Man Burning w/
Keegan McHargue
September 11–24, 2010

Saturday, September 11: Glasser
Friday, September 17: Houston
Friday, September 24: Yemenwed

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Glasser
A cappella at 8pm

W/———
141 Division Street
New York NY 10002

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Afterparty at B.East
10:30pm–late
DJ sets by Jon Santos

Broadway East
171 E. Broadway
New York NY

Sponsored by Fader

hello@withnyc.org
withnyc.org

Real Life Lies Elsewhere, Oil on canvas, 9×12″

via Union Football League / From a left wing.

I had a feeling that James Cameron was rocking out to Yes’ prog rock masterpiece, Fragile, when he dreamt up the idea for Avatar, and there is more than a little circumstantial evidence that the film’s look owes a substantial debt to master cover artist Roger Dean.

eighteen touches, one strike.

The Studio Museum in Harlem will open the fall/winter season with a major exhibition entitled 30 Seconds off an Inch. This survey will bring together contemporary artworks by a group of artists who, having absorbed the lessons of U.S.-based Conceptual art and identity politics, imbue their respective practices with a critical sense of play and irreverence adopted from Fluxus, Arte Povera, Gutai and Neoconcretism, among other international movements. 30 Seconds takes the singular practices and conceptual methods of black artists active on the West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a starting point–work that inspired a bodily engagement in conceptual practice.

Presenting approximately one hundred works by dozens of artists, the exhibition will provide an overview of a generation of artists who use a variety of media, including photography, video, large-scale sculpture, figurative painting and site-specific installations. 30 Seconds aims to show how this group of artists engages with the body and race in clever, subtle and astute ways.

Documentation: Danielle Levitt

Second Floor is a private exhibition space started by curator Sarvia Jasso and artist Kathryn Garcia. In part fueled by the economic crisis, Second-Floor was developed as a way to challenge the “white cube” mentality of the market driven NY art-world by providing artists a platform outside of the normal exhibiting structure.

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, In Total Ecstasy (sexual), 2008. Watercolor on Paper, 18 x 26 cm

by Jennifer Doyle

“Art versus Sport” is the name of Yrsa Roca Fannberg’s blog detailing the ups and downs of being an artist and Barcelona Futbol Club supporter. Entries alternate between meditations on the trials of experimental documentary filmmaking and the melodramas produced by loving perhaps the most storied side in the world. Illustrating this blog are Fannberg’s watercolor studies of life on the pitch—men in training, leaping into each others arms, throwing their bodies in the air, or glued to the ground in stupefied defeat.

It is tempting to think that Art and Sport sleep in separate beds. The discovery that one is at home in bohemia is often accompanied by parallel experiences of deep social isolation, of awkwardness and bullying, of being taunted for walking, running, or throwing “like a girl.” Maybe in your childhood, men and boys gathered in the living room around televised sport spectacle while you sprawled across your bedroom floor on your belly, pouring over magazine photos of Andy Warhol, Halston, and the superstars of Studio 54. For many of us in the arts, sports provided the childhood setting for our exile from normalcy. We tend to imagine these worlds as separate spheres, in which sport is fully masculine, and art is coded socially as effeminate and queer.

Full essay published in X-TRA contemporary art quarterly, Summer 2009.

Antonio Puleo, One For Me, One For You

Cherry and Martin presents Antonio Adriano Puleo’s exhibition I Am a Bird Now, featuring ecstatic murals, paintings and sculpture that possess a bold fusion of natural history and modern abstraction. This will be the first solo exhibition at the gallery’s new location at 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Antonio Adriano Puleo’s pictorial exploration is a twenty-first century hybrid of art history, including the painterly experimentations of modern abstraction as well as the illustrations of the 19th century American naturalist John James Audubon and Medieval illumination. The third in a series of solo shows by Puleo, I Am a Bird Now, follows up on two previous exhibitions, To This World I Must Give In (2005) and Birds and Beasts (2007). Whereas Puleo’s previous exhibitions furthered a pictorial investigation of the tensions between opposing forces (Birds and Beasts) and the individual’s place amongst these tensions (To This World I Must Give In), Puleo’s new body of work explores the manipulation of these tensions through symmetry, pattern and the hermeticism of alchemy. Inherent in Puleo’s work is the translucent dimension of ecstasy, the idea that revelation can be had through the polarities of perfect geometrical proportions, radiant color and a visceral connection to the material world.

Central to the exhibition and the artist’s concerns are two wall installations, Follow The Light (2009) and They Know Why They’re There (2009). Painting becomes architecture as vibrant bands of color seamlessly emerge from strategically placed, intimate canvases. These small paintings, whose compositions magnify exponentially onto the gallery walls, chart the implicit energy of expansion and contraction.

suddenly: where we live now
24 January — 12 April 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, 24 January, 5-7 pm

All things Desi, curated by Mansi Shah.

Above: Chacha Chaudary’s Pinki.

The Longest Train I Ever Saw, 14 February — 22 March 2009
Becket Bowes, Barb Choit, Sam Moyer, Kaveri Nair, Lesley Vance, Amy Yao

I sometimes listen to music by Smog and in the song, (In the Pines) The Longest Train I Ever Saw, Bill Callahan sings “The Longest train I ever saw went down that Georgia Line. The engine went by at six o’ clock and the cab went by at nine. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines and we shiver when the north wind blows. Well I asked the captain for the time of day he said he threw his watch away.” and the lyrics are filled with the stuff of loneliness, sex, and death. As it turns out, the lyrics of (In the Pines) The Longest Train I Ever Saw, resonate on a universal level: it’s a traditional folk tune rooted in the late 19th century with themes durable enough for multiple generations of covers and reconstructions by artists as disparate as Lead Belly, Nirvana, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, and R.Crumb, to name a few.

As an exhibition, The Longest Train I Ever Saw, is a way to give a collective (if diverse) vision to some of the ideas within the song by bringing together several artists whose work, whether through concept, imagery, or materials, is related to isolation and loneliness. It is meant to be a moody show, a show for February, and coincidentally, a show opening on Valentine’s Day.

Furthermore, and probably most importantly, the exhibition is an opportunity to fill this new, still-forming gallery space with the energy and surprise that a group show of several exciting artists can bring. In its first year the gallery is comprised mostly of solo shows and with this group show, I want to relinquish a certain amount of control and context and bring together a diverse group of voices to see what kind of new noise they might produce.