June Picks
By Christopher Chambers
So, I asked Vanessa Buia, "Where’s the other artist in this exhibition?" You see, I assumed the 3’ x 4’ glossy photographs of toys were all by the same person. Nope, it turns out that Paolo Consorti’s works are a combination of digital and painting techniques. One featured an actual human humping a blow up doll. Unfortunately, my experience with inflatable surrogates is rather limited, so I thought they were both plastic.
Even more surprising though, was that Tim Wilson’s works weren’t photos at all, they’re oil paintings. Holy bejesus those things look like photographs. Anyone who has been reading this column in the last several years knows what yours truly thinks about photorealism, but, like it or not, those things REALLY look like distorted photos of toys.
I did manage to attend (I’m always being chastised for failing to show up) Nancy Brooks Brody’s opening in an underground gallery on Crosby Street. Her new works were sensitive, sweet, precious, and lovely — everything the press release said they weren’t. Delicate pencil drawings on pristine rag paper, of trees: notched and chopped, hurting but for sure alive. Paper is made from trees, remember? The opening took place on "Earth Day." There were also some paintings of tree rings. Her work holds a redolent melancholy that is genuinely touching.
Jon Kessler’s gadgetronic gizmos at Deitch Projects were, according to the press release, about surveillance and post 9/11 paranoia. There were rotating dolls and doodads monitored by video cameras and projected on flat screen LCDs in real time. The guts and mechanical workings were visible for all to see. I particularly enjoyed the coupling of motorcycle chains and digital technology, the same sort of low/high tech pairing that Michael Zansky incorporates in his works (He showed at Briggs Robinson a few months back.), but he utilizes outscale lenses instead of video.
Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but it also seemed to fall in line with Humans, Machines and Body Parts at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery by Atelier van Lieshout, which featured semblances of humanoids attached to tubes and mechanical contraptions. And furthering this ironic low tech aesthetic is Tom Sachs’ exhibition at Sperone Westwater. It runs the gamut of his apocalyptic oeuvre; he’s really got his shtick down: Wooden police barricades fashioned into weaponry and presented in piecemeal casing. E. Pluribus Unum.
