A young boy in a rumpled maroon T-shirt and jeans pushes a wheelchair filled to the brim with heavy yellow plastic water jugs. His face is a spectral smear with a hint of a nose, a curved ear, and a slight, concentrated frown. These indistinguishable features not only obscure his identity but mark his effort … Continue reading
I regret to inform you that Montreal’s little slice of kitsch heaven, Barbie Expo (or Expo Barbie en français), has gone to seed. Sure, when I first visited the supposed largest Barbie exhibition in the world, its host, the mall Les Cours Mont-Royal, didn’t exactly live up to its PR promise to “redefine the meaning … Continue reading
Sweating through another July weekend with nothing to do and most galleries in their summer hours (because they hate us poors stuck in the NYC swamps in the summer), Emily Colucci and Jessica Almereyda struggled through multiple emails and sign-up forms to get press tickets to the Morgan Library & Museum to see their trio … Continue reading
Pretty girl, pretty, pretty giiiiirrlll…Let’s lose ourselves, sell The Beach Boys a song, and then kill everyone magnetism radiates from Charles Manson’s silent, penetrating psycho stare. I can hear “Cease to Exist,” the original version of Charlie’s penned Beach Boys tune, eventually rejigged to turn down the nutto nihilist energy into “Cease to Resist,” on … Continue reading
A thick, saliva-soaked globule of masticated green gum peeled off a spit-swapping chewing gum-covered painting and hit the shiny gallery floor with a sickening thwack. There, it joined another sopping ball of rapidly stiffening, increasingly pink, red gum, another fallen attempt to participate in Academy Award-winning actor-turned-artist Adrien Brody’s chewing gum painting, part of his … Continue reading
Tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle. Immediately upon entering Krzysztof Strzelecki’s solo exhibition Rendezvous at Anat Ebgi, my ears pricked up at the splish-splash of watery drippy-droppings trickling out at a heroically steady stream. The constant dribble sounded like some derelict crept into the gallery for a sneaky whizz in a corner. Unlikely, sure, but it’s not as … Continue reading
Two deer stare, stunned, their ears perked nervously straight up. Their sweet brown eyes have turned zombie white, caught in a camera flash rather than the headlights of a speeding Ford F-150 barreling down a dirty back road at night. One looks like she’s about to bolt, her body tensed in the tall grasses in … Continue reading
Nightlife photography should be kinda bad. Technical perfection is for shut-ins with a studio or all those photographers making photographs of photographs. Nightlife photos should be out of focus and crappily framed. Heads should be lopped right off dancing bodies, fixating instead on torsos bumping and grinding into each other (and the photographer). Flashes of … Continue reading
Nobody can convince me that ASMA’s dolls don’t come alive and skitter all over SculptureCenter at night. That these little featureless skeletal femme creatures don’t pop up when the doors lock to tinker with the accessories placed around them—playing cards while lounging in the nude, tinkling the keys of their piano used as a momentary … Continue reading
At my first stop during a recent Tribeca gallery stroll, I was nearly knocked out by workmen hoisting a humungous heavy steel beam down the stairs of Andrew Kreps Gallery’s location in the piss-soaked Cortlandt Alley. Barely missing a good, hard conk to the noggin was nowhere near as frightening as being trapped, alone, in … Continue reading