Bryan Zanisnik... plus

Bryan Zanisnik, Vivarium, for PLUGGED IN, in Hudson NY - this was the only piece I saw, but fortunately it was one of the two I most wanted to see. Short, looped video of Bryan as a tin-foil merman in a tub, looking clueless and scared, getting watered and inspected by fish-eyed masked doctors. Studying the video of Bryan, with the monitor in a glass tank, I realized that I was acting out the role of the doctor, evaluating the vulnerable Bryan.

Michael Oatman was the second artist I specifically sought out. I could hear his piece fine, but the bright sunlight reflecting off the window prevented me from seeing anything. It sounds good.

Oatman had a great video piece in his big show at the Tang a few years ago, and was recently awarded a Steve Lehman 6 Gold Star Award! Congratulations!!


Ben Butler and Laurel Sucsy - Ben has the current show in the main space at John Davis Gallery... Laurel's show at the same gallery opens in September. My photos didn't turn out so hot, so check out Ben's site.

This is Ben Butler the sculptor, not Benjamin Butler the painter... BBSculptor has a funny story about getting mixed up with BBPainter.

Molecules That Matter

Molecules That Matter, at the Tang, REALLY helps one appreciate the presence and role of a good curator. This is not a knock at the curator of Molecules That Matter, because no curators were involved. The show was co-assembled by a chemistry professor, the Director of the museum, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It's an art and science show, organized around an introduction to ten molecules, each of them represented by big models, so you can learn at a rudimentary level about things like "what is aspirin" and "how it works"... with superficially related art and a lot of visual aid set props and labels sprinkled throughout.

Maybe if you are studying or teaching 8th grade art or science, you might like this show, otherwise... don't go out of your way.

Isooctane - Gas! This molecule is explored through the display of an oil barrel, a gas pump, an Ed Ruscha gas station print, and an edited montage/collection of non-stop movie car chase scenes from various movies. Michael Oatman and Eddo Stern have done similar movie time-tunnel sequence videos, but I don't think this piece is intended as art, rather it's provided as a visual aid for what gas does.

Frank Moore - I generally like Frank Moore, but this is not the most interesting Frank Moore. Doesn't have all of the little things going on, scale shifts, no busy-ness or funky frame. It completely has not registered what molecule this piece was serving.

Jean Shin - This piece is worse than the worst undergrad Tara Donovan fan art. Towers of empty prescription pill bottles stacked on round mirrors, some from the floor and some from the ceiling. I think there is supposed to be some endless column thing happening within the mirrors, but it's not working because when you look up you can see all of the white caps reflected back at you. Internal logic functioning or not, this piece is horrible. I can't believe it's been shown at Sculpture Center, University Museum at Albany, now the Tang, and will travel elsewhere with this show.

Copies of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and some old t-shirts and buttons, on pedestals under plexiglass cubes. I'm forgetting what molecule this was about, sorry. Oh, it was probably the DDT.

Alexis Rockman, Romantic Attachments (2007) - a big painting, like a bodice-ripper romance cover, of an ape-man standing over a freakily constructed naked woman, and he has a torch raised in the air. This is a sublimely ugly painting. It seems like it might be really bad, but there are interesting combinations of paint things happening, like the underside of the girls hair, which is kind of a dark stain of drips, and how the slathered and smeared tree is put together. The sky is poured and stained, and the grass is like palette-knife applied amateur painting class grass. So many weird and backward things happening in this total form and concept PROTO-PAINTING, with the apeman bringing fire to the naked human girl, and the amateur moves.

Here is some good advice from Alexis Rockman on how to get ahead, from an article on Ross Bleckner - "Ross taught me a lot about how to be an artist, both socially and professionally - how to make myself available, how not to alienate anybody."

Fred Tomaselli - an old one, with columns of aspirin embedded under resin. Representing the molecule known as aspirin.

Michael Oatman - Michael Oatman has a big collage in an antique test-tube frame, a piece which might actually be something the Tang still had leftover in storage from his big show there a couple years ago. Yes?

Polyethelyne (plastic) had some tupperware, pink lawn flamingos, and good art by Roxy Paine and Tony Cragg.

Thomas Asmuth - this guy got screwed. His piece is included with the Prozac display... it's a soft sculpture of the Prozac molecule, like a big cuddly caterpillar... but instead of being flopped down and presented as something that is accessible and friendly, with which you can snuggle and seek comfort, it's standing upright, suspended by a cable, on a white pedestal, with a DO NOT TOUCH sign.

This piece is ruined by the presentation, and feels like a case of a relatively unknown artist who is being (felt) forced to make concessions to be included in a museum show. The Tang is SUPER anal about anything possibly being touched or photographed.

Bryan Crockett - three larger-than-life pink marble sculptures of genetically engineered rats, based on real experiments, representing three of the seven deadly sins. An obsese rat, a freakazoid steroid attack pit-rat, and I forget the other one. The marble is cast marble, with details carved or added later.

At least three of the artists in this show (Crockett, Moore, Rockman) were also included in Exit Art's Paradise Now, which I saw in NYC but had also came to the Tang. It's almost like they flipped through the catalogue of that previous art and science show, searching for artists that could be applied to selected molecules. I definitely get the sense that the molecules came first and the applied artists were an afterthought.

it is a very very very small artworld

Fairy Butler and Mountain Man have both posted announcements for Sarah Peters upcoming show at PS122 Gallery. It was a surprise to me that they are probably friends with Sarah, because I moved into her old apartment here in Richmond.

It was really strange meeting Sarah. The landlord showed me the place while she was home and we just said hi, but the next day we ran into each other at Lowes and briefly chatted about the apartment. Later that same day I ran into her again at the supermarket across town and so we laughed and talked a little more, and discovered that we had both used to live in Philadelphia (at different times), and that Sarah had gone to PAFA. I could have said twenty different Academy names but the one I said was "Do you know Carson Fox?" - someone I haven't seen or heard from in more than fifteen years. It turned out that she and Carson were best friends (!!!), AND that the place I would be renting was formerly owned by Carson's mom. Carson had grown up next door. I never would have known any of that if we hadn't run into each other that second time at the supermarket.


Carson will be showing in Richmond at 1708 Gallery in April!

I found that out last time I was in New York and saw one of her pieces at Claire Oliver Gallery. I was at Claire Oliver to see very best buds Eva and Adele's show, and then I saw one of former HUGE crush Carson's pieces, then I saw some of former teacher Bonnie's pieces, then I saw one of Philadelphian Judith Schaecter's pieces. I think I first saw Judith's work more than fifteen years ago, Meatman, at a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of Philadelphia artists; I still remember seeing that piece - a small stained-glass of a man made of meat, boxing. I'm sure PMA curator at the time John Ravenal had something to do with that show, and he is now here in Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Actually, the last time I saw John Ravenal was when I was sitting in front of Scope Miami trying to sell my paintings.


Judith Schaecter will be showing in Richmond at the Visual Arts Center in April!


So I went to the PS122 Gallery's website to see if they had any more images of Sarah's work, I hadn't seen anything since her show at Feigen last year, and I find that they still have up the page for the January show - and one of the artists is Fawn Krieger! I met Fawn at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, she is very very very funny. She does everything, her work is smart and fun and funny and GOOD. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, stories, comedy, computer things, performance - she is un-pigeonhole-able.

Then I check my e-mail today and find that Look, See friend Chris Ashley has mentioned Warren Rohrer on his own blog and that Chris will be showing in Richmond at 1708 Gallery in May, in a six-person show co-curated by Kristin Beal and Peter Baldes. Peter Baldes was one of the faculty members on the unanimous vote NOT to grant me a leave of absence from VCU (otherwise, he's okay).


Chris Ashley will be showing in Richmond at 1708 Gallery in May!

I go to the 1708 Gallery site to see if they say anything about Chris' show and notice that the current show includes a catalogue essay by Michael Oatman. This is the same Michael Oatman whose Saratoga show I wrote about in July (he posted a comment!), and whom both Warren Craghead and Carolyn Zick e-mailed to say they used to know fairly well when they lived in the Albany/Troy area. Now Warren is in VIRGINIA and Carolyn is in Seattle. Did Warren and Carolyn know each other?


Warren Craghead will be showing in Richmond at ADA in March!

Finally, at last week's ADA Gallery opening I noticed some small drawings John had in the back, and they are by one of the artists I enjoyed so much at Scope, Jered Sprecher!


Jered Sprecher will be showing at ADA in October!

Michael Oatman

I saw a big Michael Oatman show at the Tang Museum when I was in Saratoga a couple weeks ago. Do you know Michael Oatman? He's very well-regarded in upstate NY, lives and works in Troy. This show at the Tang is a presentation of work from mostly the past five years, plus some new stuff.

Oatman does a lot of collage work and is concurrently included in Mass Moca's Becoming Animal show with a bunch of his collages. He has some collages at the Tang of very cute birds wearing helmets and armor and a few of warplanes arranged like snowflakes. I also like the one of a train lifting off it's trestle and spinning up into the air. I think I saw that one at an Arts Center of the Capital Region show once.

Oatman was involved in the original Factory Direct show, organized by the Arts Center of the Capital Region's Gina Occhiogrosso, as well as a New Haven follow-up. I'm not sure if he was included in the first as an artist or if he was a co-curator or what, but I know that for the New Haven show he was a participating artist. The Factory Direct shows placed artists in residence with local manufacturing industries.... similar to the Kohler program. Oatman was placed with Tower Optical - a company that makes those coin-operated viewing binoculars you find at sightseeing spots.

A Romance in Optics is the title of that Factory Direct installation/video presented here. Tower Optical made a portable one of those viewing machines for Oatman which he took to Easter Island and set up for tourists to look through. He also asked each person the question "if you could see anything, anytime, anywhere what would you most like to see?". The video is very quiet, just a kind of spooky music and muted voices and ocean, and the answers spin into view on red discs -the time when Jesus Christ lived on Earth, Peter the Great in Moscow, the eruption of Krakatoa, I'd like to see here about 2,000 years ago, I'm happy with the present, the big bang, I'd like to meet Abe Lincoln and see my grandparents. One young woman looks away quickly and says "my friend died when we were seventeen, I'd like to see what her life would have been". The best is a smiling man who points off into the distance and says "I'm going to find the red-tailed tropic bird very soon" and later in the video shows up to say "I've done it! I've seen the red-tailed tropic bird! I'm happy". I liked this video a lot. Finding a good video might be like finding a red-tailed tropic bird.

The photo above is from his 2001 piece Taken, a mugshot video of him confessing to all of the bad, unethical, illegal, immoral things he's ever done. Lots of sighs. A good one is the story of how he left a museum with a paint chip from a Picasso painting. Hey Michael, look at this.

Interview with Michael Oatman. Here are two photos of pieces in his show (photos from previous installations).