David Ellis’s percussive symphony “True Value (pain fukette)” helped him win the Pulse Prize (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
March 3-6, $20 (children under twelve free)
212-255-2327
www.pulse-art.com
Year in and year out, Pulse Contemporary Art Fair is among the best of the fairs during Armory Arts Week, offering fun and fascinating site-specific installations and special programming. For 2011, Pulse has moved into the Metropolitan Pavilion, where more than fifty international galleries have booths, in addition to another fourteen participating in the upstairs Impulse section. Among the Pulse New York 2011 Projects are a preview of “Assembly,” comprising work by eight emerging Southern California photographers on view March 15 – April 9 at Fred Torres Collaborations on West 29th St.; Craig Damrauer’s vinyl greetings placed throughout the fair; Molly Dilworth’s paint-on-Mylar “Field Test” at the entrance, incorporating X-ray and electron microscopy images; Oskar Schmidt’s HD video “Back Portrait”; and Ben Wolf’s large-scale “Clamber,” centered on an eighteen-foot hull from a salvaged ship abandoned in Newark. Impulse, comprising one-person shows, has some excellent painting, including Jeff Kellar’s “Toler’s Fence,” “Jaded,” and “Barnyard Brawl 1” at Freight + Volume, Sangram Majumdar’s “Behind Things,” “Studio Chair,” and “Nighttree” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, and Pulse Prize finalist Jinny Yu’s exquisite oil on aluminum works, some flat, others folded and scrunched, such as the triptych “Notes (large),” the embedded “Painting, wiped, on the wall,” and the dreamlike “Black Cloud (small).” The winner of the Pulse Prize for “exceptional artist” in the Impulse section was David Ellis of Joshua Liner, whose installation includes “True Value (pain fukette),” a group of metal and plastic paint cans that come alive and give a percussive concert, in addition to a wall sculpture of resin-encased record covers (no Barry Manilow allowed) and animated videos of splashing paint. Among the downstairs highlights are Dilworth’s “Times Square Test Pour” series at David B Smith, preparatory studies for her massive ground painting in Times Square; new black-and-white paintings by Martin Mull at Samuel Freeman; Pablo Zuleta Zahr’s acrylic C-prints of wandering people at Richard Levy; a preview of Eve Sussman’s nextfilm project at Cristin Tierney; Carlos Garacioca’s photo lightboxes at Habana; Brooklyn-based printmaker and sculptor Beka Goedde’s delightfully soothing mixed media on panel and paper “Moment of Transference” works at Christina Ray; and Margie Livingston’s “Paint Objects” and Heather Gwen Martin’s large-scale “Pigeon Hands” at Luis de Jesus. We always look forward to Jeffrey Blondes’s latest water-related meditative video project at Nicholas Metivier, and this year he has brought the twelve-and-a-half-hour “Bay of Fundy, Long Island West.” Be sure to stop by the Jen Bekman Gallery booth to check out her 20×200 project, which offers limited-edition artwork at ridiculously affordable prices. Pulse Presents will feature performance art and discussions, while Pulse Play highlights such video art as Desi Santiago’s “Work for Love.”