Image courtesy of Bushwick Film Festival

7th Annual Bushwick Film Festival 
October 2-5, 2014
Multiple locations
Brooklyn, NY
bushwickfilmfestival.com

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VOLTA10
June 16–21, 2014
Viaduktstrasse 10
Basel
Switzerland
voltashow.com

Guest of Honor Preview
Monday, June 16, 10 am – 12 pm
VIP / Press Preview
Monday, June 16, 12 – 2 pm
Public Vernissage:
Monday, June 16, 2 – 8 pm
Public Hours:
Tuesday, June 17 – Saturday, June 21, 12 – 8 pm

See more at: gallerylog.com

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Vince Contarino, Elegy, 2012. Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 36 in.

Vince Contarino: For Your Eyes Only
May 16 – June 22, 2014
TSA
44 Stewart Ave, #49
Brooklyn
tigerstrikesasteroid.com

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Phil. 176/OBIT, an episodic performance installation showing this month at Brooklyn’s Bushwick Starr, is approaching these questions. To borrow an analogy from the event, whether we, the audience, enter a room which is holding these questions or we merely stand at the doorway looking in at them, we are nonetheless becoming familiar with their proposal.  Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor at Yale, is largely known for his course entitled “Phil. 176: Death,” which covers topics ranging from “free will and near-death experiences” to “the rationality of suicide.” This popular material has since been produced as a book and has also been captured and made available as an online video. Independently, performer Andrew Dinwiddie and director Daniel Fish have collaborated to present a precise recreation of these lectures, a verbatim sampling of Kagan’s semester syllabus.

Reframing concepts surrounding the greatest question of all, death (or is it life?), in a performance space and an artistic realm, implies the presence of an individual voice or a collective expression. It can be argued that this happens in all art, or at least durational art; a created mimic of a life cycle is presented for us to know through the scope of an artist’s perception. Within a series of moments, vast ideas become graspable, temporarily replacing our inability to know the entirety of our own lives and the lives of those around us.

Phil. 176/OBIT approaches this topic with a scholarly and mindful foot forward, taking lengths to obstruct identifiable characteristics. The work is put forward with the most minimal of aesthetics. An audience of silhouettes shifts through the empty black box, one with the least amount of light possible within a public space. Purely the resurrected sounds of the professor prominently holding the ideas to be learned and to be taken beyond are sensible. The voice, clinical and articulate, is peppered occasionally by a dry joke or a vocal crack. His dark form gesticulates in the postures of a lecturer, leaning and sitting cross-legged on a table.

Is one then left to simply experience and intake the information, same as the students at Yale University?  And, can we assume that the conditions in that lecture hall were similar to this deprived theater space? Thoughts and observations compound. Phil. 176/OBIT is logically consistent, with the option to continue deciphering the messes of one’s own mental and bodily distractions while aiming to move towards a gain or curious finality. It provides the option of doing so within a construction designed for collecting with social creatures outside of oneself.

by Anna Marie Shogren

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Even though Henry didn’t think he would ever work as curator, he believes, “it does make sense that artists do end up curating. I see it as analogous to any other artistic discipline. It just happens that the curators use other people’s work as a medium, the gallery as a substrate. The finished piece is the exhibition.” The curator is kinesthetically involved, connecting the dots for the viewers.

For both curators, art has been used as a point of reference throughout their lives, anchoring their childhoods and subsequent careers. Robert’s father was an artist and a professor of art; making his son’s transition into the art world smoother than most. Henry credits the influence of his mother to lead him in a creative direction. She would take him to the Brooklyn Museum every Saturday, where they took art classes together. “My memories of these moments are quite profound. They were some of the first times I saw my mother as a whole person who could do things other than ‘mom’ things.”

Given their longstanding investment and experience with art from an early age, both curators agree that the origins of their curatorial projects can stem from anywhere, sometimes the farther away from the visual arts the better. Henry interjects, “inspiration can happen anywhere.  The more unconventional, the more compelling the exhibition could be. Getting back to the connect-the-dots metaphor, it’s not so much fun if you’re only connecting dots that are close to one another.”

The gallery presents mainly solo exhibitions, and tends to hearken back to the visual and conceptual principles that both curators share. They use their gallery as a point of exploration, in which the exhibitions function as a continuous string of challenges and experiments. While some shows are conceptually closer to their personal visions, “other shows are farther away. So, rather than a series of curatorial projects Robert Henry Contemporary functions as one continuous curatorial exploration with every show, containing some, but not necessarily all of the ideas in the cluster of interests that Henry and I share.”

Considering the name of their curatorial endeavor, Robert Henry Contemporary, art of the moment is of primary interest. While both curators share much in common, their artistic preferences and interest tend to be quite different. Henry states, “I’m attracted to somewhat minimal work. I also have a tendency towards works on paper, as well as works that are heavily process oriented.” Robert admits he has a great love for Dutch portraiture and landscape paintings of the northern Renaissance. “Rogier van der Weyden, to name one.”

Every show is an amalgamation of Robert and Henry’s personal visions and philosophies, and while this may appear to be a daunting task, the duo isn’t too stressed about it. “I think collaboration often requires compromise by all parties involved. The most successful collaborations are ones where you can see the dialog between the voices, and not simply the lowest common denominator.”

And if you asked these two what they would change about their space if they could, you’d find they’re perfectly satisfied just where they are. Henry states, “I actually don’t like to think about our gallery and our curatorial vision in those terms. Any space can be the most beautiful space in the world if you knew what to do with it. As for a dream artist, this is Brooklyn, after all. There are a lot of artists out there. In that mix is some really exceptional work.”

Robert and Henry are always looking to their next project, anticipating how they can provoke their viewers to ask questions, and engage with their space and the work they believe in. They aren’t slowing down anytime soon. This fall the gallery is anticipating a number of solo shows by artists James Cullinane, Richard Garrison and Noah Loesberg. In December 2013, Robert Henry Contemporary will head to the beach for the Aqua Art Fair in Miami. We have no doubt they will work hard together to bring the heat.

roberthenrycontemporary.com

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Image courtesy of Janet Kurnatowski Gallery

Richard Timperio
Color Me Gone
November 22, 2013 – December 22, 2013
Opening Reception: November 22, 2013 7-9 pm
Janet Kurnatowski Gallery
205 Norman Ave. Brooklyn, NY
janetkurnatowskigallery.com

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Ironically, what Mandelbrot saw that day merely confirmed his notion that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin. Similarly, artist John O’Connor, whose latest show recently opened at Pierogi Gallery, seems aware that his quasi-scientific works are imbued with a hidden pattern.

By approaching everyday phenomena like the lottery; meta-dieting, computer-generated conversations and psychopathic traits, the artist has managed to unlock something of a veiled thread that shows humans to be simultaneously rational, superstitious, and abundantly absurd. Moreover, The Machine and the Ghost evokes a deep sense of alienation at O’Connor’s core.

Works in this show fit neither traditional science nor machine-like concision, but rather a hand-made aesthetic that is imprecise, but never sloppy. The artist begins each composition with an equation entirely of his own making, charting coordinates based in point, line, shape and color. When fully mapped out, they generate strange optical patterns which seem to confirm a secret knowledge at the heart of the mundane.

Take Self Portrait with Sunspots for example. The composite features a series of nine framed pictures of the artist’s face with photonegative captures of the sun’s daily spots superimposed over his skin. A subtle politic might be that the sunspots look like legions in this context. Though more interesting, perhaps, is the raw emotional content behind O’Connor’s various hairstyles here. A mussed tousle one day, an almost violently-shaved stubble the next, and a complete cover-up with ski cap by the end. It is as if the artist’s identity crisis somehow coheres with the ecstasy and agony of the sun’s harsh unpredictability.

The Shape of War, one of three sculptures in the show, operates less like traditional sculpture and more like a diorama that one could imagine Copernicus constructing in his laboratory as a means of measuring some new hypothesis. The hand-drawn texts and jagged shapes here are merely plotted based on a system set up long before the aesthetics emerge. Any onerous thoughts concerning the topic of war practically disappear, as the suspended sculpture’s framework appears both impersonal and utterly weightless.

Monster, 1992-2002 is a large-scale facial photograph collaged over with what looks like a rainbow-colored spider web masking the artist’s face. Basing the color and pattern on a pre-set equation where a sub-70°F day is plotted red and a plus-85° day is green, the work clearly acknowledges the human subservience of mood-to-weather conditions. Yet, never obvious, the Kafka-esque monstrosity that O’Connor’s face metamorphoses into becomes strangely moving, its beauty a kind of impassioned loneliness that easily disturbs.

Conversely, Portrait of a Psychopath, the show’s largest composition, is sobering to its very core. In the center, a psychedelic green, pink, and yellow mountain emerges from the plotted coordinates that match lists of figures like Odysseus, Pol Pot, and Ronald Reagan on the right, against a series of phrases to the left side such as, “Warlike courage far above norm” and, “Skill at faking emotions including love, sincerity, and regret.” The sheer verticality of the mountain gives it a monumental feel amidst the rest of the show, and a neo-liberal interpretation may be fully in line with its op-art construct. Yet there remains a shocking element here that defies politics. For surely one could expect a contemporary work based in war and corruption to have something of a mannerist irrationality. Yet, the way the composition remains resolutely composed is perhaps its most disturbing and lasting quality. Instead of pointing fingers, O’Connor seems to suggest that given the same power, each of us could become such a monster.

A 75”x60” work titled Butterfly is almost too much to grasp in one viewing. It is a text painting, but not the usual spatial affair the genre seems to imply. O’Connor instead stacks a dizzying array of hand-drawn sentences punctuated by brand logos which he employs in the telling of a single day begun by chasing an Ambien capsule with a bottle of Budweiser.

The narrator (whom we assume is O’Connor) then heads off to the Truth Gentleman’s Club where, in an extreme burst of physical and mental energy, there are several fast-food pit-stops, more prescription drug intake (Prozac, Ativan), an attempted mugging and finally, overwhelmingly, a great crash unto sleep. The viewer is left to wonder whether any of it really happened or if it was entirely dreamed. As such, the yarn becomes something of a waking nightmare, whose surrealist tropes blend uneasily with the barrage of consumer products to create a composite that is unapologetically neurotic.

In the end, the great strength of The Machine and the Ghost remains its utter lack of artificiality, despite the detached nature of its equations and the strange biomorphic patterns they produce. That such visual chaos can be both breathtakingly beautiful and endlessly hypnotic makes a very solid argument for the most basic act of stepping back from life’s messy details as a means of reinstating order and civility.

By Brian Chidester

The post The Machine and the Ghost: John O’Connor at Pierogi Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Each year the DUMBO Arts Festival seeks to highlight Brooklyn’s commitment to and presence in the arts community by presenting the best in local, national, and international art amid the breathtaking backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline.

DUMBO Arts Festival
September 27-29, 2013
Multiple Locations
DUMBO, Brooklyn
dumboartsfestival.com

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