this week in art

FOUNTAIN ART FAIR 2011

Allison Berkoy will be back on board the Frying Pan in the Lackawanna Caboose with more of her creepy but fun multimedia, lifelike installations (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Pier 66 Maritime, the Frying Pan
West 26th St. at the Hudson River
March 3-6, $10 (March 4 VIP preview $25)
www.fountainexhibit.com

The sixth annual Fountain Art Fair, dedicated to exhibiting avant-garde works from small, independent galleries, is back on board the Frying Pan, displaying cutting-edge painting, sculpture, and installation from the most radical artists to be found during Armory Week. Following the March 3 VIP and press preview, Fountain will open its doors to the public on Friday at 12 noon with works from such galleries as What It Is, Christina Ray, Microscope, LambertArts, Cheap & Plastique, Temporary States, and, as always, the anarchist Murder Lounge down below (don’t say you weren’t warned), in addition to artists projects by Greg Haberny, Evo Love, Mark Demos, Mami Kotak, and Danni Rash & GILF! There will also be a large-scale street art installation that brings together Chris Stain, Faro, Gaia, Shark Toof, Clown Soldier, Love Me, Ellis G, Alessandro Echevarria, Lee Trice, Imminent Disaster, and Dickchicken!, and Boston’s experimental Mobius Collective will be holding four days of curated roaming and site-specific performance art pieces, called “Infiltrate!,” from Marilyn Arsem and Burns Maxey’s “Captain Burns and First Mate Arsem Discover a New Land” and Sandy and Jeff Huckleberry’s “Entrapment” to Anna Wexler and Catherine Tutter’s “Vessel for Haiti III,” Joanne Rice’s “Without,” and Alisia Lord Louise Waller’s “What Are You, Some Kind of Monster?”

Jason Douglas Griffin’s “We Have an Understanding” can be found at the Leo Kesting booth at Fountain (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Other special events include an opening-night reception with live performances by Gordon Voidwell, Tecla, and Generic and a Saturday-night Lomography Picture Party with Ninjasonik and NSR, all free with the standard admission price. This year, the show has a decidedly 1980s retro East Village feel; among the highlights are Jason Douglas Griffin’s painted door, “We Have an Understanding,” at Leo Kesting (the spray-painted lightbulb is part of the work but not the heater), Chris Smith’s “Rumblers Road Signs & Rusted Cars” at G-spot’s subtexture booth, JMR’s colorful live mural at Mighty Tanaka, Demos’s lighted, scratched, and pounded glass canvases, Victor Cox’s enticing small works in the enticing Murder Lounge, Carl Gunhouse’s photos of American real estate developments at Camel Art Space, and R. Nicholas Kuszyk’s delightful robot paintings and Morning Breath’s cool collages at McCaig-Welles. One of our Fountain favorites, Allison Berkoy, is back in the Lackawanna railroad car with “Another Night in the Caboose of Magical Light” (she was previously in the caboose in 2009, with Nuala Clarke there last year), a brand-new collection of captivating light and mirror projections that give life to inanimate objects, from dolls and rice to a bowl of soup, all featuring her face. Be sure to explore every nook and cranny of the 133-foot-long lightship, which was in operation from 1930 to 1965 and spent three years underwater before being rediscovered by salvagers. Fountain is the art fair for people who hate art fairs, where anything can happen — and probably will.

KOREAN ART SHOW 2011

Do Byunggyu, “Playmate,” acrylic and oil on canvas, 2009 (courtesy Pyo Gallery)

82Mercer between Spring & Broome Sts.
March 3-6, free with paid admission to Red Dot Art Fair
212-242-4215
www.koreanartshow.com

Sponsored by the Galleries Association of Korea and KIAF, the Korean Art Show is back for its second year as part of Armory Arts Week, after a successful debut in 2010. Held in conjunction with Red Dot, the Korean Art Show will feature works from more than thirty galleries, including Hakgojae, Gallery Miz, Pyo, Seoshin, Rho, Park Ryu Sook, and Yeemock. With the rise in popularity of Asian art — primarily Chinese since the start of this century — Korean art is now joining the fold, and there were some exceptional paintings and sculptures at the Korean Art Show last year, so this should definitely be worth a visit. Among the artists to look out for are Shin Hyungsub, Do Byunggyu, Lee Sanghyun, Byun Chonggon, Lee Jeongwoong, Lee Jinju, Park Minpyong, Bae Bienu, Eddie Kang, and Oh Seyeol.

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.