Cover, Video Still, 2012
BLACKSTON
29C Ludlow Street
New York, NY 10002
www.blackstongallery.com
T: 212-695-8201/E: info@blackstongallery.com
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.
In time and with water
March 1st – April 22nd, 2012Blackston is pleased to present In time and with water, a solo exhibition of new photographs, video and sculptural works by Glynnis McDaris. A reception will be held for the artist on Thursday, March 1st from 6 to 8 p.m.
Drawing from the artist’s own symbolic visual vocabulary, McDaris presents a new body of work focused on two seemingly paradoxical elements: architecture, as the essence of contrived form, and water, the ultimate in protean materiality.
The artist’s sculptural and image-based works in this exhibition employ a repeated wooden architectural detail to evoke and reference a fully built environment. In her photographs and drawings, a lattice detail, which connotes a unique cultural and spatial association, is frequently obscured, eroded and deteriorated. Video works further edify a sense of movement and provide a meditation on passage. Each element presented is removed from its original source and specificity of place, and embodies an uneasy displacement, a sense of lost perspective and also newly formed spatial relevance.
Combining references to natural order, decay and the temporality of built environment, McDaris cultivates a poignant discourse on time and meaning, nature and creation — and the relevance of what remains with the lapsing of time.
In Time and with Water; an exhibition of new works by Glynnis McDaris- Opening March 1st, 2012 at Blackston
Happy Post Holidays- Wildcat produced our dear friends, Control Group’s holiday party at the Dumbo Carousel. A merry (go-round) time was had by all.
Happy New Year
Happy New Year from Wildcat!
Wishing everyone a brilliant, creative 2012.
Photo: Glynnis McDaris
Chandler Strange Bookkeeping & Archiving is Here!
Our dear friend and collaborator, Chandler Strange, is launching her bookkeeping and archiving business. She specializes in working with clients in the arts, and understands the customization needed in accounting and/or archiving for clients in creative fields.
We couldn’t recommend her more…. & we can guarantee you won’t find a cooler bookkeeper!
xWildcat
Chandler Strange is an experienced bookkeeper & archivist who has worked for many years with small businesses & personal estates. She specializes in the organization and streamlining of all accounting, filing, and health insurance details for business and individuals in the arts.
Additionally, she has worked extensively on the documentation, research, provenance, and organization of large art collections and archives.
-Implementing and maintaining a personalized QuickBooks system
-Cutting out-going checks
-Handling accounts receivable and payable
-Acting as the liason between businesses and their health insurance provider
**She also offer tutoring sessions in Microsoft Office (Work, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel), Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and QuickBooks.
References furnished upon request
Opening Next Wednesday: Montgomery’s Tubercles
Michael Williams
“Montgomery’s Tubercles”
Opening Wednesday, November 16, 6 – 9 PM
November 16 – December 18 2011
The Journal Gallery is pleased to present “Montgomery’s Tubercles,” an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Williams.
Perhaps in stenciling their hands those Spanish cavemen were looking forward through history, to the cities and machines that hands like theirs would one day build. Dialoguing through time, Williams uses airbrush-stenciled footprints as a visual device in the paintings here. By stenciling his feet, the hand’s clunkier cousin, Williams might be mocking the aspirational caveman and pointing out the failures of human civilization.
Thankfully, Williams undermines this pessimistic thesis when, with a few extra lines from the airbrush, the almost photographic images of feet are transformed into goofy creatures and people in domestic scenes. In the spirit of the Thanksgiving tradition of tracing your hand and turning the fingers into turkey feathers, in one canvas Williams transforms the toes of his foot into the tail fins of a lobster.
Here, as in his recent work, Williams paints over the entire airbrush tableau with a semi-transparent film of oil and pigment. This painted blur reduces the immediate visibility of the underlayer’s content, yet in time the objects and patterns divulge themselves, popping out of the ether. The visual experience is akin to how it must be for a newborn to see—without a sense of spatial dynamics, just bearing witness to a pure color field from which the occasional eyeball emerges.
The title of the exhibition, “Montgomery’s Tubercles,” refers to the round bumps in the areola of a woman’s nipple which become more pronounced during pregnancy. First described by Dr. William Fetherstone Montgomery, an Irish obstetrician who died in 1859, Williams uses the term here as an oblique metaphor to paintings on a wall.
Michael Williams lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Williams’ solo exhibitions include “Straightforward As A Noodle” at CANADA, New York; “Puzzle Paintings” at LTD, Los Angeles; and “Fried Paint” at Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen, Denmark. A conversation between Phil Grauer and Michael Williams appears in entry 31 of the journal.
In coordination with “Montgomery’s Tubercles,” The Journal Gallery has published the book Michael Williams: Drawings 2007-2011 in an edition of 100, which will be available for purchase during the exhibition.
Image of the day…
…goes to Miles Aldridge!
Hallowed
Most were busy prepping their costumes for the party that Monday would entail, but the majority of downtown NYC was using the excuse to start early, as we love to do. Joining the frantic, after-work crowd of Ricky’s shoppers on Friday evening, Wildcat was on the forefront of the weekend’s celebrations.
Organized by Glynnis McDaris & Julia Trotta in collaboration with Santos friday night installment – Spencer’s Gifs- and honoring Performa11 Hallowed was presented - a very special Halloween Celebration. The night began with the unveiling of a site specific installation made specifically for Santos Party Haus by Swiss artist, Urs Fischer.DJ sets by John Holland & Chances with Wolves paved the way for guised partygoers to a moonlit dance floor, under the faces of Urs Fischer’s installation art, turning what we once knew as Santos into a sight of the unknown. If tricks came in the form of ghouls and vampires on the scene, treats were plenty as performances went on throughout the evening entertaining anyone who caught a glance. The unveiling was followed by a Haunted Painting performance by Tyson Rieder and John Riepenhoff, a dance with an ice block by the collective Yemenwed, a dark and menacing moment from Francis Heinzfeller by Frank Hanes, Hanna Sandin’s shadow puppets, and a couple of staged freak outs in the bathrooms commissioned by Xavier Cha.
The peak of the night was perhaps the Dennis Oppenheim Halloween Costume Contest – guest judged by Iona Rezeal Brown. The winner of the award received a special gift from the Oppenheim studio along with FOUR tickets to Iona Rozeal Brown’s Performa-commissioned piece titled Battle Of Yestermore – a mix of hip hop and kabuki theater, featuring vogueing legends Benny and Javier Ninja from The House of Ninja. The winner was Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Associate Director & co-director of Cleopatra’s Gallery, Bridget Donahue, who dressed none else than a Roy Lichtenstein artwork!
- Marlee Blodgett
Photo by Billy Miller
Photos by Dustin Bowlin
Photos by Rosalie Knox
Photos by Johnny Misheff
One For the Boys
Case of the Mondays? Now you can kick out those blues with some retail therapy. One of my favorite shops in NYC – Project No. 8 – is now open Mondays. Too bad for me, they nixed their amazing Women’s store, but they’ve still got the Mens store going on!
Paul McCarthy’s Dark Fairytale
Next Monday night we’ll be at Hauser & Wirth to check out an exhibition of new works by Angeleno, Paul McCarthy. From what we can tell, you can expect a series of dark allusions to the fairytale, Snow White, cast in fantastic metals and clays. Fairytales are always an excellent source of material: steeped in the oral tradition, they can be spun in a multitude of ways, but the moral of the story remains. There is a flexibility to these stories that allows the story teller to project his or her own imagination onto the story. An artist who identifies his work as “more about being a clown than a shaman,” we can only imagine what McCarthy has done with Snow White. See below for a sneak peek!
Paul McCarthy’s The Dwarves, The Forests will be on view at Hauser & Wirth New York from November 7th until the December 17th. The opening will be on November 7th from 6-8PM.
Musing on Materiality
Paddle 8‘s new exhibition Immaterial curated by Marina Ambramovic opens with Science Fiction. Quickly noted by the curator in her introductory video to the exhibition, Science Fiction is presented as a fabricated dream world of the future, parts of which have in fact become real. As Ambramovic puts it, people have become machines. Perhaps this makes Science Fiction the perfect jumping off point for an investigation into our material world. Ambramovic exercises at home, makes tea, and runs errands all well jumbled audio frantically narrates her thoughts on the materiality of our world. Most fascinating is when the audio pauses and focuses on a note on hypersensitivity. Ambramovic states: “Everything is about vibration, there is nothing else. The entire materiality is a vibration.”
Pausing on those words and moving through the online exhibition, I found that each work rang, like a vibration from the past, sounding to preserve some intimate part of a life. Artist’s Shit No.31 by Piero Manzoni is my favorite example, not because of it’s crude sense of humor but because of its sentiment of capturing the waste left behind. It begs the question, what happens when the only material we have of someone is waste? Another evocative part in this group of works is David Adamo’s Anniversary Waltz where a man in a white tuxedo dances alone in a space only otherwise occupied by fallen balloons. He waltzes, arms held carefully in the air, as though he has a partner but no one is there besides the balloons – clear leftovers from a party. Regardless of the intimate rhythmic experience this man is feeling as he dances, the viewer can see he is holding something immaterial – that seemingly isn’t there, but to him is vibrating in his arms.
Perhaps most notable in this investigation of materiality is that the exhibition exists online. Paddle 8 is a website that hosts exhibitions on the internet. Each month the Paddle 8 team invites star curators such as Ambramovic to select works based on a theme, that are to live on the Paddle 8 website as if in a gallery. Members can even purchase works. In the case of this exhibition, the location further challenges the theme, by confronting the psychical space of art commerce – the gallery – with a virtual one. I have never been one to replace the world outside with the world online, but somehow I couldn’t imagine seeing this exhibition in a gallery. Immaterial needs no extra material.
- Jordan Robin
