Artist Kelly Tunstall is part of the last show at Giant Robot New York, which is closing later this month (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
NEW WORK BY SUSIE GHAHREMANI AND KELLY TUNSTALL
Giant Robot
437 East Ninth St. between First Ave. & Ave. A
Through September 23
Admission: free
212-674-4769
www.grny.net
It was with great sadness that we attended the opening of “Out and About: New Work by Susie Ghahremani and Kelly Tunstall” on September 4 at Giant Robot in the East Village, and it had nothing to do with Ghahremani’s adorable gouache paintings on paper and wood of animals or Tunstall’s surreal portraits of women with elongated features. Instead, we were horrified to learn from store manager Mark Gilson that this would be the last show at Giant Robot, which will be closing its doors on September 23, a victim of the bad economy. (Ghahremani was also part of the second-ever show at Giant Robot New York.) “It’s been a fun ride and it’s all smiles,” company founder and Giant Robot magazine publisher Eric Nakamura wrote on his blog that night. “Imagine, as a much younger man, I’ve always wanted to have a shop in New York City and I did it.” Sure, that’s easy for Nakamura to say; he still has stores in Los Angeles and San Francisco, while we here on the East Coast will now have to look elsewhere to find unique and unusual toys, art books, and clothing and to see exhibitions by such artists as Matt Furie, Evah Fan, Scrappers, Deth P. Sun, Keith Shore, Souther Salazar, and many others. Giant Robot was a great place to start personal art collections, as most shows had prices that began at $100 or less for original pieces. Beginning September 8, Giant Robot will be holding a clearance sale, with items selling for thirty percent off, and there will be a series of special events leading up to the closing, so keep watching this space for more information as it becomes available.
Based on a magazine serial by Jack Finney, Don Siegel’s 1956 classic, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, was the ultimate thriller about cold war paranoia. Twenty-two years later, in a nation just beginning to come to grips with the failure of the Vietnam War, Philip Kaufman (THE RIGHT STUFF, QUILLS) remade the film, moving the location north to San Francisco from the original’s Los Angeles. When health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and lab scientist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) suspect that people, while they sleep, are being replaced by pod replicas, they have a hard time making anyone believe them, especially Dr. David Kibner (Leonary Nimoy), who takes the Freudian route instead. But when Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) seem to come up with some physical proof, things begin to get far mores serious — and much more dangerous. Kaufman’s film is one of the best remakes ever made, paying proper homage to the original while standing up on its own, with an unforgettable ending (as well as an unforgettable dog). It cleverly captures the building selfishness of the late 1970s, which would lead directly into the Reagan era. As an added treat, the film includes a whole bunch of cameos, including Siegel as a taxi driver, Robert Duvall as a priest, and Kevin McCarthy, who starred as Dr. Miles Bennell in the original, still on the run, trying desperately to make someone believe him. The sc-fi thriller is screening at the Rubin as part of the museum’s Memento Mori series, being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Remember That You Will Die,” and will be introduced by Georgia Clark.
