CANVAS AND BERRIES

Some good shows today. Here are a few to check out if your around the City..


Deitch Projects
February 05, 2009 (— February 28, 2009)
76 Grand Street
New York City, NY
6pm-9pm

Interdisciplinary artist Ben Jones of celebrated East Coast art collective Paper Rad presents a solo show of between-media video sculpture, light painting, and “drawing in the digital age” at Deitch Projects 76 Grand Street gallery. Entitled The New Dark Age, the exhibition explores new methods of pictoral storytelling through the drawn, projected, and sculpted line.

The exhibition consists of five components of equal importance to the artist: Ladders, Minimalism, Cartoon Drawings, Dogs, and Bricks. Buy a pizza and throw it into a dog park. Build a doghouse out of bricks. Draw cartoons to sell to street wear corporations and gorge yourself on soft pretzels. Then come to the exhibition.

Jones' menagerie of characters, honed through years of acclaimed comic and video making, appear in The New Dark Age in fresh suits of Neon Aztec Organic Spandex. His signature 2D Flash videos in this new exhibition open up into writhing 3D sacred glowing guts. The storefront room features Mush Robos and “Travel Berries.” Neon ladders scale gallery walls, as sculptured plexiglass beings and painted neon faces appear out of the blackness. One of the four “Ben Jones Approved Patters” covers the silk-screened entryway where the welcome video prepares you for “The New Dark Age.”




Glowlab/ Show at Glow Lounge(Feb 5,12,19,26)
30 Grand street
New York City, NY 10013
7pm-9pm
As Glowlab settles into their new SoHo location, they return to our roots in interactive and participatory artwork with Glowlounge, an exhibition modeled on our original salon-style events that took place in Williamsburg from 2003 to 2005. Glowlounge acts as a platform for artists and the public to connect in an informal, creative setting to view and talk about art, social change and progressive approaches to urban living. Past Glowlounge events have featured cultural change agents including Swoon, Flash Mobs creator Bill Wasik and more.



Shaking up the traditional art world model of the month-long-show-with-opening-reception, Glowlounge opts to evolve over the course of four weeks. Each Thursday night we’ll stay open late with a changing selection of artworks and participating artists in attendance to discuss their projects with our guests. These nighttime lounges will have limited capacity, and reservations may be secured via email to rsvp @ glowlab.com. The exhibition will also be on view during our regular gallery hours.



Glowlounge brings long-time Glowlab collaborators Steve Lambert, Sal Randolph and Lee Walton together with current gallery artists CutUp, Beka Goedde, Heather L. Johnson, David Kesting, Roberto Mollá and Mark Price. We’ll also introduce works by Paloma Crousillat, Pablo Helguera, Emily Henretta, Brian Leo, Casey Porn, Tod Seelie and additional artists as the show unfolds in an environment of chance and discovery.

Honorable Mention

Matthew Marks Galleries are exhibiting 2 shows from Ellsworth Kelly.

Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal
522 West 22nd Street and 523 West 24th Street.
The exhibition features eight two-panel paintings from 2007 and 2008, on view in the 22nd Street gallery. Each consists of a black or white rectangle with a contrasting black, white, or colored rectangle placed diagonally on top and extending beyond the boundary of the canvas below.

In the catalog published to accompany the exhibition, Johanna Burton writes: “What Kelly is producing does not end at the edge…a shadow is thrown, but rather than demarcating the shape and space of the work more clearly, it works to utterly confuse what is being looked at: these are paintings that, in places, don’t end or, perhaps, refuse to show how they begin. Rather than a perceptual fluke or an experiment in phenomenology, however, this is, I think, a part of the painting.”

Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings 1954 - 1962
526 West 22nd Street
This exhibition consists of 23 drawings in a variety of media, including ink, graphite, oil paint and collage. Modest in scale, with no dimension larger than fourteen inches, many of the works in the exhibition are working drawings relating to larger paintings. They were made in the first years after Kelly returned to New York from Paris in 1954, where he lived for six years after WWII, studying on the G.I. Bill. The artist’s touch is much in evidence, and the drawings have an immediacy unusual in Kelly’s work. All of the drawings are exhibited here for the first time.

Beginning in Paris, and continuing in New York, Kelly developed a unique vocabulary of abstraction based on the observation of nature and the world around him. The drawings in this exhibition give the viewer an opportunity to see Ellsworth Kelly as a young artist exploring the full range of abstraction within his chosen vocabulary.