I trooped around Friday night in the lovely balmy air and made it to a few openings. Nexus, as usual, was hopping with folks looking at Carole Sivin‘s and Yukie Kobayashi‘s works. Kobayashi’s piece, called “Paradise” is an installation of blue handmade paper strips in a kind of circle arrangement. On the inside above your head hangs more blue — paper circles suspended horizontally like slices of sky. Two big sculptural objects dangle in the space, one an alligator-like creature and the other a more ambiguous pod-like affair. People seemed to like being in the space and loved the blue atmosphere. (image above, the artist poses with her piece looking, I think, celestial.)
Elsewhere, Paul Santoleri‘s installation at Painted Bride blew everybody’s socks off. (Caveat: I’m biased here — I wrote the catalog essay for the show.) What I had seen in Santoleri’s studio — very large work — was completely transformed and dwarfed by its immersion into a mural that is absolutely Paul Bunyanesque. (image is detail of Santoleri’s two-floor-spanning installation at Painted Bride)
The coup de theatre of the evening was the installation by InLiquid at the National Restaurants showroom which is the office for selling luxury condominiums in the new building across the street.
The internet portal and art group installed its members’ art on the walls of a model, 2-bedroom luxury condominium set up in the space for purposes of selling the units to prospective buyers. My favorite was seeing art in the laundry room, which reminded me of our friend Ditta’s laundry room art installation — a bulletin-board exuberance of words and images that had a jumble of life ambiance. What a great idea it is to have something to look at when you’re drying a bunch of wet socks (the ones that got blown off in the last paragraph, say).
(image is Kitty Caparella piece in the model condo’s laundry room)
