Posts By emmy thelander
Dead in August; Alive in Greenpoint
Recently a friend and I biked to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had my sunglasses on. The heat built up through the early afternoon and I broke a sweat by the time we arrived. I took my sunglasses off and everything looked a coolish green compared with the totalizing, creamsicle orange of my sunglass lenses. We passed a lone blue police barrier blocking traffic to one end of the block. A black event tent was set up, with people mingling underneath, and others setting things up in the background. The block party for Dead in August, a month-plus long exhibition of rotating ... More » »
Above the Arctic Circle in Norway, industrial parks and art in Berlin, John Baldessari in Amsterdam
Our plane from JFK touched down on Norwegian soil around 9:15 AM, Oslo time. My last aerial glances revealed Norwegian fields spread over long ripples of irregular landscape like crinkled foil, the plots creating a puzzle (not of squares like in America’s Midwest) but of triangles and polygons, which suggested people in a more relaxed oneness with the land.
A Different Kind of Metaphor at Dia: Beacon, New York
The Dia: Beacon, 80 miles north of New York City, houses an impressive collection of pared down, phenomenological works from the past fifty years by Dan Flavin, Andy Warhol, Sol Lewitt, Imi Knoebel, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Robert Smithson, Fred Sanbeck, Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becker, William Heizer, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra, John Chamberlain, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Franz Erhard Walther, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Irwin, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, and (not on view currently) Blinky Palermo and George Trakas.
Oohs and Aahs – Maya Hayuk at Cinders Gallery and Justen Ladda at Storefront
Brooklyn is a medley of sensory impressions, many of which shimmer and shine–the glint off the East River, new eye glasses, lustrous 99-cent accessories. Two artists on view in the borough right now explore different sorts of sensory impact: Maya Hayuk, with a black-lit installation at Cinders Gallery and Justen Ladda with subtly glimmering mirrors at Storefront.
Gore and Folklore in Bushwick: Lenny Reibstein at English Kills
English Kills is one of many DIY galleries in Bushwick. Enter through a patio alleyway lined with potted plants and homemade benches from re-claimed, rusty chair frames and slide open the set of thick, glass doors. Right now two separate exhibitions are on view. Sarah H. Paulson, Holly Faurot, and Peter Dobill share the entry gallery. Walk past all this and you will enter a larger gallery with ten paintings and three drawings by the twenty-eight-year-old Lenny Reibstein.
William Lamson at The Boiler: A Line Describing the Sun
Two summers back, while I was working as an intern at Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, a tall young man with dirty blonde beard came in to show the manager and me a project he was working on. A video on his laptop, turned sideways to accommodate the vertical format, showed himself as he shot down pairs of shoes strung over telephone lines with a bow and arrow. My reaction: “Who is this?” and “Strange.” (Libby and Roberta saw the video at Vox Populi back in 2008). But it was Will Lamson, recognized for videos of quirky performances that engage with the ... More » »
Tunneling in Bushwick: Group Show at Famous Accountants
The current show at Famous Accountants, a dimly lit, but glowing white basement gallery in a Bushwick home, is a disorienting mix of media and technology. The exhibition, Tunneling, is a 13-person group show which covers the theme of tunneling in both its physical/spatial associations and its psychological—“confining, degenerating, myopic” (press release).
