OPEN SEASON NEW YORK: Part 2
by Doug McClemont
Anna Kustera can always be counted on to present something worthy of our attention in her gallery. "Tact-Traction" brings together abstract works by a trio of artists. Ethan Greenbaum has created "landscapes" in flamboyant color which successfully navigate the painting/sculpture border. The works reside on the walls, but, like any good sculpture, make you want to touch them. Stephanie Campos's geometric impasto works lent a serious tone to the opening night with their thoughtful black, white and beige demarcations and considered edges. The third artist here is recent Yale grad, Eric Hibit, one to watch. His dangerously energetic pieces are equal parts Frank Stella and the movie Alien. It's tempting to confront the oversized eggs and tentacles with a Freudian shield but it would seem from talking with the artist that personal mythologies aren't a big part of the process. For Hibit, the materials - plaster, acrylic and blue jeans - can dictate the form the work takes. He describes White Reversal, 2006, in a word: 'Primordial'.
In the front room at D'Amelio Terras Gallery, Sarah VanDerBeek is showing crowd-pleasing photographs of sculptural experiments, and sometimes further tweaks the process by building mobiles of the photographed works. We see the absent photographer in every work, often because the sculptures resist two-dimensional representation. But any photograph that allows us a glimpse of photography's essence can be called a success.
Dario Robleto, in the main gallery, examines the colossal subjects of war, history and humanity through compact poetic means. His artworks are hewn from rescued battle relics and wartime ephemera, as well as bones and uniforms. They sit, precious behind glass, like personal altars shown to a voyeuristic public. Robleto manages his arguably grisly task without watering down the impact with a cheap desire to shock. To some viewers the silver bullets looked like exploded jewelry; to others, discarded foreskins. Whatever the impression, the objects are spent... but still potent.
Art folk willing to hop a subway to 141st Street will be rewarded by the unassuming but full-of- pleasant-surprise group show at Haven Arts. The gallery invited artists like Tim Rollins and Anat Litwin, director of Makor Gallery at The 92nd Street Y, and Wayne Northcross of Lehman Maupin Gallery to provide "10 Curatorial Perspectives." Some merely present works that intrigue them. Tim Rollins, titling the assembly "On Ecstacy" has essentially loaned part of his collection to the proceedings: it's an undeniable treat to see a Josef Beuys wood wedge on a floor in the Bronx. The works here will reward multiple visits to this small, strange space with the two noisy parakeets in the back.
Especially memorable are the talents selected by Wayne Northcross. This curator has an eye for intelligent homoeroticism--we don't need to see genitalia to be taken in by Michael Meads's New Orleans post-Katrina beefcake wearing Mardi Gras beads and holding taxidermied deer heads. Scott Ewalt's masterful portrait of the now defunct David Cinema, though sexy, has melancholy to spare. The marquis reads THE END OF NEW YORK, and we see in the 2nd Floor window a male hustler on the telephone. It's the post-Guiliani years, so presumably he's calling his final trick. Ewalt takes Times Square in its red-lighted heyday as his subject; the decade-long love letter to the past is a much needed time capsule for a Puritan United States.
Undoubtedly a highlight of the new season is Jessica Stockholder's spectacular show--her first in NYC in three years--at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The new work consists of her signature painted sculptural work sharpened to tremendous effect. Household objects such as laundry baskets and shower curtains coalesce with power cords and furniture, and all the constructions are connected to a wall in a meaningful way, even if only by a rope. Color, form, wit and gravity are equal partners in Stockholder's work when it comes to dictating juxtapositions. The artist, who made a late appearance Friday night, successfully strips the familiar individual objects of narrative, and the resulting creations seem perfectly content to exist in a perpetual present.
Doug McClemont
Artist Stephanie Campos (left) with Anna Kustera
Ethan Greenbaum, Snapshots, 2006. Acyrlic and mixed media on Cintra
Eric Hibit in front of the massive White Reversal, 2006
Dario Robleto's work @ D'Amelio Terras
Fred Tomaselli checking out a Jessica Stockholder
Work by Jessica Stockholder @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Sign in a Chelsea area business
Wayne Northcross, curator @ Haven Arts
Left to right: artist Scott Ewalt, Museum of Natural History curator Carter Emhart, novelist Nick Patrick.
Beuys in the Bronx
)
)
)