Art Now Journal - 2013 by Patrick Brophy

NOW PATRICK BROPHY

Week 1:

Week 2:

Week 3:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Week 4:

Week 5:

Week 6:

Week 7:

WEEK ONE

JANUARY 19, 2013 CHELSEA AREA OF MANHATTAN

George Adams, 531 W. 26 St., Roy De Forest, A Simple Life: Small-scale paintings from 20002003 Pace Prints, 521 W. 26 St., Selections from the Gallery including work by James Siena, Katia Santibanez, and others Mixed Greens, 531 West 26 St., Color Shift curated by Jordan Tate: Arabella Campbell, Wyat Niehaus, Zachery Dean Norman, Rick Silva, Kate Steciw, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, and Alex Walp,”all artists revisit aspects of Modernism

Gladstone Gallery, 515 W. 24, New Paintings by Carroll Dunham Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 W. 24, Svenja Deininger: One Second Balance Bryce Wolkowiﬁ, 505 W. 24 St., Time is No Longer an Obstacle: Niko Luoma (He lives in Helsinki, Finland.) Jack Shainman, 513 w. 20, ElAnatsui: Pot of Wisdom Bortolami, 520 West 20 St., Daniel Buren

Cheim & Read, 547 W. 25 St., McDermott & McGough: Suspicious Rooms without Music or Atmosphere Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 W. 25 St., William Bailey, David Bates, Jake Berthot, Charles Garabedian, Judy Glantzman, John Lees, Stanley Lewis, Gordon Moor, David Reed, and John Walker

Zwirner, 519 West 19 St., Luc Tuymans Chambers Fine Art, 522 West 19 St., Recent Worms by Feng Mengbo: Not Too Late Zwirner, 525 West 19 St., Francis Alys Petzel, 456 West 18 St., Daniel Buren

Kent Fine Art, 210 Eleventh Avenue, btn 25 and 24 St, Paul Laffoley

Underline Gallery, 238 W. 14 St., Mine: Take What’s Yours

Mary Boone Gallery, 541 W. 24, Keith Sonnier, Drawings (in neon)

45 West Tenth St., meeting with New York Times Art Critic Ken Johnson

Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24 St., Glenn Ligon: Neon

WEEK ONE

JANUARY 19, 2013 CHELSEA AREA OF MANHATTAN

Zwirner, 519 West 19 St., Luc Tuymans Chambers Fine Art, 522 West 19 St., Recent Worms by Feng Mengbo: Not Too Late Zwirner, 525 West 19 St., Francis Alys Petzel, 456 West 18 St., Daniel Buren

Kent Fine Art, 210 Eleventh Avenue, btn 25 and 24 St, Paul Laffoley

Underline Gallery, 238 W. 14 St., Mine: Take What’s Yours

Mary Boone Gallery, 541 W. 24, Keith Sonnier, Drawings (in neon)

45 West Tenth St., meeting with New York Times Art Critic Ken Johnson

Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24 St., Glenn Ligon: Neon

PACE PRINTS 521 W. 26th Street

As a printmaking major I was astounded to finally have the opportunity to visit Pace Prints. I often find myself frequenting their website in search of new artists and influences, and the trip to one of their galleries did not fall short of my expectations. A wide and varying collection of printmakers both old and new occupied the gallery walls, reinforcing printmaking’s main ideal of accessibility. I was astounded to see artists such as Chuck Close, Shepard Fairey, and Yoshimoto Nara all hanging within three feet of one another. The thing which shocked me most about Pace was the overall casual attitude I felt when walking through the gallery. Shelves upon shelves within the gallery contained countless renowned artists such as Harin, Lichtenstein, and James Sienna. The prospect of being able to simply pull one of these prints off the shelves for my own viewing had my heart racing as an art history geek. Of all the work seen at Pace, I was most intrigued by two pieces by contemporary artist Ryan McGinness. I have been exposed to his work several times before in class but this was my first time experiencing his work in person. According to Pace, “His paintings, prints, sculpture and installations incorporate the graphic elements of public signage and corporate logos, as well as images from art history.The fusion of influences establishes McGinness’ own iconographic language as a multi-faceted reflection of contemporary visual culture”. It was fascinating to witness not only the scale of McGinness’ work but also the high level of proficiency. His flat graphic design echoes ideas of visual coding once seen within the work of Andy Warhol and further question the visual weight of every day objects in design. McGinness, much like Warhol, also draws attention to the role of advertising and consum- HIS FLAT GRAPHIC DESIGN ECHOES IDEAS OF VISUAL erism through his intricate use of recogCODING ONCE SEEN WITHIN THE WORK OF ANDY nizable symbols within his work. By blending the flat graphic design quality WARHOL AND FURTHER QUESTIONS THE VISUAL of recognizable objects and the stylistic Rococo-esque curves within the compo- WEIGHT OF EVERY DAY OBJECTS IN DESIGN. sition of Four Cats My Way, McGinness is blurring the lines between high art and the commercial world. To me, printmaking is largely about blurring the lines between mediums and establishing a unique voice in the contemporary art world. McGinness achieves his own contribution to this conversation by translating imagery seen within Four Cats into a freestanding sculpture (Release).

JAMES SIENA James Siena is a master of virtuosic simplicity, creating his images from formulaic configurations of lines, interlocking combs, concentric circles, or other basic forms. The magic of Siena’s work comes from the remarkable blend of patience, exactitude, intuition, and grace with which he executes the ‘visual algorithms’ he devises.” As a math minor, it is interesting to see an artist who works as methodically as Siena. His geometric abstractions are reminiscent of textile patterns yet evoke an elegant and calculated simplicity. Of the three prints we saw at Pace I felt they worked well as a series in terms of their color palette and uniformity. The heavy reliance on line ultimately creates and balances the composition by activating each part of the print in the viewers mind.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY SVENJA DEININGER: ONE SECOND BALANCE Reconciling this push-pull balancing act, the paintings of Svenja Deininger fall within that gray zone between a structured parameter (with its set of rules) and the randomness of improvisation. They are the fruitful etudes of her arduous labor and sneak up on you. Spend some time contemplating the mercurial compositions that bleed into the toothy gaps of canvas to reveal layers of trial and error until the forms coagulate. They’re palimpsests that ran out of room for the next layer, demanding a static dénouement. The colors wax and wane simultaneously fighting for space, hence the subtle tension built into them, an aggregation of a thousand possibilities. These paintings are erasures and deletions of indecision, mishap, and circumstances of untold tribulations in the studio. They are alive in the body as much as the mind. When viewing Deininger’s work I was instantly reminded of two artist: Robert Ryman and Mark Rothko. Much like Ryman, Deininger demonstrated the unique ability to manipulate white on raw canvas in a way which cannot be paralleled by many artists. Deininger varied the amount of white as well as it’s thickness on each canvas to create a rich complexity out of very few means. The varying approaches Deininger used to manipulate her pieces had a very precise way of luring the viewer in and drawing their eye to particular aspects of the work. Small shifts between the raw and painted areas of the canvas, as well as quiet visual cues exist within the work to emphasize a subtle tension. Deininger utilizes techniques such as stitching to create lines within the canvas that seemingly disappear from afar, forcing the viewer to approach and examine the work. These subtle shifts in texture and line elevate Deininger’s abstraction and masterfully latch on to the viewer’s mind. Deininger’s longer vertical pieces with bands of color and fabric echoed the

PACE PRINTS 521 W. 26th Street

compositions of Rothko and gave off a similar aesthetic in my mind. While not as large or moving as Rothko’s color fields, Deininger’s compositions reflect Rothko in their ability to place particular colors next to one another which provoke an emotional response within the viewer. I could not help but feel at ease when confronted with her cool color palette of muted blues and greens. Deininger varies her mark within the composition by having some colors divided by a small yet solid line, while others simply bleed into one another on the canvas creating a gradient. These subtle shifts and variations again show how Deininger’s work while visually simple has many psychological layers of complexity not immediately seen. Deininger showcases her ability to balance a limited composition with a dash of spontaneity. While I am not often the number one proponent of abstraction, I was highly intrigued by Deininger’s work. I felt she displayed a precise understanding of nuance and many of her pieces resonated with a quiet and subtle tension upon closer examination.

LUHRIG AUGUSTINE & MARY BOONE GALLERY KEITH SONNIER This exhibition of early works includes examples from Sonnier’s seminal and internationally acclaimed Ba-O-Ba and Neon Wrapping Incandescent Series. These works were designed in Sonnier’s first New York studio to make use of the floor to wall relationship as well as utilize the reflective environment that working with neon and glass naturally creates. The organic free form of the neon lines in the Neon Wrapping Incandescent Series relate very much to drawing and provide a perfect contrast to the strictly geometric shapes of the Ba-O-Ba works. Sonnier’s focus here is on the experimentation between different light sources and levels, and the energetic quality of the electrical current running through the sculptures.

GLEN LIGON Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce Neon, Glenn Ligon’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and recent conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings, made since the 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Shelley, and Richard Pryor. Since 2005 Ligon has made neons that push his practice into new, unexpected territories while remaining in dialogue with his text paintings. This is the first exhibition that brings together a significant number of these neon works, many of which have never before been exhibited in New York.”

NEON: Abstract Vs. Conceptual It was quite interesting to see two artists utilizing neon as a medium in two completely ways within 100 feet of one another. Bouncing from gallery to gallery created in interesting dynamic as I began to notice trends and correlations between the artists several of the galleries chose to display. This case in particular happened to draw one of the strongest correlations of the day for me in terms of two artists using the same medium for greatly differing means. Contemporary artist Glen Ligon took a conceptual approach to the use of neon with his carefully selected text, where as Sonnier demonstrated a more abstract use of neon with his energetic light sculptures. One with a background in modern art history knows that the use of neon within the art world is not a new occurrence. Countless artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, and Dan Flavin have all used neon within their work which has ranged from minimal to conceptual. However, it is important to note that the work displayed at the Mary Boone Gallery is not contemporary but rather work completed by the artist between the years of 1968-70. At that time, many artists were pushing the boundaries of the art world and abstraction by using materials that weren’t previously considered art. These materials were purposely being used to psychologically evoke certain feelings from the viewer. Sonnier’s work capitalized on these revolutionary trends by using neon to create playful and rhythmically charged light sculptures which echo the abstract line drawings of Kandinsky. The use of color within the neon has the ability to manipulate the gallery walls and floors in a way conventional mediums cannot. This use of color as well as glass in Sonnier’s work reminded me most of the work of minimal artist Dan Flavin who would use bars of colored neon light to manipulate the gallery walls in such a way that the light emanating from the tubes became a work abstract art in their own right. Ultimately, Sonnier is channeling abstract expressionism through the experimentation of light and its different forms. Unlike Sonnier, the work of Glen Ligon IS contemporary; with all works being completed from 2005-2012. When walking around the gallery I was smacked across the face with the correlation between the work of Ligon and conceptual artist Bruce Nauman. Both compositions One Live and Die and Impediment directly echo the neon compositions of 100 Live and Die and My name as though it were written on the moon created by Nauman in the 60s. This not only demonstrates Ligon’s awareness

of neon art which has preceded him, but also creates an interesting conceptual correlation between himself and Nauman. Through text and neon lighting Ligon is exploring issues relating to light and shadow, race, and the nature of language. Work such as Warm Broad Glow confronts the viewer with the phrase ‘negro-sunshine’ in a warm neon light painted black, thus highlighting the social and political complexities of the phrase. This conceptual idea marks a distinct difference between the abstract art of Sonnier and Ligon. Where as Sonnier was more concerned with the physical material and the effect of light, Ligon is interested in answering higher conceptual questions as he transcends the physical object and confronts the viewer’s consciousness. This is a notable trend in contemporary art; using art for a higher purpose as a means to raise questions and view the world differently. Whether discussing the two artists in terms of formal or conceptual qualities, I would favor Ligon in both cases. As a printmaker, I’ve come to appreciate a certain sense sophistication straight black and white can bring to a piece and the use of neon in Ligon’s work is much more aesthetically pleasing to me than the rather colorful work of Sonnier. I also have a predisposed affinity towards artists who use text within their work so my favor again lies with Ligon. I have always been very interested in the conceptual weight behind language and text, and how numerous artists have addressed this theme throughout history. From Jenny Holzer to Robert Montgomery, artists have used text conceptually within their work as a means of dissecting the words we say and read in this age of constant communication. To me, work which combines both the formal qualities of neon and the conceptual qualities of language is far more intriguing than work which simply transforms light into abstract line. Sonnier’s work begins to feel almost dated, and rightfully so, due to its lack of conceptual weight. The contemporary art world is filled with artists, such as Ligon, seeking to provoke the mind of the viewer and answer the more complex questions of life. Sonnier’s work however feels to be stuck in a time in which what mattered most conceptually was defying the norm in terms of presentation and material.

DAVID ZWIRNER FRANCIS ALYS: REEL-UNREEL Belgian-born Francis Alÿs’s multifaceted actions and works in various media occupy a unique position within the contemporary art world. Widely known for his distinct and poetic sensibility towards social and geopolitical issues, the artist has described his practice as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables.” His works, as Mark Godfrey

has observed, are defined by their “fantastical absurdity…their transience or incompletion, their imaginative imagery, and most of all…their enigmatic openness to interpretation.” The artist’s numerous projects have involved pushing a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City, circumnavigating the globe in order to avoid crossing the border between Mexico and the United States, walking through Copenhagen under the influence of a different drug each day for a week, and filming his attempts to penetrate the eye of a tornado. Produced for dOCUMENTA (13), the video REEL-UNREEL (made in collaboration with Ajmal Maiwandi and Julien Devaux) takes its point of departure in the classic street game in which children keep a hoop in continuous motion with the help of a stick. Yet, in Alÿs’s version, the hoop is replaced with a film reel. The camera follows a flock of boys as they excitedly chase the reel down the hills of Kabul, with one boy unrolling the strip of film and leading the way, while another follows him, rewinding it. The title REEL-UNREEL alludes to the real/unreal image of Afghanistan conveyed by the media in the West: how the Afghan way of life, along with its people, has gradually been dehumanized and, after decades of war, turned into a Western fiction. -David Zwirnerv Before I even began to interpret the meaning of Alys’ work, I was amazed most by the sheer experience of the show. Alys’ work not only gives viewers something to look at, but something to interact with, and in many ways become a part of. Spanning four separate rooms the show displayed an extensive and cohesive body of work addressing the artist’s time in Afghanistan. However, the work was not limited to a gallery full of paintings. The rooms combined to create an all encompassing experience for the viewer to absorb. In one room one could see paintings done by the artist relating to censorship in Afghanistan, while the next contained a written list of the artist’s thoughts on the gallery wall. As I began to develop an understanding of the artist’s concept I was then faced with a room containing a television playing a film by the artist, accompanied by a table with a working laptop containing all the artist’s notes and research. To me this was fascinating, entering a gallery and being able to physically thumb through pages upon pages of the artists research and process in developing his work. Not only did this provide a greater insight into the artist’s concept, but it provided a unique experience typically limited to the classroom. As an art student I often become privileged when it comes to interpreting the work of my peers due to constant conversation

as loaded as racism. This again relates to Ken’s earlier statement regarding contemporary art being very much about addressing larger social issues in new ways. Unfortunately there is only so much time in a day and our conversation with Ken had to end, but he left me with a thought which I pondered many days after the conversation. While speaking Ken stated, “art is about all different kinds of consciousness”. I wrestled with this thought, as I considered not only the work I had viewed during the day, but my own work. While one may try to typify the art world by saying art is all about video or painting or installation these; art is and always will be about feeling. Whether it is a classic work of the high renaissance or contemporary video of a young Afghani boy running alongside a reel of film, what matters most is that they make both the artist and viewer feel something. Art, when done right, has the ability to affect one’s consciousness on several levels. While dealers and galleries may always have their preferences in terms of the work they exhibit, art (in any medium) which has the ability to impact the viewer on several levels and address life’s bigger questions which warrants the most attention.

and insight. In the contemporary galley however, little to no information is often provided on the artist’s or work and I am left to my own devices. The ‘grand finale’ so to speak of the show was the film created by Alys’ titled REEL-UNREEL. Outside the entrance to the theater created by the gallery were posters for the viewers, as if attending the next big Hollywood blockbuster. The theater itself provided a unique viewing experience, a dark room with small beds for the audience to lie down and experience Alys’ work depicting a flock of boys as they excitedly chase a film reel down the hills of Kabul, with one boy unrolling the strip of film and leading the way, while another follows him, rewinding it. In many ways this film, along with the others playing outside the theater, was very effective in humanizing the people of Afghanistan. The playful nature of the children drew connections to children of our own culture, thus lifting the veil on the American media’s portrayal of middle eastern culture and civilization.

KEN JOHNSON

“If you’re going to wake the After a long and exciting day gallery hopping around Chelsea it was a true delight to have to opportunity to sit down, enjoy some cookies, and some great conversation with NY Times art critic Ken Johnson. Ken was once a resident the Capital Region, receiving his Master’s in painting at U Albany and writing for Times Union. After answering a brief round of questions regarding our day Ken began to discuss the so called ‘frontier’ of the contemporary art world, and how it is about the mind. The function of art now, according to Johnson, is all based around how we present, criticize, and perceive reality. There has been a push in the art world recently for the artist to address larger social issues. This immediately made me think of the work viewed earlier in the day by Francis Alys dealing with censorship and the perception of middle eastern culture. Clearly in that exhibit Alys was addressing an immense social issue as Ken had mentioned. Following some playful banter regarding the relevance of art history versus art appreciation, Ken turned the conversation on the class asking us what we saw during the day the really struck us as art students. A general consensus was found on the work of Glenn Ligon, whose work with neon text had captivated many of us early in the day. Rather than give us his own opinion on the work, Ken asked us quite bluntly what we thought it was about. After a few missed guesses Ken proceeded to tell us that Ligon is in many ways one of the most celebrated active African American artists and much of his work deals with race, a fact he was surprised none of us had picked up on. Ken cited Ligon’s ‘AMERICA’ sign in which the black paint on top of the neon represents the so called shadow of America, referring to African American culture. Johnson also emphasized that Ligon, as many of us knew first hand, is not the first artist to use neon. Ligon, through his compositions and medium, is very aware of the formal qualities and history of neon. However, Ligon uses the medium not for it’s formal qualities but to address a question

world up you need to do it in a new way.” –– KEN JOHNSON

ART, WHEN DONE RIGHT,

HAS THE ABILITY TO

AFFECT ONE’S

CONSCIOUSNESS

ON SEVERAL LEVELS.

KEN JOHNSON

world up you need to do it in a new way.” –– KEN JOHNSON

ART, WHEN DONE RIGHT,

HAS THE ABILITY TO

AFFECT ONE’S

CONSCIOUSNESS

ON SEVERAL LEVELS.

WEEK TWO JANUARY 28, 2013 UPPER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN

Hans P. Kraus Fine Photographs, 962 Park Avenue at 82 St.- meeting with Dealer, Hans P. Kraus Allan Stone Gallery, 5 East 82 St., Transitions in Art and Design, pay special attention to Antoni Gaudi, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Alphonse Mucha Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79 St., Winter Group Show including work by George Condo, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger, Juan Munoz, John Bock Michael Werner, 4 East 77 btn. Fifth and Madison Ave., 2nd ﬂoor, A.R. Penck: New Paintings (abstract) Tilton Gallery, 8 East 76 St., James Jean: Parallel Lives Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue at 76 St., Brice Marden: Red, Yellow, Blue Hauser and Wirth, 32 East 69 ‘ St., Anj Smith Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, 70 St., Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao Stephenson Gallery, 764 Madison Avenue at 66 St., Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck: A Confectionery History of Contemporary Sculpture by Paul Shore and Nicole Root Adam Baumgold Gallery, 60 East 66’“ St., Locations

WEEK TWO JANUARY 28, 2013 UPPER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN

HANS P. KRAUS FINE PHOTOGRAPHS

“Hans P. Kraus Jr. has been established in New York since 1984 as a dealer in nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs, specialing in the paper negative era which flourished before 1860. The gallery is a member of the Art Dealers association of America, the Private Art Dealer’s Association, and the Association of Internationational Photography Art Dealers. Publications include monographs on early photographers and catalogues under the series title Sun Pictures” – www.sunpictures.com When informed of who we would be meeting on our way down to experience another wonderful day of art in Manhattan I did not know what to expect. I had never heard of Hans Kraus, nor did I have any preconceived notions on art dealers, so I did not know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised upon meeting Kraus to not only be welcomed by such a gracious host, but to have the opportunity to see things I never thought I would view in my lifetime. A consultant for the MET and the leading dealer of 19th century photography, Kraus welcomed us into his elegant gallery to show us a small collection of some of the he deals. Beginning with a series of early prints and photogenic drawings by Henry Fox Talbot, Kraus explained to us the process behind the prints as well as their historical signifigance. While I am by no means an expert on the history of photography, it was very easy to realize that the works I was viewing were historical landmarks of the medium. To have the opportunity to view them so intimately, in a setting where the dealer was more than willing to thoroughly answer any questions was truly the opportunity of a life time. After several detailed explanations on the work of Talbot as well as a refreshing crash course on the history of photography, Kraus was generous enough to share with us a reproduction of The Pencil of Nature. Published in 1844, The Pencil of Nature was the first book sold to contain photographs. Consisting of 24 plates, the book demonstrated the various applications of photography from inventory to historical documentation. Most importantly however, The Pencil of Nature contains the first documented evidence of photography being used a form of expression. Talbot’s open door print within the book clearly suggests that photography was an art form since it’s initial conception. Kraus continued to indulge our curiosity by sharing with us several other early books on photography ranging from Anna Atkin’s British Algea as well as more unique books featuring hand carved covers and painted photographs.

As I left the gallery in awe of all I had just seen and learned, I couldn’t help but think of the current state of photography. In the digital age we live in photography is constantly changing, and it is strange to consider that I have siblings in my own family who don’t know what it means to develop a roll of film. With the influx of digital cameras and social media, there is a disconnect between contemporary photography and the photography exhibited by Kraus. We are inundated daily with photographs every where we turn, and it is a bit surreal to think that it all began less than two centuries ago with Talbot’s experiments. While one without a proper background may look at a photogenic drawing of Talbot’s and fail to see the excitement over a leaf, it is in many ways the proverbial wheel which set photography in motion. It is disparaging to think that my children may never experience or know of film and photography as I have growing up, but luckily I can still take solace in the fact that I was able to see evidence of where this revolutionary new medium began.

SKARSTED GALLERY

RICHARD PRINCE Richard Prince was born in Panama in 1949. He began consolidating his style during the early 1970s, when he began working with photography and found advertising images. He became known for these appropriation works, in which re-photographed and cropped advertisements were displayed on their own or in groups, as if to emphasize the subtle, yet powerful impact of mass media images in shaping contemporary consumer culture. Over time, Prince continued to use appropriated imagery–particularly humorous cartoons and mismatched jokes–that he copied unto large, monochrome canvases. These works evolved to eventually include mostly text based elements that he manipulated in a painterly manner. Within them, medium and text overlap in playful ways, demonstrating the subjective nature of meaning and reflecting his preoccupation with notions of contemporary culture. Prince is also well known for his sculptural work, as well as his famous Nurse Paintings, which take figures from medical romance novels and transform them into striking, mysterious and sometimes gruesome characters. Recent works are also painterly in nature and include abstract figuration elements highly influenced by the works of Willem de Kooning.

HANS P. KRAUS FINE PHOTOGRAPHS

SKARSTED GALLERY

Last year I completed a body of work highly influenced by the use of text in art and had a personal affinity towards the work of Richard Prince. Not only do I admire the formal qualities and ways in which he uses text within his compositions, but the text itself is always particularly interesting. Prince’s Jokes series were always a favorite of mine due to their light hearted and edgy nature; humor in the art world is never a bad thing in my opinion. Once again I was thrilled to be able to see the work of one of my favorite artist’s in an intimate setting. Prince’s My Name combines monochrome painting and printmaking on canvas demonstrating the artist’s versatility as well as his ability to effectively combine imagery and text within a piece. Prince (along with a wide range of artist’s who also used text in their work such as Jenny Holzer, Robert Montgomery, and Barbara Krueger to name a few) uses text within his work to address one of the most conceptually rich topics of our time: language. Through juxtaposition of abstract language and imagery Prince addresses questions of meaning within language. In My Name, the viewer is presented with fragments of appropriated imagery and simple illustration along with the inconspicuous text reading “I never had a penny so I changed my name”. It is natural for the viewer to attempt to find meaning and correlation between the text and imagery within a work. However, the connection between text and image employed by Prince is so subtle that it easily goes undetected, causing the viewer to question the subjective meaning (if any) of the included language. My Name is also a work in which process plays an important influence on the viewer. One can see areas of the canvas which have been thinly covered up, or printed over, thus adding to the work’s overall aesthetic. It is this aesthetic which particularly attracted me, as well as Prince’s ability to willingly incorporate screen printing into his work which I have always considered an incredibly versatile medium for those willing to experiment with it.

GEORGE CONDO George Condo is one of the most influential American artists living today. Born in New Hampshire in 1957, Condo has occupied a prominent position in the art world for close to three decades. Ranging from painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture, his work is informed by the inherited European tradition of art making. Incorporating a hybridization of classical influences, such as Raphael, Goya, Velazquez, Picasso and Manet, his work demonstrates a distinctive style which he coined “Artificial Realism” in the early 80s when he emerged as painter on the New York art scene. This original painterly language has greatly influenced the generation that follows him. Often called “an artist’s artist”, Condo has stood as an example to younger practitioners through his unabashed commitment to his personal vision despite the coming and goings of fads in the art world. Along with Schnabel, Basquiat and Haring, Condo was instrumental in the international revival of painting in the 1980s. Over the decades, his work has consistently surprised and engaged viewers with grotesque and often tradition-conscious paintings. Dismantling and reconfiguring archetypes found throughout our cultural map, from Playboy Bunnies to Queen Elizabeth and from Superman to God, Condo questions and contemplates the underpinnings of our society. His rich pictorial inventions and many “imaginary portraits” straddle the space be-

tween comedy and tragedy, the bizarre and the classically beautiful. Seeing Condo’s work was curious to say the least. As we entered the gallery and I saw the work from a distance I was instantly struck with visions of Picasso’s Ma Jolie. Condo’s Population of Forms mirrored Picasso’s cubist style in terms of composition and warm earth tones. However, upon close examination instead of viewing indistinguishable forms I saw brief fragments of imagery; an eye, a cartoon face, absurd characters resembling Mickey Mouse. Condo demonstrates an indelible skill of fusing the recognizable styles of modern art with contemporary offbeat imagery. Through his own personal vision Condo demonstrates that there is in fact still room in the contemporary art world for not only painting, but painting which heavily borrows from the past. The hidden detail within Condo’s work invites the viewer to come closer and examine the imagery he has carefully buried within the compo sition. There is a thought provoking juxtaposition seen between the style of Condo’s work and the imagery contained with in it. The cartoonish references to pop culture and Disney in a modern art setting could demonstrate Condo’s awareness of the effects of popculture on fine art, as well as an invasion of so called ‘low art’ on ‘high art’. Condo is dismantling and reassembling pieces of contemporary culture within a modern context as a way to draw attention to the driving forces of society. It is also interesting to note that although depicting a strong classical influence it is the most recent on display in the gallery being completed in 2011. I don’t think the gallery could have described Condo’s work better by calling it both ‘bizarre’ and ‘classically beautiful’.

TILTON GALLERY JAMES JEAN Renowned as an illustrator, comic book artist and fashion and jewelry designer, Jean has channeled much of his energy into his painting over the last several years. This new body of work is a fusion of personal and universal themes, realism and mythology. Jean’s work has been influenced by as diverse sources as Chinese scroll painting, Japanese woodblock prints, Northern Renaissance art and Durer etchings, and it evokes the worlds of M.C. Escher, Aubrey Beardsley and Hieronymous Bosch as well as psychedelic artists of the sixties. His work nevertheless is rooted firmly in a contemporary vision that brings to mind Lisa Yuskavage, Neo Rauch, Alexis Rockman and Takashi Murakami, among others. Allegory and realism combine to create an interior world rooted in the present. The core of Jean’s work lies in his obsessive, detailed linear pen and ink drawings that fill countless notebooks and inform virtually all his creative

output. Jean’s larger drawings suggest personal fairy tales that merge with decorative abstraction, whereas his paintings capture individual narrative moments and comment on contemporary life. Even in these, abstract drips of paint or grids of dots overlaid on the image draw the paintings back into an imaginary dream world where nothing is as stable as it appears. This duality is also emphasized in a few paintings that were created as diptychs, pairings of representational rectangular paintings with Wave tondos, more abstract, digitally produced images of crashing waves. The catalogue for Parallel Lives that accompanies this exhibition presents these pairings although each piece may be viewed as an individual work. As Jean states, “These images represent separate realities, but there is a relationship and tension between the images when they are paired together.” It is this underlying tension within Jean’s disparate, parallel worlds that is ultimately the work’s creative impulse.

As an avid comic collector I was familiar with some of Jean’s work before entering the gallery. Jean has illustrated several cover designs for Vertigo comics Fables series which often receive high praise amongst the comic book community. Jean’s covers are often very fantasy oriented with very fine attention paid to his line work and detail. While by no means my favorite comic book artist, he absolutely deserves the recognition he receives within the industry for his ability to tip toe the line between high and low art. While the comic book industry has changed drastically since its conception with many illustrators beginning to be viewed as artists, it is rare to see a comic book artist exhibiting fine art in a Manhattan gallery. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend within the comic industry, and if more illustrators will begin pursuing independent projects in an effort to make a name for themselves in the world the contemporary gallery. As far as Jean’s work on display in the gallery, I would have to describe it as a mixed bag. I thought the sheer breath of his work was incredible; with work ranging from painting to printmaking to sculpture it is very obvious that Jean is a highly trained artist who takes pride in his craft. However, some of his stylistic choices were perplexing to me. For example: Jean had a series of

several 16x16 etchings throughout the gallery which demonstrated his beautifully detail oriented illustration style, yet each of these prints were placed in frames with either a transparent neon blue or orange Plexiglas. While the colors certainly did match the psychedelic color scheme found throughout the work in the gallery, I felt it was too distracted from the actual print and detracted from many of the finer elements in the work. I cannot deny that it is a curious aesthetic decision, but there was no clear reasoning I could decipher behind this choice. His color pallete was another aspect of the show which I couldn’t help but question. While the incorporation of psychedelic colors from the 60s which you would often view under a black light is unique, I felt the colors were so loud and obnoxious that they detracted from the finer complexity within the work. All complaints aside however, there were aspects of Jean’s show which I greatly enjoyed. Located on the second floor of the gallery and spanning the entire wall from floor to ceiling was woodcut titled Pagoda. Consisting of 84 hand carved and colored wood panels Pagoda demonstrates the height Jean’s illustration skills with fantastical composition containing a menagerie of detailed drawings and patterns ranging from a classic HOLGA camera to a pack of wolves. Each illustration seems to blend seamlessly into one another creating an immersive experience that could be examined for hours. One can see a wide range of influences on the artist in this work ranging from Takashi Murakami to Ancient Japanese scroll paintings. As a printmaker I am well aware of the level of craft which goes into endeavors such as this, and to have a woodcut consisting of so many hand carved and intricate panels is no easy task. I was immediately reminded of Karene who would constantly echo, “Make it bigger!” throughout the print studio. The idea of displaying

a woodblock as opposed to the print it produces in a gallery is not new to me, however it was very interesting to see a woodblock which was not only carved but then painted and colored to accentuate the illustration. This simple yet refined idea demonstrates the progressive mind of a printmaker finding new and innovative ways to display work within the gallery. The more I reflect on this piece in particular the less I seem to care about the aspects of the show which I did not enjoy. While not flawless, Jean’s experimental nature and careful attention to detail is admirable and more than enough to ignite a spark in my own brain when it comes to pushing the boundaries of printmaking.

lations. Many of the works in the exhibition have never been seen outside of China and several are new works on view for the first time. Lin Tianmiao is one of only a handful of female artists to have emerged from her generation born in the 1960s in China,” says Asia Society Museum Director and exhibition curator Melissa Chiu. “Her subjects and use of materials evoke domestic female labor and emotional struggles, orienting the works towards feminist interpretations. Yet the western idea of feminism does not necessarily translate in China. This exhibition aims to map Lin’s consistency of vision, allowing us to see how her ideas on physicality have evolved and been transformed. It also provides insight into her artistic development during one of the most important periods of change in the Chinese art world, the 1990s to today.”

“Harsh… very ambiguous”

ASIA SOCIETY

Asia Society is the leading educational organization dedicated to promoting mutual understanding and strengthening partnerships among peoples, leaders and institutions of Asia and the United States in a global context. Across the fields of arts, business, culture, education, and policy, the Society provides insight, generates ideas, and promotes collaboration to address present challenges and create a shared future. Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Asia Society is a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution with headquarters in New York, centers in Hong Kong and Houston, and affiliated offices in Los Angeles, Manila, Sydney, Mumbai, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, and Washington, DC.

LIN TIANMIAO: BOUND UNBOUND Asia Society Museum presents the first major solo exhibition in the United States of leading Chinese artist Lin Tianmiao. Surveying her work since 1995, the exhibition highlights the remarkably consistent focus on the human form that is embodied in her work. Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao comprises a series of installations, sculpture, and two dimensional works that fill Asia Society’s entire Museum space. Included are several large-scale, complex instal-

I was very impressed by the Asia Society over all. This pristine cultural museum provided a very intriguing experience, despite my mixed feelings about the artist on display. Lin Tianmiao’s exhibition Bound/Unbound provided a wide range of the artist’s work which addressed several dual tensions such as: male vs. female, function vs. form, physical vs. psychological. Tianmiao’s work displayed an emphasis on the female body with works containing female mannequins wrapped in thread and cloth. Her work seemed to be very much about her personal journey as a female artist in China, as well as addressing several larger issues. One could say that Tianmiao’s work shows the progress of women in Chinese society in the 90s under the rule of Mao Zedong, yet Tianmiao reveals that not all promises made to women have been fulfilled. I could not help but be reminded of Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei Wei while walking through the gallery due to the works confrontational nature. While much of Tianmiao’s work was captivating to look at, particularly pieces showcasing the technique of ‘thread winding’, I found much of the work hard to decipher and often unsettling to be around. While much of my confusion can be attributed to my lack of knowledge of Chinese culture and history, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by some of the work. For example Tianmiao’s installation ‘Mothers!!!’ required viewers cover their feet and enter an entirely white room, covered from ceiling to floor with fabric, hair, thread, and other media. Within the room were thread and silk sculptures of deformed voluptuous women, often with white and gray hair pouring out of their bodies. While I can guess the work had much to do with the female body, I found just being in the room was unsettling. The harsh white of the room coupled with the almost grotesque figures was a bit too much to handle after a long day of walking around Manhattan. Another work titled “Here? Or There?” created by Tianmiao and her husband in 2002 had me simply writing the word ‘horrifying’ in my notebook. The installation features nine human figures cloaked in or-

“Harsh… very ambiguous”

ASIA SOCIETY

nate outfits (one is entirely covered in black yarn balls, another in windsock-like tubes) while short video clips of a rushing train played sporadically throughout the room. The room, which was only lit by the glow of the monitors playing the video, was very daunting to say the least. Tianmiao’s cloaked figures seemed all but too life like to me, and during the loud and brief intervals in which they were illuminated I felt a sense of terror. While the work was incredibly thought provoking, I again felt myself at a loss due to my own lack of knowledge. Overall however I was very impressed by the Asia Society, as well as the scale and magnitude of Tianmiao’s work. While I did not feel any personal connection to the artist it was fascinating to observe such a complex and personal reflection on Chinese culture and gender.

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY

Adam Baumgold Fine Art, Inc. was established in 1986. The gallery exhibits the work of contemporary and 20th Century artists -- modern masters as well as emerging artists. Adam Baumgold Gallery specializes in and has a large collection of works available by Saul Steinberg. Ten exhibitions have been devoted to this artist’s work including the gallery’s inaugural show of Major Work. The gallery is actively engaged in buying and selling 20th century, postwar and contemporary art including such artists as Grosz, Magritte, Picasso, Steinberg, Ruscha, Murray, Wojnarowicz, Basquiat, Warhol and Richter, among others. Exhibitions of individual artists represented by the gallery are presented on a regular basis along with thematic group shows that include a wide range of artists. Adam Baumgold Gallery presents Locations, a group exhibition of work that explores a sense of place and position. The selected works consider locations distant and near, familiar and imaginary, intimate and vast. The exhibition will include 41 artists working in a broad range of media: Richard Artschwager, Olive Ayhens, Amy Bennett, Elisheva Biernoff, Bette Blank, John Borowicz, Charles Burns, John Button, Adam Dant, Stuart Davis, Elvis Studio, Rafael Ferrer, Michael Flanagan, Renée French, Arnold Friedman, Ewan Gibbs, George Grosz, Richard Haas, Josephine Halvorson, Charles Kanwischer, Alex Katz, Jill Kerwick, Vivienne Koorland, David Korty, Julian LaVerdiere/Paul Myoda, Liz Livensperger, Cyrilla Mozenter, Mairead O’hEocha, Gerhard Rich-

ter, Ed Ruscha, Seth, Eve Sonneman, Alec Soth, Saul Steinberg, Scott Teplin, Robin Tewes, Wayne Thiebaud, Corinne von Lebusa, Chris Ware, and B. Wurtz.

CHRIS WARE In the category of books by rather than about artists, one of the most stunning is Chris Ware’s new graphic novel, ‘BUILDING STORIES’ (Pantheon Books, $50), which elliptically tells the tale of a smart, fatalistic, unnamed young woman who happens to have a prosthetic leg, and of her search for love. As usual, Mr. Ware’s style is a model of compression in both word and picture. Less usual, for the genre as a whole, is the vividness with which he limns his heroine’s intense, if fairly ordinary, inner life, and also the brilliant way he avoids the visual relentlessness that can plague graphic novels. He accomplishes this last feat by spreading his story over “14 distinctively discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets,” as the text on the illustrated box they come in puts it. Varying considerably in size, length and design, these entities offer no clues about sequence. The reader is left to piece together a multistrand narrative whose characters also include other residents of the Chicago brownstone in which the woman lives — an unhappily unmarried couple and the spinster landlady — as well as the building itself. The lack of clear structure, much less traditional linearity, turns reading into an unusually active process. This is a great, easily ownable work of art.” - The New York Times I was pleasantly surprised to enter yet another gallery and see the work of a illustrator on display. I was familiar with Chris Ware’s Building Stories after having the fortunate experience of being able to borrow a friends copy. Consisting of 14 distinctly different books, pamphlets, and posters, Building stories is much more of an experience than it is a typical graphic novel. With no official correct way to read the work, the reader is left to their own devices as they thumb through their beautifully packaged stack of books and attempt to make sense of it all. All parts of the book are beautiful illustrated, featuring Ware’s flat graphic style and fairly subdued color pallete. On display in the Adam Baumgold gallery was a scale paper model of the building in which Ware’s novel ‘Building Stories’ takes place. While it was fascinating to see a realized model of the world in which Ware’s story takes place, it was more fascinating to see this type or work on display in a gallery. Much like James Jean, Ware is an illustrator whose work you wouldn’t find in a gallery setting. While Ware does not necessarily cater to the majority of the comic book community, often illustrating covers and pieces in the New Yorker, I still very much view him as an illustrator rather than a fine artist. This again raises the question as to where illustration fits in

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY

ter, Ed Ruscha, Seth, Eve Sonneman, Alec Soth, Saul Steinberg, Scott Teplin, Robin Tewes, Wayne Thiebaud, Corinne von Lebusa, Chris Ware, and B. Wurtz.

the contemporary art world. Certainly it is not viewed as it was 20 years ago, a mere trade reserved for the consumer market. Here we see illustrations hanging mere inches away from the likes of Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Ricther and can begin to draw a parallel; both work demonstrate a level of craftsmanship and conceptual thinking only seen in the fine art world. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues as illustrators such as Ware and Jean continue to differentiate themselves and make a name for themselves in the contemporary art world.

AMY BENNET Working with common themes such as transition, aging, isolation, and loss, I am interested in the fragility of relationships and people’s awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another. To that end I create miniature 3D models to serve as evolving still lifes from which I paint detailed narrative paintings. Using cardboard, foam, wood, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures, I construct various fictional, scale models. Recent models have included a neighborhood, lake, theater, doctor’s office, church, and numerous domestic interiors. The models become a stage on which I develop narratives. They offer me complete control over lighting, composition, and vantage point to achieve a certain dramatic effect. While working with tiny pieces that often slip frustratingly from my fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and vulnerability of the world I am creating, and this summons empathy for my subject. The clumsy inadequacies of miniatures help me to convey a sense of artifice and distance. I try to paint the scenes in a way that feels like a believable world, but an alternate, fabricated world. The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments meant to elicit specific feelings and to provoke the viewer to consider the moment before or after the one presented in the painting. I am interested in storytelling over time through repeated depictions of the same house or car or person, seasonal changes, and shifting vantage points. Like the disturbing difficulty of trying to put rolls of film in order several years after the pictures have been taken, my aim is for the collective images to suggest a known past that is just beyond reach.”- Amy Bennet

I was incredibly intrigued by Bennet’s painting upon entering the gallery. The incredibly intimate scale of the painting drew me in at first, asking for further examination. Upon viewing I saw a scene filled with loss; a near empty room, an overturned table, bare furniture and walls containing nothing but empty frames. A faceless figure sits in the composition, aimlessly looking towards the ceiling. A sense of motion is conveyed in the blurof the curtains, and the pictured room began to feel cold as “While working with tiny pieces ring I imagined wind whipping through it. There is a very delicate that often slip frustratingly from my presence felt within the work and narrative seemed to play a very intricate role in it’s creation. After doing some quick research on Bennet I found myself fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and enjoying her small painting ten times more. Bennet employs vulnerability of the world I am creating, and a very unique process in which she bases her paintings off of miniature models she creates as reference. Entire houses and this summons empathy for my subject. scenes using train models and cardboard are constructed by the artist as she creates paintings which reflect the small delicate world they are based upon. I was instantly enthralled by this aspect of the work due to my own vices. I am an avid model builder in my free time, and spend much of my nights building my patience as I struggle with countless tiny pieces and miniscule brushes. I particularly connected with the portion of Bennet’s artist statement in which she states, “While working with tiny pieces that often slip frustratingly from my fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and vulnerability of the world I am creating, and this summons empathy for my subject. The clumsy inadequacies of miniatures help me to convey a sense of artifice and distance.”. I admire Bennet’s process and I think the end result is very moving, even without seeing the model which it was based upon. I had toyed with the notion this semester of creating models which I can then base etchings off of, so it was gratifying to see an artist who had used this approach and ended up with such successful work. I hope I can one day see Bennet’s paintings on display alongside her models to gain a better understanding of her process and the degree of correlation between the two.

WEEK THREE FEBRUARY 23, 2013 BROOKLYN AND MID-TOWN MANHATTAN

Studio visit with artist Sharon Louden in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 220 36th st (btn 2 and 3Ave) unit B538 Marlborough Gallery, 40 W. 57 St., Julio Larraz Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57 St., Tacita Dean, Fatigues Lawrence Miller Gallery, 20 W 57 St., Kazuo Sumida, Japanese Photographer Washburn Gallery, 20 W. 57 St., Nicolas Carone Edwynn Houk Gallery, 745 5 Avenue, ValĂŠrie Belin, large format images using layered negatives Mary Boone Gallery, 745 5 Avenue, Peter Saul & Jim Shaw Forum Gallery, 730 5 Avenue, David Mach, Scottish artist MoMA, Inventing Abstraction and Contemporary Galleries 1980-Now

WEEK THREE FEBRUARY 23, 2013 BROOKLYN AND MID-TOWN MANHATTAN

SHARON LOUDEN

Sharon M. Louden graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University, School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Louden’s work is held in major public and private collections including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Sharon Louden’s work has also been written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other publications. She has received a grant from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and has participated in residencies at Tamarind Institute, Urban Glass and Art Omi. Louden’s animations continue to be screened and featured in many film festivals and museums all over the world. Her newest animation, Carrier, premiered in the East Wing Auditorium of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in March, 2011 in a historical program of abstract animation since 1927. Last year, Sharon had a solo exhibition of a major installation work entitled Merge, which consisted of over 250,000 units of aluminum at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, MN, and was on view from October, 2011 through May, 2012. Sharon was commissioned to make a site-specific work for the Weisman Art Museum that is in dialogue with Frank Gehry’s new additions to the Museum. This piece then landed permanently in Oak Hall at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. Sharon has taught for 20 years since graduating from Yale in 1991. Her teaching experience includes studio and professional practice classes to students of all levels in colleges and universities throughout the United States. Colleges and universities at which she has lectured and taught include: Kansas City Art Institute, College of Saint Rose, Massachusetts College of Art and Maryland Institute College of Art. Sharon currently teaches at the National Academy of Art in New York City and most recently, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee this past spring. Louden is also the editor of a peer-reviewed book being published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press entitled, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists. It is expected to be available in early October this year.

embrace the sincerity and beauty in nature

identify a foundation for meaning in your work, and then try to match your intentions

After a quick subway ride to Sunset Park we were met by the incomparable Sharon Louden who welcomed us with open arms into her private studio space. Despite being an incredibly active professional artist for 22 years, Sharon was more than happy to share her time with us as she addressed each of us by name and thoroughly inquired about our current position and future goals. I was happy to hear from Sharon after telling her I was attending graduate school in the fall that she was thrilled because in her opinion (and Lucy’s), graduate school is essential. After a brief round table discussion and formal introductions, Louden was kind enough to give an extensive presentation of her work and career to date. An artist thoroughly inspired by nature, architecture, and linear forms; Louden stressed how important it was to embrace the sincerity and beauty in nature. While some may argue that beauty is over rated in art, Louden’s response is a simple, “I could give a damn”. Louden noted some of influences which ranged from Caravaggio to Phillip Guston. After showing several slides of her early work ranging from representational self portraits to abstract linear forms Louden spoke to what it means to be a ‘good’ artist. In Louden’s opinion, a good artist is a critic, an observer, an objective party, and a vehicle for making work. After my four years of education at the college I could not agree more with her statement. While we are academically trained at Saint Rose in the basic principles of drawing, painting, etc. there is so much more that goes into being an artist and student. Much like Louden said, we are being trained in the art of visual problem solving. Not only do we strive to produce work, but we also strive to absorb it, analyze it, and find it in the monotony of the every day. An interesting debate arose during the conversation in regards to the importance of concept in art making. Currently, and this is no secret, much of the faculty at Picotte is split in terms of the best ways for students to go about art making. Is it best for the student to develop a concept and statement, or is it more important to just start working? As a printmaking major I know I am very much geared towards developing concepts though research and writing thorough statements of intent before ink ever hits the paper. While this works for my mathematical mind, I know it is a constant frustration for others. Lucy argued quite simply that, “Art can’t be critical at every step, then it’s engineering”. Louden provided a fair middle ground to the two schools of thoughts by stating it is important to identify a foundation for meaning in your work, and then try to match your intentions. This is something I agree with wholeheartedly. It is impossible for your art to say something if you don’t have the slightest idea as to what you want it to say, yet at the same time it is important not to limit oneself so much that your work has no room to evolve. Ultimately, Louden not only provided a wonderful presentation on her work but also provided a clear portrait of what it truly means to be an artist. An individual involved in almost every corner of the art world, Louden demonstrated that with hard work and dedication it is more than possible to live and sustain a creative life. Louden showed that one of the most import-

SHARON LOUDEN

embrace the sincerity and beauty in nature

identify a foundation for meaning in your work, and then try to match your intentions

ant phrases to live by is ‘it takes a village’, because she would not have been able to accomplish as much as she has without a strong sense of community and support. While I don’t realistically see myself becoming a professional artist any time soon given my asipirations for graduate school, it was reassuring to see and hear that such a life is possible if you really work for it.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

Founded in 1963, Marlborough New York is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading contemporary art dealers. Initially situated on Madison Avenue and 57th Street, Marlborough relocated in 1971 to its present location, 40 West 57th Street

JULIO LARRAZ The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of recent work by the Cuban born American painter, Julio Larraz, on February 13, 2013. The exhibition will continue through March 16, 2013. This will be Larraz’s fourth exhibition in New York since joining the gallery in 2000. The exhibition will feature approximately 24 large paintings on canvas and 4 watercolors and pastels on paper. Stylistically, Larraz’s work may be characterized by simplicity of touch, dramatic lighting, sensuous colors, exaggerated scale, and a combination of reality and fantasy that is generally tropical in atmosphere. His subjects are often metaphors for such things as isolation, melancholy, the absurdity of power, or political intrigue. His paintings frequently incorporate Greek myths and legends, art history dialogues, and contemporary history. Many of the pieces included in this exhibition embody an overarching characteristic of Larraz’s work: he creates a strong narrative element with latent implications that go beyond what is represented on the canvas. The critic Christofer Finch wrote, “a constant in Larraz’s art is the always ambiguous interaction between man and nature… Larraz has a virtuoso’s ability to conjure up the physical world. Beyond this he takes a poet’s delight in evoking imaginary universes, so that every image seems to take on a special significance in the context of the whole, as if it has been plucked from some epic that has yet to be written.” Born in 1944 in Havana, Cuba, Larraz grew up in a home of cultural and intellectual distinction. His parents ran La Discusión, one of the oldest newspapers in Havana. His father had compiled one of the largest private libraries in the country comprising several hundred thousand volumes on painting, history, philosophy, and literature. When the family emigrated to Miami in 1961, this invaluable collection had to remain behind. When first viewing Larraz’s paintings all I could think was, “These look like scenes from a James Bond film”. Larraz’s vivid and exotic landscapes of predominately tropical locations couldn’t help but remind me of a blockbuster movie surrounding international espionage and intrigue. One painting in particular titled Master Spy depicts a man in a suit looking upwards at an aquarium tank with a shark swimming by; if that doesn’t scream ‘bond vil-

lian’ I don’t know what does. A rich narrative is created in his compositions through their ambiguity, only a brief hint of a presumed larger scene is given sparking the imagination of the viewer. His use of vibrant colors as well as lush landscapes evoke a fantasy like element within the work. While by no means abstract, his representational imagery seems in many ways other-worldly as it shows striking correlations between man and nature. Paintings such as La Pesca de la Langosta and The Angler show figures interacting in some way with one of man’s biggest mysteries: the sea. This subtle interaction between man and nature creates an acute sense of longing, and a desire to know more about our limited scope in regards to the world at large. While nice to look at in many ways, I didn’t see much I found intellectually stimulating in Larraz’s work in terms of concept or process. Many of his paintings, while intriguing in their narrative, came off as very face value to me and I think a large part of that has to do with my generation. In a world run by relentless media outlets it comes as no surprise to me that I associated certain paintings with Hollywood movies, they are something I encounter and I am inadvertently influenced by every day. Perhaps it is my own lack of imagination, or desensitization to the constant stream of images around me, but I kept wanting Larraz’s work to do more to grab my attention.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

For over thirty years, the Marian Goodman Gallery has played an important role in introducing European artists to American audiences and helping to establish a vital dialogue among artists and institutions working internationally. The Marian Goodman Gallery was founded in New York City in late 1977 and opened an exhibition space in Paris in 1995.

TACITA DEAN Fatigues, 2012 are a series of dramatic, large-scale chalk on blackboard drawings, made by Dean over many weeks on the site of a former tax office in Kassel. Dean used the two-story space to create a natural sequence of events within the narrative of the drawings. Beginning on the upper-story with the soaring and infamous mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush and the glacial source of the Kabul River, she used the gravity of the space to show the river descending towards Kabul as the snows melt and the rising water bring the annual floods that are both welcomed and feared.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

Dean is recreating the installation in New York by using the length of the gallery en lieu of the staircase with the mountain range in the North Gallery and the deluge in the South. The drawings mark a return to blackboards after a ten year gap, which, Dean explains, came about when her attempt to make a ‘blind film’ in Afghanistan, directing a local cameraman from afar, came to nothing. It was her chance discovery of the jingoistic poem, ‘Ford o’ Kabul River’ by Rudyard Kipling, about the drowning of British hussars in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, combined with footage of a flash flood in Kabul (from the damaged Afghan film) which led Dean to think about the passage and power of the Kabul River. The title, ‘Fatigues’ is both reference to army uniform and Dean’s state post-Turbine Hall. In the North Gallery Viewing Room, Dean will show her short 16mm film The Friar’s Doodle, 2010. Made originally for the Abbey of Santo Domingo in Silos, Spain, it uses a rostrum camera to film in macro a photocopy of a doodle/drawing given to Dean by a Franciscan friar, Martin Jeffs in the ‘70s when she was a schoolgirl. Full of ducts, cul-de-sacs, stairs, passageways, bulging hearts and crucifixes, the doodle has no exit nor does the film allow the spectator to leave or see the doodle as a whole. It is a film concentrated on a drawing and on a mind. Review- GalleristNY.com Fatigues refers both to military uniform and to the state Dean was in when completing the Tate commission. Dean’s process itself being a spiral, it is no great surprise to learn that she chose to return to chalk, which she hadn’t used for a decade due to an occurrence in the editing room for Film. Utilizing matte glass painting, an old special-effects method from early cinema, Dean made a hyper-realistic painting of Mount Analogue, a mythic mountain described in an eponymous 1950’s French Surrealist novel and said to be ‘…perceived by realizing that one has traveled further in traversing it than one would have by traveling in a straight line, and can only be viewed from a particular point when the sun’s rays hit the earth at a certain angle.’ Another source of the work’s genesis was an attempt by Dean to make a “blind” film of the Hindu Kush mountain region in Afganistan, directing a cameraman from long-distance and then editing the footage herself. The film project failed under unclear circumstances, but some of the drawings are based on its damaged film stock. An unsung hero of this show is tucked (as much as a piece its size can be tucked) behind a column in the back room of the gallery. This almost empty, heartbreakingly hilarious piece has only some faint, erased marks on it, and the words “flash flood” hurriedly jotted in the corner. The image of the mandala is mirrored in Dean’s work both in form (the jetty) and in intent. Seeing that the works at Marian Goodman were made in Kassel for dOCUMENTA 13, the first

Dean’s drawings are about their own demise

ability to execute the use of a medium as fickle and ephemeral as chalk on such a grandiose scale

thing I asked the gallery attendant was: “how is it possible to get these from Germany to NYC without smudging?” The answer: it isn’t possible. The works were indeed smudged in transit, and Dean restored them in the gallery. She does not allow for the works to be treated with fixative. Firstly, as anyone who’s worked with drawing knows, it would change the appearance of the work, possibly destroying it, and even if it didn’t, I suspect Dean would have not allowed it anyway. Like a Buddhist sand mandala, painstakingly made in dust only to be blown away in the end as a sign of life’s own transitory nature, Dean’s drawings are about their own demise, and they would not have the same meaning without it. Standing in stark contrast to the giant drawings is The Friar’s Doodle (2010). Projected onto a small glass screen hovering in the middle of a side room between the two large galleries, this meditative piece comes from a drawing given to Dean when she was a teenager by a Franciscan friar. Having saved it for decades, Dean finally made it the subject of this explorative, intimate portrait, which never looks up from the page and never even zooms out enough to allow us to see the entire page. Instead, it follows the lines and whorls of the monk’s drawing, like the limited perspective of a man in a labyrinth. The only sound in the room is the projector’s purr, as it endlessly loops the 16 mm film. When first entering the gallery I was in awe of the sheer scale of Dean’s work. Stretching the entire height and length of the majority of the gallery walls, Dean’s chalkboard drawings were daunting to stand in front of. I was astounded to see the artists ability to execute the use a medium as fickle and ephemeral as chalk on such a grandiose scale. The sprawling mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush Region in Afghanistan drew multiple parallels in my mind of artists previously seen this semester. Instantly I was reminded of the work on display in the ‘Bi-Polar’ exhibition at Massry. While Dean’s drawings represent an entirely different region of the world, the sprawling mountain ranges drawn in white against the deep black chalk boards and reminiscent of the artic tundra and in many ways reflect similar themes. The work on display

Dean’s drawings are about their own demise

ability to execute the use of a medium as fickle and ephemeral as chalk on such a grandiose scale

in the bi-polar exhibition to me seemed to reflect the beauty and impermanence of the artic region, and in many ways Dean’s work does the same for the Hindu Kush. One can not help but stand in awe of the encompassing scale of the drawings, and the chalk only reinforces the fragile and temporary nature of the region. A subtle hand movement could erase or smudge an entire mountain rage, the same way time will inevitably erase these regions in the artic. I was also reminded of the work of Francis Alys in his REEL-UNREEL show seen a few weeks prior in Chelsea. While the artists have drastically different approaches aesthetically speaking, they are both examining the region of Afghanistan with similar notions. In Alys’ work one can see the undocumented side of life in Afghanistan that the media ignores; the every day lives of the people not much unlike ourselves. Alys is exposing the beauty of a region so popularly demonized in American culture, not unlike the work of Dean. Dean’s sprawling mountain ranges evoke a sense of sublime beauty that one would not typically associate with Afghanistan given the cultural climate of the past decade. Also similar to the work of Alys is Dean’s ability to incorporate both 2D work and video work into a show, a common trend seen among many contemporary artists. While Alys exhibition was largely focused around new media, Dean utilizes an old projector and 16mm film to project an old doodle which can never fully be seen by the viewer in its entirety. The idea of producing a work which can never be fully seen by the viewer is one which I feel is very relevant to contemporary notions. While the task of seeing ‘everything’ has always been an impossible notion matter what decade you were born into, the task becomes even more daunting as time progresses. In an increasingly digital and creative world there are new discoveries and images coming to life by the hour that one individual could never possibly keep up with. Instead, we are left with brief snippets, many of us receiving as much information as we can as quickly as possible whether it be through skimming headlines or browsing pictures on our facebook feeds. Dean in many ways encapsulates this notion in her video projection by providing the viewer with brief moving sections of a drawing they will never fully see.

FORUM GALLERY

FORUM GALLERY celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2010. Founded by Bella Fishko in 1961, Forum Gallery today represents more than thirty contemporary artists and estates. In addition the gallery maintains an important inventory of twentieth-century and contemporary art, with a concentration on American and European modernism and figurative art.

DAVID MACH David Mach was born in Methil, Fife, Scotland in 1956. He studied for 5 years at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, then spent a further three years working for his MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. Since leaving the RCA in 1982 he has lived and worked in London.

Mach has used everyday, recognizable, mass-produced objects in multiples, notably newspapers, magazines, car tires, matches and coat hangers throughout his career. He brings diverse items together in large-scale installations with humor and social comment. The density of the installations is echoed in matchheads where multiple objects make the whole. Thousands of safety matches are glued together so that mainly only the colored heads of the matches are seen. Mach sees the match heads as having three clear lives: the original colored head; the performance of burning it; and the burned head, instantly aged black and white version of the originals. The coathangers are made in a similar way to the matchheads, using traditional sculptural techniques, a figure or object is modeled in clay, molded, cast and then the coathangers are laboriously shaped, fitted and welded round the plastic shape. In these sculptures the hooks form a sort of fuzz that masks the identity of the object which makes it more enticing to look at. The hooks make a ghost out of the object from which they protrude. The collage works grew from a need to show a commissioner how a sculpture might look. It has grown from one small figure cut out to show scale to large scale collages, art works in their own right, using thousands of cut out pieces, which are best described as resembling a still from an epic movie. ‘A National Portrait’ a series of fifteen monumental collages was exhibited at the Millennium Dome, London. As a studio art student who highly values craft in their work I was fairly impressed with Mach’s work. Mach’s delicately crafted sculptures and collages display a high level of proficiency in assembling thousands of small parts. From a recreation of one of Van Gogh’s most famous portraits made out of pin heads, to a collage of playing cards to form the iconic image of Che Guevara’s head, Mach’s show is entirely comprised of his own interpretation of the master study with sculpture and collage. While much of the work was interesting to look at, the show really came off as a one liner to me. Mach’s process is interesting but the idea of using it to recreate iconic works of art by Van Gogh or Warhol falls a bit flat. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the dozens of street artists who often set up camp outside the MET selling their own homemade recreations of the famous works housed in the museum. Recreating such iconic imagery becomes distracting in many ways, detracting from the process and the artist’s true intention. With famous work comes a plethora of preconceived notions about the work which ultimately affects how one views or interprets the recreation. Mach is clearly aware of this however, pointing out the commercial nature of such iconic works by recreating them with com-

FORUM GALLERY

mercial materials. While his concept comes across, I couldn’t help but want more from the show. Mach is clearly a master of his craft but his choice of imagery makes me think he lacks imagination in this particular showing of his work. I would be much more intrigued to see Mach use this same process but with his own unique compositions, and perhaps address a not-so-tried theme unlike commercialization.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART INVENTING ABSTRACTION

In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists—Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay—presented the first abstract pictures to the public.Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork, tracing the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years.

VLADAMIR TATLIN:

The Monument to the Third International After the Russian Revolution, Tatlin was charged with implementing the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s plan for “Monumental Propoganda”, a campaign to remove monuments reflecting the tsarist period from soviet streets and to replace them with new ones informed by the ideas of the incoming regime. When tatlin took over the program, all monuments it had so far produced were figurative sculptures lionizing heroes of the revolution. Believing that the art of the new culture should in fact be new, Tatlin instead proposed an abstract monument: a towering open structure of iron and glass, which would reach a heigh of some 1,300 feet and would straddle the river Neva in its passage through Petrograd. Not only would the tower commemorate the revolution, it was intended to serve as the headquarters of the Third International, or Comintern, the international organization of Communist parties dedicated to promoting world revolution. Each of four internal glass volumes would house an agency of the Comintern, and would revolve at a different speed: the large cube was to hold its legislature, and would make one revolution per year; the pyramid, its executive, revolving once per month; the cylinder, its press bureau revolving once per day; and the half sphere at the top, its radio station, revolving once per hour. The monument was never realized, and is best known through photographs of a wooden model that Tatlin and a group of students built in 1920. The model’s two dynamic centripetal spirals of joined wood put Tatlin’s training as a ship’s carpenter on display. It and other models of the tower were

widely exhibited in the 1920s, even being paraded through Russia’s streets. While none of these early models have been preserved, the reconstruction featured at MoMA, made at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1979, closely follows Tatlin’s specifications. I have always had a personal affinity towards Tatlin’s tower since the moment I learned about it in art history. Tatlin’s grandiose project, while never built, evokes a unique sense of creativity and ingenuity in not only the art but the architectural world. While many debate the actual feasibility of the project, it is hard to argue with such a striking and innovative design. To see the model recreation in person was a real thrill; the scale, the moving parts, and the ability to freely walk around it had me enthralled. The structure is one I know well, having studied it intensely for a series of etchings I completed last year in intaglio. For the longest time my only point of reference for my drawings were whatever pictures I could find of the original model, but to have the opportunity to see it in person shed a new perspective on the structure. While I am not working directly with Tatlin’s tower this semester it has served as a spring board for much of my current work. Viewing Tatlin’s tower really turned me onto the concept of unrealized architecture, and examining structures such as Tatlin’s which were designed but never fully executed. The research has led to incredible discoveries ranging from unrealized works by Frank Llyod Wright to lesser known contemporary architects. It is my hope that by studying these forgotten dreams I can expand my world view on architecture and also find inspiration for my current etchings. As a future stu-

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART INVENTING ABSTRACTION

VLADAMIR TATLIN:

dent of architecture I find it just as important to study failed plans as it is to study successful ones.

CONTEMPORARY GALLERIES

Continuing the historical sequence found on MoMA’s fifth (1880–1940) and fourth (1940–1980) floors, the galleries on the second floor present art of the early 1980s through the present moment, interweaving works in all mediums. Individual galleries focus on particular topics, ranging from specific locales that nourished influential groups of artists to key strategies shared by diverse practitioners of the same generation. Others display a single significant installation or artist’s project.

FRANK GEHRY American architect, exhibition designer and teacher. He qualified at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1954 and attended the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, in 1956–7. After working in various architectural practices, from 1962 he practiced independently in Venice, Los Angeles. His early work focused on the potential of small-scale works to provide a succinct metaphorical statement, as with various exhibition designs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and his designs for the Joseph Magnin Stores at Costa Mesa and San Jose (both 1968), CA. In his major works he was interested more in the manipulation of architectural form than in technical innovation, and he was concerned with the conceptual and spatial content of buildings rather than the tighter demands of the architectural brief. Seeking an ‘open-ended’ approach to architecture, he was influenced by the work of fine artists, but his works of the late 1970s proved that his approach could provide habitable if haphazard buildings, as in the Wagner House (1978), Los Angeles, and his own Gehry House (1979) in Santa Monica, CA . The latter is composed of apparently casually assembled low-cost corrugated metal panels, steel poles and a canopy of wire mesh fencing. This idiosyncratic, industrialized effect, with the minimum of conspicuous expenditure, was also employed in the converted warehousing that he transformed into temporary accommodation for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1983. Influenced by the tradition defined by Colin Rowe in his book Collage City (1978), Gehry demonstrated his mastery of architectural collage in the Law School Building (1981) for Loyola University, Los Angeles, an urban infill with a latent sense of classicism alluding to the place of Roman Law in the school’s curriculum. In other works a single striking image is employed effectively, for example in the California Aerospace Museum (1982), Los Angeles, where a full-scale F-104 jet fighter is transfixed on the entrance façade . Similarly, his design (1986) for the Kobe Fish restaurant in Japan relies on a sculptural representation of a vast fish-like form at the entrance. Many of Gehry’s works include expressionist elements, while his innovative approach to questions of architectural form led to his being associated with Post-modernism. From 1972 he taught at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and at the universities of Harvard and Yale.

Gehry is another vital influence in my work this semester. I was lucky enough to take a trip to Seattle recently where I visited Gehry’s EMP Museum. Calling that building unique would be an understatement, Gehry’s design utilizes his trademark undulating design work and colorful materials to create a unique and inspiring home for music and pop culture in Seattle. While there was only a small model of a house designed by Gehry on display in MoMA it was still interesting to see that same creativity brought to life in a three dimensional form, and also see a working model of his design. While I am personally a huge fan of Gehry’s work and innovative architectural design, many feel differently. On several occasions Gehry’s architectural genius has been met with harsh critiscism citing his iconic designs as wasteful, extravagant, unsustainable, and a gaudy distraction from the dark financial climate. Some have even gone on to say that his architecture is nothing but a winning formula for any corporate entity that desires to be perceived as a global player. Despite this criticism I still admires Gehry’s work because it encapsulates an idea often ignored in the architecture field: expression. While every city does have its unique and notable landmarks in design, most feel very cold and bland as a whole. Not only does Gehry’s work respond to the places they are in but they also bring an energy to a city skyline that is hard to parallel. Gehry maintains the importance of expression and creativity and demonstrates the important role an artist plays in architecture through his work.

dent of architecture I find it just as important to study failed plans as it is to study successful ones.

CONTEMPORARY GALLERIES

WEEK FOUR MARCH 16, 2013 CHELSEA, SOHO AND LOWER EAST SIDE

Elizabeth Dee, 545 West 20 St, Leo Gabin, meeting with Gallery Director, Jayne Drost Johnson

Ludlow 38 (MINI/Goethe-lnstitut Curatorial Residencies), 38 Ludlow St., Adrian Jeftichew, Bumerang

Leo Koenig, 545 West. 23 St., Brandon Lattu: Not Human

KS Art, 34 Orchard St., Robert Moskowitz: Paintings 2012-13

Margaret Thatcher, 539 West 23’“ St., Rainer Gross: Logos and Toons, meeting with artist Rainer Gross

McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard St., Jason Karolak

Chambers Fine Art, 522 West 19 St., Taco Sui: Odes Walter De Maria Earth Room, 141 Wooster St., Iongterm installation by Walter De Maria Ronald Feldman, 31 Mercer St., Jason Salavon: Control Klaus von Nightssagend Gallery, 54 Ludlow St, Sara Ludy

Lesley Heller, 54 Orchard St., Jim Osman: Stack and The New Picture Plane: David Brody, Devin Powers, Tony Robbin, Jered Sprecher, Siebren Versteeg, Laura Watt Simon Preston, 301 Broome St., John Gerrard Feature Gallery, 131 Allen St., Sculpture: Richard Bloes, Jennifer Sirey; Painting: Bobbie Oliver Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, Wolfgang Laib: Without Beginning and Without End

WEEK FOUR MARCH 16, 2013 CHELSEA, SOHO AND LOWER EAST SIDE

Elizabeth Dee, 545 West 20 St, Leo Gabin, meeting with Gallery Director, Jayne Drost Johnson

Ludlow 38 (MINI/Goethe-lnstitut Curatorial Residencies), 38 Ludlow St., Adrian Jeftichew, Bumerang

Leo Koenig, 545 West. 23 St., Brandon Lattu: Not Human

KS Art, 34 Orchard St., Robert Moskowitz: Paintings 2012-13

Margaret Thatcher, 539 West 23’“ St., Rainer Gross: Logos and Toons, meeting with artist Rainer Gross

McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard St., Jason Karolak

ELIZABETH DEE

Elizabeth Dee is an American gallery that represents exhibitions and ideas. The gallery creates joint ventures with artists to manifest cultural productions. Elizabeth Dee also produces exhibitions at major museums and significant publications. Elizabeth Dee was incorporated in 2002 as a home for innovative artists working across media. Over the last decade, our program has resulted in over 100 critically acclaimed exhibitions and pioneering productions by contemporary artists responding to the changing landscape of contemporary art, technology and culture.

LEO GABIN Leo Gabin have worked as a collective since the early 2000’s in a variety of media including video, painting, drawing and sculpture. Leo Gabin teaches as a collective at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, where they received their Fine Art degrees. Leo Gabin take inspiration from the internet’s proliferation of media images, particularly the wealth of information that uncomfortably straddles the private and public realm, and harvest content from this never ending morass. The work and methodology implicitly explores the transience and capriciousness that underpins youth culture. References to sex, violence and celebrity, nestle among a canny social critique that manifests through an aesthetic which combines the influence of the street art they were exposed to as teens with a consciousness of art world trends. Not limiting their practice to one medium Leo Gabin’s approach is indicative of a media savvy generation. Traditional barriers between mediums are broken down as they work across video, digital media, drawing, print, painting and sculpture. Their influences collide and fashion spreads become quasi-expressionist paintings, trashy headlines parade across canvases and ‘It Girls’ appear to mutate into sculptures. Leo Gabin push romantic notions of artistic inspiration aside and create works that use aggregated social media content to provoke the imagination. In doing so, the works that emerge expose the often unsavory nature of the content that our colleagues, friends and teenagers are openly putting online. Leo Gabin, while a singular name, is in fact an artist collective made up of 3 male artists from Belgium. In their work Gabin displays a fascination with American youth culture viewed through the lens of the internet. Currently on display at Elizabeth Dee Gallery are several paintings completed by the collective as well as a video installation containing approximately a half hour worth of short video projects by the artist. Jane Johnson, the gallery director, told us the collective was very interesting in examining people ‘do things for the internet’. Gabin’s paintings

were incredibly reminiscent of the works of Robert Rauschenberg, combining both painting and screen printing techniques. While Rauschenberg often screen printed famous imagery from pop culture into his work (i.e. JFK), Gabin uses stills taken from YouTube seen within their video work. The paintings which rely heavily on layering and a collaborative effort by all three members could best be described as Rauschenberg for the contemporary internet culture. Much of their video work comes from assembling clips and audio collected from internet sites such as YouTube. One video was simply home videos of individuals practicing gang signs, which Gabin then set to classical music. Another compiled hundreds of similar clips in which a girl walks into a room to dance for the camera. To me this video titled Girls Room Dance provided the most weight in terms of concept and execution. The portion of video which Gabin has thoroughly compiled and assembled focuses on a part of the video that the internet audience typically doesn’t pay attention to; the initial moment where the subject walks on screen for their ‘performance’. In many ways this brief second or two which would typically be edited out is incredibly humanizing, seeing each girl walk in to a room in an identical fashion amongst a bland suburban back drop. The song playing in the background, Tell Me Why by M.I.A. is also quiet fitting for the subject matter. In the song the artist repeats the phrase ‘how come people all act the same?’ several times, thus enforcing the uniformity between each snippet of video and the actions of the girls within them. While Leo Gabin’s video work did bring out my own personal disgust with people and internet culture, it also brought up an interesting concept of pre versus post internet culture. These multitudes of images being used and collected by the artist can be obtained by any one at any time due to their sources. Twenty years ago the idea of someone recording a video of themselves dancing, lip syncing, or simply talking for millions of people around the world to see on demand simply wouldn’t make sense. We live in a culture where words such as privacy are becoming extinct. There is an incessant need amongst younger generations to share as much as they can with as many as they can, despite how trite or menial whatever they have to share may be. I can certainly understand Gabin’s fascination with youth culture and the internet, it is a puzzling phenomena to say the least. From YouTube to Facebook to more seedy phone applications such as ‘snapchat’ we are constantly inundated by other peoples personal images and lives. It has gotten to the point where one can easily know everything there is to know about a complete stranger without ever speaking to them. There is a real sense of absurdity to this fact, yet as technology and the internet continue to progress people in general show very little reserve when it comes to what they will and will not share with the world. It is as if everyone is striving all at once for their fifteen minutes of fame by uploading as much

ELIZABETH DEE

and as often as they can. While the internet certainly has its advances, one cannot help but fear for younger generations who will grow up only knowing post internet culture. For me, I can note a very strict divide in my life before and after the internet. Luckily my most formative years were spent with out it, so skills such as basic communication are not lost. However, I cannot say I agree with the growing trends of constant digital communication and over sharing of private information.

LEO KOENIG

Established in 1999, Leo Koenig Inc., New York, has presented emerging, mid-career and established artists for more than a decade. Traditionally recognized for the strength of its sculpture and painting program as well as its support of German and American artists, the gallery showcases a variety of international artists working in a range of media, including film, video, photography and performance. With its continued emphasis on original publications that contribute new scholarship to the discipline of art history, the gallery strives to play an active, supporting role in the community at large.

BRANDON LATTU Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to present “Not Human”, Brandon Lattu’s fourth solo exhibition with the Gallery. “Not Human” centers around two distinct bodies of work, projected slide shows and sculptural photographic reliefs. Both types of work extend Lattu’s ongoing considerations about the current ideological stakes of the photographic image in relation to the archive as well as particular legacies of Modernism, including the readymade and the monochrome.

In the main gallery, two slide shows are separated by a long curtain and projected onto opposite walls. Culled from the artist’s extensive archive of more than 120,000 digital and scanned photographs, “Not Human” (2013) is comprised by a timed sequence of ordered images. Within each frame, one finds the picture of an environment. Each environment includes a billboard, a bus shelter, a store window or some form of display in which the image of a person’s face is incidental. In this progression, no single image bears any relation to its previous image, formally or geographically. Frames are tethered by a very brief overlap between one illuminating and one disappearing face, both of which are situated in the same section of their respective frames; their common feature is position. Visage after visage, the overall sequence limns the digitally and surgically altered apparatus of idealized archetypes. These are constructed images of constructed people that have been presented in public for private adaptation. On the opposite wall, another slide show flickers silently at a different rate. “Smarter Than A Dog, Faster Than Anything” (2013) takes as its starting point a single image, sometimes uncanny and more often banal, from Lattu’s archive. Each image has been run through Google’s image search engine in an effort to find a similar or corresponding match. The yield varies. A stucco wall painted peach near a patch of grass mysteriously attracts wedding images. Flesh attracts flesh. Each originary image repeats momentarily between approximations chosen by the artist revealing cosmologies formed by hit and miss results. The machine, though capable of accessing a greater breadth of images faster than any archive in history, often reveals its not-quite-human status. An encounter with the second body of work on view, “Selected Compositions”, begins in the center gallery and coils into the east gallery. Further developing his “Random Composition” series from 2010, Lattu brings together four separate images from his archives to serve as the material (and conceptual) support for the monochromatic ‘face’ of a geometric sculptural volume that protrudes from the wall. The single color covering the face spills over each edge and fades onto the discrete depictive images that occupy each side, partially obscuring content. This obfuscation at once invites more detailed inspection and acknowledges a co-constructive relationship between pure image and pure color. While these works, like the slide presentations, adhere to a general format, each “Selected Composition” is unique in that it differs in shape, size, image and color according to the artist’s chosen preferences. I found it very coincidental to be viewing Lattu’s work right after Gabin’s given the correlation between the two artists. While their work differed aesthetically both are dealing with post internet culture in their own way. Since the rise of internet culture we are all faced with the question of, “Now that we have all this stuff, what do you we do with it?”. While Gabin’s solution was to compile

LEO KOENIG

and examine videos in search of trends amongst people, Lattu is working with the much more tried concept of the archive. With the help of the internet and the rise of digital photography there is no limit to the amount of visual images we have at our disposal. Lattu presents two different video solutions, one in which he archives all his personal photos in a loop visually connecting each image to the one before it. The images begin to blend seamlessly into one another as they fade on and off the gallery wall, almost becoming hypnotizing. His second video piece I did not find as interesting until I became aware of the process behind it. Google, one of the internets many miracles, has provided an insurmountable amount of search resources for people all over the globe. One of their newest and most unique search engines is one in which instead of typing in a word or phrase to search you can simply upload an image, and Google will scour the internet for similar images. While the idea and technology behind the program is fascinating, it is not without flaws. Often times (as Lattu displays in his second projection) the images Google spits back have very little to do with what was uploaded thus reinforcing that it is infact a machine doing the searching and not a human who could easily distinguish what belongs and what does not. While I personally found Lattu’s first projection more interesting both visually and conceptually, it is interesting to note the non-human aspect behind internet culture. Located in the back rooms of the gallery Lattu offered another solution to his image archive by creating three dimensional sculptures which protruded from the wall. Each sculpture consisted of a three dimensional geometric shape with a solid color on the face which gently bled into photographic images on the surrounding side. At first glace the sculptures had a very illusionistic quality to them, appearing two dimensional from some angles and dimensional from others. The unique sculptures not only activated the surrounding space through their interaction with one another, but they also provided a new way to view Lattu’s archive of images. The curious nature of the sculptures promoted closer examination of not only the form, but also the images on the side of the form, thus drawing more forcing the viewer to pay more attention to the role of digital images in the artist’s work. Overall I felt that Lattu provided several interesting solutions to creatively archiving the millions of mundane images we are inundated with in the digital age.

MARGARET THATCHER

Through its first decade, Thatcher Projects has continued to present a mix of internationally established artists alongside promising young talent. The gallery exhibits a range of mediums with a focus on abstract painting and process. Over time, the exhibition program has broadened to encompass both abstract and figurative idioms, all united by a pivotal attention to concept.

RAINER GROSS Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with New York-based German artist Rainer Gross, Contact Paintings – Logos and Toons. The exhibition brings together Gross’s painterly transformations of

contemporary symbols -- primarily logos, animated Disney characters, and sports team trademarks. In his essay accompanying the exhibition, art historian Michaël Amy observes: “Like (Jasper) Johns’ flags and targets, the images Gross has selected are both flat and man-made…These bold designs with their voluptuous curves or sharp edges and angles, and highly saturated, contrasting colors, were conceived to seize the eye. They are, for this reason, ideal territory for painting to explore. There is an aw-shucks type of admiration for these symbols of the American way embedded in these paintings, but it comes with a twist.” Juxtaposing contemporary symbols with surfaces that evoke a sense of history, Rainer Gross conceives of these paintings from our contemporary global landscape, simultaneously displacing them from any specific moment or period. Gross significantly crops the logos or trademarks. In the painting process a series of water and oil based pigments are pressed together using two separate canvases. They are then gently peeled apart to reveal the look of worn surfaces. The two canvases may be exhibited together, as groups of double logos or exist individually. Rainer Gross was born in Köln, Germany in 1951. He has lived and worked in New York City for 40 years. Thanks again to Lucy’s never ending connections we were fortunate enough to meet with and have an extensive conversation with artist Rainer Gross. An unusually nice man, Gross explained his unique painting process (described above) as well as his history with the medium. It was funny to see Gross talk so casually about his work, even hitting the canvas with his hand when asked how delicate the dried paint pigments were. While I was happy to have the chance to speak with Gross I couldn’t help but feel that his work felt a bit out of place in the contemporary art world. His paintings, while some completed as recently as this year, had a very 1960s feel to them combining stylistic choices of the abstract expressionists and the representational corporate logos and imagery of the pop artists. I felt much of the work was too expected, and as if I had seen dozens of things like it before. While no work of art is ever truly ‘original’ these paintings seemed a bit more underwhelming than most. All that being said, I still enjoyed Gross’ work. Blame it on the consumer culture I was born into but there is something fun and almost comforting to seeing paintings depicting abstractions of beloved Disney characters. While speaking with Gross he gave several pertinent tips about becoming, and more importantly staying a professional artist. Again the debate regarding the best method of working (concept vs. execution) arose to which Gross simply replied, “Worry about doing something, don’t worry about making art”. While simple in nature there is a lot of validity to his statement. Often times there is a pressure both in and out of art school that what you do needs to conform to a certain standard in order to succeed, when the reality is there never is and never will be a perfect formula as to what makes something art. By relieving yourself of that pressure, you open yourself to experimentation in your work that could yield unexpected results. I couldn’t

MARGARET THATCHER

help but be reminded of Karene telling her Screen 1 class when beginning their first project, “you’re not making work that is going to hang in the MET, you’re learning”. I still find myself struggling not to shoot down my own ideas for fear they may not be worthy or capable of being called art. By removing the stigma of making ‘art’ you are more likely to at least produce work which is vital. In order to have any chance of succeeding in the art world, as Gross noted, it is paramount that you are always driven and always doing something. Without this innate drive and ability to create work on your own there is very little room for growth and success.

RONALD FELDMAN

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts was founded in November 1971 at 33 East 74th Street by Ronald and Frayda Feldman. In 1982, after one season with both uptown and downtown exhibition spaces, the gallery consolidated at 31 Mercer Street in SoHo. Since its founding, gallery artists have participated in more than 2,000 national and international exhibitions. The gallery exhibits contemporary painting, sculpture, installations, drawings, prints, and hosts performances.

JASON SALAVON Ronald Feldman Fine Arts is pleased to present new work by Jason Salavon. Using software of his own design, Salavon transforms masses of public, communally generated data to reveal previously unimagined images. Salavon’s newest work is concerned with the tools and toys that allow us to model and quantify information and simultaneously provide a platform for seductive, but dehumanizing, abstractions. Control, Salavon’s new solo exhibition, is divided between the south and north gallery. The south gallery features two large-scale installations, from a series entitled A Seamlessness Between Things (2013) incorporating ten real-time video projections of synthesized data. The viewer of the projections, respectfully titled Index and Parametric Activity Center, is invited to interact with control devices inset into four handcrafted tables. All of the controls, pushbuttons, knobs, and joysticks are functional and manipulate the projected imagery, but not all relationships between them are transparent. Salavon highlights an increasing “game-ification” of contemporary life as evidenced by ubiquitous phenomena like online social networks and smart phones. In the north gallery, the artist explores digital interconnectedness, how many steps it takes to get from “bridge building” to “Kim Kardashian” on Wikipedia, and the way this hidden network has become an intrinsic part of our everyday environment. He expands his research to include <Color> Wheel, (2012) a c-print composed of image data returned by web searches for different color names from the tertiary ROYGBV color wheel; Good and Evil ‘12, (2012) a diptych consisting of pictures gathered through web image searches for the 100 most positive and negative words in the English language; and Last Stop, Widgetville, (2012) a photograph of a 1973 Fisher Price Activity Center which was an impetus for the larger real-time installation works.

I think the first word that comes to mind when reflecting on Salavon’s show would be: fun. There is something refreshing about walking into a gallery and being able to touch and interact with the work, especially after 4 years of walking through countless galleries. A prime example of my digital generation, I grew up surrounded by buttons, screens and remote controls. I’ll never forget the day my parents finally caved and bought me my first Nintendo. To me and many of my age group there is a familiar comfort brought about by interacting with screens. The first room of Salavon’s show is fueled by this familiar comfort with interactive projectors running on every wall. Throughout the gallery were several tables littered with buttons and knobs galore, makeshift control panels for the surrounding projections. Half the fun lied in deciphering which set of controls matched up with which screen, and what exactly they did (if anything). In may ways Salavon’s video projections are much like the video games and television sets they resemble, but rather than entertaining the masses they are commenting on the ‘game-ification’ of every day life. While growng up I used to associate pressing buttons with playing a game or turning on the TV, pressing a button is now ubiquitous with nearly every action. Paying bills, cooking dinner, writing this paper, can all be done with a press or presses of a button. One could even say that contemporary life is just a long series of pushing buttons which yield different results, much like the work displayed by Salavon. In the second room of the gallery Salavon displayed some 2D work which was very reminiscent of the archival work seen by Brandon Lattu earlier in the day. Much like Lattu whose primary means for assembling his image collections come from a google search engine, Salavon also uses various internet search engines to compile images in his 2D work. Salavon’s 2D work again speaks to the overwhelming effect the internet has had

RONALD FELDMAN

on contemporary culture, as well as draw attention to the inhuman aspects of the internet search engine. Both Salavon and Lattu demonstrate that the search engine and the results it yields have inadvertently become an inherent aspect of our every day environment. In contrast to this realization Salavon provides us with his photograph Last Stop, Widgetville, a larger than life photographic print of a Fisher Price toy from the 1970s. To me this was the most distressing aspect of the show as it very clearly shouts at the viewer, “look at how far we’ve come”. While the photograph of the simple children’s toy may not elicit much of a response when viewed alone, after walking through two large rooms filled with computer screens and search engine histories one cannot help but be aware of the overwhelming effect the digital age has had on contemporary life. The toy is just generic enough to evoke feelings of nostalgia from anyone born before the internet, a time when buttons were reserved for play things. In this piece the show comes full circle as it shows the “game-ification” of contemporary life, past and present.

LUDLOW 38 MINI/GOETHE INSTITUT

Ludlow 38 is the downtown satellite for contemporary art of the Goethe-Institut New York. The Goethe-Institut New York organizes and supports a broad spectrum of cultural events that present German culture and promote international cultural exchange. Ludlow 38 opened on the Lower East Side in February 2008.

ADRIAN JEFTICHEW MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 is pleased to present Adrian Jeftichew’s first exhibition in the United States. Adrian Jeftichew displays a personality conflict. He is torn between the will to establish a strong personal brand as an artist of his own and the emergence of a superficially imposed branding from the art world’s perception of himself as exotic. In his very first show at La Chaussette in Brussels, Jeftichew chose to express himself in a ‘natural’ way, art thus functioning as a catalyst for emotions, originality, and personality. As this was perceived as ‘outsiderish’, he went on to create more formalist paintings, which he hoped would earn him critical acclaim. During the installation of his second exhibition at Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt Jeftichew realized that these paintings still bore too many traces of his own character. Thus, in a radical gesture, he wallpapered over the whole show, covering all of the paintings on view. His third exhibition at Autocenter in Berlin used personalized imagery more consciously and more precisely, in an attempt to reflect on his own situation as an artist and the institutionalization of understandable, ‘easier’ semiotics. Jeftichew further explored this theme in his most recent exhibition at TENT Rotterdam, which primarily focused on questioning interpersonal relations and art networks. Adrian Jeftichew’s exhibition at Ludlow 38 will display a wide range of

media associated with the early to mid-1990s, Russia, Gilles de Rais, and hair combing styles, as well as attempts to flatten out or subvert these overloaded references with conceptual ideas, abstract notions, or universal principles. Materials that represent the categorization of inherited social dispositions will be confronted with tropes that legitimize self-expression. After four years of art school and numerous trips to galleries around the world I often times think there is little I can see that can shock me, yet Adrian Jeftichew proved me wrong. To say I did not enjoy this show would be an understatement; I could hardly make sense of a single ‘work’ on display. When first entering the closet sized gallery located in the heart of the bowery I wasn’t sure if the space was still undergoing installation, or if I had somehow slipped into a bad nightmare. Random objects littered the gallery walls and floor from loose clumps of hair, to full bowls of what appeared to be some sort of onion soup. I had difficulty even distinguishing what was to be considered art and what may just have been trash left over from someone walking through the gallery. To add to the confusion whoever was in charge of curating the show felt the best way to appropriately label each piece was with a post it note, the reason for which is beyond me. In the back room of the gallery there was a cardboard box painted yellow with the words taxi, accompanied by a half deflated balloon with a cat face scribbled on it. To say the least, I hardly understood anything going on in this show. While I typically am not opposed to conceptual art and I understand perfect craft and traditional techniques are seldom found in the contemporary art world, this show seemed to be more than strange in its execution. While the gallery employee informed us that the show dealt with concepts of branding, the only hint I could find regarding this was a sticker of an obscure snowboard company that few would recognize. Even upon further research on the artist and gallery website, the show description may have well have been written in another language. The ideas described as being expressed such

LUDLOW 38 MINI/GOETHE INSTITUT

as “the categorization of social dispositions” seems to be a broad of topic as any which makes me question the overall validity and message behind the work. The aspect which astounded me most was learning that much like artist Leo Gabin, Jeftichew is in fact a collective of three artists posing as one. While I can understand and accept that there will always be art which I don’t fully grasp or see the merit of, it baffles me that not one but three individuals worked together to create the ideas and work on display at Ludlow 38. While I do not know the specific extent of their collaboration, it is very strange to think that three individuals could come into agreement on this show being a good idea. My personal disagreements with the show aside, I did find it interesting to find another artist who is infact three artists operating as a collective twice in one day. While the concept of artist collectives is not necessarily new it would be interesting to find out if this is in fact a growing trend in the contemporary art world. Given the digital nature of contemporary life and the current rate of communication it would not be hard to imagine seeing a surge in this trend. Three artists could theoretically work together and create an entire show without ever being in the same room if they so desired. While I personally cannot see myself working collaboratively with others under a singular name, it is an interesting concept which questions the role of the individual in art making. While many professional artists develop their own concepts, they often have teams of individuals which they employ to actually produce and execute their vision. This could be deemed a collective in a way; many minds working towards one goal. The anonymity behind the collective is also an interesting concept, in which the viewer knows that the artist they are viewing is actually

three people, but they are given little indication of who those people may be. I feel this causes the viewer to pay more attention to the work and the concept behind it, rather than pay mind to a name they may recognize. I could see the collective being a vehicle in which big name artists such as Hirst or Koons could escape their reputations and try something new or unexpected. While I did not necessarily find anything I felt worth while in the work of Jeftichew did expand my mind to the idea and role of the collective in the contemporary art world.

I can accept that there will always be art which I don’t fully grasp or see the merit of, but

it baffles me that not one, but

three individuals worked together to create the ideas and work on display at Ludlow 38.

I can accept that there will always be art which I don’t fully grasp or see the merit of, but

it baffles me that not one, but

three individuals worked together to create the ideas and work on display at Ludlow 38.

WEEK FIVE MARCH 30, 2013 QUEENS

Museum of the Moving Image, 36-O1 35th Ave Astoria, NY 11106, Installation by Evan Roth: A Tribute to Heather, a 50 ft. lobby wall; Behind the Scene, exhibition on producing, promoting, and presenting films Fisher Landau Center for Art, 38-27 30 St, Long Island City, New York, Nancy Dwyer MoMA PS1, Jackson Ave. at the intersection of 46th Ave., Long Island City, NY 11101 Confettisystem: 100 arrangements Jef Elrod: Nobody Sees Like Us Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love among the Junk Ed Atkins: New Picture of Common Objects Meta haven: Islands in the Clouds Socrates Sculpture Park, 3205 Vernon Blvd, Astoria, NY 11102 Emerging Artists: Jarrod Beck, Melissa Calderon, Brent Everett Dickinson, Sarah Dornner, Tamar Ettun, Cui Fei, Jessica Feldman, Ben Hall, Charles Harlan, Hugh Hayden, Chang-Jin Lee, Fernando Mastrangelo, Bundith Phunsombatlert, Jeff Williams, Seldon Yuan The Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Rd., Long Island City, NY 11106, Meeting with: Rachel Krumpler

WEEK FIVE MARCH 30, 2013 QUEENS

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Museum of the Moving Image advances the public understanding and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media. It does so by collecting, preserving, and providing access to moving-image related artifacts, screening significant films and other moving-image works, presenting exhibitions of artifacts, artworks, and interactive experiences, and offering educational and interpretive programs to students, teachers, and the general public. I can easily say that the Museum of the Moving Image is one of my new favorite places, let alone museums. A true child of the 90s, I was raised on video games and pop culture. Walking into a museum filled with memorabilia from my favorite childhood movies as well as classic and hard to come by arcade cabinets was like a dream come true. Amongst the museums collection were costume and set designs from movies such as Star Wars, Muppets Take Manhattan, and Mrs. Doubtfire. As if this collection of vintage movie memorable wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough for a film fanatic such as myself to gawk at, the museum also housed a complete collection of the original action figures released in conjunction with Star Wars in 1977. Aside from being a movie buff, I am also a full fledged geek with my own staggering collection of Star Wars action figures and memorabilia. While to many the collection in the museum may just be a case filled with all toys, a true collector knows that the value of those little pieces of plastic can be valued in the millions when combined. While Star Wars may in fact be just a movie, it undoubtedly changed the world of cinema and collectibles for all time. All Star Wars obsessions aside, it was also interesting to see a recreation of an old school video arcade recreated within the museum. Each arcade cabinet was fully operational and encouraged viewer interaction, highlighting some of the most pivotal games to innovate the genre. While 10 or 20 years ago one may have never cited video games as works of art, I have noticed an increasing trend amongst galleries who are now paying attention to the medium as a new art form. A recent trip the Seattle Art Museum featured a specially curated show titled The Art of Video Games which displayed a range of both games and concept art from the 1970s to today. MoMA has also recently bought rights to iconic games such as Pac-Man to now make a part of

their permanent collection. While I no doubt see debates arising in terms of the validity of this increasing trend, it is nice to see video games getting their due for the time being. While often dismissed, many contemporary video games spend years in development under the direction of both artists and designers alike. While some cater exclusively to the demands of the market, every so often a video game comes forth which defies the industry and receives praise for its sheer beauty. There has also been increasing support for independent game studios who often create games which are increasingly driven by concept and artistic direction. While the Museum of Moving Image may not be calling these arcade games works of fine art, they are at least drawing attention to a potential medium in the contemporary art world. On the third floor of the gallery there was an extensive collection detailing the invention of the moving image starting with early toys such as the zoetrope all the way up to high definition cameras used to film movies today. It was astonishing to see how much film has progressed in the last hundred years and how such a complex idea is now accessible to virtually anyone who can press a button. Within the exhibit was an interactive stop motion display in which I was able to create my own stop motion film an email it to myself instantly, another miracle of the technological age. From soundboards to control rooms the museum provided a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scene of all our favorite movies and television shows. Overall I felt the museum was a welcome break from the contemporary gallery scene, providing an intriguing and interactive look at the history of the amazing medium which is film.

EVAN ROTH Artist Evan Roth (b. 1978) reappropriates public space, popular culture, and digital techniques tcreate surprising and illuminating works both on and off the Internet. A Tribute to Heather consists of ten new entries in his ongoing series, One Gif Compositions. For these works, Roth embeds a single animated GIF in a website hundreds of times to produce a rich tapestry of color and motion. The URL of each Composition serves as its title, describing the repeated animation and the background color. Because file load times vary every time a One Gif Composition website is accessed, each viewing is unique. The animations in A Tribute to Heather were sourced from Heathers Animations, a sprawling hand-coded archive of 90s-era animated GIFs and background images operated by its elusive namesake, Heather. Founded in 1999, the site maintains the ethos of the early web, eschewing author attribution and copyright concerns to offer a wandering taxonomy of thousands of downloadable images. On display in the entrance l obby of the Museum of the Moving Image Rothâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 50 foot video installation is comprised of 10 individual GIFs, each exhibited

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

for a full day on a two week cycle. On the day we happened to visit there was a projected GIF of the name ‘Heather’ repeated so many times it became nearly indistinguishable amongst the sea of letters. The golden letters forms undulated in a precise pattern along the museum wall creating a sense of motion as you walked by. Both the typeface and motion of the repeated name was very reminiscent of early 90s flash websites created during the early years of the internet. Roth’s work evokes a sense of nostalgia for those who grew up during the early age of the internet and also serves as a reminder for the role the internet now plays in contemporary art. It is also interesting to note that one can never see Roth’s video work in its entirety. While one could easily come back every day during the cycle to see the different GIFs being animated, due to the often times inconsistent nature of the internet each GIF loads at a different rate each day, creating subtle variations in the speed of the work. While these loading speeds may be indistinguishable to the human eye they do exist, thus reinforcing the digital nature of the work.

FISHER LANDAU CENTER FOR ART

Housed in a former parachute harness factory, the 25,000 square foot museum was designed by Max Gordon in association with Bill Katz and is devoted to the exhibition and study of the contemporary art collection of Emily Fisher Landau. The core of the 1,500 work collection spans 1960 to the present and contains key works by artists who have shaped the most significant art of the last 50 years, including Richard Artschwager, Donald Baechler, John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Neil Jenney, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Mark Tansey, and Cy Twombly. Emily Fisher Landau’s insightful selection of works by contemporary masters, many of which she bought from the artists early in their careers, is reflected in exhibitions presented at the Fisher Landau Center for Art. Her ongoing commitment to emerging artists extends to the annual presentation of the Columbia University School of Visual Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition.

NANCY DWYER The Fisher Landau Center for Art is pleased to present an exhibition exploring a wide range of Nancy Dwyer’s artwork in two and three dimensions, created over the last 30 years. Known as a founding member of the Pictures Generation, coined after the seminal “Pictures” exhibition in 1977 at Artists Space, Dwyer has refined a conceptual practice that questions the way media infiltrates our daily lives through the icons of language, gesture and implied meaning. Installed throughout the public spaces of the Center, the survey offers the viewer a sequential experience beginning at the outdoor entrance, leading through the lobby and continuing up the stairwell to the 3rd floor exhibition space.

Ken Johnson, NY Times Review Most of the works in this retrospective embody single socially charged words like “killer” and “body” fabricated by industrial methods, and date from more than a decade ago. The exhibition as a whole takes us back to the era of big hair and shoulders, which was when Ms. Dwyer enjoyed much visibility in the New York art world as a member of the Pictures Generation. Her paintings on boxy canvases fusing influences of Ed Ruscha, Kay Rosen and Jack Goldstein prove she is better in three dimensions than in two. But many of Ms. Dwyer’s sculptures hold up nicely as punchy condensations of the verbal, the visual and political commentary. “Food” spelled by galvanized garbage cans, and “Lie,” made of letters clad in faux-marble laminate to a society of waste and mendacity. An eight foot tall nylon balloon spelling “ego” is perfect: a inflated sculpture representing a pandemic pathology in today’s culture. I was instantly reminded of works by many artist dealing with text such as Holzer, Krueger, and Ruscha when looking at Dwyer’s work. Relying heavily on word play and inventive use of text Dwyer thoroughly explores the conceptual weight of text and language in the art world. I was particularly intrigued by her sculptural pieces which provided much more substances than any work hung on the wall. A pile of encyclopedias on a table were precisely carved into letter forms spelling out “BLAH BLAH BLAH”. This sculptural piece in particular was incredibly reminiscent of the paintings of Mel Bochner which also read BLAHBLAHBLAH; Bocnher’s own apathetic love letter to artists using text in painting. Resting on a table adjacent to the pile of encyclopedias was a lamp which base, when viewed from above spelled the word IDEA. Much like the pun employed by Dwyer’s ‘bright idea’, many of the pieces within the show employed this same sense of tounge-in-cheek cleverness. While I will openly admit, and have before, that I am a sucker for art involving text I genuinely appreciated the Dwyer’s work and her willingness to translate her ideas in both two and three dimensions. Having that versatility as an artist is vital especially in the contemporary world where we have seen countless examples in galleries of artists working in a variety of mediums. Also, while primarily produced in the 80s and 90s, Dwyer’s work did not necessarily feel dated and held true to many trends seen by contemporary artists using text.

FISHER LANDAU CENTER FOR ART

MoMA PS1

MoMA PS1 is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit contemporary art institutions in the United States. An exhibition space rather than a collecting institution, MoMA PS1 devotes its energy and resources to displaying the most experimental art in the world. A catalyst and an advocate for new ideas, discourses, and trends in contemporary art, MoMA PS1 actively pursues emerging artists, new genres, and adventurous new work by recognized artists in an effort to support innovation in contemporary art. MoMA PS1 achieves this mission by presenting its diverse program to a broad audience in a unique and welcoming environment in which visitors can discover and explore the work of contemporary artists. Exhibitions at MoMA PS1 include artists’ retrospectives, site-specific installations, historical surveys, arts from across the United States and the world, and a full schedule of music and performance programming.

HUMA BHABHA: UNNATURAL HISTORIES Huma Bhabha (American, b. Karachi, Pakistan, 1962) is known for her engagement with the human figure and for her use of found materials, working primarily in sculpture. Often tending towards the grotesque, Bhabha’s sculptural works and photo-based drawings feature bodies that appear dissected and dismembered, but one can likewise view them as monuments to human life reclaimed from the detritus of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Incorporating materials like Styrofoam, animal bones and clay, Bhabha creates figures that feel unstable and ephemeral. Insistently contemporary, they nevertheless recall classical figurative traditions across a range of cultures and historical periods, typifying a strand of neo-primitivism that has arisen in the past decade. While I was very intrigued by PS1 as a museum, I cannot say I particularly identified with any of the work or shows currently on display. However, I did see the merit in Hum Bhabha Unnatural Histories exhibit. Using often discarded materials such as drain pipes, tire rubber, and s tyrofoam Bhabha exhibited a range of sculptures both revealing his process as well themes dealing with the figure. Many of Bhabha sculpture figures evoke a sense of decay, feeling as if they could fall apart at any moment back into the clumps of material from which they came. Many of his figures also reflect notions of primitivism in their facial features which borrow visual forms from non-western or prehistoric peoples. Overall I couldn’t help but shake an unsettling feeling viewing Bhabha work. While his figures were not entirely representational, they still evoked feelings of bodies which had been dismembered or subject to desecration. This in combination with the earth tones and raw material found within his work created a very gritty aesthetic.

JEFF ELROD: NOBODY SEES LIKE US Jeff Elrod (American, b. 1966) creates abstract paintings using basic computer software as a starting point for his artistic process. He began painting abstractions of video game imagery in the early 1990s before using computers, starting in 1997, to facilitate paintings through a technique he calls “frictionless drawing.” While software allows for the production of lines and color fields without direct intervention of the artist’s hand, Elrod aligns his work with the long history of painting and abstraction. Without preconceived plans for his canvas, Elrod employs the computer to work, save, and re-work hundreds of drawings, and the paintings in this exhibition are made from the artist’s previous works. For this show, Elrod abandoned his process of transferring the digital image to canvas by hand, and used printers to produce the final work. These new paintings are based on the artist’s series of hundreds of computer-generated drawings created in homage to the exchange between artist and poet Brion Gysin (1916–1986) and writer William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) surrounding Gysin’s “dream machine,” a device built by Ian Somerville in the late 1950s that uses oscillating light frequencies to stimulate the optical nerves while the viewer’s eyes are closed. Evoking the hallucinatory effects intended by Gysin’s machine, Elrod processes his original drawing into blurred images to create visual fields that resist coherence. The space, shapes, and lines from the artist’s original drawings are lost and the indeterminate blur that he produces becomes the paintings’ dominant aesthetic form. In the work of Elrod we again see the dominating influence of the technological age. Elrod, an artist thoroughly influenced by technology, produces digital prints of paintings which are not in fact created by the artist’s hand but rather a computer program developed by the artist. While this level of disconnect between artist and work would have once bothered me, it seems almost fitting in the contemporary art world. We live in an age dominated by disconnect, where technology allows us to do virtually anything without a true human connection. Elrod’s work reinforces this theme while also exploring the complexities of human vision. From a distance Elrods work appears to be nothing more than enlarged blurred pixels on paper, however when one enters a room and stares at the work it yields unexpected results. When looking at the work I couldn’t help but feel my eyes struggling to focus as my head began to spin. While I am by no means trained in optics Elrod clearly has explored these images effects on the eyes and the almost hallucinatory effects they can have on an individual. Although a bit gimmicky, it was interesting to step into a gallery and have a work physically effect me to the point where I felt the need to leave the room. While some may be moved to tears by a particular work of art, this is a rare occurrence particular to the individual. The nauseating effects of Elrod’s work is universal due solely to the way our eyes work. Elrod demonstrates that technology even has the ability to affect our lives on not just a psychological but a physiological level.

MoMA PS1

SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK

Socrates Sculpture Park is the only site in the New York Metropolitan area specifically dedicated to providing artists with opportunities to create and exhibit large-scale sculpture and multi-media installations in a unique outdoor environment that encourages strong interaction between artists, artworks and the public. The Park’s existence is based on the belief that reclamation, revitalization and creative expression are essential to the survival, humanity and improvement of our urban environment. Socrates Sculpture Park was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members, under the leadership of artist Mark di Suvero, transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that also serves as a vital New York City park offering a wide variety of free public services.

ensconced within a building that houses ten galleries. As a whole, the Museum provides an intimate, reflective space in which to experience Noguchi’s sculpture and design, fulfilling a vision that the artist deemed essential to his life’s work. Visitors enter the two-story, approximately 27,000-square-foot Museum through the celebrated sculpture garden. While the ground-floor galleries and garden contain a permanent presentation of work by the artist, selected from his own collection, since 2004, the Museum regularly presents temporary exhibitions that offer a rich, contextualized view of Noguchi’s work in the upper galleries. An international center for the study and interpretation of Noguchi’s work, the Museum is dedicated to illuminating the artist’s vision, his experience with sculpture and public spaces, and the legacy of his work on later artists. In order to reach the broadest possible public, The Noguchi Museum offers programs that engage children as well as adults, that provide sign-language interpreters and “touch tours” for the blind and partially sighted, and that bring arts initiatives to New York City’s public schools. Mission

I am not a stranger to the Socrates Sculpture Park and it always makes me happy to see such a wonderful use of public space. New York is not the only city in the world to transform its once abandoned landfills, in fact this is a trend seen nationwide in which former dumping grounds are now home to many public utilities. Not only does the sculpture park provide an excellent home for public art but it is an excellent resource for both local artists and the general public offering a wide variety of art classes and other resources. By increasing public works within our state parks we can foster a greater appreciation for art in the public eye and thus promote artists both young and old. While some may argue art to be an unnecessary expense I think the Socrates Sculpture Park is a perfect example that the human spirit is alive and well when surrounded by new and exciting works of art. By providing an outlet for creative expression as well as a patch of land with a beautiful view of Manhattan, New York is taking a big step in the right direction to ensure that the art world is here to stay.

NOGUCHI MUSEUM

The Noguchi Museum was founded and designed by internationally renowned, Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) for the display of what he considered to be representative examples of his life’s work. Opened in 1985, the Museum is housed in a converted industrial building, connected to a building and interior garden of Noguchi’s design. Located in the vibrant neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, the Museum is considered in itself to be one of the artist’s greatest works. In building a museum, Noguchi was an early pioneer who led the metamorphosis of the Long Island City area into the arts district it is today, home to cultural institutions such as Socrates Sculpture Park, SculptureCenter, MoMA PS1, and Museum of the Moving Image, among others. Noguchi designed the Museum complex as an open-air sculpture garden

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum is devoted to the preservation, documentation, presentation, and interpretation of the work of Isamu Noguchi. The Museum, the first in America established by a living artist of his own work, contains the world’s richest holdings of Noguchi’s art. The Museum seeks to honor and preserve the unique setting designed by Noguchi and to exhibit a core group of works for permanent viewing. Through changing exhibitions and educational programs the Museum aims to illuminate the interrelation of his sculpture, works on paper, architecture, and designs for furniture, lighting, landscapes, and theater, as well as the intellectual environment in which the works were shaped.

ISAMU NOGUCHI Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors. Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs,

SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK

NOGUCHI MUSEUM

The prospect of modeling the earth into a place ceramics, architecture, and set designs. His work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for the reintegration of the arts. Of all the work on display at the Noguchi museum I must say I was most intrigued by Noguchi’s work involving architecture, particularly his park designs. As a future architecture student looking at the work of Noguchi, an individual well versed in the fine art world, will without a doubt be incredibly influential in my studies. In addition to all his other visionary concepts, designs, theories and sculptures, Noguchi viewed the earth itself as the original sculpture medium. He felt that the ground, not buildings, embodied the spirit of creativity that inspired early humans and suggested a way for them to get control of their spiritual existence. In other words, to arrange your inner landscape you must sculpt your outer landscape. I found his parks fascinating in their design and how organically they reacted to the preexisting landscape. To me, the model of the proposed Riverside Park on display at the museum encapsulated the height of playground design as an art form with its strong curvilinear design elements promoting not only interactivity but beauty. Unfortunately the plan was never realized largely due to the will of Robert Moses. In an interview regarding the Riverside Park, Noguchi stated, “...many distinguished educators, child welfare specialists and civic groups had seen the model and had hailed it as the only creative step made in the field in decades. And it is a thing of beauty as the modern artist has found beauty in the modern world. Perhaps this is why it was so venomously attacked (‘a hillside rabbit-warren’) by the Cheops of toll bridges (Robert Moses).’’ Robert Moses was the New York City Parks Commissioner for most of the years that Noguchi was attempting to get his designs accepted. Moses was best known by New Yorkers as the man who planned to put a six lane inner city highway through Greenwich Village, knocking down the Triumphal arch in Washington Square Park and ripping out the park itself. He appeared to be more interested in the free flow of vehicular traffic than free flow of pedestrians. As a Long Islander I am very familiar with Robert Moses due to the many parks and bridges named after him, however I have often been told his legacy is not deserving of the many landmarks after his name. While my future as an architect is yet to be determined, Noguchi certainly makes a compelling argument for park design. I have often considered myself nothing but a kid at heart and reading the words of Noguchi often resonate within me. In regards to his parks Noguchi once stated, ‘’The idea of playgrounds as a sculptural landscape, natural to children, had never been realized. How sad, I felt, that the possibility of actually building one presented itself when it was past my age of interest. Why could it not have been 30 years before, when the idea first came to me?’’. The idea of viewing the natural landscape as a sculpture yet to be carved is awe-inspiring, and provides for some of the most innovative and beautiful park designs I have ever seen. The prospect of modeling the earth into a place in which both children and adults alike can take a moment to relax and reflect on the world around them is certainly a virtuous goal set by Noguchi, and one which I may be able to reach for one day. A true Renaissance man of the 20th Century, Noguchi continues to provide inspiration for all those who think creatively as he single handedly set a new standard for interdisciplinary arts.

in which both children and adults alike can take a moment to relax and reflect on the world around them is certainly a virtuous goal set by Noguchi, and one which I may be able to reach for one day.

WEEK SIX

APRIL 13, 2013 SWANN GALLERY & UPPER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82 St., Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity Swann Auction House, 104 East 25 St., Meeting with photography specialist Daile Kaplan Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park at 70 St., Tim Lee in Focus, interactive homage to Bob Dylan; Vandy Ratanda: Bomb Ponds Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue (77 St.), Works from the Jenney Archive Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79 St., 1980â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Revisited Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, (86 St.), German Expressionism 1900-1930: Masterpieces from the Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art Photography and the American Civil War After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age

WEEK SIX

APRIL 13, 2013 SWANN GALLERY & UPPER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN

SWAN AUCTION HOUSE

Swann Galleries was founded in New York in 1941 by antiquarian book dealer Benjamin Swann as an auction house specializing in rare and antiquarian books. George Lowry acquired the business and became president in 1970 upon Mr. Swann`s retirement. At that time, a staff of four organized and conducted book auctions for a customer-base composed mainly of dealers. As the auction world opened to the general public, separate departments were established for different fields of collecting: first photographs, then autographs, and in the late 1980s-early 90s, prints and drawings and vintage posters. Swann is now a world leader in the auction market for works of art on paper. For over 25 years, Swann has been located on East 25th Street, just one block east of Madison Square Park, adjacent to the historic Murray Hill, Gramercy Park, and Flatiron districts, and right across town from Chelsea. The premises doubled in size in 1999 with the addition of a second gallery and salesroom. As a member of International Auctioneers, an alliance of prestigious auction houses, Swan’s sales are publicized to auction clients around the world. Thanks once again to Lucy’s never ending web of connections in the art world we were able to have the pleasure of meeting the director of Swann Galleries, Daile Kaplan. After graciously giving each of us a catalog of the current photography exhibition Daile gave us a brief synopsis of the history and function of the auction house. A world leader in the auction market, Swann exclusively deals in works of art on paper (primarily photograpghs). The class was given the task of exploring the gallery with a mock budget between five a ten thousand dollars to purchase a print to hang in the Picotte student lounge. After a thorough exploration of the collection the class reconvened to discuss their choices. It was interesting to see the range of photographs picked by each of my peers and the reasons behind each. Some photographs were picked solely on personal preference, others to gain notoriety for the school, and others were chosen based on their relation to current issues in Albany. I chose The Book of Life by photographer Robert Parkeharrison for multiple reasons, the first of which being Parkeharrison’s proximity to Saint Rose. A photograph popular amongst many of the studio majors, Parkeharrison currently teaches at Skidmoore College 45 minutes north of Saint Rose. I felt that by having a work produced by Parkeharrison at Saint Rose it would not only increase student awareness of local artists but also serve as a bridge to promote relations between the two colleges. While I thoroughly enjoy my time spent in the art department at Saint Rose it would be interesting to be exposed to art departments around the capital region. I also chose Parkeharrison’s photograph because I was incredibly drawn to both the beautiful and surreal quality of the work. Parkeharrion’s inventive and dreamlike compositions often elicit a strong emotional response and send of wonder upon viewing.

While I was more than grateful to have the opportunity to both meet the director of the auction house and explore it, I couldn’t help but feel myself wanting more from the visit. I was first introduced to the concept of auction houses when reading The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark last year and found myself very intrigued by the corporate art world. I was hoping a meeting with the director would provide more of a behind the scenes look into the world of art auctions, but I only felt myself viewing a very small glimpse. Little information was given in regards to the role of the artist in an auction, how much revenue each auction brings in, or general auction procedure. I feel it would have been more beneficial for Daile to provide a lengthier explanation of her position and the role of auction houses such as Swann in the contemporary art market.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

Larry Gagosian graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a degree in English Literature. In 1980, he opened a gallery in Los Angeles, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Five years later he expanded his activities to New York, opening a gallery in Chelsea with an exhibition of key works from the renowned Pop art collection of Emily and Burton Tremaine. Until 1996, he owned a SoHo gallery with the legendary dealer Leo Castelli, where they mounted a complete survey of Roy Lichtenstein’s painted bronze sculptures, as well as exhibitions by Ellsworth Kelly and Bruce Nauman, among others. Attuned to the dynamics of today’s world, Gagosian Gallery has evolved into a global network, currently maintaining twelve distinct exhibition spaces in eight cities. Within the United States, the Madison Avenue location opened in New York in 1989 and has expanded to occupy three floors of the building. Gagosian Los Angeles doubled its footprint in 2010 with a spectacular gallery designed by Richard Meier, who was also responsible for the first gallery at the adjoining site, which opened in 1995. The versatile gallery complex on West 24th Street in New York, which opened in 1999, is complemented by a second large gallery on West 21st Street, both designed by Richard Gluckman. In 2013, a new ground floor gallery and restaurant will open at 976 Madison Avenue.

NEIL JENNEY Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Works of the Jenney Archive.” Neil Jenney’s distinctive art emerged in the late 1960s in direct response to the dominance of Minimalism and Photorealism. Working first as an abstract painter, then as a sculptor evincing form through the use of attenuated line, he developed a purposefully rough, gestural painting style in works that came to be known as “bad painting,” inspiring the polemical group exhibition “Bad Painting” at the New Museum in 1978. Considering himself to be a realist painter and have a style to be not only a set of aesthetic principles but also a personal philosophical dictum, Jenney sought to forge a new type of realism in which narrative truth could be indicated by the simple fact of proximate relations, such as Husband and Wife, Girl and Doll, or Them and Us (all 1969). In the seventies, Jenney decided to take up the opposite challenge, and began producing studies of the natural world that he called “good painting.”

SWAN AUCTION HOUSE

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

With titles such as North American Vegetae (2006–07), North American Aquatica (2006), and North America Depicted (2011–12), the Good Paintings treat ecological issues pertaining to the native North American landscape with a sense of subjectivity that verges on mythological. Crafted in layers of oil paint on board, these paintings provide a solution to the mechanical perfection and emotional indifference of Photorealism, while remaining exacting in their representation. Atmospheric (Impressionist) color and refined classical lines combine to produce landscapes that are almost hallucinatory in their attention to detail. Encased in hyperbolic wooden picture frames with bold typographic titles at the lower or side edge, the paintings are windows onto meta-realities. At the same time, their blatant framing ensures a distinct separation from the illusory world; they are as sculptural as they are painterly. Evoking the Luminist and the Hudson River School painters of the mid-nineteenth century, the Good Paintings convey the temporal coexistence of their subjects in both the real and the imagined world. “Works of the Jenney Archive,” on view throughout all three floors of Gagosian Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue, begins on the sixth floor with a room of eleven Good Paintings made by Jenney since 1971. On display in the sixth floor corridor is Jenney’s Statement Series, consisting of silkscreened, oil on canvas editions of statements, maxims, rules, aphorisms, etc. such as “ART IS A SOCIAL SCIENCE,” “IN LAW WE TRUST,” “IDEALISM IS UNAVOIDABLE,” and “PAINTING IS SCULPTURE.” The exhibition continues on the fifth and fourth floors with works by artists who Jenney knows personally and collects—Truman Egleston, Kay Mollison, William Wegman, Peter Bramley, Ros Barron, Harris Barron, Robert Lobe, John Duff, Gary Stephan, Louise Lawler, Mary Obering, Thornton Willis, Sally Ross, Susan Grayson, Curtis Jenney, Bernard Edwards, Timothy Hoffman, Joseph McNamara, Peter Saari, Master Sung, Claire Ferguson, and Peter Reginato. The fifth floor explains Jenney’s eclectic inspirations through a timeline of artwork and archival material in the possession of the artist, such as newspaper clippings, personal photographs, Jenney’s submissions to the United States patent office, and a hand-drawn architectural plan for the museum he has envisioned to house his artworks. The exhibition concludes on the gallery’s fourth floor, where several of Jenney’s sculptures from the 1960s, as well as a painting from 1971, are exhibited alongside works by artists in his personal collection. “Works of the Jenney Archive” was curated by Jenney, providing insight into the unique perspective and inspirations of an artist who the New York Times recently described as a “true-blue original.” Suprisingly enough I had never heard of Neil Jenney until stepping foot in Gagosian. I was instantly impressed by the breadth and style of his work, especially those exhibited on the 6th floor. Upon entering the gallery there was a series of screen prints on canvas with various statements by Jenney such as “PAINTING IS SCULPTURE”. I was instantly reminded of iconic 80s artists such as Holzer, Baldessari, and Prince with the similar use of text. In my junior year at the college I completed a series of text based screen prints very

similar to the work of these artists using text. For all the research I did during that research on artists using text I am surprised I never stumbled upon Jenney. My work followed a very similar formula in which I presented short statements in a uniform manner to be displayed as a series. Not only did I find Jenney’s statements just curious enough to warrant my attention, I was drawn to the presentation of the solid black bar containing text amongst an off white canvas dominated by negative space. I was also intrigued by Jenney series of aptly titled ‘Good Painting’ in which the artist constructed large black frames which border on sculpture. The way in which the image rests within the frame creates a unique sense of tension, as you are only being given a small strip of a much larger composition. The incorporation of text within the frame speaks to Jenney’s screen prints and also provides a point of reference for the viewer in order to emphasize the location of each composition. Jenney’s sculptural paintings create a sense of mystery as they both invite the viewer in to Jenney’s imagined world while specifically distance the viewer from the scene with the use of the thick black frame. On the fifth floor of the Gagosian was a gallery featuring some of Jenney’s influences over the years such as sketches, miscellaneous newspaper clippings, and even collected artwork by fellow artists. While it was interesting to see Gagosian try to display Jenney’s inner monologue so to speak while creating the work seen on the floor above, it did not prove as interesting as Jenney’s actual work. Many of the items in the gallery only served to confuse me given my limited knowledge of the artist. Unfortunately the fourth floor of Gagosian featuring Jenney’s sculptures was closed, it would have been interesting to compare Jenney’s sculptures with his already sculptural paintings.

SKARSTEDT GALLERY

Skarstedt Gallery was founded in 1994 by Per Skarstedt to mount historical exhibitions by Contemporary European and American artists that had become the core of his specialty in Sweden and New York in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The New York gallery’s program remains focused on artists of the late Twentieth Century whose work explores concepts such as representation, authorship, identity and sexual politics across a wide-range of media. Skarstedt Gallery’s unique relationships with artists allows it to present exhibitions both on the primary and secondary markets, creating a dialogue between the generations. Skarstedt Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition 1980’s Revisited, featuring iconic works by the most influential artists of the decade including, George Condo, Carroll Dunham, Robert Gober, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, David Salle and Cindy Sherman. 30 years later, 1980’s Revisited serves as a time capsule, reflecting the iconog-

SKARSTEDT GALLERY

raphy that has come to represent the complex and competing movements that defined the New York art scene during the 80’s, including Appropriation, Neo-Expressionism and Graffiti art. Jeff Koons’ One Ball Total Equilibrium is one of the most significant contributions from the 1980’s exploring the legacy of the Pop Art movement and Appropriation. Created in 1985 for his first solo show on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the pristine tank, with Spalding basketball impossibly positioned, elegantly summarizes the previous decades’ focus on minimal abstract sculpture, while newly exploring the idea of using ready-made objects as the basis for sculpture. Similarly, in Mike Kelley’s Arena #11 (Book Bunny), 1990, found objects, including a plush bunny, a thesaurus, and two Raid cans, are carefully arranged in a sculptural tableau. Like Duchamp before him, Kelley’s direct appropriation of readymade objects questions the myth of originality and authorial voice within artistic practice. The constructed Arena plays into the viewer’s inclination to project onto objects so imbued with childhood memory. Subverting the concept of the ready-made, Robert Gober’s Drain, 1989, reverses the use of the found object as the artist makes painstaking efforts to hand-make an ordinary object. Richard Prince’s re-photographed picture of a young Brooke Shields in Spiritual America, 1983, is arguably the most controversial work of art from the 80’s. The artwork was originally exhibited alone, in a temporary Lower East Side gallery space. The illicit subject matter, and concurrent lawsuit over the image’s ownership rights, drew a crowd whose intentions were far more voyeuristic than artistic, revealing the power of desire in the consumer culture so dominant in the 1980s. The term Neo-Expressionism came to describe a diverse group of artists whose work was characterized by a pre-occupation with the mass-media, fashion, and sexuality. In Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #138 the artist takes a photograph of herself dressed up as a fashion victim, commenting female stereotypes and appropriating the male viewpoint. Jenny Holzer employed the L.E.D synonymous with the Times Square news ticker for Survival, 1983-1985. Holzer’s iconic L.E.D signs represented a new way to make political commentary and gender issues an implicit part of everyday life. The1980’s also saw graffiti redefined as fine art. George Condo first made a name for himself in the East Village in the Eighties, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. In his Untitled work from 1985, Condo riffs on street-scrawl creating a graphic all-over motif using a sable brush the size of an ink pen in this highly detailed expanding canvas.

Monumental and game changing ideas such as appropriation, preoccupation with mass media, and graffiti redefined as art are all on display in this show, demonstrating the timeless qualities of each of these artists.

I was more than happy to return to Skarstedt Gallery after a very beneficial visit a few weeks prior when I was able to see a prime example of Richard Prince’s white paintings. The current exhibition, 1980s Revisited essentially

serves as a ‘Best of the 80s’ show for now renowned artists such as Holzer, Sherman, Haring, and Koons. It was certainly a thrill to see so many big name artists packed into one gallery; a clear showcase of Skarstedt’s most impressive collection. While the 80s may have been over three decades ago, the influence of these artists is still incredibly prevalent in the contemporary art scene. Monumental and game changing ideas such as appropriation, preoccupation with mass media, and graffiti redefined as art are all on display in this show, demonstrating the timeless qualities of each of these artists. Artists such as Holzer and Koons were essentially trailblazers for todays contemporary artists, making a show of their work more relevant than ever. I know that even in my own work the handful of artists on display in this gallery are ones I am constantly looking at for new ideas and inspiration. If it wasn’t for concepts such as appropriation or art based on text I can’t even imagine what I would currently be doing in printmaking. While the 80s may be long gone, the precedent left by the contemporary artists of the time are here to stay.

NEUE GALLERY

Neue Galerie New York is a museum devoted to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design, displayed on two exhibition floors. The third-floor galleries feature German art representing various movements of the early twentieth century: the Blaue Reiter and its circle (Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, August Macke, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter); the Brücke (Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Hermann Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff); the Bauhaus (Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer); the Neue Sachlichkeit (Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad); as well as applied arts from the Werkbund (Peter Behrens) and the Bauhaus (Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Wilhelm Wagenfeld). Our museum’s name (which means “new gallery”) has its historical roots in various European institutions, artists’ associations, and commercial galleries, foremost the Neue Galerie in Vienna, founded in 1923 by Otto Kallir. All sought to capture the innovative, modern spirit they discovered and pursued at the turn of the twentieth century. Our institution thus reflects a dual commitment: an embrace of the city in which we are located and a focus on the culture upon which our exhibitions and collections are based. Two of the principal goals of the Neue Galerie New York are to bring a sense of perspective back to Germanic culture of this period, and to make the best of this work available to American and other audiences for both scholarly and aesthetic inquiry.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM 1900-1930: MASTERPIECES FROM THE NEUE GALERIE The Neue Galerie presents important works of German Expressionism from its permanent collection. The exhibition examines themes of primitivism and modernity, two poles of Expressionism that artists employed to free themselves from the academic conventions of the nineteenth century. The engage-

NEUE GALLERY

ment of these artists with the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century in Germany led them to paint emotionally charged, often contrasting scenes. On display will be both lively depictions of cabaret and circus culture, as well as cityscapes of lonely, alienating Berlin streets. As a printmaking major I am more than familiar with the work of the German Expressionists. Their return to the early Germanic art or woodblock relief printing has had a dramatic effect on the history of printmaking and its influence even extends to today. Last year I was given the opportunity to create a self portrait of my own based on the style of the German Expressionists such as Kirchner and Kollwitz. By freeing themselves of academic conventions the German Expressionists created self portraits with a dramatic sense of light and shadow along with elongated or abstracted facial features in order to portray a sense of angst or inner turmoil. Much of the art of the German Expressionists was focused around the individual and the inner workings or the artist often alienated from society. The medium of the woodblock not only spoke to the artist’s German heritage but also provided a tool for the artist to convey their own inner-psyche through rich and varied mark making. It was great to be able to see such a rich collection of so many German Expressionists on display in the same gallery. Many of the images I had thoroughly studied in previous semesters were twice as captivating in person. The thing which has always fascinated me most about the German Expressionists is the collective identify formed by the group. In an article entitled “Cultural nationalism, Brücke and the German woodcut”, art Historian Robin Reisenfeld once stated that there was need for German artists to establish a collective identity by relating the origins of their group with the origins of German nationalism. During Germany’s Grunderzeit, or ‘founding years’, the country saw not only German unification but a large economic growth and military expanse. This pivotal time in Germany’s history as a nation led to the reprinting of works by old German woodcut artists which were used to assert Germany’s artistic history. This in turn led Germany to invent a shared legacy with a medium that they claimed, “there is no art practice that is so closely intertwined with the innermost presence of our people as the woodcut” . By reviving this antiquated medium Germany and Die Brücke aimed to establish a vital, visual art, based upon its heritage of ‘cultural difference’ as equal but distinct from other cultural centers such as France. Being aware of the need for national sentiment in Germany, artists including Kirchner began to use the woodcut as a marketing device. Given the privilege the woodcut had obtained in Germany society, by purposely using this medium the Brücke artists were not only affirming their cultural heritage, but guaranteeing favor for their work in the eyes of the German viewer. A direct involvement in this national discourse is seen in the woodcuts of the expressionists since they were not abiding by the typical terms of modern production and producing for an anonymous consumer. Instead, they were

marketing specifically to a certain audience through the use of the woodcut. Reisenfeld claims, “by insisting that the medium of the woodcut itself signified ‘Germanness’, Brücke successfully cultivated a collection of like minded patrons from the divided bourgeoisie and within the emergent culture industry”. While there are many artistic movements associated with a particular region, very few can be associated with a specific country. The German Expressionists represent a unique moment in art history when artists not only established a collective to make work in a similar vein but also represent their German nationalism. The only contemporary trend I could relate to this phenomenon is the YBAs in England, although that trend is much more related to geography rather than nationalism. Much of the contemporary art world is focused on much broader and universal issues, which is not surprising given contemporary communication. While the contemporary art world is increasingly multicultural, the Neue Gallery certainly continues to uphold the German Expressionist’s ideals of a collective identity and German Nationalism in their current collection.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded on April 13, 1870, “to be located in the City of New York, for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said city a Museum and library of art, of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction.” The mission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards.

AFTER PHOTOSHOP: MANIPULATED PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE DIGITAL AGE Over the past twenty years, photography has undergone a dramatic transformation. Mechanical cameras and silver-based film have been replaced by electronic image sensors and microchips. Instead of shuffling through piles of glossy prints, we stare at the glowing screens of laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Negative enlargers and chemical darkrooms have given way to personal computers and image-processing software. Photographers have always used manual techniques to alter their images, but digital cameras and applications such as Adobe Photoshop have made the process quicker, easier, and more accessible to many more people—both amateurs and professionals—than ever before. Today, the manipulation of photographic images is ubiquitous—in magazines and advertising, in police work and medical imaging, and increasingly in the snapshots of vacations, weddings, and graduations that we email to friends and family and upload to social-networking websites. It is not surpris-

ing that artists have seized upon these new tools to realize their visions and to spur reflection on the medium’s past, present, and future. This exhibition presents a selection of photographs and video in which artists have used dig-

ital technology to modify and transform the camera image or, in some cases, to generate convincingly realistic photographs with no real-world counterparts. Whether imagining alternate realities, reinterpreting classic works of art, or exuberantly defying the laws of gravity, these artists and others are pointing the way toward a new conception of photography as a malleable medium with an exquisitely complex relationship to visual truth.

MATTHEW JENSEN, THE 49 STATES For The 49 States, Jensen traveled virtually through the continental United States by means of Google Street View, an online mapping tool that provides 360-degree panoramic views of locations throughout the world. The artist chose one image from each of the forty-nine states covered by Street View when he was working on the project, using image-processing software to adjust color and contrast, straighten perspectives, and fill in gaps. The resulting images are ordered alphabetically by state abbreviation. The square format recalls the look of color snapshots made with instamatic cameras in the 1960s, when American vacationers took to the roads in record numbers. While the work memorializes the age of the great American road trip, it also signals a new understanding of the landscape as a virtual space to be explored by the armchair traveler parked in front of a computer.

JOAN FONTCUBERTA, GOOGLEGRAM: NIÉPCE Since the 1970s Fontcuberta has explored the slippery nature of truth in works that cleverly deconstruct the myth of photographic objectivity. Here, he revisits the earliest surviving photograph, Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (1826; Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin), a landmark in the history of visual representation. Fontcuberta created this work by processing the results of a Google Image search for the words “photo” and “foto” through photomosaic software, which generates a tiled picture from a large group of thumbnail images arranged according to

chromatic value and density. The result is a composite of ten thousand tiny electronic images that links the photography’s chemical origins to its dematerialized, pixelated present. I was thoroughly impressed by the current contemporary photo exhibition at the MET and found the work of both Jensen and Fontcuberta most relevant to the dialogues I had observed from artists previously viewed during the course. Both artists, while in a photography exhibition, have not technically taken any of the photographs currently on display. Instead of a film or digital camera their medium is the search engine. Using the all mighty mecca of search engines; Google, Fontcurberta and Jensen have both created works comprised of appropriated imagery taken from Google searches and then manipulated using digital techniques. Both artists show a direct correlation with the work of previously viewed artists such as Brandon Lattu and Jason Salavon who also used images appropriated from search engines. These artists reaffirm the profound effect new technology and the dawn of the internet has had on the contemporary art world. In a world dominated by images, it is only logical that artists begin to use the infinite numbers or tools at their disposal in their work. The work also speaks again to the ‘game-ification’ of contemporary life by further demonstrating that there is very little that cannot be done or seen with the click of a button. In Jensen’s work in particular we see an artist who was able to take a photo in 49 of the 50 states (a feat very few can say they have accomplished) without ever leaving his home. While some may argue that technology has made the artist’s job easy in many respects, I disagree. The point of all the work produced by the aforementioned artists is not simply about showing the viewer how many images they can collect from google and stick in a gallery, it is about making a poignant social comment on the effects of the digital age. It is about acknowledging the current state of post internet culture and figuring out a way to make sense of it all. It would be foolish to deny the role of technology in every aspect of our lives at this point. From the way to communicate to the way we absorb information there is very little which modern technology has not effected. By appropriating and presenting this very real aspect of contemporary life we are faced with the realization of how much the internet has allowed us to do as a people. The surrounding debate will always question the positive or negative implications of this technology, yet either way it has undoubtedly changed us. As we change as a people, the art world changes with us, constantly critiquing and questioning the larger aspects of humanity (or in the case of technology: inhumanity).

WEEK SEVEN APRIL 20, 2013 BROOKLYN, CHELSEA & LINCOLN CENTER

Studio visit with Ethan Ryman, 524 Court St., Brooklyn, NY Gladstone Gallery, 530 W. 215 St., Miraslaw Balka Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W. 21 St., Wayne Gonzales, paintings based on found photographs Zwirner, 537 W. 20 St., Richard Serra: Early Work Postmasters, 459 W. 19 St., David Diao Zwirner, 525 W. 19 St., Thomas Ruff: Photographs The High Line Ryan McGinIey, High Line Billboard, “Blue Falling” Rubi Neri, “Before a Framework” El Anatsui, “Broken Bridge lI” Goshka Macuga, “Busted: Colin Powell” George Condo, “Busted: Liquor Store Attendant” Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 W. 24”‘ St., Elliott Hundley Meet with former Museum Director and College of Saint Rose Graduate Elizabeth Cook Levy to see the new “campus” of Lincoln Center

WEEK SEVEN APRIL 20, 2013 BROOKLYN, CHELSEA & LINCOLN CENTER

ETHAN RYMAN

Prior to discovering art Ethan was engineering rap records for Masta Ace, Beat Nuts, Wu-Tang Clan, Grave Diggas, Old Dirty Bastard, and others. He attended Carnegie Mellon Drama School, New School For Social Research / Eugene Lange College, New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Conservatory Program. Ethan Has worked professionally as an actor, musician, arranger, producer, audio engineer, writer and artist. His first art show was in 2007 at K12 Salon in Berlin with Thomas Fuhs and Marguerite Kharl. In the spring of 2010 Ethan showed his work in New York for the first time at his studio in Brooklyn. Since then he has been included in Bjorn Ressle Art Projects Winter Salon Show at Elga Wimmer Gallery New York, Serra Sabuncuoglu’s “A Place To Which We Can Come” at St. Cecilia Convent and was selected for “Tomorrows Stars” at the Verge Art Brooklyn art fair. Artist Statement What is two-dimensional and what is three-dimensional? What is straight and what is not straight? Where does one thing end and another begin? Edges and lines that we consider to be straight, on closer inspection turn out to be quite jagged. Things that we consider to be static, are really in motion. Objects that we consider to be singular are actually groups. Most of our perception of the universe it seems is contrary to what we know to be true. If the universe is a cloud of vibrating stuff, as cosmologist are considering, then our perception is likely unique to our structure and location in time and space. We see what we see because we are us, here. The infinite boundaries and classifications that make up our perception of the universe are at the core of my thinking so far. I use photo images and sculptural constructions to make works that show choices in spatial perception, between two-dimensions and three, between representation and abstraction, exploring how we see three-dimensional space. In a lot of my work I seek and explore situations in which three-dimensional space becomes irrelevant, where it no longer matters if something is in front of or behind something else or what it’s form is in three dimensions. Space is flattened to its core divisions of lines and fields…or not. While I’m not particular crazy about Ryman’s work or his opinions on art, it was hard to deny how impressive his studio was. Located in Brooklyn, Ryman’s two story studio/exhibition space housed not only two separate rooms in which Ryman works but also a beautiful high ceiling gallery which Ryman uses for a variety of purposes. It is hard to believe that an artist with little to no gallery representation and such a young career already has so much, but I suppose that is one of the many perks of being the son of Robert Ryman. When I asked him about the weight his name carries and the effect it has had on his career he revealed the pros and cons. While on the one hand he has the opportunity to call and interact with an immense number of famous artists and art historians, many galleries are reluctant to show favoritism to the son of a major artist who has just began making art. However, with the amount of resources Ryman currently has at his disposal I did not get the impression at any point that he personifies the typical struggling artist. In a world dominated by ‘its all about who you know’, Ryman knows just about

everyone. In many ways it was frustrating to see someone who only recently began to make art have so much because I can’t imagine he would be in the place he is today without the aid of his name, but such is life. In terms of his work, as a studio major there is something a bit off putting in seeing work in which the artist does very little. While he does not consider himself either a painter or a photographer, Ryman’s art consists of photographic images of ‘convergences’ which are then digitally altered and displayed as if they are paintings on slightly imperfect canvases. Ryman didn’t seem to keen on the idea of incorporating painting into his work, but I would be curious to see him attempt painting since so many of his compositions reflect abstraction. While visually I do not mind his work I couldn’t quite get behind his ideas conceptually. Much of what he spoke about in terms of 2D vs. 3D planes seemed a bit textbook and I couldn’t help but get the feeling that Ryman wasn’t totally sure what he was talking about. He mentioned that he wanted to “keep art out of his art”, a statement that seemed both puzzling and contradictory. He cited an example in which his work is different than an

abstract painter who arbitrarily places a yellow dot on green field because it looks nice which I particularly had an issue with. While an abstract artist may make a decision for a visual reason there is also conceptual weight behind that, which one would hope the son of Robert Ryman would understand. Even his artist statement proves to be concerning and almost indecipherable at times (i.e.: We see what we see because we are us, here.). While Ryman is technically an artist, producing and making work to be both bought and viewed by an audience, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that he did not fully accept himself as one. Ryman’s attitude towards art almost seemed reluctant, as if he just woke up one day and said ‘maybe I’ll give this a shot’. I am curious about his dynamic with his family and if the success of his father and brothers pressured him into the art world somehow. His insistence on keeping art out of his work and avoiding conceptual notions lead me to believer that Ryman would rather be noted as an observer rather than an artist, but I could have just been misunderstanding his intentions. Regardless, while it was great to have to opportunity to see and visit his studio, it was quite obvious that Ryman is still in the early stages of figuring art out like many of us. I noticed a huge contrast between Ryman and Sharon Louden for example, who after being a professional artist for over 22 years was more than confident in talking about her work and ideas. I will be curious to see where Ryman ends up as he continues to work and learn more, and hopefully I will be able to keep in correspondence with him when I move to this city this upcoming summer.

ETHAN RYMAN

DAVID ZWIRNER

Representing forty-two artists and estates, David Zwirner is a contemporary art gallery active in both the primary and secondary markets. Since opening its doors in 1993, it has been home to innovative, singular, and pioneering exhibitions across a variety of media and genres. The gallery has helped foster the careers of some of the most influential artists working today.

RICHARD SERRA David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of early work by the artist Richard Serra. Dating from 1966 to 1971, the works on view, drawn from museum and private collections, represent the beginning of the artist’s innovative, process-oriented experiments with nontraditional materials, such as vulcanized rubber, neon, and lead, in addition to key early examples of his work in steel. Also featured will be a program of the artist’s films from this period. The interplay of gravity and material that was introduced early in his career set the stage for Serra’s ongoing engagement with the spatial and temporal properties of sculpture. This exhibition aims to reconsider the groundbreaking practices and ideas that so firmly situate Serra in the history of 20th Century art. Ken Johnson, NY Times Review: Say what you will about the rise of the intercontinental mega-gallery, it’s hard not to feel grateful for what it has given the art-loving public. Any art museum in the world would be proud to offer — and unashamed to charge visitors to see — “Richard Serra: Early Work,” a near-perfect, admission-free exhibition in the for-profit art dealer David Zwirner’s gorgeous new building on West 20th Street in Chelsea. The exhibition consists entirely of sculptures borrowed from institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim and from private collections. In two spacious, sky-lit rooms it reveals with wonderful economy five formative years in the career of the man who has come to be the world’s most admired living sculptor. The first room is filled with an array of single and grouped objects that might collectively be titled “Back to Basics.” Each piece is the result of some sort of physical procedure, often involving lead. “Folded, Unfolded” is a sheet of lead flat on the floor that was folded into quarters and then unfolded. “Tearing Lead” is a sheet of lead accompanied by crumpled ribbons of metal evidently torn from its edges. “Three Lead Coils” consists of lengths of coiled lead tubing hanging from the wall and falling to the floor. Four works consist of sheets of lead rolled like carpets; one, called “Bullet,” resembles a large-caliber cannon shell. Most complicated is “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure,” a floor display of steel plates, pieces of pipe and large blocks of wood. Mr. Serra created it by arranging those materials on a steel base plate, then running them through an industrial saw with two parallel blades, dividing the whole into three parts. It’s like a salesman’s demonstration of his product’s capability. Hardly anything here would be recognizable as art were it encountered at a construction site or junkyard. A viewer could suppose that Mr. Serra was engaging in the philosophical game of importing nonart objects into the gal-

David Zwirner Johnson, Ken. “Don’t Touch the Art. Really!” The New York Times (April 19, 2013): C28.

lery and in that way turning them into artworks, as Duchamp did when he presented a urinal as a sculpture. But Mr. Serra’s intentions were otherwise, as he made clear in “Verb List,” two pages of handwritten phrases, including “to fold,” “to impress,” “to flood,” “to grasp,” “to bundle” and many more.The list also includes nouns, as in “of gravity,” “of entropy” and “of nature.” What all these have in common is that they have to do with being and acting physically in the material world. Missing from the list are more cerebral activities, like representing, imagining and symbolizing, as well as concepts associated with artistic creativity, like aesthetics, metaphor and transcendence. “Verb List” is a manifesto declaring Mr. Serra’s commitment to an anti-idealistic program grounded in the phenomenological experience of time and space. While various works in the first room call to mind other artists operating in what would come to be called the Post Minimalist genre — Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier and Bruce Nauman — the works in the second room, dating from 1969 to 1971, are unlike anyone else’s. The first four consist of lead plates, four feet square and an inch thick, standing on edge, all propped up without welds, screws or glue. In “One Ton Prop (House of Cards),” four slabs lean against one another to form a square enclosure. In both “V + 5: To Michael Heizer” and “5:30” a single long lead pole is laid across groupings of the slabs, touching a corner of each to keep them in place. In “Equal (Corner Prop Piece),” one standing plate, bisecting but not touching a corner of the gallery, is held up by a horizontal four-foot pole touching one of the plate’s corners and both of the gallery’s adjacent walls. Because nothing but friction and gravity holds these arrangements in place, there is a sense of danger about them — that they could come crashing down. A sign in the gallery warns viewers to keep their distance.

DAVID ZWIRNER

David Zwirner Johnson, Ken. “Don’t Touch the Art. Really!” The New York Times (April 19, 2013): C28.

The exhibition’s grand finale is “Strike: To Roberta and Rudy” (1969-1971), a single slab of hot-rolled steel, 8 foot 1 inches tall, 24 feet long and an inch and a half thick, wedged into a gallery corner at one end and jutting into the room at 45 degrees. To progress from the multiplicity and fragmentation of the works in the first room to the simpler and clearer prop works to this utterly unified condensation is to take an exhilarating intellectual journey. A historically minded viewer might wonder about a young artist doing such seemingly insular, self-reflexive things during the peak years of war in Southeast Asia and sociopolitical turmoil at home. In its own way, however, Mr. Serra’s art was vehemently ideological. If you consider how much trouble can be caused by idealistic convictions — religious and nationalistic zealotry, for example — then you understand his insistence on the experience of material states. You still might be concerned about Mr. Serra’s participation in today’s high-end art system, epitomized by Zwirner’s fabulous new pleasure palace. To achieve his ambitions, Mr. Serra has had to collaborate not only with the architecture of the white cube but also with museum and gallery administrators, wealthy patrons and, in the giant steel spiral enclosures of his recent decades, with big-scale fabricators. It’s perplexing. Isn’t modern art supposed to challenge hegemonic power? Or is the idealistic dream of art’s radical independence a distracting delusion? There’s no pat answer. Reality, after all, is nothing if not paradoxical. That is one of the deeper lessons of Mr. Serra’s titanic career. There is very little I could say about Serra’s work that hasn’t already been said. Serra’s groundbreaking and awe inspiring sculpture work has been a pivotal component in both studio and history classes alike during my time here at the college. It was incredibly exciting to have to chance to interact with an exhibit solely devoted to the artist’s early work, and experience many of the works I have seen in slides and textbooks for so many years. Serra’s immediately identifiable steel sculptures, known for their ability to both terrify and mesmerize viewers, are still profoundly influential in contemporary sculpture. Walking around the steel wall pivoted against the far corner not only filled me with a sense of wonder but also created an ineffable feeling of tension inside me for fear the wall could fall and crush me at any moment. Serra’s smaller steel sculptures involving steel squares and rubber proved to exemplify an improbably balancing act in the gallery between strength and fragility. Serra’s minimal work not only displays a mastery of intangible elements such as gravity, but also exemplifies the equally important spatial qualities of sculpture.

THE HIGH LINE

The High Line is a public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side. It is owned by the City of New York, and maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line. Founded in 1999 by community residents, Friends of the High Line fought for the High Line’s preservation and transformation at a time when the historic structure was under the threat of demolition. It is now the non-profit conservancy work-

ing with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to make sure the High Line is maintained as an extraordinary public space for all visitors to enjoy. In addition to overseeing maintenance, operations, and public programming for the park, Friends of the High Line works to raise the essential private funds to support more than 90 percent of the park’s annual operating budget, and to advocate for the preservation and transformation of the High Line at the Rail Yards, the third and final section of the historic structure, which runs between West 30th and West 34th Streets. History The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s largest industrial district. No trains have run on the High Line since 1980. Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, formed in 1999 when the historic structure was under threat of demolition. Friends of the High Line works in partnership with the City of New York to preserve and maintain the structure as an elevated public park. The project gained the City’s support in 2002. The High Line south of 30th Street was donated to the City by CSX Transportation Inc. in 2005. The design team of landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, created the High Line’s public landscape with guidance from a diverse community of High Line supporters. Construction on the park began in 2006. The first section, from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, opened June 9, 2009. The second section, from West 20th Street to West 30th Street, opened in spring, 2011. High Line Art Presented by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art commissions and produces public art projects on and around the High Line. Founded in 2009, High Line Art presents a wide array of artwork including site-specific commissions, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator & Director of High Line Art, and produced by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art invites artists to think of creative ways to engage with the uniqueness of the architecture, history, and design of the High Line and to foster a productive dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape.

THE HIGH LINE

EL ANATSUI, BROKEN BRIDGE II Considered one of the foremost contemporary artists of his generation, El Anatsui is known for his intricate sculptures, which are grand in scale and composed of recycled materials mostly collected near his home in Nigeria. Much of the artist’s work consists of metallic bottle caps, which are culled from discarded Nigerian liquor bottles and woven together with copper wire. These three-dimensional paintings evoke the economic and cultural traditions and histories of West Africa, and the artist’s choice of materials engages viewers to reflect on the role that consumer waste plays in changing the parameters of globalization. For the High Line, the artist will present his largest work to date, an awe-inspiring sculpture that will hang on an outdoor wall next to the park between West 21st and West 22nd Streets. Originally shown in Paris during the 2012 Triennale, this ambitious artwork will be reconfigured by the artist for this unique location. Made of recycled pressed tin and mirrors woven together, Broken Bridge II will create a stunning visual of wave-like patterns and folds, evoking traditional practices of tapestry weaving, while reflecting the surrounding landscape of the High Line. At 37 feet high and 157 feet wide, the installation will be viewable from the High Line and the sidewalks along West 21st and West 22nd Streets, surprising park visitors and pedestrians with its monumental scale. It was incredible to see the scale of Broken Bridge II in comparison to Anatsui’s other works seen earlier in the semester. Using the similar ideas of utilizing discarded material, Anatsui draws attention to consumer waste in contemporary society. Incredibly inventive in his process, Anatsui is able to take one man’s trash and use basic techniques such as weaving to create a breathtaking installation. The piece currently on display at the highline is easily my favorite of his to date. Not only does it evoke the same properties of his earlier work, but it also reacts perfectly to the environment it is in. Walking through the high line on such a beautiful day was the perfect opportunity to stare up in awe at the expanse of Anatsui’s work. Expanding the length of nearly an entire city block the combination of mirrors and recycled tin evokes not only the tattered history of the high line but the shiny new façade of the park built on top of it. The mirrors not only provide a window for the viewer to reflect on the beauty of the city around them but a stark reminder of the effects of consumer culture on our delicate ecosystem. Anatsui continues to exemplify the versatility and power of material in artmaking as he continues his rapidly evolving career.

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY

It has always been the goal of the gallery to retain a specific territory for each artist that we represent. What defines the artists as a group is that each, independently, is fully responsible to the medium of their choice and is fully questioning of the role that art plays in the contemporary social-political, and/ or cultural arena. We see the responsibility of the gallery as three fold; to work for the long term development of each artists career, acting as a liaison to international galleries and museums as well as placing works in collections; to create an historical archive for each artist; and to act as an accessible public space in which the exhibitions become an exemplary gesture of the power of subjectivity to the audience at large.

ELLIOT HUNDLEY Every piece in this exhibition embodies both the rich dramatic content and the powerful physical presence for which Elliott Hundley is known. Rigorous and vibrant paintings, hybrid painted collages, quintessential billboards and sculptures hold each of their own territory as well as take on monumental significance as Hundley pushes to further intertwine and contrast his varying bodies of work. In formulating a distinct visual lexicon he has achieved unbelievable freedoms - not only creating pure gestures but also allowing those gestures to manifest in complete, purposeful ways. While content can be perceived through each combined layer in which materials are fastened, unhinged, glued and stripped away, it is ultimately in the making of the work that meaning is generated. For years he has pulled from his prior works – sometimes physically, sometimes metaphorically. A fragment torn away during the creation of an earlier work can ignite a new piece; remnants from previous sculptures will reappear in another. Pulling from an archive of his own documented works, Hundley lays down his past as a new foundation and history becomes material. Photographs of entire pieces may dissolve into under-layers of new work; a sequin can appear as an object shimmering in three dimensions or as a pixelated representation from another piece. Hundley is a reactionary artist with a fine-tuned and specific index of goods from which he plies his trade. A thickly rendered, painted surface may be built upon a foundation of worn, stacked materials, and a smooth area may be made of countless layers of rubbed and fanned out paint. He cuts angular crevices into works to starkly contrast the flatness of two-dimensional surfaces. Through vast fields of printed paper and pinned photographs he delicately carves intricate channels, embroidered with a full spectrum of colorful thread and held by thousands of gold pins. The works are constructed in a way that is completely controlled but freely conceived. It is with strict intentionality and equality between painting, collage, photography, sculpture and hybrids of each that the work can be authentic and automatic. While in much of his past work he has referred to Greek plays, Hundley is not only interested in how those particular narratives are representations of our shared subconscious – he also has a deep interest in how the recordings of those plays, for which there were never perfect versions or final drafts,

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY

tions he is able to chronicle the very actions of ideas. This is Elliott Hundley’s third solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

physically and mentally manifest in perpetual reinterpretations. While this particular body of work is not about one specific play, Hundley takes mythologies from his own language so that the metaphysical and ethical quality of Greek theater weaves throughout. Utilizing his remarkable ability to join connotative content and pure markmaking, he is able to goad new reactions with psychological impact. Always a natural collector and archivist, Hundley also has a deep love and scholarly understanding of performance, literature, history, film and theatre. Born from these passions, he elegantly stitches together a cumulative portrait of the world he sees filtered through the familiar. He builds elaborate sets on which he directs, stages and shoots performers and then systematically alters their scale, either blowing them up to billboard sized murals or cutting them into thousands of tiny figures. He culls from flea markets, newsstands, and art supply stores and enlists foundries and industrial shops for raw materials. By employing content-rich resources that are psychologically dense, he forms a kind of decentralized cultural map to magnify realities and achieve unexpected formal connections. Art history imparts a heavy weight onto mediums like oil paint, but, like any other material, Hundley then capitalizes on these histories by embracing them and unleashing their potential - by titling some of the paintings Still Life or Composition he embeds yet another layer of historical reference. Through sheer invention and an endless cycle of reac-

I was incredibly impressed by Hundley’s vibrant and playful compositions which teetered the line between contemporary folk art and a hoarder’s storage closet. Many of Hundley’s pieces were incredibly outrageous, collage a seemingly infinite number of pins, jewels, strings, and paper cut out on top of rich abstract paintings. Hundley’s work made it very clear to me that he had a background in art history. Many of the historical references in his inventive works echoed the ideas of Robert Rauschenberg, particularly his combine pieces. One composition by Hundley even contained two stuffed pheasants jutting out of the canvas, mirroring the stuffed crow from Rauschenberg’s Canyon. I also noticed a relationship between Hundley’s work and that of El Anatsui. While very different aesthetically, both artists make incredibly use of found materials which speak to contemporary culture. While Anatsui’s compositions are more universal, Hundley’s reflect the kitschy thrift shop culture of the working class. Hundley’s work also points to the continued trend amongst contemporary artists to practice and be skilled in multiple mediums. Hundley’s exhibition demonstrates not only his painting ability but the artist’s talent for sculpture and mixed media. While at Saint Rose many studio majors have a particular concentration, the contemporary art world continually shows us that it is in our best interest to work in multiple mediums in order to develop a strong body of work. I feel one of the worst things you can do in life is rely solely on what you’re good at; by doing this you are only limiting yourself.

LINCOLN CENTER

Lincoln Center is the world’s leading performing arts center and a cornerstone of NYC’s cultural life and one of the most noteworthy venues for performance anywhere. Located on 16.3 acres of New York’s Upper West Side, Lincoln Center is the home of 11 of the world’s great arts institutions. Together, these institutions attract millions of visitors each year to thousands of performances, educational programs, tours, and other events. After nearly five decades of artistic excellence and service to its community, the nation, and the world, Lincoln Center embarked upon a major transformation initiative—now nearly complete—to fully modernize its concert halls and public spaces, renew its 16-acre urban campus, and reinforce its vitality for decades to come.

tions he is able to chronicle the very actions of ideas. This is Elliott Hundley’s third solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

LINCOLN CENTER

DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO Diller Scofidio + Renfro is a New York City-based interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts. Originally founded by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in 1979, the firm is particularly well known for its interdisciplinary approach to architecture. Their influence stems as much, if not more, from their contributions to the theory and criticism of architecture as from their built works. Diller Scofidio + Renfro recently completed the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Redevelopment Project in New York, including the redesign of Alice Tully Hall, the renovation and expansion of The Juilliard School, the Hypar Pavilion Lawn and Restaurant, the expansion of the School of American Ballet, renovations to the New York State Theater lobby, the canopy entry to Fashion Week at Lincoln Center, as well as public spaces throughout the campus, and new Information Landscape Nicolai Ouroussoff , New York Times Review Reconstructive surgery or just a little nip and tuck? That’s the question that troubled the people who run Lincoln Center for Performing Arts for years. As other cultural organizations around the country embarked on extravagant building projects in the late ’90s and the early ’00s, the center’s various institutions bickered about how to compete, given their aging campus. Eventually they settled on a modest course of treatment, hoping that a few careful incisions here and a stitch or two there would be as effective, and produce a result as beautiful, as new construction. It seemed a sensible, even shrewd, strategy, especially after the completion last year of the project’s first phase — in which the architects, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, carved up the interior of the old 1960s-era Alice Tully Hall and sliced off parts of its facade to produce a striking hybrid of Modern and contemporary. But the latest and most important phase, a renovation of the central and north plazas that will be unveiled on Friday, doesn’t measure up to that promising start. While the new spaces do a lot to connect the famously aloof complex to its surroundings, their architecture is too subdued in some places, pointlessly gimmicky at others. Worse, the spaces don’t flow together in a way that might have given the center the internal coherence that it sorely needs. Lincoln Center has never been easy to love, of course. Conceived as part of a vast slum-clearance program in the mid-1950s, it was denounced early on for its tabula rasa planning strategy and its fortress like isolation from both Amsterdam Avenue, along its western edge, and 65th Street, which separates the main campus from Alice Tully Hall to the north. Its buildings were pastiches of Classical and Modern motifs, and the lack of architectural unity from one to the next was only underscored by their uniform cladding in Italian travertine. Still, many of us have developed a fondness for the center as a cold war period piece. And to a younger generation of architects — who are able to see the postwar megablock with fresh eyes — projects like Lincoln Center and the old World Trade Center functioned, despite their obvious flaws, as welcome counterpoints to the smaller-grained city. Even their detachment had an upside, providing a quiet escape from the frenetic energy all around.

Part of what was appealing about the Diller Scofidio & Renfro proposal was the way it embodied those kinds of mixed feelings, and evinced a desire to create something of our own age without butchering history. The main approach to the central plaza from Columbus Avenue, for example, has been entirely re-engineered without significantly changing its character. A road for drop-offs that once separated the two has been relocated below ground, and the architects have extended the plaza all the way to the sidewalk, so pedestrians can now climb the stairs up to it without first running a gantlet of taxi traffic. Similarly, the gloomy 204-foot-wide bridge that once crossed 65th Street, connecting the north plaza to the Julliard School and Alice Tully Hall, has been ripped out, forcing people down to the street via a generous staircase. A new two-story structure, which will eventually house new facilities for the Film Society and a high-end restaurant, rises from ground level just to the west of the stair; its roof, covered by a vast, tilting lawn, overlooks the plaza. The project’s most dazzling space, the lawn warps up on two sides, so that climbing it can make you feel as if you were about to float off into the air on a carpet of green. The overall architectural strategy brings to mind some of the ideas that inspired Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century vision of Paris: tear new channels through the urban fabric, unclog blocked arteries, create new sites for public spectacle. But Diller Scofidio & Renfro’s approach is less violent. If all art represents, in part, psychological struggle with the work of our parents’ generation, then the Lincoln Center project is more a gentle, probing examination than an effort at outright obliteration.

The problems begin with the tacked-on feeling of some of the design elements. The new car drop-off along Columbus Avenue, for example, which snakes down along the edge of a narrow landscaped garden before disappearing under the new plaza entry stair, elegantly interweaves the pedestrian city with elements of postwar car culture. Yet Diller Scofidio & Renfro mess it up with cheap frills: the LED lights that scroll across the risers of the steps listing the night’s performances are distracting and pointless; the two slender glass canopies that extend out over the edge of the staircase from the bulky travertine arcades of Avery Fisher Hall and the David H. Koch Theater look flimsy, as if a strong wind could blow them away. An impression begins to build that the architects and their clients, who will have eventually spent more than $1 billion on the project, wanted to make sure that the public could see where the money went. More important, however, is a surprising insensitivity to the way bodies flow through space, something that is as fundamental to architecture and urban planning as to ballet and theater. A subway entrance at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 65th Street, designed by the architects, is set at a slight angle to the site, partly blocking the flow of movement up toward the plaza from the north. At the back of the plaza, the two low walls that frame the entry to the Metropolitan Opera House have been beefed up, which makes the passage into Damrosch Plaza, on the left, and the north plaza, on the right, feel pinched. The problem is especially apparent in the north plaza. In Dan Kiley’s original design for the space, for example, the shallow reflecting pool in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater was flanked on two sides by rows of low square planters, which allowed people to filter through the site from various directions. Diller Scofidio & Renfro replace this grid with a more linear scheme that feels comparatively oppressive. A small, rectangular grove of trees, elevated on a concrete pedestal, runs along the southern edge of the pool, funneling people from the central plaza along a narrow passageway toward the theater. The reflecting pool is now 20 feet longer, further emphasizing that east-west flow. Even the elevated lawn rising up from the north side of the plaza can seem oddly out of place from here, its warped form relating neither to the theater nor to Avery Fisher Hall to the east. It is only once you climb onto it, through a small entry point at one corner, that its beauty becomes apparent. Strolling around the site, I found myself thinking about the architects Alvaro Siza, whose subtle compositions of line and form draw you through space naturally and unobtrusively, and Zaha Hadid, whose work does much the same, albeit at a faster pace. Here the effect is more jarring and fragmented.

There were two ways to avoid this trap. If the heads of Lincoln Center’s constituent institutions could have gotten on the same page, they could probably have produced a bolder, more coordinated plan — one that included the buildings. Given that this wasn’t a real option, they should have done something subtler and lower-key, resisting the temptation of visual splash for its own sake. Instead the project, for all its strengths, is an unwitting symbol of an atomized culture. It is an apt metaphor, perhaps, for Lincoln Center’s history of institutional discord — or our era’s inability to build political consensus — but that in itself doesn’t make for great architecture.

PATRICK BROPHY CRITICAL ESSAY

Throughout the course of this semester Art Now has opened my eyes to a wide range of trends currently taking place in the contemporary art world. An exhibition on Civil War photography at the MET has shown me the influence war has had on art. Artists such as Leo Gabin and Adrian Jeftichew have demonstrated the rising presence of artist collectives. Several trips to the Asia Society and various Asian art galleries have shown the expanding dominance of China as they continue to use the contemporary art market as international currency. Artists no longer conform to a single medium in their work, and no one medium dominates the gallery scene. I have seen a dramatic shift in the Manhattan art scene as art is no longer made there, but rather just displayed. The production of art has creeped into every corner of the surrounding boroughs as artists strive to sustain their creative life styles. However, despite all these fascinating trends none interest me as much as the influence modern technology and Internet culture has had on art. Since week one of Art Now there has been a noticeable difference in not only the way contemporary artists make art but also in the concepts they are addressing. Due to the many graces of modern technology, we live in a world dominated by image. Tools such as search engines, digital cameras, and cell phones have become unlimited resources of both subject and material. Not only do these facets of modern society provide us with the ability to have the world at our fingertips, they have drastically changed the contemporary art scene. The current rate of communication has evolved so rapidly that anyone can easily know what is taking place on the other side of the globe in an instant; it is only natural for the art world to strive to keep up. Artists seen over the course of the semester such as Brandon Lattu, Leo Gabin, and Jason Salavon have all addressed the phenomena of post-internet culture in their work. While artists such as Gabin seem to simply portray a fascination with Internet culture in both their 2D and video work, Salavon displays a much more analytical approach in his interactive installations. Salavon’s work was not only the most effective interactive piece viewed this semester, but also the most effective in drawing attention to the ‘game-ification’ brought about by the Internet in contemporary life. In a world where both artists and individuals alike have so much at their disposal much of life is taken for granted, and the national attention span grows shorter and shorter with each passing day. Artist Brandon Lattu further demonstrates the dominance of the Internet and image in contemporary society by compiling thousands upon thousands of digital images from both his own photographs and those appropriated from search engines. Technology has drastically impacted the way in which we live our lives, yet the role of the artist remains the same as they both analyze and

question these forces driving us as a society. I cannot help but feel weary of the effects the technological age has had, and cannot begin to predict how this will all play out long term. However, I do find solace in art’s constant embrace and questioning of the world around it. This class has been more than enlightening, with each trip opening my eyes to things I couldn’t fathom learning in a classroom. Not only have a seen some of my most admired artists, but I have gained an entire list of new ones to follow. I can safely say I will be making several trips to many of the contemporary galleries visited this semester when I am living in the city next year, and many years to come. I am incredibly grateful for all this class has shown me, and for the many opportunities it has afforded me. While I may be leaving Saint Rose to pursue architecture next year, the fine arts will always play a vital role in my education and Art Now has shown me the perfect way to ensure that.

PATRICK BROPHY CRITICAL ESSAY

100

NOW

2013