Brian Dewan

Brian Dewan "Undertow" 2011, drawing from The Tide Waits For No Man Filmstrip, via Pierogi

In his latest exhibit at Pierogi, visual, performance, and musical artist Brian Dewan pokes at humankind’s haughtiness in our tendency to ignore potential unintended consequences of tampering with the natural world. His spoof takes the form of a filmstrip—those dry, hokey educational slideshows from the 1950s. Dewan wrote and performed his own dark and humorous narration of the effect of the moon on humans and tides. Dewan’s watercolors that line the walls of the gallery are the film’s slides, which illustrate both the tidal effects of the moon, and cartoon-faced characters skeptical at the well-founded science behind the facts. They grumble at the thought of moving their beach gear when the tides rise, and genuinely wonder why we can’t use our technology to nuke the moon in lieu of such inconvenience. Dewan skillfully avoids condescension by offsetting the severity of his message with playfully tongue-in-cheek visuals and genuinely funny lines.

See The Tide Waits for No Man in Gallery 1 at Pierogi in Williamsburg through November 13^th.

Amanda Dow Thompson

Amanda Dow Thompson, Ghost Moth installation view via Causey Contemporary

Amanda Dow Thompson’s latest show at Causey Contemporary is an examination of transience and permanence when light shines through her sculptures and creates shadows as dynamic as a prism’s rainbow. The sculptures of carved wood, cast resin and cast glass hang from the center of the gallery ceiling. The dreamy resin and glass ones look like double helixes, while the wooden ones feel like some bone hybrid of rib cage and spine, columnal and swirling, support systems that are somehow delicate themselves. Light projects through them as they slowly spin, casting blurred organic shapes. On the wall are Andrew Garn’s photographs of these shadows, cast with colored light creating a more kaleidoscopic version of the live view behind it.

Ghost Moth is now on view at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through November 6^th

Re/Deconstructing History

Jessica Stoller "Untitled" via Like the Spice

The latest group show at Like the Spice features five artists who challenge perceptions of our shared past by reappropriating imagery and techniques throughout (art) history. One standout is Jessica Stoller who works with traditionally decorative and innocuous porcelain lace figurines to reimagine and subvert femininity through violent imagery. Joseph Heidecker livens vintage photographs by embroidering them with colorful beads and string, especially effective where they look like muscle fibers on a weight lifter. All artists manage to successfully modernize variably antiquated materials and representations in ways we haven’t seen and wouldn’t expect, which are inspiring especially to fellow artists.

Re/Deconstructing History is now on view through November 6^th at Like the Spice in Williamsburg.

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich, "Elevator Pitch" 2011 via Sean Kelly

Argentine-born Leandro Erlich’s latest exhibition Two Different Tomorrows is named for the confusion that arose while the artist was traveling in Asia, making his “tomorrow” a different day from the gallery’s. His sculptural installation at Sean Kelly uses elevators as its central symbol for space and time warping. In Erlich’s words an elevator is “a functional object, but one in which life seems to be suspended parenthetically.”

In the center of one of the gallery rooms stands an elevator stuck between floors, an ode to a state of limbo. Peer down and see a newspaper crossword tossed on the floor, as if forgotten by captives upon rescue. Another room contains open elevator banks that become a mind-bending maze. The only working elevator in the exhibition opens and closes its doors to show a video of actual elevator passengers filmed in Tokyo.

An elevator shaft is turned on its horizontal axis and viewers are invited to walk inside through the dark concrete cave toward an elevator car. The light at the end of the tunnel comes from the main gallery, where viewers emerge once again questioning their sense of space and direction.

Two Different Tomorrows is now on view at Sean Kelly Gallery through October 22^nd

Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh "Fallen Star 1/5" 2008-11, via Lehmann Maupin

Seoul born Do Ho Suh expresses cultural displacement and a mental dual citizenship through a preoccupation with architecture and memory of space, especially in the home. The exquisite detail of his replicas and miniatures is irresistible in his latest exhibit Home Within Home at Lehmann Maupin.

Suh first came to America in 1991 to attend RISD. He wrote a story that describes his journey as the result of a tornado lifting and carrying his home in Korea across the Pacific Ocean and crashing it into the side of his new home in Rhode Island. The highlight of the show is a scaled model of Suh’s personal fable. The brick home in Providence is split, displayed in cross section and includes every last coffee table book and window treatment.

Suh has also created exoskeletons of objects in his current New York home—a bathroom sink, circuit breaker, door knobs—made of what appears to be a nylon polyester blend. Monochromatic and framed in tight bundles, these 3D objects appear like insect specimens on the gallery walls.

Home Within Home is now on view at Lehmann Maupin in Chelsea until October 22^nd.

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz, "After the Bath, after Edgar Degas," 2011 via Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

In his latest series Pictures of Magazines 2, Brooklyn-based Vik Muniz continues his practice of photographing his own found object mosaic works. Muniz is the subject of last year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Waste Land. The film chronicles the artist’s return to his native Brazil where he finds inspiration for his next project on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Muniz befriends catadores (pickers of recyclable materials) at Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, and hires them as artist assistants to arrange garbage into giant portraits of fellow catadores.

At Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Muniz instead recreates iconic imagery out of torn magazine pages and the result is surprisingly painterly. Each tear replaces the gesture of a brushstroke as the topography mimics globs of paint. Thousands of decontextualized media scraps become a visual miscellany suggesting a constant stream of updates. When arranged into the likeness of a single work, once labored over by a single artist, Muniz seems to point out a discrepancy of focus and value over time.

Pictures of Magazines 2 is now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea until October 15^th.

Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage "Afternoon Feeding" 2011, via David Zwirner

In a contemporary art environment that shies away from figurative representation, Philadelphia-born Lisa Yuskavage boldly paints female nudes and has created her own cast of signature plush, erotic, brooding, youthful characters. In her latest exhibition at David Zwirner, Yuskavage has enlarged her usual scale to dimensions a viewer must walk across to see in full, a development that likely goes hand in hand with her more prevalent use of vast landscape.

A toxic yellow-green smoggy glow envelopes her fertile figures, who coyly display and contemplate themselves as cartoonish but dangerous Lolitas. But these are not simply portraits. Yuskavage’s works contain entire cinematic scenes filled with art historical references. Her process as of late usually begins with free association that reveals itself to be symbolic. Yuskavage then grabs hold of this glimmer and enhances it into a flash.

The highlight of the exhibition is Yuskavage’s first triptych, which began as a single panel and evolved organically into a more than 25-foot-long piece. A very personal interview with the artist in this season’s issue of BOMB Magazine details her artistic journey so far, including pivotal advice that emboldened her to bring her own provocative personality to her paintings. Read the transcript here.

Lisa Yuskavage is now on view at David Zwirner in Chelsea until November 5^th.

Yutaka Sone

Yutaka Sone "Little Manhattan" (detail), 2007-09, via David Zwirner

Originally trained as an architect, Japanese artist Yutaka Sone has focused his inclination for obsessive detail on sculpture at his latest exhibition Island at David Zwirner.

The entire first room of the exhibit is devoted to a single white marble sculpture. With the help of photographic reproductions, helicopters, and Google Earth, Sone created “Little Manhattan.” Weighing in at two and a half tons, the scaled model includes every street, avenue, building, and bridge east to west. The jagged edges drop off and seem to melt like a curtain of wax.

In the next room, more marble sculptures mingle with banana trees made from steel framework and rattan, a natural plant fiber. He paints them a bright but true-to-life green that pops in a white room filled with white objects. In a series of more marble sculptures called “Light in between Trees,” Sone brings physicality to rays of light. He carves the rays in rounded cartoon proportions that add a pop art element to an otherwise classically informed work of realism.

In Island, Sone exposes the cultural ambiguity of such a landform by playing with the natural and architectural connotations of the word through contrasting forms of jungles and cities. Be sure to see more of his stunning pieces in this survey of selected works.

Yutaka Sone Island is on view at David Zwirner until October 29^th.

Jordan Eagles

Jordan Eagles "Bar 1 - 9" 2009 via Causey Contemporary

At Hemoglyphs, the current show at Causey Contemporary, New York City native Jordan Eagles encases salvaged slaughterhouse blood in plexiglass and UV resin. The resulting ceiling-high abstract sculptural murals are incredibly bold, both in form and intention. His method permanently preserves the blood’s color and texture. Light shines through the panels to reveal unexpected details in the layers of blood, which vary to appear every red between black and baby pink. Some coats are splashed and dripped while others are crystallized and congealed into a glowing tapestry of pauses at different stages of the preservation process.

Eagles mysteriously avoids profanity by presenting objects so unapologetically big, bright and bold as to numb any squeamish reaction. By going all in, he humbles the viewer into absorbing the visual effect rather than the gory medium. It’s ambiguous whether the source material is meant to make a political statement. But the suspension of a vital, flowing substance as abstract imagery seems rife with universally applicable interpretations.

Hemoglyphs is now on view at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through October 2^nd.

Michael Schall

Michael Schall "Eidophusikon" 2011, via Pierogi

It’s September and Brooklyn’s summer gallery hiatus has passed. This month, Michael Schall exhibits his new graphite drawings at Pierogi. Schall’s is a dreamy world of tension between structure and the ephemeral. His series of large-scale drawings each include surreal or otherwise off-kilter light sources. In “Eidophusikon” a large screen is illuminated from behind, leaving the front stage in the dark. A gap in a bridge mid-construction spills a waterfall of liquid light in “Hoover Dam.”

Many of Schall’s drawings feature cage-like structures that impossibly enclose clouds or explosions. The combination of his forceful solid lines with soft fuzzy strokes creates a balanced yet unsettling image. Unanchored by horizon line, these object studies float and cast shadows on an undefined white space. The bursting motion of permeable matter sure to escape its precarious bounds incites a tick of anxiety. Schall further warps physics and scale by pairing his explosive clouds with traditional still life subjects—a Fabergé egg, an ornately carved wooden box, a mason jar. The absence of color throughout his work maintains a cohesive sense of silence. The specificity of his tone almost masks his raw drawing skill, which is worth attention in itself.

Wall Cloud is on view at Pierogi in Williamsburg until October 9^th

Jaume Plensa

Jaume Plensa Echo, photograph by James Ewing via Madison Square Park Conservancy

The Madison Square Park Conservancy has extended the duration of its current commissioned work from Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, who has bestowed upon the park its largest monolithic work in its seven-year history as a public art space. In the center of the Oval Lawn, the forty-foot tall bust called Echo depicts a young girl from the artist’s Barcelona neighborhood in a pensive dream state. Plensa also references a Greek myth in which Zeus’ wife Hera punishes the garrulous nymph Echo to repeat only the words of others.

The sculpture's peaceful quality is slightly disturbed by a vertical stretch of its proportions. Made of polyester resin, fiberglass and marble dust, Echo is a monochromatic non-reflective chalky white. The distortion coupled with the color make the sculpture look like a 3D hologram when lit up at night. For such a large-scale object, a 360 degree viewing is essential to take in the varying backdrops and details, like a nearly hidden braid molded to her neck.

See more of Plensa’s works here and see Echo on view until September 11^th in Madison Square Park.

GeekDown

Matt Richard, The "Impressionists" via GeekDown

Technological themes are ubiquitous in contemporary art. Artworks often force the viewer to mourn the casualties of the digital age—attention spans, connectedness, sense of time, space, and memory. They challenge us to reconcile the absurdity of our practices and expectations, and how quickly they recalibrate themselves as technology progresses (see Arcangel). Such sentiments have inspired art for centuries, and reasonably, now more than ever it seems.

GeekDown is an antidote to the dystopic vision we’ve come to expect from art that highlights technology as medium and/or subject. The exhibition at 92YTribeca presents a showcase of young minds from NYU and RISD that hark back to the kids section of the science museum, where we were excited to learn through interaction, delighted and inspired all at once.

One standout is Nick Yulman’s "Song Cabinet," an interactive mechanical musical installation. Atop an old wooden cabinet a card reads “please open drawers.” Each drawer is rigged up to play sound with various knick knacks, sea shells, a xylophone. More complex beats emerge the farther the drawer is pulled out of the cabinet.

Another favorite is Jack Kalish and Yonatan Ben Simhon’s "Illumination." From afar, the installation seems to be a writing desk with an overhead lamp shining on a clipboard. Up close the lampshade houses a light projector and downward facing camera. The viewer is invited to place any printed text on the clipboard. The camera takes a photo, which is downloaded to an OCR (optical character recognition) script that scans the page. The words are processed by an algorithm that contains a model of grammatical structures taken from thousands of existing works of literature and poetry. After scanning for these patterns, the projector lights up single words on the page to reveal a poem.

Refreshingly unfocused on the Internet, nor on nostalgia of analog technologies, the exhibit instead contains stimulating work that combines artful concepts with technical ambition and prowess.

See GeekDown at 92Y Tribeca before it ends on September 9^th

Lisa Nankivil: Lines of Inference

Lisa Nankivil, The Aerialist, 2011 via Spanierman Modern

Abstractionist Lisa Nankivil might wake up feeling green one day. She begins there, then walks away for a while, returns, and continues improvising until she completes another lush, colorful world. In her latest exhibition Lines of Inference, Nankivil creates stripes with brushes aided by blades, squeegees, planks of cardboard and wood, and a T-square on wheels. Sometimes she scrapes and smudges lines together, or drips paint and lets gravity do the work. The varied tones of paint and techniques of application produce a clear tension between surface and deep space. At the same time the consistency of lines in an innumerable rainbow of solid, blended, bright, and muted colors create a contrast of order and chaos. A completely different viewing experience emerges as the viewer steps away and fine lines become indiscernible.

See a complete gallery of works from Lines of Inference and an interview with Nankivil.

Lines of Inference is now on view at Spainerman Modern in Midtown through September 2^nd.

David LaChapelle: From Darkness to Light

"Adam & Eve" installation view via David LaChapelle

In From Darkness to Light, David LaChapelle hopes to “resuscitate the figure from its current state of commodity.” The photographer and director actually began his artistic career in galleries before Andy Warhol launched him into fame with a job at Interview Magazine. Like Warhol, LaChapelle playfully splashes in both commercial and conceptual puddles to stir together a highly distinctive concoction.

At the Lever House lobby, LaChapelle takes his primary medium of photography back to kindergarten art class with paper chains, collage, and stickers. In “Chain of Life,” LaChapelle replaces construction paper with photographs of the human form, stapled together into swooping and cascading strings that create a celebratory visual of human connectedness. In “Raft of Illusion, Raging Toward Truth,” he combines watercolor, pencil, paper, and glossy prints of his own staged photographs and mounts them on varying numbers of cardboard layers to create a 3D take on French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa. Epic in both size and subject, the ceiling-high collage of cut outs and art class materials showcases LaChapelle’s eye for the surreal. In “Adam & Eve” he arranges tinted translucent stickers of nudes into two circles (separated by sex) on the glass walls of the lobby. The forms swim around each other in a distinctly cell-like mosaic that create an effect of a church’s stained glass window through a microscope, conjuring at once images of science and religion. LaChapelle’s vision of interconnectedness and enlightenment through a youthful lens makes for a compelling experience.

From Darkness to Light is now on view at Lever House in midtown through September 30th.

Never gonna let you down

Jason Bard Yarmosky, "Fanny" and "Harry", 2009

Jason Bryant, "Love's Labor Lost; Epilogue", 2011

Allie Rex, "Plate 22"

Fresh from the wildly popular exhibition of Matt Stone's Tectonics, Like the Spice has every reason to celebrate. Their 5 year anniversary show Never gonna let you down showcases an impressive 40 artists (including Stone). They've curated an eclectic mix of painting, drawing, mixed media and sculpture that feels, quite honestly, exhilarating to walk through. It's not too often that a group show this large doesn't feel daunting, but instead coherent and inspiring. Some standouts include Allie Rex, Jason Bard Yarmosky, and Jason Bryant. See all works on the Like the Spice blog.

Never gonna let you down is now on at Like the Spice through the weekend.

Hamburgers

"Kim Kardashian" 2011, via Shinji Murakami

In south Williamsburg you can enjoy Japanese comfort food at the same place you check out the latest from emerging artists. Now at Supercore, see Shinji Murakami’s physical manifestation of his love for 8-bit video games. His 3D sculptures of McDonald’s-inspired meals are visible from the sidewalk, placed on cafeteria trays along the front window. A map of a Super Mario-esque Central Park and other colorful, nostalgic resin panels line the bar. Kim Kardashian zoomed into 169 pink pixels looks especially striking and Internet-y with a backdrop of tiled cats that wallpaper the café. His work is fun and worth a look.

Hamburgers is now on view at Supercore in Williamsburg until August 31^st.

POWHIDA

Detail of "Portrait of a Genius" via Flavorwire

I entered Marlborough Gallery wondering if I indeed “may never seen an art gallery the same way again” as Brooklyn artist William Powhida boldly envisages in the gallery’s press release of his self-titled show. Rather than the usual air-conditioned perfume, I inhaled the scent of a hot stack of fresh pizzas where press releases and publicity packets usually sit. A photographer fervently documented a ping-pong match, men surrounded a poker table and seemed to challenge me to a game with their eyes. I kept walking, past velvet-roped leather couches and absinthe bottles. A painting called “Portrait of a Genius” by Tom Sanford shows a business casual Powhida holding a bottle of liquor and releasing a dove as a devoted blonde woman clutches his leg.

At the opening night an actor playing Powhida (who matched the “genius” in the painting) arrived in a Mercedes convertible, drinking champagne as women clutched onto his sides. He drank, smoked, and jerked people around while surrounded by an entourage of security and more groupies.

I think Kyle Chayka at ARTINFO hit the nail on the head when he says that, "...for contemporary art, reality and is parody are often so close as to be indistinguishable. What could be ironic satire, a knowing wink, might also end up as an ironic failure to satirize--funny and sad not for truth-telling and bullshit-cutting but for its own self-reflexive victimization, like a joke that falls flat. A large portion of the Marlborough audience wasn't in on the joke; they were there to see and be seen, and they were, regardless of the artist spectacle."

But does that prove Powhida's point all the more effectively? Does filtering subversion through the mainstream expose its cracks or buy into it? Does doing both destroy his credibility?

POWHIDA is on view at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea through August 12th

Cordially Yours

Liam Wylie, Untitled (2010) via Liam Wylie

To enter a gallery and engage in a warm chat with the curator is unusual. But when Enrico Gomez detailed the concept of the current show at Camel Art Space, this refreshing welcome suddenly made sense.

All too familiar with closing phrases of letters requesting consideration for exhibition, the artists who run Camel decided to help water these budding portfolios of potential. The aptly named Cordially Yours is a show made up of cold submissions from emerging artists, democratically selected by the staff after careful consideration of each portfolio submitted the past year. They each made a list of favorites, then voted on the best from each other’s lists based solely on the work itself rather than names, resumes or personalities.

Cosmic sculptures and collages from Ontario’s Liam Wylie stole the show. But the whole of this global collection of seven emerging talents is worth a look.

Cordially Yours is on view until August 14th at Camel Art Space in Williamsburg.

Live and Let Die

Video still from Nadja Verena Marcin's Grand Slam. Photography by Jessica Benett via NURTUREart

In the current installment of NURTUREart’s weekly exhibition series We Are:, Guillermo Creus of Fortress to Solitude curates “Live and Let Die.”

This week, three artists exhibit one work each that combine to fill the gallery with an unsettling tension. Sarah Frost’s paper sculpture of a machine gun is the first sight upon entering the space. It sits low to the ground, stark white and menacing. Upon visiting her website, it seems to be a piece from her larger installation “Arsenal” at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Taking perhaps one of the most direct approaches to addressing the relationship of art and money, Ash Sechler stacks a thousand one dollar bills in a neat (surprisingly short) pile in the middle of the gallery floor, forcing the viewer to call into question the value of the piece.

In Nadja Verena Marcin’s video performance, Grand Slam, the artist plays a one-sided tennis match projected high on the gallery walls. In hectic hand-held camera shots, her high-contrast black and white figure ricochets in a blank, indecipherable space. Diegetic echoes of grunts and racket strikes and the echoes the video creates in the high ceiling of the gallery, coalesce into a single anxious soundtrack to the show.

Each piece exudes a matter-of-fact bravado that underscores the visceral reaction their forms incite. See more from each artist below:

Sarah Frost

Ash Sechler

Nadja Verena Marcin

“Live and Let Die” is on view at NURTUREart Gallery in Bushwick.

Cory Arcangel

Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011) via The Whitney Museum of American Art

Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools is at once humorous, solemn, and timely. His works are product demonstrations that he tinkers with to reveal the equal absurdity of outdated technology, advanced technology, and the speed of that exponential growth. In Various Self Playing Bowling Games, the highlight of the show, Arcangel hacks bowling video games from the late 70s to the 2000s and creates loops of gutter balls. The results are projected onto the wall in chronological order. The effect is something of a line graph, a horizontal failure over time. “I have found the repetitive failure of a poorly rendered 3D human figure bowling to somehow be an apt metaphor for our culture’s bizarre fascination with technology,” Arcangel says. Such are the matter-of-fact labels in the exhibit that describe strikingly clever ideas with ambiguously intentional humor.

This is, however, the tip of a tech-savvy, philosophical iceberg. Other sculptural, video, and print works continue deeper into his universally fascinating windows into human-machine interactions. Giant prints of Photoshop gradients, a video collage of Seinfeld clips that mention Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables...you should see it. In today’s contemporary art world where technological advancement is a ubiquitous subject for comment, and where the funny-sad tone pervades, Arcangel stands out for his fearless and astute statements that we don’t see anywhere else.

Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools is on view at The Whitney on 945 Madison Ave. at 75th St. until September 11.