Friday, October 2, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Art Review: An Excellent Short Summer Group Show at Black and White Gallery, NYC
Black and White Gallery’s current exhibit is characteristically relevant, cutting-edge and well worth a jaunt over to the western fringes of Chelsea. Michael Van den Besselaar provocatively addresses denial and in so doing takes a casual slap at pop art shallowness. Softly photorealistic portraits of vintage television sets from the 70s – two of Asian manufacture, one European – project images of terrorist activity (a hijacked airliner, a helicopter and a trio of Mercedes 240 series sedans) from their grainy black-and-white screens. Eerier still is a set of six Weegee-esque dead womens’ faces. Bonnie Parker, Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa, Evita Peron and Rosa Parks are smaller in death than life; the Anna Nicole Smith portrait pans down on her, puffy and lifeless in the purest sense of the word.
Most striking of all is Van den Besselaar’s Lethal Chamber Series. Whether or not these are actual depictions of the rooms where American executioners paralyze and then inject convicts with caustic de-icing chemicals, they’re impossible to turn away from, the curtained white rooms with their gurneys and straps radiating a brutally sarcastic soft-focus light.
Also on display: all-white, lifesize gas masks by Konstantinos Stamatiou; starkly strange cross-stitch-on-canvas figures by Alicia Ross...read on
Most striking of all is Van den Besselaar’s Lethal Chamber Series. Whether or not these are actual depictions of the rooms where American executioners paralyze and then inject convicts with caustic de-icing chemicals, they’re impossible to turn away from, the curtained white rooms with their gurneys and straps radiating a brutally sarcastic soft-focus light.
Also on display: all-white, lifesize gas masks by Konstantinos Stamatiou; starkly strange cross-stitch-on-canvas figures by Alicia Ross...read on
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...or Just Trash It !?
When artists make art for years...decades—through undergraduate assignments, art festival inventory surplus, graduate critiques and thesis exhibitions—it’s only natural that one starts to acquire quite an art collection. Not the type that you’ve purchased from others, but a collection, you quite literally purchased from yourself.Unless you’re one of those very rare artists that have sold every piece you ever made (and if you are, I hate you) there comes a point where you must decide which one of your “babies” gets salvaged and which “babies” get thrown from the nest.
Lately, I have been analyzing the pros and cons of what stays and what goes. I have to admit, I’m a bit of a hoarder by nature—not because I think my work is brilliant, or because I have invested my heart and soul into every piece (or hundreds of dollars in framing, materials, etc.), but because the unsold pieces that remain provide a certain nostalgic scrapbook of sorts....past series, thoughts, theories, phrases, experiments, relationships...
So the inevitable question... “How long do we keep our past creations?” Do we find them good homes with friends who have claimed to admire pieces over the years (and hope they weren’t just being kind)? Do we do as an ex-boyfriend of mine did—take a hammer to everything he felt unfit to remain intact...or a friend from college who used to throw his pottery into a nearby lake and then create maps to guide archeologists centuries later (*eyes rolling*). Or do we hoard our work, drag it from apartment to apartment, from house to house, keeping alive the remote possibility that in our twilight years the Whitney calls wanting to do a retrospective of our life’s work. “Oh! What a pain for them to get back all the work from collectors...We’re doing the curator a favor...keeping it all in one place.” Ha.
I guess there are other possibilities. “Why not try and sell it,” my mother always (always!) asks. And I suppose I could stroll down that avenue, but it always feels wrong to try and sell older series that I have grown out of. I’m sure that’s not the same for everyone. My boyfriend, who never likes the idea of me discarding my previous work (isn't that nice) (...until he ponders the idea of me and all my “babies” moving into his bachelor pad and starts to hyper-ventilate..haha...who can blame him!?) ...he wisely reminds me that while my previous work might seem dated and stale to me, it's fresh and new to the majority of others who come in contact with it.
I'm not quite sure how much of my collection I will dismantle, toss or resell, but for now, I’m leaning more towards a mass purging—looking more towards the future than to the past.
Monday, June 29, 2009
"A BLACK & WHITE WORLD" - A Short Group Show - Black & White Gallery - NYC - July 16 - Aug 8, 2009
A BLACK & WHITE WORLD
- short summer group show -
July 16 - August 8, 2009
Opening Reception & Live Art Performance:
Thursday, July 16, 2009, 6-9pm
Elia Alba, Michael Van den Besselaar, Jason Clay Lewis, Fernando Mora, Pesu, Alicia Ross, Konstantinos Stamatiou, Eric White
Black and White Gallery
The Chelsea Terminal Warehouse // 636 West 28th St.
New York, NY 10001
t: 212 244 3007 // f: 212 244 3312
HOURS: Tues - Sat, 11 AM - 6 PM and by appt
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