Thursday, August 30, 2012
Art Art Picks From Print
Posted by Paul D'Agostino on Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:49 PM
Stormfronts and drafting stunts figure into the mix of exhibits recommended in the 8/29 print edition of this fine magazine.
KAREN MARSTON & KERRY LAW
Storefront Bushwick, 16 Wilson Avenue, through September 16th
Marston's oil paintings on canvas and panel that fill the gallery's front room feature forms of terra firma in variable flux, from hilltops ablaze in brush fires to fields cowering beneath tornadoes and cumulous menace. Our natural landscape is here, our stormed sphere is here, but we are nowhere to be found. A different extreme end of our resident stratum is Law's subject matter in the project space. His paintings capture the upper register of the Empire State Building—glimpsed from Ridgewood—with compositional consistency, their variance governed by light, weather, season, instant. Neither in this sphere, note, do we appear.
GROUNDED
Airplane Gallery, 70 Jefferson St., through September 2nd
Rudimentary, resourceful, heady and harmonious are but a few terms to properly describe and contextualize this exhibition of indoor and outdoor sculptures by nine artists. Curated by Rico Gatson, the show features works that incorporate, for aesthetic and conceptual purposes alike, "found, recycled or otherwise 'humble' materials"—from furniture legs to repurposed fabrics, from art books found to Skittles browned, from dirt and dust to posts ridden with rust. Material humility within and without 'grounds' these sculptures, as it were, but the fine works themselves don't readily underscore it. A fuller review of Grounded is here.
EYES CLOSED / EYES OPEN
MoMA, 11 West 53rd St., through January 7th
These gatherings of drawings recently added to the museum's collection are politically inspired, curiously interactive and introspectively, in a way, quasi-whimsical. Franz Erhard Walther's mixed media meta-drawings beg human interaction for complete realization, hence the scheduled presence of trained facilitators to help visitors experience them in full. Martha Rosler's drawings from 1967-72 comment on the fraught sociopolitical discourses of their time. Willem de Kooning's works, then, turn the focus all the way inside. His almost wispy, fleeting drawings vary to some extent in terms of subject matter—but he executed them all with closed eyes.
BIANCA CASADY: DAISY CHAIN
Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th St., through September 8th
You've heard of the sister-duo indie group Cocorosie, no? Did you know that one of those sisters, Bianca Casady, can boast of quite a career as a visual artist, too? Well, her current solo exhibition of installations, drawings, collages, photographs and video works at Cheim & Read should provide ample testimony. The show is fairytale folksy and gravely weightless; a commingling of fancies and fears, mirths and tears; delicately gritty, ethereal. Not unlike so many Cocorosie songs, all told. And if you've ever wondered who does their album art, now you know that, too.
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