The art world returns from winter break.
Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below.
Stephen Thorpe featured in A Hong Kong Art Magazine
A new exhibition by one of New Zealand’s most lauded lens-based practitioners Ann Shelton explores female experiences of representation, control, fertility and trauma.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”
A roving exhibition, now on view in Manhattan, looks back on capitalism and its “artifacts” from an imaginary future after the system has disappeared.
Make a day of it with our roundup of Tribeca highlights.
What’s old is new again in Tribeca, the neighborhood that fell off New York City’s cultural map when galleries moved en masse to Chelsea. Today, the area is booming again as dealers rapidly relocate their galleries to the triangle below Canal Street.
Photography is a bit of a bitch. It has been a willing accomplice in this whole imperialist project.
While it’s true that things aren’t always what they seem, it’s also true that things can be hidden in plain sight. A show of new works by Erin O’Keefe embraces both maxims. Just as Photorealist painters flipped the script on their medium, a number of photo-based artists of late have been tinkering with processes and materials to painterly effect. Consider the process-based abstractions by Matthew Brandt and Alison Rossiter, or even the video reenactments of Old Master works by Eve Sussman and Bill Viola.
From the pocket of a white denim jacket in the back of Denny Dimin Gallery, Dana Sherwood pulls out a rock. Not just any rock, though: she’d picked this one up while visiting the Gobi Desert. Shortly after, she took it to a Mongolian shaman, who blessed it and handed it back to her as a sort of talisman.
For her stunning new series of paintings, New York artist Dana Sherwood centres on her experience of living and working amongst nomadic tribes in Mongolia.
by Erin O’Keefe
Selected by
Rebecca Leona van Enter, Artist and Gallery Liaison, Unseen
“Carefully aligning colourful 3D blocks, Erin O’Keefe’s abstract compositions play with space and spatial perception. The resulting photographs trick the eye, and are often mistaken for paintings.”
As David Little sees it, there’s a fair amount of gray in that definition, since there’s debate about when modern art, the dominant theme of the 20th century, segued into contemporary art — sometimes broadly defined as “the art of today.”But the director and chief curator of Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum also notes that many contemporary artists are willing to work in multiple mediums — painting, printmaking, photography, video — and can comfortably integrate those fields, while also finding inspiration from multiple sources, from the media to found objects to plastic and plexiglass.
JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 large scale color photographs, framed in grey and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the divided gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2019. Physical sizes range from 25×20 to 50×40 inches, and all of the prints are available in editions of +2AP.
Erin O’Keefe at Denny Dimin Gallery
As a student of Western art history, I have been asked to study the work of Pablo Picasso a little too frequently for my taste. I thought I could confidently say that I had puzzled over his collages—you know, the famous still lifes that incorporate wine bottles and cut up pieces of le journal—enough to be thoroughly fed up with seminar table conversations on representation and reality in pictorial space.
At the center of iris yirei hu’s installation is a tapestry hanging from a Navajo loom atop clay shards that resemble dry earth mounded over a grave. The woven image is of a weaver, a picture hu pairs with a print of a woman weaving silk (the source image is a Chinese work found in the nineteenth century), which rests on the clay bed.
A collaboration of Mark Dion and his wife Dana Sherwood, Confectionery Curiosities (2008/2019) is a highlight of Mark Dion: Follies, on view through November 11. The first exhibition to display Dion’s folly works as a major survey is an exploration of the artist’s creative interpretation of architectural folly since the mid-1990s.
Glasgow International, Scotland’s biennial festival for contemporary art, has announced the details of its upcoming program, which will take place from April 24 to May 10, 2020. More than one hundred artists—including Kader Attia, Yuko Mohri, and Eva Rothschild—will participate in the approximately sixty exhibitions and other events that will be staged in various venues across the city.
With the decline of retail, storefronts in the Triangle Below Canal Street are filling with galleries — it’s New York City’s most unlikely new art scene.
When the artists started moving in, five decades ago, TriBeCa was a winsome village of empty warehouses and forsaken loading docks. A few artists, like my own sculptor father, are still in their lofts, making work. But the neighborhood has long since transformed into a bustling hive of boutique hotels and high-priced condos. So it’s strange, and a little magical, to see it suddenly filling up with galleries — with three more opening in just the last two weeks and about a dozen participating in last week’s Tribeca Gallery Walk, a biannual tour experience and mini-festival founded by the art fair Independent New York.
Something wonderful is happening in the once and future art neighborhood of Tribeca. On the first Friday after Labor Day, these blocks were populated with crowds of artists and art lovers, all drawn by the siren song of possibility. But the smell of money, hustling collectors, and deal-makers was nowhere to be found. Instead, the air was filled with a feeling that’s been hard to come by for some time: hope. A batch of galleries opened for the very first time that night. Others had been there for a while. Many have come looking for new homes, trying to escape the alienating slew of High Line tourists and the costly rents of Chelsea.
A bright and vibrant colour palette doesn’t often figure into the oeuvre of a trained architect, but for the artist Erin O’Keefe, who not only studied architecture but has taught it as well, the power of colour couldn’t play a bigger role in how she perceives space.
The artist Erin O’Keefe — whose work we’ve been continuously sharing since 2014 — has a solo show opening this week at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York.
Here’s a taste of what’s opening this season in the Big Apple.
Caroline Goldstein & Sarah Cascone, September 3, 2019
It’s that time of year again… back to school, back to work, and back to the galleries. With so many venues, it can be daunting to try to figure out what’s worth your time and Instagram attention. So we’ve put together a handy list of the shows we’re most looking forward to this season. Happy gallery hopping!
With five new gallery spaces opening in Tribeca on September 6, two others joining the neighborhood this past summer, and at least three more rumored to be putting down stakes next year, the Triangle Below Canal Street has emerged as New York’s hottest destination for art.
