A bust by resident artist Harin Lee, at the Clay Studio, one of the warmest of his portraits of people between worlds
First Friday caught Roberta and me at just a few places. Here are my quick takes:
Before I met up with Roberta, I ran into the Clay Studio to check out the stylized ceramic busts by by resident artist Harin Lee. The subjects are at once androgynous, seductive and chilly. They remind me of store mannequins, with mannered gender neutrality and prominent sexual traits like popping nipples and giant packages in their pants.
Black and white and sensual
Then Roberta and I headed into Gallery Joe, which has work by Mark Sheinkman and Annabelle Daou. Daou was leaving as we walked in, but Sheinkman was there for the duration, accompanied by his young daughter, who colored quietly at a table in the gallery. I was so happy chatting with him and with Gil Kerlin that I didn’t take a single picture. Becky Kerlin indicated the art fairs in Miami were great and showed us some snaps she took of the tropical lifestyle, all palms and hot tubs.
Sheinkman is showing transparent white on black curls that suggest layered space, smoke and sensuality. Besides the beauty, the work has a magical how-did-he-do-this quality (it involves sanding away the black). If I hadn’t liked the work so much before I met Sheinkman, I would have been convinced to like it just because he is such a likable guy.
In the Gallery Joe vault Daou’s Book of Hours continues her romance with language and letters, this time with ink writing in book or book-like formats. The writing this time is incomprehensible, and her ongoing theme of failure to communicate merges with the theme of time spent. The work is packaged as precious, but the details are anything but, that dichotomy adding still another layer of content.
Color at Carbon 14
Painting by Jackie Tileston
At Carbon 14 on Third Street, we hung out for a while with Tim McFarlane and his girlfriend–she was here on a visit from Australia. And then Vince Romaniello came along–and then Caitlin the artblog intern!
The gallery is showing mostly very large paintings in a small group show. The standout was Jackie Tileston’s luxe painting of pink and purple lozenges floating in front of a network-patterned golden aura. Painting/collages by sisters Holly and Ashlee Temple were collaborative and one of them included scraps of embossed wallpaper or embossed tin (I’m not sure which). Romaniello had an enormous minimalism-inspired painting, its rugged rustiness whitewashed over. Also in the show, James Rosenthal’s inscrutable decorative ink escutcheons; and paintings with outlined figures, some by Falling Cow Gallery’s Tim Bowen and some by Deborah Curtiss, who also was hanging out at the gallery.
Future Nomad at nomadic Vox
Three Tyler students, Chris Mahoski (left to right), Sarah O’Donnell, and Megan Bartley-Matthews pose in Relaxation Cube, made by Keith Wilkins and Paul Mangan, part of the Future Nomad exhibit at Vox Populi. The cube is like an indoor deck, and it’s made of salvaged wood, hardware and seating. Bartley-Matthews was in our class at Tyler.
Vox Populi was hosting its final show at the Gilbert Building, an appropriately themed exhibit by independent curator Sara Reisman–about moving. Reisman, a former Whitney-Lauder curatorial fellow at the ICA, had curated the Soft Sites exhibit there. The exhibit at Vox, Future Nomad, is an international group show brimming with ideas for nomadic living, including a portable deck, anonymous 4-wall structures whose mirrored windows would blend in with shiny office parks, a funny comparison of Ukrainian and Brooklyn sukkoth (temporary booths for the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkoth), and more. The work ranges from conceptual to hilarious in its solutions to life on the move. What I looked at, I enjoyed, but I was too much enjoying the people at the opening to focus on all the art. I grabbed on of the freebie newspapers, by vydavy sindikat, and moved on.
For pictures of the scene at Vox and other First Friday pix, go to my Flickr set.
