Adam Suerte, “Overpass, Redhook”
Laura Enderle, “Martini Theater”
LJ Lindhurst, “Magenta Sweet Soaker”
Tonight (3/16/23) at Basin Gallery in Redhook, Brooklyn, is the closing reception for the group exhibition of work by Adam Suerte, Danny Cortes, Laura Enderle, and LJ Lindhurst.
Bonam Kim, “Untitled (401 Suydam Street), 2022”, Dollhouse miniatures, taxidermy pigeon, wood, paint and “Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down”, 2018, wood, screw, silicone
Bonam Kim, “Untitled (401 Suydam Street)”, 2022, Dollhouse miniatures, taxidermy pigeon, wood, paint
Bonam Kim, “Untitled (Classroom)”, 2022, Dollhouse miniatures, wood, paint, paper
Bonam Kim, “Untitled (Classroom)”, 2022, Dollhouse miniatures, wood, paint, paper
Bonam Kim, “Untitled (1990-2005)”, 2022, Wall clock, dollhouse miniatures, wood
It’s the last weekend to see Bonam Kim’s GOOD JOB WELL DONE, at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. The collection of sculptures are each based on events in Kim’s life and are incredible creations.
From the press release-
Kim grew up with her brother’s architectural models and drawings scattered around their house. Captivated by the relationship between model and actual space, she gained an acute sense of her spatial surroundings. This sensibility, combined with her love of making things with her hands, led her to constructing miniatures of her world. These objects invite us to navigate not only the spaces she has occupied physically, but also the psychological space of her experiences and memories. By manipulating scale and taking a bird’s-eye view perspective, Kim reclaims power over the past and present. Works like Between Dream and Dark and Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down playfully explore the frustrations of cross-cultural exchange, while Untitled (April 2, 2020) and Untitled (203 Harrison Pl) evince feelings of isolation and accumulation during the pandemic era.
In Untitled (Classroom), Kim recreates a typical classroom from memory. Within it she presents us with some of the artifacts of the post-war South Korean educational system: politely folded hands are given a “stamp of approval” on the blackboard, commended for their conformity. Kim continues this examination of the way architectural spaces regulate human behavior in Untitled (401 Suydam Street), a model of the artist’s bedroom. She restages an event in which her apartment’s ceiling had become infested by pigeons, eroding her sense of personal space and producing an uneasy awareness of surveillance—of being observed at her most intimate by an other.
Untitled (1990-2005) contends with a traumatizing childhood experience where Kim suffered a severe hand burn which led her to have multiple surgeries over an extended period of time. These memories led her to grow averse to going into spaces that brought forth memories of the hospital’s formal qualities, such as hair salons. With the piece she distills the relation between time, space, and memory, turning a wall clock into an operating room and hair salon. This sense of spatial unease is echoed in the piece Untitled (Mexico City-Seoul), which models the circumstances of renewing her visa in the middle of the 2020 pandemic. Having to ping-pong between Mexico and Seoul without knowing when she would be able to return to the United States made her reflect on the arbitrariness of the system, which is mirrored in the piece by an embassy office held within a lottery box, pointing to a bureaucratic opacity that leaves the user in a sort of Kafkaesque limbo.
This exhibition closes 3/12/23.
Bosco Sodi’s outdoor sculpture installation, Perfect Bodies, presented by Pioneer Works, was on view in Redhook, Brooklyn from October 2020 until December 2020.
From Pioneer Works’ press release-
Sited on a once teeming commercial concrete parking lot two blocks south of Pioneer Works, Perfect Bodies speaks to, in artist Bosco Sodi’s words, “silence, contemplation and the passing of time—the small things in life and our relationship with the earth.” The installation consists of large-scale clay spheres and cubes made from local clay fired in the artist’s studio in Oaxaca, Mexico, which made the long journey by road across the Mexico-US border to Red Hook. A longtime resident of the neighborhood—itself named after the tone of its own clay soil—Sodi is known for his use of raw and organic materials to create textured paintings and objects.
Sodi’s ongoing dialogue with nature and landscape, shaped by his interests in Japanese aesthetics and Abstract Expression, puts himself in the lineage of both Arte Povera and Land Art—two post-war movements which emphasized, respectively, radically simple materials and an integral relationship between art and earth. As Spanish author Juan Manuel Bonet remarked in the artist’s 2020 eponymous monograph, his three dimensional works reconcile an interest in minimalism with the practices of Mexican heritage. On this topic, curator Dakin Hart further writes: “At his place in Oaxaca, Sodi hand forms large geometric sculptures from clay and fires them in a makeshift kiln on the beach. Cuboids in different formats recall the scale and how-did-they-do-that-craft of cyclopean architecture across the ancient world. While spheroids, each formed by eye in a landscape of unbelievable things, might be the petrified remnants—or organic vanguard—of a Jurassic invasion. The past seeding itself into the present, a starting point for nature’s revenge.”
Currently, as part of Art Biennale 2022, Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro is showing What Goes Around Comes Around at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, in Venice, Italy, until November 27th, 2022. The art installation will include his paintings as well as recent sculptures.
The images above are from Michelle Handelman’s film Irma Vep, The Last Breath, starring Zackary Drucker and the late Flawless Sabrina.
The video installation is based on Musidora, the French silent film actress, and the character she is best known for Irma Vep from the 1915 film Les Vampires directed by Louis Feuillade.
From the exhibition’s caption-
It’s a piece about living in the shadows, criminal anxiety, and the relationship between the artist and her creation, both fictional and real.
Irma Vep and Musidora are played by Zackary Drucker (Transparent) and the late Flawless Sabrina (The Queen), two artists whose identities transgress the border of art and life. Together, they developed a relationship that documents a cultural evolution of gender.
Musidora was an early 20th century feminist who took control of her career, not only acting, but also producing/directing films and theater. She was an artistic force of her time, producing several works by her lover Colette and having many documented affairs with both men and women. After financing dried up for her projects, she lived in relative obscurity until her death in Paris, 1957. In her later years, she worked the ticket booth of the Cinematheque Francaise, where few people ever knew that the woman selling them their movie tickets was France’s beloved vamp of the silver screen.
Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes up motifs from the silent movie such as gazes, affected body language and the figure of the masked woman. It’s shot on a starkly illuminated set that makes space for anxious projections of desire on the void that is Irma Vep- a space between genders, between vamps of the silent era and the contemporary queer- smashing the shiny veneer to reveal dark, subconscious layers of fluid identity.
The film is part of the larger exhibition Idol Worship, a group show curated by Emily Colucci, at Smack Mellon which “celebrates the ongoing cultural, social and political significance of role model adoration as an essential survival strategy”.
The exhibition closes 12/29/19.
Currently at Brooklyn Museum is Garry Winogrand: Color, the first exhibition dedicated to Winogrand’s color photographs.
From Brooklyn Museum’s website-
While almost exclusively known for his black-and-white images that pioneered a “snapshot aesthetic” in contemporary art, Winogrand produced more than 45,000 color slides between the early 1950s and late 1960s.
Coming from a working-class background in the Bronx and practicing at the time when photographs had little market value, Winogrand did not have the resources to produce costly and time consuming prints of his color slides during his lifetime. Yet, he remained dedicated to the medium for nearly twenty years.
The exhibition presents an enveloping installation of large-scale projections comprising more than 400 rarely or never-before seen color photographs that capture the social and physical landscape of New York City and the United States. On his numerous journeys through Midtown Manhattan and across the country, Winogrand explored the raw visual poetics of public life—on streets and highways, in suburbs, at motels, theaters, fairgrounds, and amusement parks. For him, the industrially manufactured color film, which was used by commercial and amateur photographers, perfectly reproduced the industrially manufactured colors of consumer goods in postwar America. By presenting this group of largely unknown color work, Garry Winogrand: Color sheds new light on the career of this pivotal artist as well as the development of color photography before 1970.
Winogrand’s photos are always captivating, both in his style and subject matter, and now there is the addition of time, which adds nostalgia to their allure.
The exhibition begins with a slide projector showing single slides, most of which aren’t on view in the main room (shown below).
The main room (shown below) has slides rotating on the walls along both sides of the large room with seats in the center for viewing. The pairings often accentuate each others colors, with the smaller slide of each pair staying up longer. It is definitely worth making the time to see them all.
Also included in the exhibition are a room of Winogrand’s black and white photographs and a video of him discussing his work.
This exhibition closes 12/8/19.