NY ARTS at the Armory
Lee Klein and Abraham Lubelski
The Armory Show 2005
Like the slew of Reality TV shows and makeover magicians in today’s pop culture, this year’s Armory Fair reveals noteworthy stylistic revolutions in the work of several prominent artists. The list of big boys and girls includes Inka Essenheigh, Terry Winters, Jenny Holzer and Will Cotton. Given the selection, we are urged to recount it as a resilient Top Ten list, thus bending to the very nature of the game.
#1 Will Cotton, Michael Kohn gallery, Los Angeles.
The standout in name is "Cotton Candy Sky" by Will Cotton. This artist translates pre-Raphaelite lushness into a contemporary confectionary-scape. In his work two blondes float upon a pink gauze of a cloud in a heightened blue sky, as if a note that never crescendos. He has created a pure Candyland of naked women as its citizenry (shuttle service provided).
#2 Phillip Allen, The Kerin Gallery and The Approach London.
Here the dynamics of new geometries and spatial plays (where perspectival dynamics echo prismatic xylophones of impasto to unveil a true artist) form a berth in the gate nobody saw. Going possibly one step beyond where the curtain once rose with one Jennifer Reeves.
#3 Jenny Holzer, "The Hand Desired," Cheim & Read.
Here this writer and his editor speak in the third person. This becomes the inter-zoned first to go for Jenny Holzer. Holzer’s saying, "Withdrawn into some desiccated realm of beauty the hand desired but the heart refrained," is projected onto a palazzo on the canal. For a canonical 80s artist whose tangents often seemed heavy handed, this change of context and its new lightheartedness? is a delight indeed.
#4 Gonzalo Puch Le Corbusier changes directions here in an interior-scape of white. He offers a display of architectural elements which work like a come-together readymade. It is the photojournalistic, if the picture taker is removed, and rediscovers itself as the mother of its own inventions.
#5 Publishers Choice – Nobuyoshi Araki, "Painting Flower," Taka Ishii Gallery
An erotic suite of nudes and half nudes is set beside flowers of digitized overlays.
#6 Inka Essenheigh, Shopping the Victoria Miro Gallery
London _ Essenheigh Steve Mumford of Arnet?s Baghdad
Journal wife and Mark Kostabi?s favorite name to drop turns up here. She turns him from an anthropomorphic being which has at times looked like Purdue chicken and at others samurai warriors in bondage to a scene of surveillance. The store bulges and recedes as consumers shop in what appears to be a long, open meet locker. They pick up flesh to go.
#7 Anton Kern gallery: Once again, a top-notch instillation of various media creates a multi-level maze for the eye.
#8 Jane South: Her works at Spencer Brownstone and
Susan Veilmetter Los Angelos Projects unveil her cul-de-saces of ovoids rounding the grid and going "Geodesic".
#9 The always repentantly attired David Maupin of Lehman-Maupin makes our list for exclaiming into his cell phone, "we have an appointment Wednesday- what day is that?"
#10 Maria Friberg for from the series "Still Lives," where a sleeper rests within an inner valley of a straight wall of books- How seamless the dream is?
