this week in art

RAW SHOWCASE

Dawn Toledo Walsh will feed RAW artists to a hungry city on February 24 at 3Ten lounge on Bowery

RAW:natural born artists
3Ten lounge
310 Bowery
Thursday, February 24, $10, 8:00
www.rawartists.org
www.3tenlounge.com

Based in Southern California, independent nonprofit DIY organization RAW:natural born artists was founded in March 2009 by Heidi Luerra “to provide up-and-coming artists of all creative realms with the tools, resources, and exposure needed to inspire and cultivate creativity so that they might be seen, heard, and loved.” The grassroots collective travels across the country holding showcases, workshops, seminars, and other special events with handpicked local artists in the fields of film, fashion, music, art, photography, performing arts, hair and makeup, and design accessories. On February 24, Raw comes to the 3Ten lounge on Bowery for a multidisciplinary evening featuring film, live music and dance, a fashion show, and more, with such artists as JT Lotus Dance Company, Jessica Noe, Sarah Valeri, Ness Ros-Zeppelin, Aljosa Daumerie, Crayongirl, Brian DePinto, Lyle Thomas, Jon Epstein, Fabylosa, and others. Cocktail attire is suggested. “The city is hungry,” notes RAW New York City location director Dawn Toledo Walsh. “I intend to give it all it can eat.”

RED DOT ART FAIR 2011

Red Dot will move into SoHo this year and will host benefit for West Harlem Art Fund (photo courtesy of Kyle Dean Reinford)

82Mercer
82 Mercer St. between Spring & Broome Sts.
March 3-6, Day Pass $10, Week Pass $20
917-273-8621
www.reddotfair.com

Armory Week is heading to New York for its annual visit, paving the way for all kinds of art fairs all over town March 3-6. Over the course of the next ten days, we’ll be featuring every one of them, beginning with Red Dot New York, which this year moves into 82Mercer in SoHo, where approximately fifty international exhibitors will be presenting works, including Art Charlotte, Chung Jark, Galerie Edel, Gana Art, Independent Press, Brenda Taylor, and Wellside. Founded by George Billis, who has galleries on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles and West 26th St. in Chelsea, Red Dot’s mission is to “create a venue for art galleries seeking to present work of lasting value and beyond current trends.” The opening reception on March 3 ($20) will benefit the West Harlem Art Fund; on March 4, Red Dot will host a cocktail party at the Strand Hotel, and on Saturday it will unveil Patrick Singh’s “Bridging Stone Figures,” which will be digitally projected onto the Manhattan Bridge. Red Dot also hosts the Korean Art Show, which made an impressive debut last year, at no extra admission charge.

HOLIDAY MONDAYS: QUEENS MUSEUM

Luis Márquez, “Untitled,” exhibition print from original negative, 1940 (courtesy Luis Marquez Archive, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Monday, February 21, free, 11:00 Am – 4:00 pm
718-592-9700
www.queensmuseum.org

The Queens Museum of Art, which is usually closed on Mondays (and Tuesdays), will open its doors on Presidents’ Day, offering free admission from 11:00 to 4:00. Among the special programs will be family-friendly tours and arts & crafts workshops as well as free refreshments. Currently on view through March 6 is “Luis Márquez in the World of Tomorrow: Mexican Identity and the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair,” comprising more than eighty photographs taken by Luis Márquez, who served as the Mexican Pavilion’s official photographer and art adviser, in addition to costumes that were displayed at the pavilion and other historical artifacts and memorabilia. The Queens Museum also has several long-term installations, including “The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass,” “A Watershed Moment: Celebrating the Homecoming of the Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System,” and “The Panorama of the City of New York,” a spectacular up-to-date, nearly ten-thousand-square-foot architectural rendering of all five boroughs, containing approximately nine hundred thousand individual models of apartment buildings, parks, cultural institutions, bridges, airports, and other structures.

JIM CAMPBELL

Jim Campbell, “Scattered Light,” approximately 2,000 LED lights, wire, custom electronics, 2010 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Scattered Light/Broken Window”: Madison Square Park, 23rd St. & Fifth Ave., free, extended through March 7
“4 Works”: Hosfelt Gallery, 531 West 36th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., Wednesday – Saturday 10:00 am – 6:00 pm, free, extended through March 19
www.hosfeltgallery.com
www.madisonsquarepark.org/art

An MIT grad with dual degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics, Chicago-born digital-media artist Jim Campbell has been creating complex light sculptures built around the subjects of perception and memory for more than twenty years. Since October 21, his three-dimensional “Scattered Light” has been dazzling the public on the oval lawn in the middle of Madison Square Park, a twenty-foot-high, eighty-foot-wide hanging grid consisting of nearly two thousand LED lights that depict people passing by in shadows. Although one might assume that it is relaying actual movement — many of his previous works have incorporated live processing — in this case, it is all preprogrammed by computer, adding an extra layer of mystery. Be sure to walk all around the sculpture to get its full impact. “Scattered Light” is supplemented by “Broken Window,” a six-foot-by-six-foot glass-brick wall near the corner of 23rd St. & Fifth Ave. that appears to be a blurry window showing live movement of people and cars making their way through the Flatiron Triangle but is actually composed of previously shot video, and “Voices in the Subway Station,” a series of rhythmically modulated lights on the ground that seem to be holding their own conversation. Campbell’s largest public installation ever — he’s also had commissions in Phoenix, Battery Park, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Berlin, Paris, San Diego, Montreux, and his longtime hometown of San Francisco — “Scattered Light” will remain on view through March 7.

Jim Campbell, “Scattered 17,” 17 panels of 192 LED lights each, plexiglass, custom electronics, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In conjunction with the Madison Square Park installation, Campbell is also having a solo show indoors at Hosfelt Gallery on West 36th St., featuring four new technology-based works from 2010-11 spread around the dark space. “Scattered 17” consists of seventeen LED panels of 192 lights apiece that appear to be jutting out from a black wall but are not as they show what look like birds flying across the lighted rectangles that recall television sets. Visitors can walk into “Tilted Plane,” a room in which 256 doctored LED lightbulbs hang from the ceiling at an incline; although it is fun wandering around the lights, you’ll get a better feel for the piece as a whole by standing in one of the corners. “Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio” is composed of one row of wires filled with LEDs that takes you on a short trip through the city; as with “Scattered Light,” look through your camera lens for the best viewing experience. And “Home Movies (Glimpse)” is gimmicky but intriguing, confounding visitors by appearing to click through a series of family slides that include movement within them. The show also includes the red “Reconstruction #9 (Ganges)” next to the office, in which you’ll find the blue and white “Reconstruction #3” and “Fundamental Interval (Tourists),” a plexiglass box of 1,728 LEDs depicting people and ghostly shadows moving through a train station. There’s something innately satisfying in Campbell’s work, especially if you don’t get caught up in the technology and just let the intoxicating, often dreamlike visuals take you away.

SUPER SABADO: CARNAVAL

FREE THIRD SATURDAYS
El Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Ave. at 104th St.
Saturday, February 19, free, 11:00 am – 8:30 pm
212-831-7272
www.elmuseo.org

One of our favorite ongoing parties takes place the third Saturday of every month, when El Museo del Barrio welcomes visitors for a free day of art, live performances, and other special events. On February 19, the museum will be celebrating Carnaval with ArtExplorers family tours of the “Voces y Visiones” exhibition of works from the permanent collection, gallery tours of that and the “Luis Camnitzer” retrospective, a Colorín Colorado storytelling presentation of Elisabeth Balaguer’s My Carnival / Mi Carnaval with the Bilingual Birdies, the Say Quesoooo! photo booth, a vejigante cape-making workshop, the live music and dance show “Afro-Caribbean Carnaval: The Legacy Circle, Alma Moyo & Kalunga,” followed by a Q&A with the artists, the Oh, Snap! Young Powerful Voices at Work spoken word workshop with Caridad de la Luz “La Bruja,” and more.

THE BROOKLYN RAIL THREE DAY SILENT ART AUCTION

Richard Serra’s “P&E XVII” 2007 litho crayon on Mylar will be one of many works available at Brooklyn Rail auction

Visual Arts Gallery at the School of Visual Arts
601 West 26th St., fifteenth floor
February 17-19, $25 admission, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
Auction February 19, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
718-349-8427
www.brooklynrail.org/auction

Phong Bui, publisher of the free arts paper The Brooklyn Rail, refers to the nonprofit print publication as “absurdly impractical,” noting that “what we’re doing as a collective is entirely removed from any pragmatic notion of supply and demand.” With that in mind, Bui is curating a fundraiser in honor of the Rail’s recent tenth anniversary. Taking place over the next three days at SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, the works will be on view through Thursday through Saturday from 12 noon to 6:00, after which a live silent auction will be held Saturday night. Admission to the gallery is $25; among the participating artists with works for sale — and it’s quite an impressive list — are Marina Abramovic, Lynda Benglis, Joe Bradley, Paul Chan, Maria Elena Gonzales, Philip Guston, Alfredo Jaar, Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Shirin Neshat, Philip Pearlstein, Will Ryman, Charles Seliger, Richard Serra, Ben Shahn, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, Mark di Suvero, Terry Winters, and Lisa Yuskavage.

BYE BYE KITTY!!! BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ART

Makoto Aida, “Ash Color Mountains,” detail, acrylic on canvas, 2009-10 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through Sunday, June 12 (closed Monday)
Admission: $15 (free Friday from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.byebyekittyart.org

There’s only one week left before Japan Society’s engaging exhibit “Bye Bye Kitty!!!” goes bye-bye, so we highly recommend you do what you can to say hello before it leaves. (Sorry, we were trying to be cute.) Subtitled “Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art,” the small but insightful show offers an alternative take on the cute kawaii and otaku culture that has been so prevalent in Japanese youth over the last few decades. “Bye Bye Kitty!!!” exposes the underside, if not quite dark underbelly, of that groovy scene with a collection of installation, videos, photographs, paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are often cute in their own way — until you look a little deeper. Makoto Aida’s “Harakiri School Girls” sets the tone for the exhibition, mimicking the charming covers found on Japanese manga but upon further examination focuses on a young girl with a samurai sword decapitating her schoolmates. Aida’s massive “Ash Color Mountains” wall painting is composed of hundreds of faceless, dead salarymen jumbled together (along with Wall-E and Waldo). Playing off the “Famous Views of Kyoto” paintings by Hiroshige, Yamaguchi Akira populates his “Narita International Airport” pen and watercolors with scenes of impending environmental disaster. Chiharu Shiota takes that most beautiful and representational of objects, a white wedding dress, and inserts multiple tubes coming out of it, extracting blood that continuously pumps through them, commenting on femininity, tradition, and virginity.

Chiharu Shiota, “Dialogue with Absence,” painted wedding dress, peristaltic pumps, transparent plastic tubing, dyed water, 2010 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tomoko Shioyasu’s “Vortex” is an ultra-delicate cut-paper installation that hangs in the center of one gallery room, casting wild, intense shadows behind it. Miwa Yanagi’s “My Grandmothers” photos stage scenes where a group of Japanese women think they will be fifty years in the future, not necessarily predicting what would be considered a happy, normal life. Tomoko Yoneda’s simple yet evocative photos depict a location in Seoul that was used as a Japanese military hospital in the first half of the twentieth century and a place for interrogation and torture in the 1970s. The most exquisite pieces in the show come from Manabu Ikeda, whose three heavily detailed pen and acrylic ink drawings are awe-insipring and breathtaking, with “Existence” celebrating life, “History of Rise and Fall” mired in death and destruction, and “Ark” not exactly offering the way to a better world; be sure to spend plenty of time examining the myriad amazing intricacies of this fascinating series. Divided into three sections, “Critical Memory,” “Threatened Nature,” and “Unquiet Dream,” the exhibit also features works by Tomoko Kashiki, Rinko Kawauchi, Haruka Kōjin, Kumi Machida, Kohei Nawa, Motohiko Odani, Hiraki Sawa, Hisashi Tenmyouya, and Yoshitomo Nara, who says good-bye with a fitting farewell.