I want to add my enthusiasm to what Libby already said about this funky art bazaar. Very serious fun was had by those participating. I had fun just nosing around at the closing party. And I love the conceptual, performance and sculptural aspects of everything I saw. And I want to say it kind of reminded me of Mike Kelley’s high school fair, Day is Done, from 2005 at Gagosian. Everything but the kissing booth.
Ben Phelan‘s fog box/dance chamber with its changing colored lights and dense atmosphere reminded me of the Olafur Eliasson Your Colour Memory piece at Arcadia a few years back. Phelan told me he was working lights (and smoke and mirrors) for the Brooklyn band Yeasayer and had just come back from being on the road with them. The band will be playing at New York Pier 54 August 13 and Phelan will be there doing his thing.
Katie Miller told me she had worked for a year on the figures in her mylar-swathed red room. They were truly formidable — a lifesize nude male and female — influenced, she said by the Critical Art Ensemble’s Cult of the New Eve. I asked her where she got all that mylar. Online, at mylarstore.com.
Phil Cote was there and I talked with him briefly. The Bobo band member collaborated on the Speakeasy “Casuals” with Jonathan Santoro. Cote told me that the piece the Bobos had put in the Blood Drive show at Zack Feuer had been removed from the show. The reason was a little unclear. The Bobo piece, a digital collage, is an obsessive, conspiracy-theory rumination about Youngbloods taking over the world. It’s very trippy and paranoid–and you have to take it as a parody and funny, so I’m not sure what caused the gallery to take it down.
That’s the news. Pifas Place has ended and I hope we’ll see something like it again in the future. Pifas continues.
