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Tom Sachs Space Program Mars at the Park Ave Armory

21 May

When you read ‘About Tom Sachs’ the explanation is usually along the lines of “innovative re-examination, re-construction and exploration of capitalist cultural icons and systems of daily life.”

For Space Program Mars, Sachs recreated his own version of NASA space mission to Mars and astronaut protocols in a series of videos, sculptures, and performative installations.

The most important part of the experience at the Armory is emphatically the ‘indoctrination.’ Participants are ‘indoctrinated’ through watching a series of videos, and then moving through the Mars stages and completing assessments and challenges in order to achieve the final prize that is access into the LEM – landing module.

I attended this show with a wonderful friend, who coincidentally works for a major aeronautic company. When one of Sachs’ studio assistants-come-indoctrinaters tried to convince us to participate in the indoctrination assessment test to be tasked with a skillful chore (either sweeping or screw sorting) – she laughed and remarked that “this is what the aeronautical field truly feels like, in regards to protocols and behaviours, and assessments” and she did not quite see the what Sachs was satirizing.

Key take aways from this remarkable program is:

a) The powertools are named after rap heros

b) Live by the bullets, especially #8 Always Be Knolling (I highly recommend watching the videos, they are spectacularly produced

Tom Sachs Always Be Knolling

c) His lucrative collaboration with Nike in creating limited edition running shoes and bags is amazing exclamation point in on a oeuvre highlighing capitalism.

Storm King

12 May

Storm King Art Center is the most spectacular park, located just 150 km north of Manhattan. Featuring a breathtaking collection of monumental sculptures, from the iconic Mark Di Suvero, Daniel Buren, Alexander Calder to David Smith, Richard Serra, and many more, there are over 500 acres of plush grass and rolling hills to explore and discover.

Kadishman’s Suspended is one of my favorite sculptures at StormKing.  From a distance the perspecive gives the appearance that there are two sculptures one in foreground one further back resting on each other.  When you get closer, the smaller volume is actually suspended off the larger rectangle, and the massive scale still gives a feeling of increadible lightness (for an idea on scale, that is me jumping under the Suspended).

Andy Goldworthy’s Wall, uses found stones and weaves its way through a row of trees in a poetic nod to the man vs nature.

May Lin’s famous Wavefield of rippling waves of grass. As a part of the temporary exhibition Light & Landscape – this gorgeous Solarium by William Lamson, who fashioned the windows out of carmalized sugar making our visit to Storm King even sweeter.

 

David Shrigley’s Billboard on the Highline

7 Apr

HIGHLINE

The newest art work on New York City’s Highline is a billboard by the sardonicly hilarious artist David Shrigley.  How Are You Feeling? Remarks “I’m Feeling very unstable and insecure” as the billboard continues on to ramble about feeling anxious and inadequate.  Shirgley inverts and redirects the rhetoric around marketing and self image – marketing tries to convince of unrealistic ideals only making the target demographic insecure and anxious about not being able to attain those billboard looks.

At this year’s Ted talks, Elizabeth Diller, partner at the architecture firm that designed the Highline diller scofidio + renfro, spoke about how one of the serindipidous surprises of the completed Highline is how it has become a place of rest and refuge for local New Yorkers – a population that is always on the go.

I love the juxtapostion of Diller versus Shirgley as his push of anxiousness upon her rare peaceful place in such an anxious and adrenaline fueled cities.

Palais de Tokyo: Carte Blanche All of the Above

18 Nov

On of my favourite contemporary spaces, the Palais de Tokyo, is undergoing massive renovations, and during this time are hosting selective exhibitions in the atrium and main auditorium.

John M Armleder curated a All Of the Above, by presenting a variety of art works by 20 different artists (including sculptures, videos, and paintings) in an non-traditional manner.  He staged the works on a multilevel platform allowing the viewer only a frontal viewpoint.

This intriguing display method gave me a whole different perspective and challenged the way I typically evaluate and look at art.  Generally by passing video – the small monitors really stood out between the imposing works around them.

The Creators Project: DUMBO

16 Oct

The Creators Project is a festival of art and technology featuring interactive works, massive installations, and progressive ideas.

A highlight was undeniably the massive LED sculpture titled Origin by United Visual Artists and Scanner.

Glazer + Spaceman created a cathedral like setting in interpreting the Spiritualized track “Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space.  The warm radiating beams of light, soft fog, and the speakers embedded in the floor created a total encompassing experience.

Life on Mars Revisited was a 4-walled installation, where film director Barney Clay and photographer Mick Rock remixed David Bowie’s music video for Life On Mars in an explosive and jarring yet pleasantly overwhelming immersive piece.

Sophie Calles’ The Room at the Lowell Hotel

15 Oct

The French Institute:Alliance Française invited Sophie Calle to participate in this year’s Crossing the Lines Festival of contemporary Art.

Sophie Calle’s body of work engages in an intensely autobiographical exploration generally centered around intimate memories and failed love. 

For this installation, title Room, Calle has occupied a suite in New York’s Lowell Hotel where she has narrated stories through installed objects.

Burnt mattress drapped with a taffeta red dress, a Polaroid camera with a picture posed on the bedside table.

Handwritten letters, followed by stories of commissioning poets to write them for her.  Stories of her earliest experiences with men, cruel memories of insecurity of first loves and unrequited love.

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Echoing back to Calle’s early work that she created while working as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, Room brings out the nostalgia and power of the object linked by memory and narrative.  This is a must see experience, on view through Sunday Oct 16 at midnight.

Ryoji Ikeda : The Transfinite

30 May

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Transfinite is a noise and video immersive installation by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda.  The baseline for the work is the visual mathematics of binary code, which as an abstract language is the base for all computer media and technological processes.

The Park Avenue Armory is a perfect venue to highlight the polarities of the installation’s story – A historic building where the sound of beeps and pings resonnate and the binary codes and barlines flash upon the massive screens.

Festival of Ideas for the New City – Flash:Light Highlights

6 May

Flash:Light brings site specific sound and light installation to the streets with the Festival of Ideas for the New City.

Video projections and performance transformed the city, as art filled the streets and venues around the Lower East Side.

Aida Ruilova media performance featured a pair of twins dressed as nurses, that simultaneously filmed and broadcasted their performance live with iPhones as a reflection of social networks and technology in interactions in the city.

Let Us Make Cake is a collaboration of video works that were created to be projected on the façade of the New Museum.  The brilliant assemblage of artists making art was an affective exploration in re-contextualizing the museum as white-walled interior cube into an animated 53 meter high canvas.

St. Patrick’s, New York City’s oldest cathedral, was host to two compelling projects.

Valeska Soares’ Walk On By was presented in the courtyard.  Two plexiglass benches placed in front of a video of a bench in a lush green park, inviting viewer to become a passive participant.  The screens were animated by ghostly figures of typical park inhabitants – an old man playing the accordion, a young girl dancing around the bench, a gentleman reading the newspaper, the mundane solitary actions performed in a park.  This work was contrasted by the Marco Brambilla‘s Civilation, a looped 3D digital short which cycles through Dante’s Divine Comedy that cycles through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven (with cameos by famous faces as StayPuff Marshmallow Man, Michael Jackson, amongst others).

Sculpture in the City – Urs Fischer LampBear

5 Apr

In conjunction with the Post-War & Contemporary sales starting on May 11, Christie’s will be installing Urs Fischer’s Lamp/Bear in midtown Manhattan.   This 7-meter high bronze teddy bear will be snuggled under a black bedside lamp on display for the next five months.

Christian Boltanski No Man’s Land at Park Avenue Armory

13 May

Christian Boltanski’s No Man’s Land fills the interior of the Park Avenue Armory with thousands of pieces of used clothing, and creating a 40-foot-high mountain. A huge clawed crane grabs clumps of clothing from the top of the pile and then the pieces flutter back down to the floor.


The floor is gridded off into sections where coats are laid out, animated by the pounding sound of human heartbeats.

Visitors have the opportunity to contribute their heartbeats to the piece in Boltanski’s Archives du Coeurs, a collection of human heartbeats from around the world. My heartbeat is number 000052, fast and irregular. Click play below and turn up the sound!!
http://www.youtube.com/get_player
This piece, as consistent with Boltanski’s work, speaks to memory and human life. The rows and piles of clothing which once were filled with human life calls to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
The military barracks of the Park Avenue Armory add a dark intensity that was less cumbersome when this work was exhibited in Paris’ Grand Palais.

http://artjetset.blogspot.com/2010/01/christian-boltanski-for-monumenta.html

Christian Boltanski for Monumenta

28 Jan


Christian Boltanski has been invited to present an installation for Monumenta the annual exhibition at Paris’ Grand Palais.
Personnes is an exhibition that discusses society, religion, and humanity, in the notions of destiny, death, memory, and chance.

Lever House shows Barbara Kruger

6 Oct

The Lever House building at 54th + Park Ave is a brilliant example of corporate art in the public sphere. With Tom Sachs Hello Kitty sculptures out doors, the lastest exhibition, a black and white ceiling to floor Barbara Kruger installation titled Between Being Born and Dying.
As high as 17 feet tall, Kruger uses striking Helvetica type to cover the entirty of the floors windows and walls, interior and exterior of the Lever Building.
Curated by Richard Marshall, the Lever House Art Collection was conceived by Aby Rosen and private dealer Alberto Mugrabi in 2003, they invite artists to create artworks specifically for the Lever House lobby.

Toronto Sculpture Garden

3 Apr

Since its inauguration 1983, strange and wonderful things have been growing in Toronto’s Sculpture Garden.

The current exhibition is a giant mushroom, of which the interior serves as the artist Katie Bethune-Leaman’s studio space.

Mushroom Studio, is a vague reference to the phenomenon-tradition of towns construct emblematic objects as tourist attractions (yeah…. we all have photos of the Big Apple off the 401West bound), which was recently parodied in beer commercial.

Mobile Art – Hermes HBox

24 Mar

Director of Artists Space New York, Benjamin Weil and French fashion house Hermes, pair up in launching HBox, which was on view at Paris’ Centre Pompidou and will travel throughout Europe.

In the Hbox, are presented video works by artists from various cultural backgrounds, discussing those exact issues, cultural diversity. Alice Anderson, Yael Bartana, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Dora Garcia, Judith Kurtag, Valerie Mrejen, and Su-Mei Tse.

After Chanel and Hermes, do we see a future collaboration in fashion houses superseding the Museum??

Mobile Art – Chanel and Zaha Hadid

23 Mar

Everyone is excited about Chanel Contemporary art Container by Zaha Hadid. Its mobile art looks like a spaceship, and houses artworks by Nobuyoshi Araki, the Russian Collective Blue, Sophie Calle, Jean Cocteau, Lipchitz and Diaghilev.
Designed by the hot architect of the moment Zaha Hadid, it is inspired by the “mattlasse” quilting of the iconic madamoiselle chanel bag.

First landing in Star Ferry Car Park in central Hong Kong, and then travelling around the world.

Art in the Streets of Paris – Buren and Bourgois

13 Mar

Daniel Buren ‘s black and white marble columns were installed in the Cours de Palais Royale in 1986. C’est beau. A dominant theme in his works, a dialogue between the art in the museum confines and out, a modernized mirror of the columns and arcades which surround the works. In 1986 when the work was comissioned for the space, as typical French tradition, it created a scandal, modern art’s place within the cours behind the Comedie Francaise.

Now, 2008 the scandal continues regarding the 3million euro restoration costs!!!
Meanwhile, in the Jardin de Tuilleries, stalkes Lousie Bourgois’ giant spider sculpture. This sculpture has been featured in outdoor exhibitions around the world, from Spain to Japan. Coincidence or not, it has hatched tall ominous legs arching towards an erie dark Parisian sky, at the moment the weather seems to embody this piece. A second sculpture is also on view, indoors, at the Centre Pompidou.

ANSELM KIEFER Falling Stars at the Grand Palais Paris

6 Dec

The Grand Palais is stunning, the domed ceiling and the intensity of the day light adds a quality to everything it houses.

So stunning and immence as Kiefer’s Sternenfall. The combination of the architectural structures and the housed spaces with walls filled from top to bottom with paintings is exemplified by the title of this series Monumenta. Anselm Kiefer was inspired by the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann whose writings reflect on the horrors and sentiments oaround Auschwitz and the Shoah.

Concrete towers with dried sunflowers growing from the windows.


In Kiefer’s traditions, emotive layering of paint and which conveys the a pure sense of the stormy dark waters, and the magnitude of ocean’s void. Superimposed dried flowers and rusted boats floating in the cracked rippeling paint.

The floor to ceiling exhibition of paintings in several niches echoed his ideas of cosmos, nature, and void. At the entree of each niche were the poems which inspired the works. The most beautiful Pays de Brouillard by Bachmann, “for it is fogland I have seen, for it is fog heart I have eaten”.

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