The Next Fair -- Chicago, Sunny, 52 degrees:
Two works stood out to me in the way that they engaged the space and refused to hang blithely on the wall (as my own work did!)--Jeff Carter's "Catalog Floor" and the collaborative installation of particle board, folded bathtowels, and drawings at Scott Projects . Also beautiful and strange prints by Dutes & Stan printed at Spudnik press, imagining two men spawning from of their lengthy, intertwining beards.
Museum of Contemporary Art -- Chicago, Rain, 60 degrees:
A floor to ceiling wall of moss by Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago--what got to me--the scent, the itchy (teary!) eyes, the pale green color of the reindeer moss, the enormous scale, its half living, half dying piquedness.
(Above: Karel Funk, 2006, Untitled #21, Acrylic on panel)
Rochester Art Center--MN, Rain, Flood Warnings, 45 degrees:
Karel Funk's paintings (yes-paintings!) are based on digital photographs that he painstakingly reproduces. These hooded, bundled figures appear aloof, but are made more intimate through Funk's careful painting--every stitch in the hem of a coat can be seen. I have to admit it is rare and refreshing to see a show of paintings that is equally about representation and technique and the gallery--about the viewers moving through the space situating themselves among and between the paintings. The layout of the show built upon a unique type of interactivity that is hidden and unexpected in this very quiet work.
(Above: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Detail)
Mass. Museum of Contemporary Art--North Adams, Sunny, 65 degrees:
NO SHOW ON EARTH could have prepared me for the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings at Mass MOCA. This show is entirely phenomenal, totaling three floors--each floor half the size of a football field. The physical experience of color is incredibly intense--the gut churning orange with green stripes, the eye boggling grey on grey on grey. I went with a group of art professors and we all wished that our students could see this show, not only for the use of color, but because if anyone dares to say they have "done enough" after seeing this show they will understand immediately that they have not. Also at Mass MOCA was "These Days: Elegies for Modern Times," an intense little show about life after the apocalypse that included one of my favorite works of contemporary art--"A little bit of Death" by Sam Taylor Wood.
One of things that struck me about Mass MOCA is that this is museum gives itself up to the artists. There is such a sharp contrast between this museum and spaces like the Guggenheim or Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum where the work conforms (or interacts-depending upon the artwork) to this space.
Walker Art Center--Sunny, blissful 70 degrees.
The Quick and the Dead lives up to the word on the street that this is one of the best shows of 2009. I had a very strong response to the show as an artist--wanting to resist the dematerialization of art, but also relishing the cleverness of many of the works like a drawing by Joseph Beuys--a simple line on a page with the caption--the future starts here. It certainly invoked the stillness of something reaching the end of its time, but the connections between the works are so rich that it would take much more than a blog entry to unravel.
(Below: Beuys at Mass MOCA)
Heaven Gallery--partial sun, 55 degrees.
A lovely little show, I just saw in passing, also addresses this post-apocalypse, life after death theme that is circulating--really captured in the title of the show, "In that gold land." It was all about looking to the future and rebuilding.
Let's begin again!
Next month: "Frontier Preachers" at the Soap Factory and "THE Modern Wing".
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