store gates, MRIs, Chase construction signs, and church pews, consider how the idea of support - physical, psychological, spiritual, and monetary - connects them all.
Within a few minutes of looking at Meckseper’s sculptures, videos, and photographic works, you’ll notice her ongoing exploration of American consumerism and politics focuses this time on car culture and it’s connection to the oil industry and related domestic and foreign policy decisions. Manipulating found and appropriated objects and images, the artist offers a range of works in a direct and multi-reflective mode.
