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.

Maureen Shields

Maureen Shields "HBAC2009" via Maureen Shields

About Glamour is a multifunctional platform for creative expression in fashion, music, design, and art in both a shop and exhibition space. Through the store filled with one of a kind new and vintage clothing, accessories, and livingware, AG Gallery currently welcomes San Francisco’s Maureen Shields. At first glance, her collages on wood panels and vintage porcelain plates depict cheerful technicolor worlds. But up close, her pieces whirl a carnival-like blend of humor, delight, and terror. She layers the animal kingdom with early civilization, the modern manmade world, and abstraction to create a visual timeline that describes a place by compressing thousands of years of its existence into a single image that unnerves as it amuses.

Shields “seeks to reintroduce the strangeness and complexity associated with childhood.” Indeed her eye for assembling familiar imagery into the unexpected does conjure a childlike bewilderment that we wish to absorb and resolve. But her use of faded paper collage and neon acrylics appears to be an expression specific to a Gen Xer reconciling the experience of growing up in a rapidly changing world that in remembrance feels like time travel.

Maureen Shields: Collages is on view at AG Gallery in Williamsburg through October 30th

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.

Amy Joy Watson

Untitled, 2011, balsa, watercolor, thread, balloon via Amy Joy Watson

The central intrigue of Australian sculptor Amy Joy Watson’s works lies in the irony that transforming childlike dreams into physical reality requires an adult patience and refinement. The unwavering dedication and vision is palpable in viewing her latest group of sculptures, Big Rock Candy Mountain. The structure of her wildly jubilant world is comprised of multi-colored fine cuts of balsa wood, hand-stitched with needle and thread. Her choice to stain wood with watercolor in lieu of a palette of harsh neons and crisp acrylics serves to conjure images of faded alphabet blocks.

Another central contrast in Watson’s creations is their inherent structural allusions to something technological and futuristic; like architectural mock ups from another planet or time, that are constructed by hand out of the basest of materials. Analog materials of wood, needle, and thread are stitched into a digital Willy Wonka universe, as if a 21^st century Oompa Loompa's early 3D renderings of everlasting gobstoppers were blown up into an otherworldly scale, to be transmitted into a million little pieces through Wonkavision. A playful relationship between hard and soft, and jagged and round pervades her pieces. A geometric orb is tied to a perfectly spherical pink helium balloon. Hundreds of hard wooden panels take the form of a ribbon's organic drape.

There is something life-affirming is Watson’s sculptures. They are magical artifacts of an undying child-like imagination that matures into a dedicated artistic vision. She honors the spirit of her former self with tools she’s gathered along the way. In a somewhat literal representation of such, she constructs a winged clam-like cradle that holds a gobstopper candy. The luxurious and precious preservation of frivolity makes Watson’s work hard to resist.

See the Big Rock Candy Mountain gallery

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.