this week in art

ALCHEMY

Nick Doyle, “Smoke and Mirrors,” mixed media performance, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

7Eleven Gallery
711 Washington St. between Perry St. and 11th
Tuesday – Saturday through February 18, free
www.7elevengallery.com

Back in 1946, the Southland Ice Company began calling its chain of convenience stores 7-Eleven, named for the hours it was open. Today there are more 7-Elevens in the world than McDonald’s restaurants, and inside you can find a wide range of relatively edible products made from different chemical reactions, most famously the Slurpee, which has been known to result in brain freeze. Back in 2008, Sabrina Blaichman, Caroline Copley, and Genevieve Hudson-Price started the nomadic 7Eleven Gallery, which has held several art shows around the city over the last few years but has returned to its original home at 711 Washington St. Its latest exhibition, “Alchemy,” is a collection of works that involve the transmutation of materials into a wide range of multimedia objects that elicit aesthetic, philosophical, and physical reactions from those who partake of its resulting product, sure to stimulate the brain, not freeze it. The centerpiece of “Alchemy” is Nick Doyle’s “Smoke and Mirrors,” a large-scale installation of a volcano hovering on the edge of a city; visitors can flip switches from a control board to add lightning strikes, circling clouds, steam rising from below, an eruption, and even earthquakes, turning the viewer into a kind of mad scientist with the power to change the world. (Doyle will be at the gallery on February 10 at 7:00 giving free tattoos for three hours.)

Eve Andee Laramee, “Invisible Fire,” depression glass, UV light, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The artist known simply as GAINES has transformed four wooden doors into electrified instruments. Video artist Casey Neistat becomes an unseen chemist, performing “The Whisky Water Trick” to Tex Ritter’s “Jack o’ Diamonds (Rye Whiskey).” Sculptor Thomas Beale uses found shells to make an untitled knoblike form sticking out of the wall. Alchemy generally involves turning base metals into gold and silver, but Michael St. John takes a different tack, unfolding a trademark-blue Tiffany box into an abstract geometric shape. But the real gem of the show is Eve Andee Laramee, who combines artistic exploration and scientific investigation in “The Memories of the Stones,” a Victorian steampunk viewing globe right out of Jules Verne, with the addition of streaming video; “Dustball as the Model of the Universe,” a ball of dust encased in a glass bottle; “An Unnatural History of Discontinuity,” a series of acrylic, collage, and ink on paper pieces that evoke scientific experiments; and “Invisible Fire,” glowing depression glass formally arranged in a downstairs cave. In addition, Laramee has a curio cabinet in the gallery’s store, where many of her old-fashioned, offbeat, alchemical objects are for sale. And no, you cannot get hot dogs, Slurpees, or other inscrutable food and drink behind the counter.

TOM ECCLES, MARK HANDFORTH, AND IRVING SANDLER DISCUSS THE WORK AND CAREER OF MARK DI SUVERO

Mark di Suvero’s “Joi de Vivre” stands tall in Zuccotti Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New York Foundation for the Arts
20 Jay St., seventh floor
Tuesday, February 7, free, 6:30
www.nyfa.org
www.stormking.org

For more than half a century, Chinese-born American artist Mark di Suvero has been creating sculptural works using wood and steel beams, focusing on large-scale pieces such as “Joi de Vivre” that occupies Zuccotti Park, “Yoga” in Brooklyn Bridge Park, and a number of installations at Storm King Art Center. Last summer di Suvero, who led the transformation of a Long Island City landfill into the beautiful Socrates Sculpture Park twenty-five years ago, had an impressive exhibit of works across Governors Island, and he regularly shows a massive piece inside the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. On February 7 at the New York Foundation for the Arts, curator extraordinaire Tom Eccles of Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, Miami-based site-specific sculptor Mark Handforth, and art critic and historian Irving Sandler will discuss di Suvero and his oeuvre, placing his work in sociocultural and artistic context.

ALL ME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WINFRED REMBERT

Winfred Rembert tells his fascinating life story in ALL ME

ALL ME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WINFRED REMBERT (Vivian Ducat, 2011)
Pelham Fritz Recreation Center
18 Mount Morris Park West at 122nd St.
Thursday, February 9, free, 1:00
212-860-1380
www.allmethemovie.com
www.nycgovparks.org

Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. Rembert, one of the most fascinating characters you’re ever likely to come upon, will be at the Pelham Fritz Recreation Center on February 9 at 1:00 with Ducat and producer Mark Urman for a free screening of All Me, and what should be an enlightening Q&A afterward. (Rembert and Uman will also be at the Montclair Art Museum on February 16 at 7:00 as part of the fifth annual Montclair African American Film Festival, which is also free.) And if you’re as captivated by Rembert’s story as we are, you can see more of his work in his “Amazing Grace” exhibition, running through May 5 at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers.

FIRST SATURDAYS: BLACK MALES DEFYING STEREOTYPES

Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, with Kamal Sinclair and Bayeté Ross Smith, stills from “Question Bridge: Black Males,” multichannel video installation, 2012 (courtesy of the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, February 4, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum turns its attention to Black History Month for its February First Saturdays program, focusing on the exhibition “Question Bridge: Black Males,” in which Hank Willis Thomas, Chris Johnson, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair traveled around the country interviewing 150 black men in a dozen locations and editing the results into a multiscreen video installation. On Saturday night there will be an Action Station where visitors can add their own questions on the topic of identity, a discussion with the creative team, pop-up dances by Renegade Performance Group inspired by the exhibit, an interactive workshop led by “Question Bridge” education director Samara Gaev, and a dance party with DJ Stormin’ Norman featuring songs by black men. In addition, there will be live music by Game Rebellion, curator Shantrelle P. Lewis will discuss her Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts exhibit “Dandy Lion: A Re(de)fined Black Masculine Identity,” hands-on art will help attendees create a mixed-media piece based on Kehinda Wiley’s work, museum guides will lead a tour about defying gender stereotypes, Daniel Bernard Roumain will play parts of his “Symphony for the Dance Floor” with Lord Jamar, Carla Peterson will discuss her book Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, and the Brooklyn Circus will host a fashion runway show. And the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Raw/Cooked: Shura Chernozatonskaya,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” “Work of Art: Kymia Nawabi,” and “19th-Century Modern.”

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON CASSAVETES?

Mounira Al Solh’s “Dinosaurs” pays tribute to John Cassavetes at Art in General

Art in General
79 Walker St. between Broadway & Lafayette St.
Friday, February 3, 7:00
212-219-0473
www.artingeneral.org

Pioneering improvisational writer-director John Cassavetes, who made such searing, emotional, cinema vérité films as Shadows, Faces, Husbands, and A Woman Under the Influence, died on February 3, 1989, at the age of fifty-nine. Art in General will honor the influential auteur at a special program on the twenty-third anniversary of his death, “What’s your take on Cassavetes?” being held in conjunction with Mounira Al Solh’s new exhibition, “Dinosaurs,” a film installation inspired by four of Cassavetes’ character-driven works, Faces, Husbands, Opening Night, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Al Solh will talk about and present clips from the four films, followed by a screening of the complete Faces, which stars Gena Rowlands, Seymour Casssel, John Marley, Fred Draper, and Val Avery and was added to the National Film Registry of the Library Congress last year. Also on view at Art in General right now are Katrin Sigurdardóttir’s “Stage” and Theresa Himmer’s “All State.”

BRAINWAVE: IT COULD CHANGE YOUR MIND

Artist Sean Scully and neurology professor Anjan Chatterjee will examine “Abstract Cognition” as part of the Rubin’s fifth annual Brainwave festival

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
February 4 – April 23, $14-$30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/brainwave

Don’t forget to pick up tickets for the Rubin Museum’s fifth annual Brainwave festival, in which artists and neuroscientists team up to discuss personal and professional aspects of this year’s central topic, memory. Each session includes a brief mnemonic art tour of the galleries and a karma “telephone” chain that will wind down the spiral staircase left over from when the space belonged to Barneys, if you can remember that far back. The series begins this Saturday afternoon, February 4, with painter Sean Scully and neurology professor Anjan Chatterjee delving into “Abstract Cognition” and is followed by such other pairings as broadcaster Jane Pauley and computational neuroscience professor Sebastian Seung discussing “Welcome to Connectome” on February 8, roboticist Heather Knight and brain researcher Dave Carmel screening and discussing Alex Gabbay’s documentary Just Trial and Error: Conversations on Consciousness on February 18, actor Scott Shepherd and hippocampus expert John Kubie getting into “Committing the Great American Novel to Memory” on March 4, comedian Lewis Black and Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Barry Gordon screening Gaylen Ross’s Caris’ Peace and asking “What’s My Line?” in regard to short-term memory on March 7, author Diane Ackerman and clinical neurologist and professor Dr. Todd C. Sacktor examining “Using and Losing Language” on April 14, and gourmand Ruth Reichl and psychology professor Paul Rozin exploring Proust and “The Madeleine Syndrome” on April 23. In conjunction with Brainwave, a new Cabaret Cinema series, “You Must Remember This,” begins Friday night with Casablanca, introduced by artist Samuel Cucher, and continues February 10 with Claudia Shear introducing Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, Fern Mallis introducing Gigi on February 17, and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas on February 24, with other films scheduled through April 27. “In this year’s [Brainwave] series we will look at the role memory has played in the past,” notes Rubin producer Tim McHenry, “and the debatable role it plays in our contemporary cut-and-paste culture.”

MICHAEL SNOW: IN THE WAY

Michael Snow, “The Viewing of Six New Works,” installation view, seven looped video projections, silent, touch design recording technology by Greg Hermanovic, 2012

Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 11, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-645-1701
www.jackshainman.com

Canadian conceptual artist Michael Snow has been creating cutting-edge multimedia works for more than fifty years, including such seminal experimental films as Wavelength and Corpus Collosum and such site-specific projects as “Flightstop” and “The Audience.” In his latest gallery show, the eighty-two-year-old Guggenheim Fellow and chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres explores the creation and perception of visual art itself in the four-part installation “In the Way.” Visitors first encounter “La Ferme,” in which Snow takes 16mm footage of grazing cows, then arranges eleven successive frames horizontally, the way it was actually seen as the film was made, instead of vertically, the way the frames would appear in the developed film itself; the 1998 work announces that you are in for a unique experience that is going to examine ways of seeing while laying bare the process behind it all. In a room off to the left, “In the Way” (2011) features a twenty-three-minute video loop projected onto the floor; you have to stand right on it in order to get the full impact of the panning shots taken from a truck, making you feel like you’re moving over green fields, dirt, asphalt, and rocks, each surface giving you a different visceral experience. Experience is at the heart of “The Viewing of Six New Works” (2012), as Snow projects seven changing geometric shapes, in varying bright colors, onto the walls of a large room, each image shifting based on how the eye reads a rectangular work of art on the wall, following ocular patterns of perception and forcing viewers to see these images in the same way. “When attention is not being paid to it,” Snow explains in the press release, “the object/rectangle is not there.” The fourth piece, 1985’s “Exchange,” involves a holographic set-up in a daring red that falls short of expectations, with little happening as you move around it. Continuing at Jack Shainman in Chelsea through February 11, “In the Way” is another engaging example of how we look at art, from one of the masters of the genre.