ArtBUZZ: May 28-June 2, 2010
Video still, Jonas Mekas, 2010. Courtesy of Momenta Art.
WILLIAMSBURG / BUSHWICK
Opening: Friday, May 28, 7-9pm
Brooklyn-based artist Conrad Ventur is best known for his cinematic environments that raise questions regarding aspiration, longing, sincerity, ‘affect’ and captured historical performance. For his exhibition Screen Tests Revisited, Mr. Ventur worked over the course of a year to author a kind of second-generation body of Warholian work, looking to the archive of Andy Warhol’s earliest forays into film-based portraiture, the ‘screen tests.’ Initially conceived as quotations, he worked intimately with key Factory ‘Fantastics’ Billy Name, Mario Montez, Ivy Nicholson, Ultraviolet, Bibbe Hansen, Penelope Palmer and Jonas Mekas to restage these films some 45 years later. The new films approximate the lighting, frame and delayed playback speed of the originals, as the subjects of then and now conflate with the two artists and the spaces between them. Formally, the sitters exude a candid familiarity with Mr. Ventur, suggesting a conspiratorial undoing of the youth-obsessed ground on which popular culture stands. Screen Tests Revisited is the first of ongoing collaborative works between members of this cast and the artist. For the artist, the past and present intermingle in a filmic narrative that connects decades just as it reanimates our own particular links with popular culture and shared societal memories radiating with light.
Opening: Friday, May 28, 7-9:30pm
An exhibition of paintings on paper and canvas by Martín Reyna. His second solo exhibition at the gallery will present new works that expand and meld his ongoing explorations of landscape, architecture, the void of nothingness and light. Mr. Reyna’s paintings in their utmost, celebrate the accident as a thing that can be masterfully controlled. With the use of minimal gestures his paintings provoke a poetic blurring of the distinction between recognizability, the purely abstract and the place where the two meet together in a dreamlike state. In both his heavily textured oils on canvas and his intricately woven watercolors, a most vivid use of color plays a vital role in the representation of metaphorical analogies of existence and creation. With the use of familiar yet mostly camouflaged imagery such as trees, geometrical shapes and spatial perspectives, the works pave a way into the convergence of a space where landscape meets an abstracted tapestry that weaves together and relies on the most miniscule of components to make up the whole. Refracting all of the possible colors of the spectrum into a transcendental space that is both contemplative and meditative, the prismatic qualities are fused to formulate and exude a metaphysical by-product where particles collide, explode and separate creating a unique and spiritual view of the universe.
Opening: Wednesday, June 2, 7-9pm
The paintings are gouache and arranged in grids. Denise Corley refers to them as visual poems. The exhibit might also be entitled Copulae Works. According to Ms. Corley: “Copulae are linking verbs or passive verbs- they are my basic artist statement- awareness of just being.”
The arrangements of the grids; the why and wherefore- the connections- range from self-evident to enigmatic.
PROSPECT HEIGHTS
Brian Dupont Gravity and Array (Study). Opening: Friday, May 28, 6-8pm
Brian Dupont studies the transmission- and distortion- of the visual aspects of information within the framework of abstract painting. In each painting he uses diagrams, scientific images, written language, symbols, and musical notation to establish an underlying pattern or structure, which he then stresses through a process of editing, erasure, and re-transcription. The final image emerges from these accumulations and removals of layers of paint and reverberates with contemporary anxieties about the threat of collapse, decay, miscommunication, and information overload.
FORT GREENE
Opening: Thursday, May 27, 6-8pm
Parenthetical Admission (Things Eventually Recognized After the Fact…) is an exhibition of work that is inspired by the essence of human fallibility, thriving on personal limitation, and pursuing a sense of glory within the inglorious qualities of an individuals faults and failures. The work is a reevaluation of personal mishap and misjudgment with the intention to resurrect its previous uselessness into components of renewed vitality and purpose.
David Schnuckel reflects and reconsiders the significance of things previously overlooked and dismissed as meaningless. As a result, his work is a conscious effort to piece together seemingly defected fragments in order to compose a beautifully callused and genuine whole. The content of Mr. Schnuckel’s work is often based around the human response to personal conflict. He explores the ironic beauty within struggle, humility, and failure, and how these factors allow us to continually redefine ourselves and, therefore, serve as highly transformative opportunities.
