catch-up on nyc stuff of note

Benjamin Butler, Leafless Trees, 2008, at ATM

I've liked his stuff on-line for a while, but I think this was the first time I've seen any for real. He had four solid little exercises here, all trees.


Benjamin Butler, Dark Tree, 2008 - many nods to greater artists, mostly Mondrian... this one, Dark Tree, has a bit of Charles Burchfield's radiant pulsation.

Nice to look at the old Burchfield post on Mountain Man's blog from two+ years ago... my comment was "i love him, and Emily Carr. they are like shinto landscapists, every element of the landscape is imbued with spirits and energy."

Laleh Khorramian, at Salon 94 Freemans - another artist whose work I'd previously admired only on-line.... has a time-lapse film of orange peel figures, curling in a tight embrace as they decay. Quietly beautiful and otherworldly, she's constructed a Persian-inspired miniature oasis isolated in the desert under a star-filled sky.

My 1/2006 PainterNYC comment - "i don't hate this at all. it's like a late 60's illustration of a tatooine funeral."


Chrissy Conant, in Sexy Time: A Group Effort, at Morgan Lehman - Wow. She made a rubber cast of herself.... so disturbing... it's like the sickest sex doll. The Chrissy skin is supported by magnets placed in the hands, feet, and head... so you could actually take that down and put it on your floor.

She made a painting also.


Robert Colescott at G.R. N'Namdi - always go to this gallery and always see something good.

Cliff Evans, Empyrean, at Luxe - showstopper of a video, on five(?) vertical screens... only six minutes, I watched it at least three times. Full of collaged moving images... I think he must take all of the photo images from the computer, and then does a kind of stop-motion edit with them... they don't move a lot, just a little bit, mechanically... but it's a total cacophony of images and references, a super-epic commentary on the American now. Movie stars, logos, the military... it's America here and abroad, everywhere, from the internet. The audio is great also, so many muffled sounds... rumbles, helicopters, cameras clicking, singing, birds.

David Ebony was there, he was into it.


Jamisen Ogg, at Hudson Franklin. More exhbition photos. His studio.

Liz-n-Val at Winkleman Gallery... they are the real deal. FAVORITES! UPDATE: Eric Gelber's review of the David Kinast show at Winkleman.

Michael St. John, at Marvelli - Disappointment. Really liked his installation of fourteen small Negroes With Guns paintings last year... inspired by the book, they were all book size... so compact and powerful in the small room. Don't get the point of this new enlarged version.

John Armleder and Haim Steinbach at Nicole Klagsbrun.
Joyce Kim at Thierry Goldberg and Fake Estate.


Anna Mertens, "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" (Sunset, January 24, 1848, Sutter's Mill, Columa, California), 2008, in Making History, at Jeff Bailey - she uses a computer to calculate the star rotation patterns at the dawn or dusk of important dates... and makes quilts. This one shows what the stars looked like the evening gold was discovered in California.

Here is a detail showing the star rotation pattern. Lauren Ross was there... she also liked the Mertens piece.

Regret missing Roger Shimomura at Flomenhaft, Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman, Tetsumi Kudo at Andrea Rosen... others.

more later maybe....

chelsea, june 2007 - some interesting solo shows

Tom Meacham, at Oliver Kamm, through July 13th - these paintings are not really paintings....... the one on the left is some kind of print, maybe an inkjet print, directly onto canvas, and the one one the right is black tape on canvas. There is a table of knives, like a street stand, I'm not sure what that is about. Oliver Kamm is consistently interesting.

Oh, surprise, I just did a search of this blog to find any previous Oliver Kamm mentions here, and it turns out I talked about Tom Meacham's O. Kamm show back in 11/2005. Weird. Looking at those pictures of the 2005 show, on the gallery's website, makes me think that maybe if the 2007 me could travel back in time and see that 2005 show I might like it even more than I did at the time. Maybe I am not getting Tom Meacham fully. Maybe the 2009 me would like this 2007 show more than the 2007 me. I need to spend more time at the next Tom Meacham show, really try to get it, and catch up with myself. If nothing else, this blog is maybe good for me to try to keep track of and figure out what I'm interested in, and why.

Earlier this year I enjoyed the Michael Rodriguez show at Oliver Kamm.


Liz Markus, at ZieherSmith, through July 27th - they're sort of ominous, apocalyptic, tie-dye-ish, rohrshachs... of hippies. Stain painting, poured painting, folded painting (it must be folded at some point, right?)... I see in these rorschachs lots of 50's/60's painting references together with the 60's/70's cultural references, all of which are included together within this Cold War/Vietnam time-frame. Seeing the same hippie face in every rohrshach is too much though.


Alison Fox, at ATM, through July 6th - lots of nice small abstract paintings, hung salon style throughout the space, with some of the gallery walls covered by sheets of cork (not really cork, a cork wallpaper). It seemed like they were full of nods and references, like little tributes to technique, but maybe that is my imagination. I think the cork thing contributed to that.. the idea of putting up postcards of your favorite paintings.


David Noonan, at Foxy Production, through July 6th - The floor was covered with a big mat, not tatami, but something like tatami... smelled good. The subdued palette, smell, and central "screen" sculpture all made me think of Japan stuff... plus one of the images was vaguely like something from a Mifune samurai movie (even thought it wasn't at all). The images are all black and white screenprinted photographs, or maybe film-stills... there was definitely a cinematic feel.

That screen sculpture mentioned above consists of a group of flat cut-out screenprinted figures - like the Clockwork Orange gang, but they also could be mimes, or clowns, or street performers.