Girls (and Guys) Just Want to Have Fun

We start with Guy Goodwin's excellent show at  Brennan Griffin. Why excellent? Strong, weird objects that invite the eye to roam. Read and see more here:
Gallery Link

Which offers a hilarious handout interview with David Reed in which the artist discusses the torture he feels making his work.

Clearly the labor is there.

It is important to him the color retain an 'off' quality, not quite the clean tones of advertising. "It's advertisting-like color, but I'm refining it. There's a little more harmony in the way the colors work together, echoing or reverberating."

Guy Goodwin: "When it works there is some kind of strange street-like harmony. That's the only way I could put it--like the way a billboard would work. Another quality that's really important...is the way the color sucks the light in."

DR: "I think of a grotto as being in the dark. Do you think of it that way?" "GG: "No, I just think of it as more artifically lit...same way a cave would work. ..not something that is naturally formed. I like it that a grotto is artificial. That seems very important ...it's my construct. It's not a real place."

DR: {Joseph Beuys} liked Palermo's work because it was 'porous.' 

GG: "I think that's the reason why I started emphasizing these holes, in other words the holes are about more than the surface. The surface in traditional modern work is always there...I was emphasizing that surface with the staple gun, punching holes in it."

"Per Kirkeby wrote somewhere that painters are either looking out of the cave or looking into it." DR: "You are looking into it?" GG: "When I was younger, possibly I was looking out. The older I get, the more I'm looking into the dave. There's no doubt. That's where I feel I belong."

Here, an arialist, one of many gifted performers in the splendid Norte Maar production Combine  at Brooklyn's Muse. Foundation Link

The crowd was seated in a square around the performers in a two-hour intensive featuring poems and poets, dances and dancers, musicians, arialists, paintings hand-carried around the stage by staff with white gloves, a circus barker and cotton-candy-maker! Combine revives the glory days of Judson Memorial Church, its title a tribute to Rauschenberg and its concept an interdisciplinary extravaganza. It was wonderful to savor the wit, imagination and pure talent that unspooled. I did not photograph much in favor of direct experience, but the images convey a sense of the production's scale.

This kind of ambition is what makes Norte Maar shine; they have done some amazing projects including the  sound performance at Harvest works, the Combines, and every April, ambitious dance performances in which dancers work with artists.

Speaking of dance: a small sketch by Amy Feldman in her show Nerve Reserve at James Cohan, LES
Gallery Link 

The paintings risk fleeting touch, the very moment. Their surfaces are beautiful, the paint glossy and wet and brush load perfect.

Jim Drain at Natalie Karg. Gallery Link

I enjoyed the anthropomorphism

Worlds within worlds on small floor pieces, reminding me of the topographies of Nicole Awai and others.

At Sargent's Daughters, a magnificent group show, the Coverly Set.
Gallery Link

Trompe L'Oeil fades and flat gesture - delicious and just right

From Press Release: The natural world and the digital world are often viewed as being at odds with each other...this simplistic notion of natural v. digital is at odds with reality, in which the meeting point of the nature and science is far more complex."

"Artists have long been drawn to the inherent possibilities of rendering the natural world numerically, as in Fibonacci sequences and Umberto Eco's calculations of ideal beauty, and this intricate relationship has become more pronounced as technology becomes not only a subject for art, but the means by which it is made."

Ann Craven's gorgeous bird

"The Coverly Set highlights the complex ways nature and man are entwined, and how our own relationshp and development of technology can be used to enhance as well as enlarge the world around us."

Suzanne McClelland's three-sided painting - a painting with a shadow life!

Reminiscent of Stacy Leigh's densely painted figures with a stronger sense of form and internal life

Animation

Painting on a vinyl surface, similar to Alexi Worth - only other time I've seen this surface

Keltie Ferris

Alexis Rockman watercolor near desk - detail

In Brooklyn, at Studio 10, a magnificent duo: Daniel Wiener and Jennie Nichols in a show called Doubled. Here, Weiner's epic mask installation in ceramic.
Gallery Link

Shadows behind the masks

Ensor,  Joanna Pousette-Dart come immediately to mind, but it's bigger than references: the primal confrontation with Others...

In space you can enter, that weaves in and out, as if clouds on a Japanese screen.

Here, the show's thesis: a mask-within-a-mask by Weiner and a cast rubber radiator by Nichols. 

Hand-kneading is evident, with imprints of fingers.

Ending with the boisterous Bigger, Bolder, Better show at 470 Atlantic, temporarily commandeered by curators Etty Yaniv, Christina Massey and Jaynie Crimmins for an unruly experiment in artistic squatting (by invitation). Gallery Link
Here and below, a walk through Elizabeth Riley's meditation on time, light and space.

Carol Salmanson's live-light sketches

Leaf rubbings by Alyce Rosner

Jaynie Crimmins' shredded financial documents recast as decorative wall sculpture! These remind me in some ways of Carol Prusa's illuminated domes; I do not see work like this very often.

Ellie Murphie's bilateral ropes ingeniously affixed like a bicycle delivery package, collapsing monumental and informal

Christina Massey, fusing material and painted weaves

Mia Pearlman

Suzan Shutan's tar paper relief

Jaanika Peerna in front of Pearlman

Susan Luss window treatment.
In theFort Green/Bed Stuy neighborhood (where I rented fourteen years) the inexorable changes wrought by New York real estate create this show--and it is this kind of energy that makes the city so great! What a pleasure to see work experimentally produced for the pure, ephemeral  joy of it.