Chelsea Runabout

Images from the opening: Delano Dunn in his debut show at Lesley Heller remembering the 1992 LA Riots and how they shaped his childhood.  Gallery Link

According to Wikipedia, LA Police Chief Darryl Gates took much of the blame for the excessive violence perpetrated on Rodney King by LAPD officers. In spring 1992, around this time of year, four officers were acquitted. Several thousand people rioted in response and the death toll, injury and property damage were extensive. 

The insertion of photos from the riots with romantic landscape imagery recalls the  sweet and sour quality of Kerry James Marshall's ruminations on his LA childhood.

Images from the actual riots taken by Marcy Kaputnik in LA from where she lived on Crenshaw Blvd.

Photo Marcy Kaputnik, 1992 riots.

of this photo, Kaputnik writes, "Quite a battle between the looters and the store owners ensued. The looters first set fire to the delivery trucks that had been parked to block the parking lot entrances. Then the looters pushed aside the delivery trucks and rammed their cars into the store entrance, whereupon the store owners shot the looters and the TV helicopters caught images of looters lying motionless on the ground. Even though I lived about 300 feet from here, I watched it live on TV and stayed safely inside, only venturing out to take photos once the shooting had more or less subsided."

Elisa D'Arrigo at Elizabeth Harris presenting rich, densely surfaced forms that yield surprising interiors. The interiors on iPhone are hard to catch, but here one finds a surprisingly endless, glossy black. D'Arrigo's exhibition, In the Moment, was made improvisationally, wet into wet. Gallery Link

Martha Clippinger's cast ceramic works, wall hangings and tapestries presented in the second gallery interweave high and low art influence, inspired by Zapotec aesthetics and her travels in Mexico. Gallery Link

The color is rich and surprising.

Terrycloth enters the lexicon of tapestry.

More D'Arrigo. Gallery Link

Blue sky inside.

Susan English at Kathryn Markel in the solo show Periphery. Gallery Link

Luminous veils of color with repeated pours, often stacking substrates together.  

Nancy Cohen in the front gallery: hybrid sculptural objects and layered handmade abaca paper constructions almost woven in their density. The artist made the paper at Dieu Donne and later fabricated the works in her studio. Gallery Link

The objects capture light much more dynamically than this photo suggests--like people, they have multi-faceted personalities. 

Fran O'Neill's gestural paintings in her solo show Divergence at Sears Peyton Gallery. Gallery Link

The large interior scale and exuberant gestures share qualities with painters Andrea Belag and  Elliot Green, but unlike them O'Neill bounds the gesture by framing with an extra band of color. 

The immediacy of this work can be attributed, in part, to the wet on wet processes also used by D'Arrigo and to a lesser extent English, while their large interior scale suggests late Guston.

Syncopation, a two-person featuring Emily Berger and Bob Seng at Odetta Chelsea. This new space is housed in the 7th floor 1st dibs complex, a 4,500 s.f. 'permanent art fair' that serves as a second location for artist Ellen Hackl Fagen's longtime Bushwick space. Gallery Link 

Berger's repeated marks create mountain-like masses.

Echoed in Seng's collaged and scraped exit signs.

Another visit to Deborah Brown's This Dream and Other Animals at Burning in Water. Gallery Link
Like Odetta, this gallery adapts a new model with the High Line Nine building that houses multiple galleries in a corridor linking 27th and 28th Streets. There is another space nearby as well.

Bravura paint handling prevails in large paintings of women and dogs exulting in the landscape. 

The surfaces are dry while the handling is wet. Form is achieved through confluence of marks.