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.
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).
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:
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.
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”
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.
The name of Ron Arad immediately conjures up pieces such as the Bookworm bookcase (1993) and the Tom Vac chair (1997), but his surprising work goes beyond any easy classification and expresses a free creative spirit working without constrictions or frontiers in design, architecture and the plastic arts. Ron Arad defines himself as belonging to “No discipline”.
No Discipline is the title of his current retrospective at MoMA. Seen here at the opening, Arad humour and spirit is posted confidently on his I Don’t Want No Retro Spective t-shirt.
The retrospective presents major and emblematic works, prototypes accompanied by audiovisual documents, limited series and mass-produced objects, along with numerous architectural projects.
Born in Tel Aviv, Arad lives and works in London, and is considered one of the greats amongst industrial designers. 
Sculpture Center Long Island City summer show In Practice features new works. The creepy dank basement of the Sculpture Center at once houses and compliments the artist’s works bringing a sculptural environment to these works.
Michael Ashkin’s project consists of a miniaturized model of a fictional urban agglomeration at a scale of 1:128. Built entirely of found cardboard, stretching the length of the central basement tunnel at SculptureCenter the piece emulates a stretch that would extend for two miles and can be only be observed from one point of view situated well beyond its area of maximum density. The model is based on an architectural/urban typology increasingly found on the outskirts of many cities as a result of rapid urbanization.
Virginia Overton’s sculptures use material such as beams, pallets squished between walls with shims, and large sonotubes. Overton prefers to highlight what she calls “unskilled skills” – like driving a truck and stacking chairs or pallets. The series comes to a pinacle in the video of the spotlight that grows ever omnipresent as the viewer advances through the dark basement.
Cindy Loehr’s The Advisor says, “the revelation we’re ready for is the revelation we’ll get.” The Advisor’s ghost-like figure is inspired by a cut out pattern from an old paper project book. Though larger-than-life, it is unassuming in its construction: simple pattern pieces held together by nuts and bolts. Between decoy and protagonist, the humorous figure of the Advisor delivers philosophy and idiosyncratic ruminations, on life, death and hope. Combining prosaic descriptions of life in the city with aphoristic existential advice, small books of the speech are available for visitors to take home.
Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, This exhibition is an excercise in endurance.
Featuring fifty artists from 25 countries, all are under the age of 33. This generation has been categorized by sociologists, marketers, and social anthropologists as the iGeneration or Generation Me… a generation distinguished by technology and their consumption patterns. Granted this was the main theme that translated through the show.
The New Museum has consistently presented “challenging” shows. There are some elements of in Younger than Jesus that go beyond “challenging” into obsurdity, and just dilute the integrity of the interesting art from the “WTF is this art?” art.
Ryan Trecartin and AIDS 3-D’s Internet-inspired infantilism with the OMG monolith framed by burning torches. The artist Icaro Zorban here posing with his turntable installation. Liu Chuang diaporama, like a commodity portrait, she stops people in the streets of China and buys everything they have on them, and displays the items methodically on a white platform.
The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, a part of the Generational: Younger than Jesus exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Los Angeles artist Liz Glynn and the help of volunteer artists (including myself and my unsuspecting brother) used found materials to chronolgically reconstruct the Rome.
The construction began at 6.30pm April 6 and at 6.30pm April 7 – Rome was destroyed.
The only elements remaining are displayed polaroids of the succsive building that took place.
I was first introduced to Dumas’ work in 2002, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art show Marlene Dumas’ First Drawing Retrospective. Mostly black ink on paper portraits, the walls were grids of gestural blurs and watery streaks which created intensely focused faces. The series Models and Jesus Serene, I was struck by the profound expressiveness Dumas achieved with such little technical articulation. Dumas plays on subversive means of expression; the interplay between tension, joy, desire, thought, the ambiguous, the anonymous, and the relationships of reaction and interpretation.
For Measuring Your Own Grave the paintings are shown grouped thematically rather than chronologically. I broke the show down into six prominent themes. Early colour portraits circa 1985, babies circa 1990, faces circa 1994, naked paintings circa 1999, soft close ups circa 2003, and finally the newer works of articulated portraits. Not that every retrospective should be chronological, but the dispersion of these themes dilutes the cohesiveness of these already challenging works. The viewer’s attention is distracted and jolted from painting to painting.
In one particular room hung Male Beauty, a water colour on paper of a nude male viewed from the back with exposed genitals, The Shrimp and Miss Pompadour, both paintings of women bent over with exposed buttocks and genitals, and finally The Kiss (2003) an intimate vulnerable downward face kissing with closed eyes. The juxtaposition narrates that not all naked and not all erotic is necessarily pornographic. The Kiss, as soft visually as emotionally, was lost amongst these naked bodies, obvious by one disgruntled visitor who belted out “It not that they are erotic, they are just not appealing.” Just as the life sized gentle portraits of Helena were hung opposite the over sized unsettling contorted babies. It was more the juxtaposition that was just not appealing.
The painting that struck me as the most explicative of Dumas oeuvre is the painting Evil is Banal. An early work from 1984 this large (possible self-portrait) portrait tightly focuses upon a pensive female face with wild orange hair, her head posed on her folded hand. The title does not relate directly to the image, it is more about the cerebral notion of banality, of our psychological conceptions of evil, of what and how we think and how this individual interpretation translates onto facial expressions and emotions. Similarly, upon one large wall hung six paintings, each painted during different years with different subjects and varied stylistic treatment. Dumas’ masterful use of black as the principle palette and use of colour to highlight cheeks, foreheads, and jaw lines, gives the emotional integrity and subtly provocative nature of these large stunning portraits, especially White Disease, The Believer, The Pilgrim.
For my second plunge into Marlene Dumas’ dark portraits, I have defiantly dug deep. I encourage viewers of this show to look at these portraits with the same focus and determination as these portraits are looking back at you with.
NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is a stunning sculptural, visual, and olefactory experience discussing ritualism, spiritualism, and artistic production of a great display of talented artists.
P.S.1 is the Museum of Modern Art’s contemporary affiliate. It is really not that far out of the city, it is 3 stops east of the MoMA on the V train.
From the exterior it looks like Art Jail, immense concrete walls that box in vast baren courtyards of gravel… you wonder who they are trying to keep out, or what they are trying to keep in.
Each room of the interior, including the basement and the stairwells houses artworks.
Norwegian artist Borre Saethre installation imposes an akward voyeurism peeking through frosted glass, warm pulsating lights, and subliminly subversive videos and objects for this installation titled Stealth Distortion.
Leandro Erlich Swimming Pool is a full sized swimming pool installation which from above looks like a generic poolside, with rippling subtle waves and bodies floating below. It is from underneath that we uncover a hollowed pool which allows the viewer to look up through the pool’s surface. Visually presenting a distortion of physics and optics.
The Guggenheim got a long deserved facelift, and is now sparkling new!!!
theanyspacewhatever is the perfect title for this show. Scattered and not at all cohesive, with areas underconstruction, empty spaces, one space for a work whose only presence was in the audioguide (thank you Philippe Parreno) there was a lot of SPACE and a fair amount of WHATEVER.
Overall it was a pleasure to be in the Guggenheim. A not serious, witty, ironic, group of compelling contemporary artists, seemed this exhibition was about collective non-collectivity, even more so highlighted by the clever Liam Gillick signs and their contradictory inversions.
Maurizio Cattelan Pinocchio floating facedown in the fountain…. yet the visitors seemed more complexed by the the mysterious “free coffee stand” not realizing that in fact it is an installation work by Rirkrit Tiravanija.
In Paul McCarthy’s Central Symmetrical Rotation on realized as an installation at the Whitney, uses architecture to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space.
Such a pleasure to see an exhibition by David Rokeby, I went to see a lecture given by him when I was a university student at York University.
Profiling is an interesting commentary on ‘the war on terrorism’ and the use of technology and survielance videos and photography to create digital profiles. Commenting on privacy and identity.
The space with two large screens, one traces ghostly shadows by a camera which registers heat emmisions within the room. This projection is looped every 20seconds, and layers the older images one upon the others, showing how many congregate near the door, and patterns of moment throughout the space. The other scans and targets a figure, zooming in and out, and framing their face.
This was a powerful exhibition, since like CCTV, we move through life unaware of the fact that we are being filmed and registered. The reaction to the work once the viewer realizes that it is themselves the subject is the intriguing part. Being conciously aware of our movements is one thing, but having it registered looped and hung framed and traced out in a massive projection seems to make people uneasy.
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