Showing posts with label art galleries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art galleries. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Monday, October 21, 2013
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Saturday Evening in Williamsburg: Opening Reception for "Ocean" by Cook & Gates at Live With Animals
This evening we had the pleasure of going to Live With Animals
for the opening reception of Ocean, an installation by the local artists and fashion designers Cook & Gates,
known for their luscious, unique hand-dyed canvas bags and pouches.
Here Ethan Cook and Sara Gates expand on their process and create a whole environment incorporating dyed canvas, organic found material, sound, and limited edition bags for sale.
On such a gloomy day, it was jolting to enter the gallery and feel the environment change so abruptly, like at the end of Un Chien Andalou.
The beach created -- we wonder where they got such beautiful sand, better than we know from the beaches on the south shore of Long Island and the city --
is far more intriguing than our blurry-crappy cellphone pics could possibly convey. What we liked most about it was that it was too profound to be whimsical or "ironic"; we're just not articulate enough to say why.
Live With Animals, open Saturdays and Sundays from 1-6 p.m. or by appointment, is an artist-run gallery, is at the corner of Kent and Metropolitan Avenues, in the same complex as Monster Island, where we were a few nights ago.
Having papers to grade and a final exam to give tomorrow (yes, college is now on Sundays, too), we didn't get to stay as long we would have liked and so plan to come back to see Cook & Gates' Ocean again. You need to go to see it for yourself.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Sunday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Stephen Mallon's "Next Stop Atlantic" at the Front Room Gallery
On a bright blue, somewhat chilly afternoon we walked down Metropolitan Avenue over to the Front Room Gallery on Roebling Street to catch the last day of Next Stop Atlantic, the exhibition by the brilliant photographer Stephen Mallon that we'd heard a lot of good things about.
The photographs of the process of turning discarded New York City subway cars into artificial reefs, in order to create a refuge for thefish and crustaceans which would colonize the structures, were absolutely stunning.
Mallon, a Clinton Hill resident, got a lot of wonderful notices for his striking "Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549," a series of photographs documenting the salvaging of the US Airway flight that, amazingly, airline captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had managed to safely emergency-land in the Hudson River in on January 15, 2009.
We don't have the vocabulary or expertise to comment intelligently on these hauntingly surreal photos -- at the fabulous School of Visual Arts, we do teach classes of photography majors, but we teach them Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire, Kafka and Beckett -- but this review by Benjamin Sutton of the exhibit at The L Magazine we clipped out last month drew us here to see it before it closed:
The industrial photographer followed the MTA's involvement in a project to build artificial reefs along the East Coast, committing stripped subway cars to the sea floor to provide shelter for marine life. That process, documented in the exhibition's 15 medium- to large-format color photographs, opens with the decontaminated cars stacked on a dock like shipping containers, gathering snow in bleak winter sunlight.
Lifted onto barges, the iconic cars are a puzzling sight, suddenly slowed from their clanging subterranean velocity to a few swaying naughts per hour. In Mallon's crisply focused photographs, the awkward barges piled high with the tinny shells look downright biblical, the last surviving members of some extinct species of slithering underground monster crowded aboard a madman's ark.
There's an incredibly gentle rhythm to Mallon's series, too, with stage in the journey following at a plodding, measured speed befitting the huge forms in play. The pace only quickens at the end, when a massive forklift tips and knocks cars into the ocean. In "Virginia Placement" (2008), an 18-ton car flies off the barge; shot suspended in mid-air, the clunky hull has all the grace of a Hummer limousine rattling along Meatpacking District cobblestones.
Nonetheless, the momentary impression of weightlessness, the anticipation of impact evoke Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris" (1932), the inevitable splash tantalizingly withheld. A few feet away, Mallon unleashes the full force of impact in "Bellagio" (2010), with a nearly symmetrical wall of water sent shooting up as a car belly-flops into the ocean. As the reefs-to-be slip beneath the surface, shots of cars half-filled with water are the series' strangest.
In "Settling" (2008) a car sits oddly upright at the top of the frame, with water like sluggish Bedford stop commuters pouring into its wide open doorways. En route to their very last stops, these elaborately (and expensively) manufactured objects double as time capsules, tokens from a culture trying fitfully to repair environmental damage it's done in even the most bizarre and oddly poetic ways.
Yes, it's really poetic, almost dreamlike and definitely filled with a weird majesty: after all, these are the subways that we get crammed into in rush hour, and here they are, stripped and decontaminated (from us!) and becoming part of nature. You can see Stephen Mallon's photographs in their glory on his website.
We're grateful to him and to the Front Street Gallery for this show and glad we got to experience it before it closed.
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