Art in Brooklyn is expanding! I’m working on updating the site to carry even more arts coverage by combining my two sites: ArtinBrooklyn.com and ArtinNewYorkCity.com. The volume of posts is going to slow down temporarily during the transition to the new site BUT even greater things are on the way!
Obstacle at Invisible Dog
MAY 14 – JULY 10
OPENING PARTY MAY 14 – 6 to 10 pm
Curated by Steven and William Ladd. This exhibition is part of PLUS ONE CURATION SERIES
Works by: Chris Astley, Carlton DeWoody, Ethan Long, Steven and William, Suzanne Sattler, Chris Dunbar, Antonia Wright, Ruben Millares, Wayne Adams, Paul Bloodgood, Sally French, Allyn Bromley, Stephen Freedman, Deborah Nehmad, Evan Ryer, Michael Joaquin Grey, Project Lab @ PS58, Aaron Padilla, John Silvis, Anne Pearce, Andrew Zuckerman, Jennifer Mills, Robin Kang, Ian Trask. Artists Bios here
Surrounding themselves with people and places they love has always been important to Steven and William Ladd. Their initial encounter with The Invisible Dog was love at first sight. The space brought back childhood fantasies of exploring caves, old buildings, and nature. Buckets and barrels filled with trinkets and trimmings left behind from a defunct belt factory lined the floors. Lucien Zayan, envisioning the spirit of the future art space, commissioned them to utilize these materials and create a chandelier for the ground floor gallery. This commission blossomed into a friendship and opened the doors to a professional collaboration – from curating The Invisible Store to curating their first art show.
Steven and William have chosen “Obstacle” as the theme of the exhibition; born from the idea of an obstacle course – something to challenge the body and demand attention in the present. They approached artists and asked them to investigate the work they were making, and how the work relates to obstacles. The Perfect Storm, by Sally French, deals with the loss of her home during the housing crisis. Chris Astley explores force, pressure and weight with concrete forms. In the case of artists Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares, they literally confront theirs with a running start. Steven and William collaborated with their sister Bee Ladd’s education program at PS 58, Project Lab. They spent two weeks talking about obstacles and making art with over 400 students. Art-education has always been an important way for them to give back to the community and to encourage future artists.
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Jason Bryant: New Work at Like the Spice Gallery
I Confess, Oil on Canvas, 2007. 40" x 60"
Jason Bryant: New Work
March 11th, 2011- April 3rd, 2011
Opening 6:30-9:00pm, Friday March 11
Like the Spice Gallery
224 Roebling Street. Brooklyn, NY 11211
Read more
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Recyclables at Hudson Guild Gallery
Guild Gallery II /Hudson Guild Fulton Center, 119 9th Avenue, NYC
March 10 – May 5, 2011
Meet the Artists Reception / Thursday, March 10 / 1:00 – 2:30 PM
Viewing Hours / Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays / 3:00 – 6:00 PM and by appointment.
Artists /
Denise Adler, Fran Beallor, Michael Berube, Lee Brozgol,
Niccolo Cataldi, Bonnie Epstein, Rubin Gonzalez, Olivia Kaufman,
Peggy Klineman, Erwin List, Rose Mosner, Viviane Rombaldi-Seppey,
Danielle Poletto, John Ros, Sonia Rivero, Anna Walter
Curators / Jim Furlong and Sonia Rivero
Information / 212-760-9837
Arts Programs at Hudson Guild are supported in part by / National Endowment of the Arts, Fund for Creative Communities New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Milton and Sally Avery Foundation and Friends of the Arts.
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Ellen Gallagher: Greasy at Gagosian
Ellen Gallagher: Greasy at Gagosian
555 West 24th Street
By Matthew Farina
Revealing her most personal and least socially assertive work to date, Ellen Gallagher’s large mid-career show Greasy is more seductive than political. The artist’s varied interests including natural history, minimalist abstraction, the Harlem Renaissance, and marine life come together with unexpected results, especially within a series of new translucent collages interspersed throughout the exhibition space.
One thing that viewers will notice, especially since this much of Gallagher’s work hasn’t been seen in New York since her 2005 show DeLuxe at the Whitney, is her less pointed use of social commentary and sarcasm. Her former interest is still certainly there, in titles and in collaged rolling eyeballs viewers may remember from the early 2000’s. The artist makes fewer direct references to racially charged ephemera like Ebony Magazine, ads for hair-straightening or skin-lightening products which consistently seemed high-impact but heavy-handed in her shows. The comment on race in her work generated an inseparable discussion of the topic among the viewing public and critics when commenting on her pieces. Since then the artist has intelligently side-stepped into the shadows of this imagery and the decision has only added to the power of her personal aesthetic. The works in Greasy still connect the dots in the story of her artistry- just into a more ethereal realm.
Gallagher’s show is ambitious and full of work that walks the line between dark imagery and glistening abstraction (some of it actually does glitter). In Bone-Brite (2009) we encounter the most representational work in the show, rendered in the same nocturnal blues and greys that you’ll leave the gallery loving. Bone-Brite recalls the faceted compositional acuity of Romare Bearden while presenting a menacing figure enacting some derisive act onto a skeleton. The artist’s disparate influences and vague socio-historic references, which she also imparts in An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (2008), seem to provide viewers only so much in terms of her intent. Although, to be fair, benefiting from the emotional power of her work, especially in the larger pieces, doesn’t require full understanding of her ideas. The pieces are simply engaging on many levels. As one can inhale and exhale in various depths, Gallagher’s pieces are imbued with the same kind of oscillating flexibility. While you ponder the content, you are entranced by the material – in turn you consider her deftly honed process, and so on.
The star of Gallagher’s show is Morphia (2010). Eight two-sided translucent collage works on paper are presented in the round. The pieces are delicate and milky in appearance and feel lighter and less formal than the looming canvases that fence you into the space. Light and reticent content seeps through the cracks of each work made from ink, varnish, egg tempera and other collaged pieces. The imagery in Morphia is generative and lacy although strangely scientific. You’ll see veiled internal organs, masks and sea creatures that recall the artist’s personal purgatory, Drexciya- the mysterious under-water world she has discussed in many interviews as a “Black Atlantis”. The images in Morphia hover in stormy weather, swallowing the imagery before it emerges in new layers like precipitation. This group of collages adds yet another level of complexity to Gallagher’s recent oeuvre. Thankfully, its odd presence doesn’t turn the exhibit into a one-woman group show.
What really dazzles about Gallagher’s work is her capable range that, in Greasy, unveils the artist’s most personal work to date. An aqueous elasticity can be found in each piece that is tranquil without being warm, and bares the history of a whole story rather than a sequential narrative. The loss of socially or racially charged imagery in most the work serves as a benefit to Gallagher, who seems to be moving away from comment for others and toward a process that is more for herself. The result is a cool glow of ethereal danger that soothes in an equivocal way, just before you feel uneasy.
Ellen Gallagher at Gagosian continues until February 26, 2011.
—
Matthew Farina is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist.
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Triple Canopy Launches Tenth Issue
Triple Canopy collaborates with artists and writers to create innovative, Web-based projects and recently launched “And Yet It Moves,” their tenth issue, featuring works by Nancy Spero, Matt Mullican, and Eve Sussman, among others.
Planetarium, by Matt Mullican
Mullican collaborated with artist and programmer Patrick Smith to create “Planetarium,” a navigable scale model of the solar system. The project deals with the experience and representation of unbounded space, which Mullican has been interested in since he first experimented with digital environments in 1991’s Five into One, a virtual city constructed in accordance with the artist’s personal visual vocabulary and cosmological order.
whiteonwhite, by Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation
Sussman and her collective, the Rufus Corporation, collaborated with programmer Joshua Noble to create the online version of this “algorhithmic noir.” Whiteonwhite tells the story of Mr. Holz, who arrives in City A around 2016. The film employs an algorithm that draws upon a database of more than one thousand video clips, which are continuously edited together according to “tags” embedded into the voiceover, creating a unique experience with each viewing.
Notes in Time, by Nancy Spero with Christopher Lyon
Triple Canopy collaborated with Prestel editor-in-chief Christopher Lyon and programmer Seth Erickson to reanimate seminal artist Nancy Spero’s landmark 1979 work, Notes in Time. Notoriously difficult to exhibit, this 210-foot scroll (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art) is rarely on view. Here, viewers get the chance to engage with the work as the artist intended.
A Forcing of Barriers, by Per-Oskar Leu
“A Forcing of Barriers” is the story of a chance encounter between Arno Breker (1900-1991), Hitler’s “official state sculptor,” and Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), whose work was used to promote the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937. (Many of these works were recently excavated by German authorities and placed on view at the Neues Museum in Berlin.) The project picks up where the Guggenheim’s current “Chaos and Classicism” exhibition leaves off, examining the notion of “political art” through historical documentation and Leu’s own work.
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Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays from Art in Brooklyn. Thanks for your support and interest in following the work of Brooklyn’s artists. We look forward to continuing – and expanding – coverage of the arts in 2011!
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Happy Thanksgiving!
Wishing you, your family and friends a Happy Thanksgiving!
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Save the Date/Call for Artists
Save the Date – INSIGHT Vol. III Release Party
Saturday, October 16 from 7-11pm
F.O.K.U.S. INSIGHT Volume III | Issue 3
Triomph Fitness
540 President Street, Brooklyn NY
Art in Brooklyn will be co-hosting the event, and we’re looking to show work by local artists. To be considered, please submit a jpeg file with image details (size, medium, title) by September 7th to artinbrooklyn@gmail.com
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Lisa Corinne Davis
Pandemic Logistics
Measureable Phantasmagoria
Itemized Pandemonium
Analytical Anarchy
Quizzical Framework
Artist Statement
Stemming from my own experience as an African American woman of mixed heritage, my work has been an exploration of the divisions and relationships between contemporary ethnic groups. Signs, representations, and abstractions reveal themselves in implied geography, cartoonish shapes, exoskeletal forms, spores, cancer cells, flora, fauna, and so on. Size, shape, and color function to shift and ultimately disrupt the viewer’s perceived ability to conclude that a form is fixed and nameable as perhaps an insect larvae, a piece of candy, an environmental contamination, or some other recognizable object. The impulse to identify and label the forms, and to force a system into the visual disorder in order to create a tidy, decisive, pictorial sense, becomes impossible as the viewer gives in to the realization that his or her decision making is a shifting, contingent interpretation of the visual information presented. Ultimately, these paintings reveal the extent to which our labels and fictions create an artificial simplicity, which guards a more complex and meaningful truth.
Website
http://lisacorinnedavis.com/
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Happy Holidays!
It’s been a fantastic year and you’ve helped to make it possible, so thank you!
I’ve gotten married, had my work featured in several exhibits, got a new art studio, revamped my website, started developing a new group of paintings (see one of my latest pieces above), and posted the work of 50 artists at Art in Brooklyn. Thanks for your support and please stay tuned for more exciting events in 2010!
Health and happiness to you and your loved ones in the New Year
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Jessica Baker
Centerpiece
Multiple Leaf Print
Leaf Relief
Pile of Maples
Ginkgo Leaf Circle
Artist Statement
In 2007, while walking home from my studio on a rainy Fall day and looking down at sidewalks covered with leaves, it occurred to me that the damp, resilient surface of a recently fallen leaf might be able to hold the image of a small, circular copper plate I had recently finished etching. Soon afterwards, I began to experiment with printing on fallen leaves collected from the streets and parks around Brooklyn. As a result, I created an initial series of single and multiple leaf print arrangements using circular copper plate etchings and Plexiglas plates in various combinations to print etchings, monotypes and monoprints directly on the leaves. Several of the arrangements contained leaves with no prints on them at all and some I attached to small branches and suspended with fishing wire to create three-dimensional leaf mobiles.
In 2008, I continued collecting leaves, and began to print monotypes on paper, monotypes directly on leaves, and soft ground etchings of leaves on leaves, while continuing to create new leaf arrangements and mobiles. By the Spring of 2009, I started collecting hundreds of Samara seeds produced by budding Maple Trees and used them to create new monotypes.
I am interested in how the use of the leaves and Samara seeds to make prints on paper removes the plants from their usual context and imbues them with a permanence that does not exist in the natural world. I use multiple plates and colors, along with carefully executed arrangements, endeavoring to make intricate, multi-layered images and patterns that transcend the singular identity of the individual leaf or seed. Yet, somehow I am preserving the memory of each plant’s passage through the world, even while interrupting nature’s intent.
I am also interested in the process of how the leaves are transformed into art objects. I use the botanist’s method of drying and flattening the leaves to preserve them, but they are not chemically treated. Interestingly, a similar technique is used by printmakers to dry and flatten dampened paper after printing. Dried plants can last for hundreds of years, but they have a limited life span. Eventually, the leaves I’ve used will decompose, but the decomposition is designed to be an ongoing and evolving feature of the artwork and functions as a metaphor for life as well as for art.
By using a leaf that has fallen from a tree in November or a seed that has fallen from a Maple Tree in May, I endeavor to capture a moment in the growth and life cycle of a tree and to convey its transient beauty. It is perhaps this ongoing transformation through the inexorable passage of time, this mirroring of life, that has the greatest effect on me.
Biography
Jessica Baker lives and works in Brooklyn, where she collects her materials from the streets and parks of Brooklyn, and creates all of her own prints on a table-top etching press in her studio near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her artwork has been presented in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally.
Jessica will create her first installation, Seasonal Fall, opening December 4, 2009 in the window of the Soapbox Gallery in Brookyn. From June – August of 2009, Jessica’s work was featured in the exhibit The Nature of Being curated by the Flanders Art Gallery in Raleigh, NC for the Greenhill Center for the Arts in Greensboro, NC. From January – March of 2009, Jessica’s prints and leaf prints were featured in the exhibition Ancient Echoes in Contemporary Printmaking at the Hofstra University Museum in Long Island, NY. In 2008, Jessica’s mixed media leaf work and circular prints were featured in two solo exhibitions, Leaf Circle Line at the Lifebridge Foundation in Rosendale, NY and Leaf & Circle, at the Prospect Park Audubon Center at the Boathouse in Brooklyn, NY. In 2007 and 2008, her work was exhibited at the Galería Nacional and the Dar(t)do Gallery in San José, Costa Rica, the Flanders Art Gallery in Raleigh, NC, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland’s Gormley Gallery in Baltimore, MD, the George Washington Carver Gallery at the Magnolia Tree Earth Center in Brooklyn, NY, the Monroe Center for the Arts in Hoboken, NJ, the JMS Gallery in Philadelphia, PA and the Arlington Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY. In 2006, Jessica’s work was featured in a traveling exhibition, Four Points of View: Figuration in Printmaking, presented at the Galería Naciona in San José, Costa Rica and the Dutchess Community College’s Washington Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY.
In 2007, Jessica was awarded membership in the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA). In the past five years, Jessica has been awarded three artistic residencies at Weir Farm in CT, Skagway National Historic Site in Alaska, and The David and Julia White Artists’ Colony in Costa Rica. In May 2005, she was awarded an etching fellowship at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Her work has been collected privately and is also in a number of public collections.
http://www.jessicabaker.net
Upcoming Exhibit
Seasonal Fall, will be presented by the Soapbox Gallery at 636 Dean St. between Carlton & Vanderbilt Avenues in Brooklyn. It can be viewed daily from 12 – 10 p.m., December 4 – 17. During the opening reception on Dec. 6 from 4 – 7 p.m., attendees are invited into the gallery for refreshments and an exhibit of additional artwork by Baker, as well as the related sculptural work of Soapbox Gallery founder, Jim Greenfield.
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