Don’t miss these three exhibitions closing soon:

1. Spencer Finch: The Brain — is wider than the Sky –
Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street
Until November 28

All images: The Brain — is wider than the Sky — Installation View. Postmasters Gallery. 2009.

Color, light, memory and perception. What more can you ask from an artist? Spencer Finch offers up an installation of:

• stars (in the form of cans hung by string from the gallery’s ceiling: “The Shield of Achilles (Night Sky over Troy 1184 B.C.) is a three-dimensional, illuminated star map of the night sky as it appeared during the siege of Troy”*), 
• poetry (in the form of melted, lit, and yet-to-be-lit candles: “366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year) is based on the year 1862, Emily Dickinson’s annus mirabilis, when she wrote an amazing 366 poems in 365 days”*)
• and everyday life (“In Paper Moon (Studio Wall at Night) Finch precisely re-creates the shadows cast on his studio wall by exterior streetlights and passing cars. It is a very boring piece and clearly not for everyone.”*)
  *Quotes from gallery’s Press Release.

Edward Burtynsky. Highway #1 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003

2. Edward Burtynsky: Oil
Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, 537 West 24th Street
Until November 28

If you’ve never seen Edward Burtynsky’s work before, it’s a must. The photos here center around the accumulation, storage, use and disuse of oil and they all at once seem familiar and disarming. They offer the beauty of a crime-scene to a forensics expert, but one that exists around the world and one in which we are all culpable. Burtynsky captures the highway arteries running through the Los Angeles sprawl, the wastelands of oil fields in California and Alberta, and decomposing jets, refineries, and automobiles in Arizona and Azerbaijan.

3. Rashaad Newsome: Standards
Ramis Barquet, 532 West 24th Street
Until November 25 (that’s tomorrow folks!)

Feel free to rush by the the collages in the front room –> head straight through the chromed doors to the back where you will find several videos from this Brooklyn-based artist.

This piece below was made from 5000 individual video frames that were enhanced and re-edited to track the hands of artists from various hip hop videos. It is called: The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi).

The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi) from RASHAAD NEWSOME on Vimeo.

You may have seen this show reviewed in Time Out New York by Joseph Wolin. In it he says the ‘technical wizardry adds up to little more than a trite rehearsal of street cred.” Mr. Wolin mistakenly equates the culture of hip hop with the song “Milkshake”, basketball, and diamonds, while calling it out as a subject no longer worthy of attention in the ‘art world’. Though I find most videos containing remixed images of other people’s work a bit boring, this piece hit me like Jay-Z’s “Hard-Knock Life” — I just smiled, moved my hands to the beats, and tried to sing along.