ArtBUZZ: March 11-March 18, 2010
Love Billy. Weaver, 2009. Spray paint on aluminum. Union & Van Brunt Street, WORK Gallery.
RED HOOK
WORK Gallery presents: “LOVE BILLY”
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13th, 6-9pm
This is the first New York gallery show of Brooklyn based street muralist and graffiti artist, Love Billy, who has developed a distinctive and recognizable style over the past decade, making his work a ubiquitous presence on the streets of Williamsburg, Bushwick, Red Hook and throughout Brooklyn. His figurative work features an array of highly stylized hybrid creatures set against a colorful, textured background. Typically found on deteriorating buildings and vacant lots, Love Billy’s creations characteristically reveal a subtle expression of ennui, iterating a wry self-awareness of their surrounding environment.
Transforming the WORK Gallery exhibition space, the installation will feature several of the artist’s oil and spray-paint works on canvas, wood panel, aluminum, and various other found materials.
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13th, 1-6pm
147 pieces of art selected from over 1,500 submissions by three jurors: Anne Strauss (Associate Curator of 19th Century and Contemporary Art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Mark Hughes (Director of Galerie LeLong in Chelsea), and Bill Murphy (Professor and Gallery Director, Wagner College). There will also be an “Affordable Art Wall,” with more than sixty pieces of work prices under $500 each.
WILLIAMSBURG
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12th, 6-9pm
Outside the Timezone (a curatorial partnership between Chris Rawson and Julian Calero.) and Camel Art Space are pleased to announce “Lonely Fire,” a group exhibition of new work by visual artists Chris Burnside, Tania Cross, Nathan Gelgud, Sam Martineau, Ben Needham, Alisa Ochoa, Adam Taye, James Woodward, a.o.
The exhibition borrows its name from the epic Miles Davis track from the Bitches Brew Sessions, recorded between 1969-1970, and will explore the concepts of the deification of the modern male athlete, spirituality, local tradition and the road to victory. Sports are still perhaps the greatest theater of live performance where local customs and factional interests are played out. Sports bring solidarity to diverse populations, unified behind a shared goal of winning and team identity. It is in this context that the spectacle of human beings pitted against one and another (or going at it alone) is at its greatest and yet most basic height.
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12th, 6-8pm
In the summer of 2008, Andrew Garn was assigned by the Smithsonian Institution to document biodiversity in a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon. This mission was an incomparable opportunity to photograph an unexplored region of the jungle. Accompanied by six scientists and a number of macheteros, the team traveled throughout the brush, many times creating new trails in untouched rain forest.
Soon the duplicitous nature of the expedition surfaced. The Smithsonian was in place to document the pristine conditions of the forest during the early stages of an extensive oil exploration project initiated by the Spanish energy giant Repsol. Leasing an immense 800 sq mile tract from the Peruvian government, Repsol created over twenty helicopter landing fields by clear cutting immense swaths of forest. Explosive charges were set off to measure the oil reserves under the jungle floor. Eventually, pumping rigs were flown in and a fifty-mile pipeline was constructed to bring the oil to market.
Mr. Garn’s experience in the Amazon reveals a place of majestic beauty as well as one of overwhelming chaos, confusion, and terror. His photographs and eight minute video, Lost Amazon, depict a setting of obfuscation, where the boundaries of heavenly reprieve frequently dissolved into torment and wretchedness.
Two series of photographs detail the jungle inhabitants in their grace and inevitable demise. The Shadow Series illustrates a troubling world where lies an artificial sense of safety. The main body of work, set in a darkened gallery, conveys both the seduction and fear that make up the Amazon.
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Jessica Stoller, Untitled, 2010, porcelain, slip, china paint. Courtesy of Like the Spice.
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12th, 6:30-10pm
A “sculptural experience” curated by Marisa Sage and featuring work by artists Langdon Graves, Patrick Jacobs, Matthew Northridge, Diana Puntar, R. Justin Stewart, and Jessica Stoller, this show is an exploration of the way each person can make a piece their own.
Each sculpture in this group exhibition embraces both the viewer and the object, using the relationship between the two to recreate the definitions of reality, invention, and representation. With porcelain, maps, zip ties, wood, latex, and various other materials, these six artists construct nuanced universes that give us sneak peaks into post apocalyptic futures, offer new lenses and body armor to help us view scenes from imagined narratives, and visually translate information as familiar as a map and as individual as our belief in God. The new world that is created in the gallery is contextual: the information delivered not only piece by piece, but viewer by viewer. Each experience will be a co-production between the artwork and the viewer and together they will unlock both aesthetic importance and visual functionality.
PARK SLOPE
Artist Reception: Sunday, March 14th, 6-8pm
Pulling diagrams from a variety of sources as broad as internal medicine, psychology, chemistry and physics, Phillip Buntin coalesces imagery into not quite functional pictographic explanations of complicated ideas. His paintings have a logic all their own that results in multi-layered complex compositions that seem to work- even if the viewer isn’t quite sure how. Mr. Buntin’s visual metaphors seek to express the “experience of generating interpretations (or understandings) of complex things, ideas and experiences.” This exhibition features twelve oil and acrylic paintings on panel.
