Hallucinating With Fred Tomaselli

Brooklyn-based artist, Fred Tomaselli is about 5 days into his show at the Brooklyn Museum.  Though I am not a big fan of going into the desert to take hallucinogens and commune with coyotes, I am enamored with Tomaselli’s meticulously crafted psychedelic artwork.  Tomaselli’s work is often composed of collaged elements including the requisite cut-out magazine confetti, but also marijuana leaves, prescription pill particles and other illicit substances.   His patterning evokes organic repetitions on a cosmic to microcosmic spectrum–Big Bang style light fracture to a Double Helix type intricacy.  It’s like he’s trying to illustrate the magic around us that’s either too far away or too small for the eye to see.

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Art and Taxi Cab Drivers

Film still from Transient

Art invades the streets via New York City cabs.

From September 9 through September 15, visual artist Amir Baradaran will debut TRANSIENT, a series of 40-second video installations infiltrating NYC taxicabs for one week. “TRANSIENT is intended as an ephemeral gift, foregrounding the possibilities of liminal states. Baradaran seeks to capture, challenge and transform the everyday modalities of NYC cab rides by interrupting Taxi TV’s regular programming flow in 6,300 taxicabs, to be viewed by approximately 1.5 million passengers. Using the technology against itself, TRANSIENT solicits focus in a space marked by dispersed attention and invisible human boundaries. Comprised of shots of a driver’s steady gaze in the rear-view mirror or through the grainy, often-stained plexiglass partitions, the incisive videos take the experiential disjuncture between the driver and passenger as their point of departure. ‘It was not my intention to make a humanist statement,’ says Baradaran, ‘but rather to create a space of introspection.'”

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Sally Potter at MoMA

A scene from “Yes” on the left and Tilda Swinton in “Orlando” on the right

Always political, always experimental, Sally Potter is one of the most exciting filmmakers in contemporary cinema.  MoMA took notice this month and screened her masterwork, Orlando, which managed to launch both her own and Tilda Swinton’s career.  Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando is a science fiction/fantasy tale of a gender-shifting character who gets to experience life both a man and a woman over a period of hundreds of years.  Potter’s body of work continues to broach radical topics while maintaining an aesthetic principle, which is one of the reasons I like her so much.  Even her film still (above, right) looks like a perfectly composed Jacques Louis David.

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A Lush Life on the Lower East Side

The literary and visual arts are intersecting in New York’s Lower East Side, thanks to independent curators Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Franklin Evans who have assembled an intricate group show based on the popular LES detective novel “Lush Life” by Richard Price.  The eponymous group show utilizes nine Lower East Side galleries as geographical correspondents to scenes that take place within the novel.  For more on the intricacies of this endeavor, click here.

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Favorite: Eva Hesse

Ohne Titel 1966 Black ink with wash and pencil on paper 29.8 x 22.9 cm > 11 3/4 x 9 inch via evahesse.com

Eva Hesse was one of the artists who led the Postminimalist movement. She was a brilliant sculptor and painter who took such cold and unfriendly materials as latex, fiberglass, and plastic and imbued them with warmth and the pulse of a beating heart. She died before her time but not before leaving behind a prolific collection of work that can only make one wonder how much more she could have contributed had she been gifted with not just pure talent, but length of days.

Untitled, 1966. Brown ink wash and pencil, 13-3/4 x 10-3/4 in. via walkerart.org

Ohne Titel 1966 Ink wash on rag board 14.1 x 17.7 cm > 5 1/2 x 7 inch via evahesse.com

Look for the Eva Hesse traveling exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2011.

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Know Your (Art) History

Art History Poster

Found this via the Swiss-Miss site. It pretty much sums up anything you need to know and ends the debate over who owns what in the history of art. Brilliant.

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A Look Back: “Five Series of Repetitions” by Xu Bing

Five Series of Repititions, Xu Bing, Ink on paper, 1987

I love printmaking. I love the selection of papers, I love the processes, and I love how versatile a craft it is. An artist can silkscreen an edition of 200 to make some affordable works or he can execute a more painstaking process – woodblock, lithography – for one magnanimous creation. Chinese artist Xu Bing has

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