Thought I’d take you on a tour with me and Andrea of some of the stuff we saw. To see all my pictures, go to my Flickr set here.
222 Gallery
Big Kids, Little Kids, curated by John Freeborn
Jesse Goldstein, Stripes, screenprint, 18 x 24 inches
The first gallery, 222, and the first piece I saw was Stripes, by Jesse Goldstein, and what a great beginning. It was beautiful and struck me as a reverse UPC code!
Speaking of commerce and upc codes, the exhibit is filled with bargains. Check it out. Plus show curator John Freeborn’s book, Big Kids, Little Kids, is for sale, with a pair of limited edition silkscreen dustcovers made especially for show by Todd St. John and Andrew Jeffrey Wright.
As usual, Thom Lessner made me laugh with one of his fan paintings. This one, if you couldn’t tell, is of Twisted Sister.
Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Rainbow Bright’s First Period, 10 x 8-inch screen print
The show was chock-full of great stuff. I found a pair of pieces by Andrew Jeffrey Wright hysterical–a perfect mix of gross-out and sharp cultural observation.
3rd Street Gallery
Marjorie Grigonis
We got a shot of Marjorie posing with a couple of her paintings, Yellow Cloud and another work of hers reflected in the glass. Plus there’s a shadow of me in there, not to mention the lights.
Stan the Box Cutter is almost cute at this jumbo scale–a tool as a toy. Or is it a terrorist tool?
Here’s the best thing we saw at FUEL. The name of this piece (36″ x 12″ x 4″) is Stan the Box Cutter, and it’s made of carved and painted high density foam. It’s hung above a mantel, looking just great in the architectural setting. I don’t know the artist, but if someone writes in who, I’ll add it to the post.
Here’s the additional info on Stan the Box Cutter (see comments below the post): The artist who created the box cutter is Ken Parris III, who works in Brooklyn. He’s also the painter whose work is featured on the first floor at FUEL. But it was the box cutter that interested me.
Austin Lee, The Big Fight, acrylic on board, 10 x 10 inches, 2007
We also hunted around and found couple of small pieces by Austin Lee there, upstairs.
Vox Populi
Fact and Friction
My Barbarian, a shot of one of the two facing videos in The Golden Age. On the opposite wall, the video is of a dancing audience, often moving in unison.
The evening ended with a bang, too. Fact and Friction, curated by Geir Haraldseth and Ruba Katrib, is a terrific show of videos, books, painting, objects, even an internet web site. It’s a conceptual show, packed with ideas about culture, fact, fiction and our misinterpretations of what is in front of us. The art is from around the world and quite interesting. (One of the videos, having to do with the Berlin wall, wasn’t working when we were there.)
The two-channel video The Golden Age, by My Barbarian (an LA based performance troupe), takes on race and slavery. It is hysterical, riveting, and definitely fits into the paradigm of new, exciting video mentioned by Holland Carter in the New York Times, yesterday. It’s fun to watch and pretty weird. Andrea, who was with me Friday, immediately whispered Shirin Nishat, because of the facing screens and the synchronized group action. We both laughed.
The exhibit included a number of books that challenged the authority of books and history and newspapers and the police and everything else. People were scattered around the gallery reading the books and playing with an internet site, wikiality, inspired by Stephen Colbertian truthiness. You can see this online part of the show by never leaving your computer.
This is Scott Hug’s JFK, with the photo reflected on the left in a black mirror. Kennedy’s glasses also reflect a bunch of stuff. The image reflects the slipperiness of identity, and the more we know about Kennedy, the less we know him as the president we thought he was.
Aramis Gutierrez II, Lemon Road (this is large, maybe about 5 or 6 feet wide)
Aramis Gutierrez II‘s lurid history-sized painting, Lemon Road, tells the tale of four teenage girls who killed a 12-year-old girl in 1992. I had to put this up for the obvious comparison to Rob Matthews’ Knoxville Girl.
Screening Gallery
Adam Putnam
For our last stop, at Screening Gallery, I sat for a while in front of Adam Putnam’s shadowroom II, a movie with no movement other than the static-y flicker of the pixellated image of a dark, empty room that looks just like the room in which I was watching.
I almost didn’t have this photograph because I saw a dark image, thought it was just nothing and put it in the trash. Fortunately for you, I realized me mistake and retrieved it before I permanently vaporized it! As a viewer in the gallery, I got to reflect on Andy Warhol, movies, and the mind (Putnam’s, my own, etc.). That’s where the movie (the stillie?) forced me to go.
