Gallery Crawl

JUST MISSED IT: Jaclyn Santos at DFN Gallery

By: James Kao

 

I heard about Jaclyn Santos’ Figurative Works Solo Show Event at the DFN Gallery from a friend. I was curious to see her own work in the flesh as opposed to the work she’s produced for the reality television show Work of Art, and so I attended the opening. The DFN Gallery is a small space in the Upper East Side, and Santos’ works did not occupy my time for long.

Santos presented a series of paintings. What I gathered immediately from them was her attempt to contribute to the discourse of gender and social issues. Untitled featured herself and a female companion sitting in men’s urinals, recalling the general and age-old discussion of the (in)ability for women to pee standing up and what that meant in relation to men. A quick Google search would yield at least five results on this issue, and it has certainly been a topic more than a few times amongst female friends. On her website, there is a drawing of the same idea – a woman standing in front of a men’s urinal. I feel that these works were not contributing anything new to the subject but were merely illustrations. Super Hero, another painting, portrays a woman on the kitchen floor, cleaning, but wearing business attire. This work presents the idea of how a woman of today can not only contribute to the family economics but also still (have to) uphold the duties of the old model of “housewife.” Again, I feel that this is a shallow illustration of a well-worn issue, and there was nothing else for me to read or feel from the painting. Her technique is solid, but not particularly striking.

One painting that captivated me slightly more was Reflection 3, which demonstrates a middle-aged woman staring in the mirror and towards the viewer. At first I felt that this piece was more honest, showing vulnerability from the artist regarding what she might feel she does not wish to turn into: someone older. A quick conversation with her confirmed it, sort of, as she told me it was a painting of her mother. When I mentioned honesty, she then swayed between it being about her fear, or perhaps irony, or perhaps something else. She sounded confused and I became confused. Also, if it does demonstrate fear, then is her fear simply of how she would look physically, or perhaps there is something more personal there? If so, I was not able to gather something deeper from the painting, which would have made the work more compelling.

One painting I enjoyed was Confinement. A figure sits in the bathtub, face turned away. The composition and the image held my attention for longer than the other ones did. To me, this piece did not attempt to speak about any specific gender or identity issues; rather it portrayed a feeling of isolation, reinforced by the white empty shape that occupies a portion of the canvas.

Santos reproduced a piece she did on the Bravo TV show and it was hung in the back. She told me that she had wanted to have people write on it, as had been done to the original piece in the show, but decided not to in the end because she feared that the gallery might be too crowded. I preferred that the piece be in the back and not a focus, as I was more interested to see her own work rather than results of the challenges.

Santos’ style and work has a certain aesthetic, but for the most part I did not feel intrigued or excited. In her attempt to comment on certain issues of American culture, I feel that she is merely illustrating preexisting ideas and discourses as opposed to presenting her own voice, which perhaps she is still developing.

 

Jaclyn Santos at DFN Gallery was a one-night event on July 22^nd

 

DFN Gallery

74 East 79^th Street

New York, NY

Take the 6 train to 77^th Street.

Gallery Hours: M-F, 11-7

Gallery Website: http://www.dfngallery.com/index.htm

“Here We Aren't, So Quickly,” at Thierry Goldberg Projects

By: Erin Tireses

 

    The burnt grass under the lasso of a naked hermaphroditic cowboy in Bronco Buster, by Hiroyuki Nakamura, absorbs viewers by offering them a hint of a world beyond the canvas. This typifies the intriuing nature of all the paintings on display in “Here We Aren't, So Quickly”, a group show at Thierry Goldberg Projects. All three artists in the show successfully engage the viewer, but each does so in drastically different ways.

  Hiroyuki Nakamura grabs the viewer with the narrative nature of his paintings. The simple detail of the scorched earth in Bronco Buster informs the viewer that the scene in the painting is merely a snapshot of a long story. All of Nakamura's paintings in this show depict dramatic moments for their subjects, and each is filled with details that challenge the viewer to form a plausible narrative. These details are so intriguing that they inspired lively discussions and debates at the opening. While lassos are normally hurled outward, this cowboy spins his around himself. Is this a form of defense or self-imposed entrapment? The headless scarecrow strapped to his back could be a reflection of the plight of a hermaphrodite living in a culture wedded to gender binaries, as the sexless body is bound to his own at every joint, in a way that he could not have tied to himself. Or it could represent his dream to be a cowboy while living on a manicured lawn behind a white picket fence, since his posture is intimidating but no one is present to be scared. He could be staring at the dark woods on the other side of the pristine fence with longing or fear. We don't know. His face is turned away from the viewer. The lack of answers to these questions might frustrate viewers in a lesser painting, but the phenomenal composition of this work makes it pleasing to struggle with the uncertainties. The figure of the cowboy is masterfully modeled, with the exception of his boots and hat, which transition into the flat style of the grass and fence. The curve of the fence seems to dance with the treeline of the abstract woods in the background.

 

 

 

Bronco Buster, by Hiroyuki Nakamura. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  The works of Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline also absorb the viewer and beg a series of questions, not with narrative details, but with vague, unsettling images. His works are far more abstract than the works of Nakamura. Human forms exist in each of Kaktins-Gorsline's paintings, but they are broken into pieces, blurred and reassembled. Four of his paintings in the show use the traditional composition of portraiture. He paints some elements of his subjects in a photorealistic style, using his paint to recreate the pattern of light and dark that would appear on a form when photographed. But he represents the faces of his subjects in a more painterly style, creating space with the paint itself. The marks, colors, and weight of the paint engage the viewers and force them to consider the figures' relationships to the art that depicts them.

Slip Across Lad features a photorealistic head of hair, but where the face should appear, instead two hands emerge from the abstract background. Heavy chunks of paint balance the composition.  However, the hands are slightly unnerving – either one is inverted or they are both right hands—and each reaches for a wispy white line weaving down the center of the piece that neither can grasp. The viewer is left to wonder if this is because of one figure's deformity, or the inability of two figures to work together.

 

 

Slip Across Lad, by Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  In Best Boy, the ghostly image of a face is pushed back in space and its features are only vaguely suggested by the brushstrokes, while its shoulders stand boldly in the foreground. The viewer must question whether the figure is in the process of using its own arms to take shape, or if its sturdy shoulders are holding it back, keeping the details of its face hidden.

 

 

Best Boy, by Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  Kaktins-Gorline's fifth and largest painting in the show, November, presents the full bodies of at least two figures, as evidenced by four feet at the bottom of the canvas. However, similarly to the hands in Slip Across Lad, the poses seem impossible, and the viewer considers if there are more figures lost in the jumble, or if the two are horribly deformed. But like in Bronco Buster, the tension is tolerable, even desirable, because of the quality of the composition. Kaktins-Gorline uses ambiguity well. The torsos of these figures are reminiscent of the faces in his other paintings – open spaces filled with dynamic chunks of paint. The viewer wants a reason to take time to explore these spaces and decide if two human forms are being mutilated, or several people are coming together and working in harmony.

 

 

 

November, by Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  The works of Guy Ben-Ari attract the viewer with the psychology of their subjects. Odd mental states are obvious in the subjects' faces and are also physically manifested through strange objects that inhabit their otherwise familiar domestic spaces. Narcissist Seat shows us a man separated from a woman by a series of mirrors coming out of his chair, reflecting every detail of his face back at himself. The contentment in his expression is obvious, but this and Ben-Ari's other paintings are slightly less successful at absorbing the viewer than the works of the others artists in the show. The composition lacks the interesting variety of techniques deployed by the other artists, who use these techniques to explore both their subjects and the spaces they inhabit. Ben-Ari seems very interested in the faces of his subjects, but he is clearly less interested in their spaces. His rendering of patterned wallpaper and hardwood floors in Narcissist Seat add nothing to the composition, and don't relate well to the painting as a whole. The slightly boring nature of these details may attempt to reflect the boring pattern of his figures’ lives. But this idea, while interesting, has been explored before, and Ben-Ari's rendering does not add interesting nuances. The spaces lose the attention of the viewer rather than stimulate further thought.

 

 

Narcissist Seat, by Guy Ben-Ari. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

  The ability to add nuance to a well-known subject is exactly what the works of Hiroyuki Nakamura do so successfully. Like Bronco Buster, all of his paintings explore the problematic myth of the American West as a land of freedom. This idea has been explored ad nauseum, but by forcing the viewer to create a narrative with his haunting details, Nakamura literally forces us to change and re-imagine that old, American narrative.

  In My Own Private West, a cowboy with his head buried in his hat crouches in a sterile living room. A melting, long-fingered hand sits on his windowsill in a nod to Salvador Dali, whose brand of surrealism Nakamura uses to paint the window itself. Outside the window is an abstract world of zebras being herded by the Marlboro Man, who seems to have crawled down from a billboard in the distance. The billboard is now blank and its beams are exposed. Evenly spaced seams and the abstract style of the scene outside the window imply it is a painting, leading the viewer to believe that the cowboy has nailed this misrepresentation of the American West to the exterior of his suburban house. And if the viewer studies the painting closely, they will notice that the hand on the windowsill is actually that of the cowboy. His severed limb is hidden by his hat, but a stick is strapped to his stub, and that stick holds a “Rocky Mountain Marshmallow” over a fire. The marshmallows strewn across the floor are the most sensitively painted part of the whole stunning work, and as they drip off of his stick, they destroy a wooden guitar.

 

My Own Private West, by Hiroyuki Nakamura. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  As in the works of John Irving, Nakamura reuses the metaphor of missing limbs as physical representations of mental inabilities. Annie Withdraws alludes to the great sharpshooter Annie Oakley and critiques the role of women in the male-dominated narrative of the American West. This is not a new critique of the myth, but again, the details of this painting argue the point in a fascinating manner. In Annie Withdraws, a handless woman holds forth a smoking gun like the body of Christ in a haunting reinterpretation of the Pieta. The woman has fired the gun despite lacking hands, and she has shot the face out of a figure who appears to be her husband. The cowboy husband is actually a cardboard cutout, yet he leaves a trail of blood, ostensibly from the injury. Annie's distant, vacant gaze is reminiscent of the many protagonists from old Western movies who stare out at the frontiers before them, yet all the details around her re-infuse the look with a new set of chilling capabilities.

 

Annie Withdraws, by Hiroyuki Nakamura. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

  All of the artists in “Here We Aren't, So Quickly” tackle the challenge of depicting the human form, and in doing so, say something intriguing about being human. Each artist explores the nuanced relationship between figures and the spaces they inhabit, and in the process, unearths truths about our relationship with the spaces we inhabit. This relationship is often far more loaded with history, mythology, abstraction, and ideas of domesticity than we ever consider. The most successful pieces in this show remind us of this, and add new details to these old ideas. Meanwhile, by placing several such works next to each other, the show as a whole forces us to think even further. Two human forms blend together and fade into the background, challenging us to confront the idea of sharing space with another human being and maintaining our individuality; while a cowboy on the adjacent wall stands perfectly modeled except for his extremities, which flatten as he reaches for the landscape of the frontier.

 

“Here We Aren't So Quickly” runs through September 3^rd

 

Thierry Goldberg Projects

5 Rivington Street, Ground Floor

Take the J or M to Bowery, or the B or D to Grand Street

Gallery Hours: Tues-Fri, 2-6

Exhibition Website: http://www.thierrygoldberg.com/exhibitions/here/here.html

“Shred” at Perry Rubenstein Gallery

By:  Erin Tireses

 

  An eight foot wide comic book style close-up of two women passionately kissing greets the visitors to “Shred,” a group show at Perry Rubenstein Gallery. Curated by Carlo McCormick, “Shred” explores the art of collage. Each artist uses the form differently, bringing a unique approach to the medium, and the show itself presents the viewer with the wide range of the possibilities that collage has to offer.

  Never Enough by FAILE, with the central image of two women embracing, appears to be a collage created from layers of ripped images. The main, carnal image emerges from a wall of advertisements for call girls, like those that cover plywood construction barriers. However, the entire piece is acrylic on canvas, painted in a trompe l'oeil fashion, successfully commenting on gorilla and found art without co-opting those forms.

 

 

 
Never Enough, by FAILE. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  All of the most successful pieces in the show add an element to the basic idea of collage – that of a simple assemblage of images – and in doing so evoke some unexpected ideas. Helicopter, by Swoon, is not an assemblage of images, but the surface itself is assembled from scraps of newspapers in various languages, envelopes, and discarded plastic bags. On this collaged surface, Swoon screen-printed a huge, masterful image of two large heads emerging from peasants tilling a field. The piece is strikingly beautiful from a distance. The materials of the surface give the piece an ephemeral air, while the image of toiling workers references the cultural revolutions of the 20^th century. The use of trash as a surface for such a work is an example of form reflecting content: the scraps of a wasteful society are used to create revolutionary art.

 

 

Helicopter, by Swoon. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  Four Square, by Bruce Conner is a small, one dimensional piece created out of images from different eras and cultures. The artist uses a traditional Christian print of Christ bearing the cross, and integrates other images to add another dimension of space and meaning, which entirely changes the effect of the piece. The added images are all from different eras and traditions, yet they are so well-placed and integrated in both style and scale that they do not corrupt the balance of the original print. In fact, the image of a headless magician is added so seamlessly that it appears like a small child is turning from the scene at Golgotha to reach for a magician's hat, highlighting shared ideas of magic and wonder in everyday life. This capability of collage—to bring together seemingly disconnected images and the ideas they represent—is increasingly pertinent as multiculturalism intensifies around the world.

 

 

Four Square, by Bruce Conner. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  Three pieces by Gee Vaucher are simple collages of images pasted on other images, but they diverge from the standard trajectory of that concept with their subtlety. Vaucher uses common place photographs, like that of a woman holding her head, then distorts the faces. But instead of creating a shocking juxtaposition, Vaucher carefully weaves three or four images onto the faces, so that at first glance, the image still feels like an unaltered photograph. The effect is quietly disturbing and causes the viewer to question their assumptions about common images and the common place.

 

 

Installation view of four pieces by Gee Vaucher. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  Look Out, by Erick Foss, most explicitly explores the idea of found art. The majority of the work, in terms of area, is a single found painting of a wooded mountain range, whose sweeping grandeur is awe-inspiring. Atop this, Foss evenly places images of floating, hooded figures and one comical Dracula, who stands atop a tower of stuffed owls and points at the viewer. These figures also inspire awe, but of a very different sort, like that inspired by the idea of the grim reaper. By pairing these two versions of awe, Foss explores the emotional underpinnings of both.

 

 

Look Out, by Erick Foss. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  A work by Shepard Fairey commanded much attention on opening night. I had never seen a piece by Shepard Fairey other than his mass produced posters, which although masterfully composed and effectively graphic, I generally considered emotionally flat and less about craft than politics. But Big Brother is Watching You justifies his fame for me. The colors and assemblage are beautiful, and by layering different mediums, such as wood, plaster, and paint, he creates a surface that is so beautifully subtle it is a work of art in its own right, adding an element of physical depth to the medium of collage. Like the surface of Helicopter, the layers themselves work with the overt political message of the piece: newspaper headlines of executive orders and presidential power are masked behind layers of paint and wood.

 

 

 

Big Brother is Watching You, by Shepard Fairey. Photo by Erin Tireses.

 

 

  Three video installations run in a loop on one television in the corner of the gallery. The most successful was Triumph of the Wild, by Martha Colburn. In it, images of toy soldiers war with images of wild animals bounding through pastoral landscapes. Blood explodes in almost every scene, and the stop motion animation pulses with a contagious rhythm that had viewers tapping their feet. Many of the images are sections of puzzles, which are assembled between frames before they begin to war with other images. This tactic is self-reflexive for the art of collage, which is assembled in a similar way as a puzzle is pieced together. The toy soldiers and stuffed animals may seem to come from different worlds, but they fit together quite nicely, and it makes war and environmental destruction seem inevitable, as these toys are constantly paired in the toy boxes of America's youth.

  When the video ends, this concept of the collage as the piecing together of a puzzle resonates and lends itself to the rest of the show. Almost every collage in the exhibition successfully performs this important function. They bring together pieces of the world that were once chaotic and indecipherable, and create a clear picture, a more inclusive system of order. For this reason, the show is more thought provoking than many shows of a similar size, it holds the viewers in the gallery for hours, and it sticks with them long after they leave.

 

“Shred” at Perry Rubenstein Gallery runs through August 27^th

 

Perry Rubenstein Gallery

527 West 23^rd Street, between 10^th and 11^th Aveneues

Take the C or E train to 23^rd Street, the M23 bus to 10^th Avenue, the M11 bus to 23^rd Street, or the M20 bus to 23^rd Street

Gallery Hours: Tues– Sat, 10– 6

Gallery Website: www.perryrubenstein.com

Lush Life Exhibitions in the LES

By: Gallery Crawler and Simmy Swinder

 

In the midst of an abnormally steamy and a typically slow New York City gallery season, the Lush Life exhibitions aim to inspire cross-media buzz.  Curators Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez Chahoud have organized the work of 60 artists across nine shows at nine Lower East Side galleries—Sue Scott Gallery, On Stellar Rays, Invisible-Exports, Lehmann Maupin, Y Gallery, Collette Blanchard Gallery, Salon 94 Freemans, Scaramouche, and Eleven Rivington—each corresponding to a chapter of Richard Price’s celebrated crime novel set in the LES,  Lush Life.   

These exhibitions are a group of group shows at galleries of various sizes and varying levels of prominence, which, of course, all but guarantees that the results will be a mixed bag.  That being said, the experience of walking into each of the galleries, be it the luxuriously vaulted heights of Lehmann Maupin or the tiny, stuffy converted storage room that comprises Y Gallery,  was very similar.  In each white space hung or stood works in several media, chattering away to each other, talking at cross purposes, buzzing distractingly.  And in each space one or two works pull you immediately, silently in. 

Lehamann Maupin’s exhibition, “Chapter Four: Let it Die,” yielded the best pickings. The most affecting works in the exhibition correspond directly to the pulsing dread and madness that envelop the character of Billy Marcus, who obsessively wanders the LES alternately looking for his dead son and his son’s killers.  Rashid Johnson’s large, framed mirror spray-painted with the word “DEATH” is both a crass declaration and a more subtle suggestion of a momento mori.  Nina Lola Bachhuber’s series of 16 pen and ink drawings of capering, skeleton-headed creatures, Untitled (2009), also recalls Medieval momento mori.  However, Bachhuber’s creatures often cavort too sweetly to serve as a sobering reminder of our mortality.   Amy Logenecker-Brown’s small canvases (10 x 8 inches), Bedroom (2009) and Bathroom (2009), yield maximum horror per square inch: a figure seeming to spontaneously combust in a dingy apartment, an ominous white cloud erupting from a battered toilet stall.  The woozy fright of Bedroom is intensified by the work hung to its right, Dani Leventhal’s deer-blood painting, Untitled (2008), which looks like nothing so much as huge scorch mark. 

Salon 94 Freeman’s also offers rich rewards in “Chapter Seven: Wolf Tickets.” Like Frazier’s self-portrait, Patrick Lee’s portrait, Deadly Friends (Big Top) (2010), depicts a person or a character that would be at home in the streets.  The image of Big Top simultaneously attracts viewers to him and even through the mediating graphite and paper, puts them on their guard.  Part of Big Top’s appeal is his hyper-intelligent wariness; he would not be so easily caught by the novel’s Quality of Life squad.  Erik Benson’s Overgrowth (2010), is an excellent example of his unique painting style and could easily serve as a stage for the unfolding events in Lush Life.  His images are finely detailed renderings of urban ruin and waste which each feature a specific element that subtly rises off the surface of the canvas through the buildup of millimeter thick layers of paint. 

Ultimately, it is hard to find the connection between most of the works in the exhibitions and the novel, which amounts to a wasted opportunity.  However, this lack of narrative cohesion will likely only trouble those thousands of New Yorkers who have read the novel.  On the other hand, as a successful work of cross-pollination, the Lush Life exhibitions are a success.  The opening was well attended, by both art-world grandees and neighbors, and with so many works on display everyone could find something they liked.  Moreover, this kind of team-work benefits the smaller galleries and the less-well-known artists they represent who will gain cache by association. 

Price’s character Eric Cash had this to say about his fellow LES artists: “They were the crest of the wave, young gifted, privileged, serious for now about making art…and not only reasonably confident in their ability to do so but also intheir god-given right to do so.”  One can’t help but make that connection between Cash’s jaded description of his compatriots and the cheerful crowds who thronged the exhibitions.  But if Price’s book has one overarching message, it is that the LES cannot go back, cannot rewind the tape to earlier decades.  Today’s LES, a hipster playground studded with galleries and boutiques, can’t be returned to it’s roots as an ethnic enclave.  The beat goes on.  And as all the galleries included in their press releases, “ ‘Lush Life’ will be the present for what will become a living ghost to the future form into which the LES will inevitably morph.”

 

Sue Scott Gallery   Chapter One: Whistle        June 17-August 1

On Stellar Rays  Chapter Two: Liar         June 23-August 1

Invisible-Exports    Chapter Three: First Bird (A Few Butterflies)   June 25-July 31

Lehmann Maupin   Chapter Four: Let It Die        July 8-August 13

Y Gallery       Chapter Five: Want Cards  July 8-July 25

Collette Blanchard Gallery  Chapter Six: The Devil You Know         July 8-August 13

Salon 94 Freemans     Chapter Seven: Wolf Tickets   June 24-July 30

Scaramouche     Chapter Eight: 17 Plus 25 is 32    July 8-August 7

Eleven Rivington         Chapter Nine: She’ll Be Apples     July 15-August 13

 

 

Read the full article at www.artobserved.com

“Natural Renditions” at Marlborough Chelsea

By:Simmy Swinder

 

Natural Renditions at Marlborough Gallery's downtown Chelsea space is a refreshing alternative to the gallery’s more traditional blue-chip-exclusive exhibitions. Diana Campbell and Marlborough director Eric Gleason co-curated this summer group show comprising twenty-two contemporary artists. The two teamed up to juxtapose artworks that render natural elements through various media: landscape paintings, collage, and sculptural forms made from or to mimic flora, both realistically and in the abstract.

The exhibition consists of both up-and-coming art stars, such as Marlborough artists Steven Charles and Will Ryman, as well as relative unknowns like Amit Greenberg, a first-year art school student who was also included in Diana Campbell's recent pop-up exhibition, Pretty Young Things. Other artists who fit seamlessly into the show’s curatorial theme are Kent Henricksen, Vlatka Horvat, and Valerie Hegarty.

The exhibition covers Marlborough’s first and second floors. The first floor is split into three rooms. In the first room, which faces the street, is a painting by artist Kim Dorland. Its thick globs of paint semi-abstractly depict a wild wood. Right next to it is a small pseudo-pointillist painting by Steven Charles. The verticality in the composition and subject matter of both the paintings make their proximity the obvious choice. In this same room are two sculptures by Rob Wynne of glossy, bulbous mushrooms made of poured and blown glass, which rise in small clusters from the ground. David Brooks’ wall-suspended balcony with an uprooted tree branch attached to it, aptly named, Balcony with Landscape and View accompanies this. The works in this first room create a visual unity infrequently achieved in many exhibitions.

 

 
Installation view of “Natural Renditions.” Courtesy Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY.

 

This cohesive approach to curating is repeated throughout the show, but less directly. The works in the second and third rooms on the first floor of the gallery produce a dialogue with each other, as if the dividing wall was not there. Wade Kavanaugh & Stephen B. Nyugen’s installed sprawling, branch-like limbs that make up a mock-animate material emerging from the other side of this wall which helps unite the two rooms.

 

 
Installation view of “Natural Renditions.” Courtesy Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY.

 

The exhibition’s theme provides a range of works that fit within its mission; objects made of organic material as well as works representing organic material, digitally manipulated images of fantastical, Avatar-esc environments are complemented by Vlatka Horkat’s photographs of nowhere but everywhere locations with “Here to Stay” written out with leaves. Such juxtapositions are continued on the second floor, where two synthetic webbing designs flank an image of an unidentifiable green substance, randomly perforated and giving way to a scene of a glacier in situ. The same artist, Shane McAdams, made all three works. The diversity of artistic output is also present in Diana Cooper’s work, who on the one hand created a synthetic 3-dimensional world of overlapping and crisscrossing linear forms, similar to that found in computer chips, and on the other, wrapped branches with yarn and stuck them in a glass case resting on a bed of sticks resembling a bird’s nest.

  Though it’s difficult to find any art that isn’t in someway inspired by “fundamental structures and occurrences that pervade nature,” the curators did a good job of providing a more specific focus with a nucleus from which other works can make meaning based on how they relate to each other. This isn’t to say, however, that there weren’t pieces that left me wondering how they belonged. Aleksandra Mir’s collage of biblical scenes set in modern times and Nir Hod’s deflated balloons felt disconnected to the other works in the show. Nevertheless, a group show worth seeing.

 

“Natural Renditions” at Marlborough Gallery Chelsea runs through July 9^th

 

Marlborough Gallery

545 West 25^th St

Take the A, C or E to 23rd Street and/or the M23 bus to 11th Avenue

Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat, 10-5:30

Gallery website: www.marlboroughgallery.com