For a gorgeous hot summer afternoon, a must see is this season’s Met Roof Top installation is by Argentine architect Tomás Saraceno titled Cloud City. The reflections of the glass surfaces mirror sky and tree tops as they intersect with windows and metal rivets creating a stunning illusion of land and sky hovering above you.
On the clever marketing angle, the offer the Cloud City cocktail, a toxic blue drink that comes with a dry ice stirstick!
I had the great pleasure of attending the preview vernissage of the Cindy Sherman exhibition, opening tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art.
With all the favourite Untitled Film Stills, and the grotesque series, renaissance portraiture, to the most recent Italian housewife series – the most charming part of this retrospective is the visual narration of the maturity of her characters.
I had a fond memory revisiting her teenage girl series – a series which I saw for the first time at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s retrospective of her work in 1999, when I was a teenage girl.
Sherman continues to be an icon and a major influencer.
The MoMA’s Contemporary Drawing department hosted their annual lecture with guest speaker artist Scott Treleaven. ArtJetSet first saw works by this talented Canadian artist at NADA Miami 2008, http://artjetset.com/2008/12/24/nada-fair-miami-2/
The lecture explored the direction of how the definition of drawing is evolving. As a young artist Treleaven created zines – most notably Salivation Army, cut and pasted Xeroxes of photos and stories. This greatly shaped his maturer works, as he evolved his practice towards collage, and most recently abstracted collaged paintings.
Another concept discussed was how drawings that was once considered preliminary works for performance art pieces are now being absorbed into the drawing realm as unique works on paper.
Myself, as a teenager growing up in Toronto I attended many zine fairs, and find it compelling to think how the zine has evolved into the new media blog.
Carsten Höller, scientist-come-artist, hilariously delightful exhibition at the New Museum presents the familiar in a way that challenges our preconceived notions of experience.
The Mirror Carousel is strikingly beautiful but spins at an impossibly slow speed. Not only changing the expected velocity of fun but allowing the viewer to experience riding a carousel not as a joyful carnival ride by rather at a pace to savour every elongated second of the ride. Höller’s work centres around the reinterpretations of sensory experiences, specially enjoyed the Rabbit on the Skin and the Aquarium.
Conversely, the slide propels you down through 3 floors at an ecstatic speed then violently catapults you into a room filled with strobbing fluorescent lights and neon alligators. I experienced Carten Holler’s Untitled (slide) in 2007 at the Tate Modern in London. The Tate’s version of the installation was more of an intricate short series of slides that connected through the turbine hall a various levels.
Life, death, humour, irony, distortion of scale, pigeons… what can you say about Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective at the Guggenheim titled All.
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 brilliantly curated Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the Collection, contextualizes works from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago permanent collection with thematics of the great assemblage sculptor Joseph Cornell.
Cornell’s body of work is characterized by the found objects he installed in little simple boxes which evoke nostalgia, memory, and time.
Divided into chapters, each room’s theme juxtaposed contemporary works with themes that mirrored Cornell’s undercurrents. Highlights included Feathered Fantasies which paired works by Nick Cave, The Voyeur which compared works by Jeff Koons, Michelangelo Pistolleto, Cindy Sherman, my favorite was the analogies formed in context with Cut and Paste works by John Baldassari, Lari Pittman, and John Stezaker.
The most fascinating juncture was the video installations, the bubble floating through an empty house by Rivane Neuenschwander as well as one of my favorite pieces by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist titled Sip My Ocean which I had seen at the Musée des Beaux-Art Montréal in 2000.
MoMA PopRally presented a three night performance featuring the collective SSION at MoMA PS1.
Performing songs from their new album Bent, the absurdest spectacle combined fantastic video backdrops, costumes, and props. The thematic content hysterically touched on subjects on feminism, a few classic grunge rock covers, dieting and purgatory.
SSION is a group collective lead by front man Cody Critcheloe, and an entourage of drag queens, performance artists, and musicians that to likes of Huizenga, Alexis Blair Penney, Colin Self, Mykki Blanc, Sky Ferreira, and Casey Spooner.
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).
Charles LeDray installation titled workworkworkworkwork recreates a thrift store sorting facility and sales floor at a shrunken scale. The awkward perspective sets the viewer above the ceiling. This all encompassing eerie field of view makes the objects seem not like children or doll clothes but a sad real life Gulliver’s Travels.
The remarkable part is that each piece of clothing is meticulously hand sewn, and each artifact from the garment bags to the hangers are all hand crafted.
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art showcased New Acquisitions in Context including work by contemporary Australian artists Hany Armanious, Tim Silver, among others. 
The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra was recently renovated, including James Turrell’s Within Without sculptural installation added to the entrance.
Street art and grafitti has proliferated in Australia with support of the arts councils and city support, especially in Melbourne.
A spectacular presentation of Australia’s street arts showcased at the Space Invaders show at the National Gallery of Art in Canberra.
Song Dong’s Waste Not— describes a generation of Chinese people who grew up during the Cultural Revolution with the experience of displacement, poverty and the constant shortage of goods.
Exhibited in the atrium of the MoMA in New York, the installation occupied a massive space, and stood as a monument of this period in Chinese history, a record of his mother’s life, as well as a tribute to his father’s death.
Exhibited in Vancouver Art Gallery through several rooms, the installation allows for a more intimate experiential connection and relation to the objects. The broken pieces, the familiar lables, and the sheer amount and weight of the objects that occupied the museum’s galleries.
This remarkable retrospective of American conceptual artist John Baldessari spans the diversity and evolution of his career in a poignantly well curated show.
In 1970, for Baldessari’s Creamation Project, he incinerated all his works created before 1966. It was great to see a few of the surviving pieces in this show.
Spanning all his major thematic movements, including my favorites, the photocompositions like Kiss/Panic and the red dot series.
As well as some of his video works:
2010 Commissioning Program and the PowerPlant, showing stunning wallsized woven tapestries of textured smoke and paper, by Pae White titled : Pae White: Material Mutters
At the closing of this show, the PowerPlant will undergo a massive re-looking. Including renovations to the physical building interior, refreshing the branding strategy, and online personality. Looking forward to the relaunch March 2011.
MOVE! was a two-day event at PS1 where fashion and art merged through the collaboration of designers and artists, organized by V Magazine’s Cecilia Dean and style journalist David Colman
Spectacular Olaf Breuning and Cynthia Rowley. Rowley created bespoke denim outfits, and the models had paint poured on them by Breuning. A photographer captured the performative aspect of the pouring and the presentation of the new work of art, while the garment became the unique art object.
Conveniently hosted Halloween weekend, CHERYL and American Apparel created a psychotic space dedicated to bizaare performance. Participants were able to receive “Psycho Make-Overs” with the American Apparel clothes, fake blood, hair extensions, and lots of glitter.
Rob Pruitt and Marc Jacobs created a green-screen catwalk guided by ‘fashion show directors’ who shouted encouragement as participants were hurled down a blue corridor and flashed with lights. Upon entering the next room, the surprised viewer is confronted with their own multi-perspective runway show with them as the star model.
Rashaad Newsome and Alexander Wang was a vocal performance amazing beyond words. Newsome uses sound bites performed live to create a symphonic harmony of gossip sounds.
Tauba Auerbach and Ohne Titel beautiful modern dance piece, contrasted by the fairly boring Jonah Bokaer and Narciso Rodriguez lone performer in the dark.
Julian Schnabel is famous for is vibrantly beautiful biographical films Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and the one of my most favorite films Before Night Falls.
His skill is in capturing the creative energy of his subjects and then building captivating and vivid visual imagery. His masterful cinematography is enhanced by engrossing narratives recounting the stories of these artist-heros.
This survey of his life works, as an artist, Schnabel seems to have only one persistent theme… BIG canvases.
Jenny Holzer, famous for her LCD Truisms, has collaborated with Keds shoes and the Whitney Museum in the creation of a line of shoes emblazoned witht he slogan “Protect me from what I want”
Kelly Richardson is another young emerging Canadian artist working in the theme of man vs. nature technology in her video installation. ArtJetSet saw this piece at Birch Libralato a few years ago, and it was very happy to revisit it at the AGO.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s project Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With, based on Mies van der Rohe’s 50×50 House project.
The entire space is inverted, suspended from the ceiling… except a coffee cup and saucer which has come crashing down from the table.
The phone rings and a narrative is played from within the glass house. A frustrated couple trying to sort out the story.
Natalie Jeremijenko: Tree Logic - Tree Logic, the art of the piece is not found in its condition at any single point in time, but in the change of the trees over time. Trees are dynamic natural systems, and Tree Logic reveals this dynamism. The familiar, almost iconic shape of the tree in nature is the result of gravitropic and phototropic responses: the tree grows away from the earth and towards the sun. When inverted, the six trees in this experiment still grow away from earth and towards the sun – so the natural predisposition of trees might well produce the most unnatural shapes over time, raising questions about what the nature of the natural is.
The first integrally comprehensive show of New York based artist Roni Horn, a
show which negotiations perception, memory, passage of time, identity and representation.
Often working in pairs and series and the use of water as reflections of identity is Horn a thematic predominant in her work, be it her photographes or her large cut glass sculptures.
Still Water, like the River Thames, is a stunning photo series of water underlined by footnotes which give anecdotes and refrences from films and passing thoughts of memory, dark waters, and fleeting moments like the water’s passing currents.
One of the more iconic Roni Horn works This is You This is Me, a photo series of her neice. One wall is this series where she has a playful docile demeanor, usually mirrored on the other wall is are the pairs of these photos where the neice makes grotesque and angry faces.
Roni Horn aka Roni Horn is exhibited on two floors at the Whitney, and this work was seperated, one hung at the entrance of each floor. I have seen this piece at the DIA hung together and think it is much more effective that way.
The Whitney present’s Omer Fast’s three part video installation Nostalgia, which combines dark fictitious dramatizations with documentary and futuristic fantasy.
Fast also has a concurrent show at Postmasters Gallery in New York.
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