March 30 – April 24
312 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston streets
New York City, 212-466-1100

E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler, Untitled 21, 2012. Archival photographic print mounted on sintra, edition of 3. 45 x 60 inches. Courtesy of The Hole

Walking into E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler’s delightfully campy exhibition at The Hole is like teleporting into an alternate reality.  Lines between real and fake are not merely blurred but altogether irrelevant.  The artists, assisted by a grant from Playboy, have transformed the gallery space into a delirious recreation of Monet’s gardens at Giverny.  Day had spent the summer of 2010 at Giverny after receiving the Munn Artist’s Residency from the Versailles Foundation: her only instruction was to be inspired by the gardens.  The Giverny that the artists have constructed on the Bowery is a utopian intersection of art and artifice, where sensory overload is de rigueur and childish delight the only appropriate reaction.

A gravel path winds through the gallery, cutting a noisily crunching swath through AstroTurf knolls and living flowers.  Mulched flowerbeds feature tulips and roses. Goldfish swim in a lily pond spanned by a comically short arched bridge.  The illusion is completed by a Sunday painter working away at an easel, churning out landscapes suitable for a Starving Artists sale at a Marriott.  Day’s photographs are hung on vinyl wallpaper emblazoned with lush weeping willows.  Some of the large-scale works are brightly lit and prominently displayed, while other small- scale works are tucked away in unlit corners, making for delightful discoveries.

E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler, Untitled 22, 2012. Archival photographic print mounted on sintra, edition of 3. 50 x 50 inches. Courtesy of The Hole

Day invited performance artist Kembra Pfahler to join her at Giverny, where she photographed her in character, as the Playboy Femlin-inspired frontwoman of  glam-punk band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.  Pfahler is naked save for hot-pink body paint, thigh high pleather bondage boots, and a towering wig.  Her painted skin perfectly matches the pink lilies, while her shiny boots reflect in the glimmering pond.  It takes a minute to notice the eerie symmetry of some of the photographs, where Day has digitally manipulated the images into perfect mirrors of themselves like hallucinatory Rorschach tests.  The unsettling effect boldly emphasizes the artifice of their mise-en-scène.

The exhibition’s melding of nature and artifice, human and botanical, history and present, is thoroughly refreshing.  Gallery visitors can sit on the fake grass and smell the flowers.  Curious tourists pop their heads in the door, exclaiming to one another “there’s a garden in there!” and, farther inside, “she’s naked!”  The artists relate an amusing anecdote in the press book at the front desk.  As Pfahler and Day worked alone at Giverny, posing and shooting after the thousands of visitors had left for the day, Pfahler, unaccustomed to the lack of an audience, complained of the solitude.  A solution presented itself when they discovered a group of gardeners spying on them from the bushes.  Invited to participate, the delighted gardeners posed for pictures with the painted performance artist, no doubt appreciating her vibrant colors and exuberant demeanor as much as any of the blooms they tended daily.

Pfaler appears to own her environs like a futuristic wood sprite or a new species of plant-fembot hybrid.  The audacity of Day’s inspiration to transport this doyenne of East Village punk to Monet’s storied garden seems oddly like the most logical choice in the world.  Of course, Monet’s Impressionism once shocked people too.

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March 8 to 11, 2012
548 West 22nd Street, between 1oth and 11th avenues
New York City – Sunday hours: 11am to 4pm

Andrea Bowers, Tree sits - Canopy Camping, earth First! Direct Action Manual with Dream Platform, 2011. Recycled wood, rope, carabiners, miscellaneous equipment and supplies. Courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery

Strolling through Independent with its open, airy installation one feels something akin to calm – an emotional state alien to the usual art fair experience of cluttered booths and madding crowds. Architect Christian Wassmann designed the layout,  in the former Dia Center for the Arts building along with a “site-specific environment” on the roof intended, in the words of the press release. to “align with the true North-South axis of the earth.” Whether or not visitors buy into this ambitious concept – or even notice it – the fair is a delight.  There are few dividing walls, allowing one gallery area to flow seamlessly into the next, a joyful antidote to ubiquitous, claustrophobic cubicles.

Sam Windett, Under The Sun (White on White), 2012. Oil on canvas, 62 x 43cm. Courtesy The Approach

On each of Independent’s three floors there are moments of surprise and aesthetic reward.  At The Approach on the second floor, three achingly beautiful white-on-white works by Sam Windett represent the best paintings in a fair diversely populated by installation, sculpture, work on paper, photography, and film.  Daria Martin’s 16mm film projection, Closeup Gallery, at Maureen Paley is a mesmerizing depiction of smiling performers shuffling multicolored decks of cards as they slowly twirl on a kaleidoscopic table.  The colors are bright and nostalgic – the palette of a children’s TV show in the 1980s – though the film’s content is determinedly inscrutable.  It is 10 minutes long, and looped, and it is nearly impossible to walk away.  Mac Adams’s sinister 1976 installation at gb agency, Black Mail consists of a half-eaten meal on a table in disarray, an overturned chair, and dripping candles burned down to their nubs.  An act of violence has taken place, and the title hints at the cause, but with no victim or suspect, we are left to make up our own narrative: a do-it-yourself murder mystery.

On the third floor at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Andrea Bowers’ Tree sits – Canopy Camping, earth First! Direct Action Manual with Dream Platform, an ode to environmentalist civil disobedience, presents a fully functional tree sitter’s platform complete with instructions for residence (dedicating one side as kitchen, the other as bathroom because one “wouldn’t want to do both in the same area”).   Bowers has explored many activist tropes (Feminism, Immigration reform) but her gallerist explained to me that while the work is about activism, it is not actual activism.  This neat semantic hat trick in no way detracts from the sincerity and idealistic appeal of the work.  In fact, given Dia’s treacherously steep staircases, the ropes and carabiners might prove extremely useful to fairgoers.  Other works not to miss on the third floor are Moyra Davey’s grainy close ups of the back of a ten dollar bill from 1989 at Murray Guy and Michel François’s exuberant bronze splatter evoking Jackson Pollock at Bortolami.

Rob Pruitt’s silver-tape covered chairs, The Congregation (2010-12) at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise almost steal the show on the fourth floor, but it is well worth lingering around the corner at Creative Growth Art Center where Dan Miller has created spellbinding odes to the power of language in pen, paint, and typewritten words on paper.  The works are both confounding and compelling – alluring, indefinably sad, and creepy.  Their poignancy is almost overwhelming when one learns that the artist has Autism, and can hardly speak at all.  His words are all in his art.

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May 6- June 18th, 2011
537 West 22nd Street. between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-680-9467

Sean Landers, Around the World Alone (Boy Skipper - Dawn), 2011. Oil on linen, 52 x 68 inches. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery

Sing in me, Sean Landers, and through me tell the story of a sad clown who weathered many bitter nights and days in his deep heart at sea.

Landers’s new exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, does not sing, nor is it particularly poetic or lyrical, though the narrative depicted could certainly be described as an epic.  Around the World Alone, presents a series of flatly stylized portraits of one of his alter-egos, the clown, on a solo-circumnavigation – a life-long voyage from boy to old man.

The clown appeared relatively early in the artist’s oeuvre, together with images of aliens, robots, monkeys, rabbits, and naked hippies, serving to liberate him from the widely popular text-based works for which he was known.  Though the texts were certainly solipsistic, they were highly entertaining and visually compelling, and when contemplating his subsequent style of deadpan affect and purposefully banal image presentation, one may occasionally ache for the challenge of deciphering hundreds of misspelled words chronicling ambition, insecurity, bawdiness, and witty self-reflection.

Clowns are problematic icons in popular culture, calling to mind Steven King’s Pennywise, The Joker, John Wayne Gacy, and any number of cheap jokes.  Artists Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman have tackled our discomfort head on by creating the creepiest of creepy clowns (Sherman) in unpleasant or vile circumstances (Nauman).  Landers embraces his anti-hero fully however, freeing him from the circus and sending him around the world as skipper of a disturbingly un-seaworthy and shape-shifting vessel.  He eschews the laws of physics and narrative continuity in this series – the captain’s wheel shrinks to flimsy inadequacy and expands to dwarf the helmsman. Though the artist is an experienced sailor, the details of the boat are purposefully wrong or missing; the jib is not tied to the boom, the gunwale appears to consist of carved wooden bannisters, the wheel sometimes faces the stern.  His brave avatar is far from land, in a deliberately inadequate craft.  The ocean is rendered more authentically – shifting from green to blue to calm to roiling – indicating that on some level this journey is real.  Despite the perceptual ambiguities and challenges present, this voyage is not entirely doomed.  In Around the World Alone (Force Ten Stalwart) Landers has equipped the ship with a compass, a life saver, and red and green port and starboard lights.  Around the World Alone (Arctic Endurance) depicts the threat of icebergs safely past – enigmatic menaces whose true mass is concealed beneath the surface, where what you don’t see coming can sink you.

The metaphor of solo embarkation is hardly a new one (remember Bas Jan Ader’s foolhardy and ultimately fatal quest) but though heavy-handed it is quite effective.  Landers may or may not aim for seriousness but he strives for a level of honesty and clarity– desiring always that the viewer recognize him or herself in his work.  This is not a tall order in Around the World Alone – who has not felt adrift in life, sabotaged by faulty equipment and at the mercy of the whims of weather and fate alike?  The artist’s deployment of the clown indicates that only a self-defined outsider or fool would deliberately take such a hazardous journey.  When considered in terms of Landers’s oeuvre however another level of interpretation presents itself – the artist felt that his clowns were neither understood nor accepted for a long time and in this series they heroically survive against nearly impossible odds.  The cast bronze heads of seafaring clowns at the exhibition’s entrance are positioned as if busts of famous nautical clown captains past.  In Landers’s own words, despite his experience, he is “an armchair sailor first and foremost” – he prefers to let the clowns have all the glory.

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May 6 – June 11, 2011
548 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 989 7700

Dasha Shishkin, Butter Is the Passport to Pleasure, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 30 x 42 inches. Courtesy of Zach Feuer.

In electric, Kool-Aid-colored acid fever-dreams Dasha Shishkin depicts death, amputation, glamour, deviance, ritual, and the mundane, often all at once.  The narratives are obscure, veiled by an abundance of line and color delineating violent and quotidian moments with equal dispassion.

The title of Shishkin’s current exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, Desaparecido, translates as “one who has been disappeared,” and every one of the hominoid creatures in her phantasmagorical world could easily be “disappeared” at any moment. Recurrent motifs of coffins, dismembered torsos, severed breasts and phalluses abound, though the horrors are apparently routine for the inhabitants – the breasts are served prettily on a platter in a cannibalistic patisserie, and judging by the number of mutilated living corpses scattered about smoking cigarettes, they are quite fresh.  The sketchy markmaking and cluttered splotchy surfaces camouflage a ferocity simmering under the surface.

To focus entirely on the macabre grotesquery of Shishkin’s imagery would be (however pruriently satisfying) a shame, for there is great beauty here as well. A gleeful riot of color runs through her exhibition like a hybrid beast escaped from her paintbrush.  It is unabashedly pleasing, as is her delicate linear style, despite the barbarities depicted.  Though the artist has often been compared to Egon Schiele and Henry Darger – her predecessors both in style and content – hers is an entirely new synthesis of delirium and graphically compelling presentation.  The inhabitants of her fantastical land are mutant creatures with human limbs and distorted features – elongated phallic or devilishly pointed noses abound.  Sometimes the figures are clothed in grey dresses; occasionally they sport rat-like tails.  Their skin tones range from pale pink to bright green to a Simpsons yellow.

Dasha Shishkin, With the Dark Comes Dinner I Hope, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 72 x 105 inches. Courtesy of Zach Feuer.

These quasi-people enact celebration scenes, funerals, bizarre medical procedures and scientific experiments.  In Butter is the Passport to Pleasure, slender pink and blue figures are served wine at a long banquet table in a spacious interior decorated with palm fronds, while small figures lie end-to-end in caskets before them.  With the Dark Comes Dinner I Hope depicts graceful yellow female figures, sporting high heels and rodent tails, carrying bright pink and red coffins, upon which sit comely polka-dotted sprites with ferns for hands. In A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother one of the few male figures disgorges red berry-like entrails while a female torso gives birth to tiny birds in a hospital-like environment with a tiled floor.  All Prayer All the Time presents a similarly medical interior where elaborate human and animal dissection takes place – perhaps experimental cross breeding or a search for a cure has gone drastically awry. Though the scattered body parts and ever-present splatters of red paint could have sprung from the demented dreams of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, there are rare moments of heroism to counter-balance the savagery.  The rare outdoor scene of Sure Like Shite Sticks to the Blanket shows a chain of grey-clad figures rescuing one of their own from a perilous fall from a grassy cliff.  Though sometimes these beings function as food for one another, apparently there is also a sense of community, even caring.  Clearly this strange brutal world has an order to it, albeit one that is impossible to comprehend.

It is tempting to read an intended social commentary into Shishkin’s works – could this frightening yet strangely alluring world be a nightmare mirror image of our own, where brutality, aggression, and the fatality of life itself are laid bare for our examination?  It is possible, yet perhaps a too-literal interpretation.  After all, the artist deliberately obfuscates the reading of her works with catchy yet unrelated titles;for example, Enthusiasm is a Fever of Reason.

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March 24 to April 30, 2011
528 West 26^th St, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-315-0470

Kate Shepherd, Violet Grey African Rabbit Skin, 2010. Oil and enamel on wood panel, 90 x 50 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

In this new body of work Kate Shepherd adeptly fuses modernist architectural images with formal minimalism and a compelling eccentricity.  And Debris presents twelve glossy oil and enamel paintings and seventeen adorably homespun wire sculptures.  The paintings are created with Shepherd’s characteristic coolness; she uses architecture and animation programs on her computer to map out her composition before painting.  The finished pieces reflect this measured approach – they are elegant and alluring– at once angular and lyrical.  Against high-gloss monochromatic enamel backgrounds the artist dangles and intertwines collapsed geometric shapes etched in wavering white lines of oil paint.  Titles range from the descriptive and comparatively straightforward Hung Tied String Figure on Grey (2010) to the appealingly esoteric Violet Grey African Rabbit Skin (2010).  Rabbit skins exist as empty vessels, divested of the living animal they once encased, and re-imagined by Shepherd as triangles and quadrilaterals suspended without infrastructure and hanging limp.

The wire sculptures consist entirely of unbent coat-hangers awkwardly reshaped into irregular amoebic forms and suspended from the gallery ceiling with 28 gauge steel wire so they dangle at eye level with the standing viewer.  Eight are human-scale and vaguely creepy; their negative space threatening, like the shadows of sinister ghosts, or portals into a disordered alternate universe.  When viewed as a group, especially from end to end, they oddly resemble 3-D versions of Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings, twisting and swaying gently in eddies of air.  In the side gallery there is another series of smaller wire sculptures rather less successful then their larger counterparts.  At about half the size, they are a bit baffling, appearing more as puzzles or questions then the statements and demands of the large-scale works.   The sculptures are at their best when viewed en masse – their amalgamated formlessness is visually enticing and borders on the physical, as the viewer walks around the works.  I was strongly tempted to climb through some of the larger works – just to see what was on the other side.

Viewed singly, the medium of the sculptures becomes the message, as one is reminded of the unpleasant connotations of the coat hanger in the quotidian culture, from back-alley abortions to the hideous scene from the movie, Mommie Dearest: “No more wire hangers!”

The exhibition’s title theme, debris, is underscored in grainy black and white photographs printed on newsprint, displayed folded in a case at the entrance and available as handouts.  The photos are of the view from the artist’s studio – a messy detritus-filled lot and a tangle of dissected wire hangers reinforcing the mundane simplicity of junk and underscoring its alchemical transformation into art objects.

The exhibition is quirky and captivating, inviting gallery goers to linger in contemplation whether deciphering the twisted geometries of the paintings, admiring their shiny surfaces and pleasing colors, or confronting the ­­­compelling ambiguity of the wire sculptures.  Shepherd’s older work was more blatantly architectural (she has a background in architecture) and her work’s evolution into a more veiled and nuanced subtlety is a pleasure to see.  A new unrest has crept in, adding layers of complexity and challenging easy interpretation.  One wonders if a glimpse through the coat-hanger portals or an untangling of the paintings’ ordered chaos would yield a view into a parallel world – one slightly more sinister than our own.

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January 6 – February 19, 2011
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 646-230-9610

Kahn & Selesnick, Cave, 2010. Archival Ink Jet Print, 44 x 44 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery

Kahn & Selesnick fabulize at the intersection of historical fact, apocalyptic future, nerdy museology and steam-punk.  Melding childlike playfulness with adult obsessiveness they create faux-historical narratives realized as photography, sculpture, and installation.

Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, currently on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery, depicts the adventures of two unitard-attired women as they explore an unwelcoming landscape studded with the defunct remains of ambiguous circuitry, abandoned dish-structures, and enigmatic monoliths.  Most of the works are photographs, including a few of the detailed panoramic scenes that the team is known for.  Five mid-size dry-looking hematite and concrete sculptures are positioned on the gallery floor, as though the exploring team had managed to send back a few heavy artifacts from the crumbled civilization they investigate.

The environment was digitally constructed from actual photo-mosaics of Martian landscapes taken by NASA, combined with deserts in Nevada and Utah.  The female protagonist’s clothing is compellingly impractical- many outfits lack arms or eye-holes, though concessions to the necessity of breathing are plentiful – every bodysuit comes equipped with a facemask, and snakelike tubes coil around an “Abandoned Oxygen Farm” and lie tangled in shallow lakes.  This Mars has water, and hence, the ability to sustain life- though judging by the occasional space-suited corpse, not forever.

Kahn & Selesnick, Squidnight, 2010. Archival Ink Jet Print, 12 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery

With Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, Kahn & Selesnick have departed from previous more “academic” displays – where labeled artifacts were carefully presented in display cases and copious documentation of the expedition was presented in the form of a diary or log, or elaborately forged newspaper articles.  Their new deliberate ambiguity liberates the earthbound preoccupations of artist and viewer alike, allowing suspension of disbelief.   Oddly this suspension both strengthens the impact of the show, and allows it to be perceived more intuitively.  When rules of space and time are too obviously suspended, as in Oracle, 2010, where a blue-clad figure regards a half-sphere upon which stands a blue-clad figure regarding a half-sphere, and so on like self-consciously meta- Russian nesting dolls it’s hard not to be jolted by the impossibility – a sign of prior credence.

Kahn & Selesnick’s ongoing interest in inefficient transportation extends beyond the recurring motifs of balloons and dirigibles to gliders and “sandboats.”  Humankind has made it to Mars, but with technology from the turn of the 20^th century.  This is the second series where the team has combined science fiction and space travel with archaic means – in The Apollo Prophesies, man lands on the moon, only to discover that it has already been colonized by an expedition from the Edwardian era.

If, as the artists presuppose, humankind has truly come unstuck in time and place, as the hourglass of the title is endlessly flipped end to end, we must address the unsettling question: Is Mars’s past our present?  If so, is Mars’s present, Earth’s future?

One might conjecture that the team’s recurring choice of explorers as protagonists reveals something of their psyches – the artist as intrepid traveler in a strange land – but Kahn & Selesnick do separate reality from art in “real” life (unlike say, McDermott & McGough.)  It is only in their art that there is no division between fact and fabrication.  The distinction is irrelevant – to belabor it would be missing the point. In art, unlike life, there is no physical or temporal limitation.

Two concurrent exhibitions of Kahn & Selesnick:

The Apollo Prophesies and Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
600 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, through April 3. 312.663.5554

Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea
Carl Hammer Gallery
740 North Wells Street, Chicago, through February 19. 312.266.8512

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Vik Muniz at Jardim Gramacho in WASTE LAND, an Arthouse Films release 2010. Photograph by Fabio Ghivelder, courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Vik Muniz cuts a sympathetic figure as the star of Lucy Walker’s documentary film, Waste Land, which screened in New York last fall at the Angelika Film Center and will be available on video this coming spring.  His playful artistry has garnered him wealth and fame, and led him to the pursuits of the virtuous rich: philanthropy and social change.  Rather than simply writing a check, Muniz has embarked on a high-wire project of social reform through the transformative power of art.

Walker’s film charts the production of Muniz’s latest series, “Pictures of Garbage.”A consummate draughtsman, Muniz is known for re-creating images recognizable from art history (Warhol’s Marilyns, past masters’ Greek myths) using unlikely materials such as dirt, diamonds, chocolate syrup, and plastic toys, with a photograph of the completed image always the end result.  On this occasion, Muniz employed garbage pickers from the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Brazil to help him create large portraits of themselves out of refuse collected from the site and return the proceeds from the sale of the resulting artworks to the workers’ cooperative. The artist’s jovial demeanor and idealism carry him through the film like a benevolent ringmaster, under circumstances where a man with more self-doubt or heightened situational awareness might crumble under the moral ramifications of his stated vision;“to change the lives of a group of people [using] the same material that they deal with every day.”

Vik Muniz, Marat (Sebastião), from Pictures of Garbage, 2008. Digital C-print. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The film follows a group of catadores (pickers) who pluck recyclable materials from the dump, reselling it to eke out a living.  In Brazil catadores are among the most socially marginalized; coming from backgrounds where the only other options are the drug trade or prostitution, they have chosen trash. Though they take pride in their work and are quick to describe its environmental merits, it is unsanitary, unsavory, and deeply unpleasant. 7,000 tons of garbage arrive at Jardim Gramacho daily from Rio de Janeiro and surrounding areas. The stench is unbearable. At night there are fires, completing the illusion that this place is hell on earth. Though catadores can earn double the minimum daily wage, the hazards are extreme. Injuries from the garbage trucks are common, as is finding headless corpses among the trash (casualties of the drug and gang wars nearby). Suelem, who has worked at the landfill since childhood, tells a harrowing story of finding a dead baby. Then, there are the leprosy outbreaks. A worker named Isis states it simply: “There is no future here.”

The camera captures the squalor beautifully, and the catadores are quirky and quotable, easily lending themselves to the stereotype of the honest yet simple laborer popularized in the 19th century by Courbet, Van Gogh and many others. It is in this vein that Muniz casts the catadores – as in Picasso’s Woman Ironing and Millet’s The Sower.

Early in the film, Muniz asks his studio manager Fabio whether it will be difficult to collaborate with the catadores, fearing they might be criminals and drug addicts. “It would be much harder to think that we are not able to change the life of these people,” Fabio responds.  The unconscious hubris of this statement rankles in the background of the film.

The heavy responsibility inherent in changing lives becomes clear to Muniz and Fabio as the project approaches completion. Fabio articulates this concern saying, “They totally forgot about Gramacho. They don’t want to go back. At the beginning I had the impression, and I think now that this is wrong, that they were happy there.” As the portraits are finished, photographed, and dismantled we begin to see the catadores dissolving in tears as the realization dawns that they must now return to the landfill – their temporary employment at Muniz’s studio at an end. Isis weeps as her portrait is completed, confessing that she implored Fabio to give her a job at the studio, so she wouldn’t have to return to the dump. The catadores thank Muniz over and over.

Tiaõ, the handsome and charismatic union leader, watches as his portrait (fittingly styled after David’s The Death of Marat) is sold at Phillips auction house in London. Surrounded by contemporary art built upon ironies that have no place in his life, he is overwhelmed and breaks down, knowing the proceeds ($64,097) will fund the pickers’ co-op he founded.

Vik Muniz takes the photo of Tiao as Marat in WASTE LAND, an Arthouse Films release 2010. Courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio

Since the film premiered, several of the catadores have found work outside the landfill, and the proceeds from the sale of the artworks have paid for numerous benefits for the workers’ co-op: a new truck, computers, a business training program. Those who modeled for portraits and helped to construct them each received their own photograph as well as monetary compensation. Some returned to Jardim Gramacho, begging the question posed by Muniz’s wife Janaina, “If you shake them up…show them life can be different….what can they do with that afterwards?” The dilemma is as complicated as the workers’ reality. Muniz takes responsibility, saying he hopes they come up with a plan to get out of Gramacho, and that it is hard for him to imagine doing much damage to these people to whom so much has been done already. It is that uncharacteristic lapse of imagination on the artist’s part that gives the film its uneasy subtext: there is altruism, but is there also inadvertent exploitation?

Unrated. English and Portuguese with English subtitles. Available March 29, 2011 from iTunes, amazon.com, and newvideo.com. Waste Land will be broadcast on PBS in April 2011 – check local listings. www.wastelandmovie.com

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September 10- October 23, 2010
540 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th aves
New York City, 212-255-2923

installation shot of Jennifer Steinkamp at Lehmann Maupin, New York City, 2010 with digital animation projections from the Premature series. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin

Walking into Jennifer Steinkamp’s exhibition feels akin to the zero-gravity mission of Dr. David Bowman in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddysey. The work is powerful, disarmingly friendly and compelling, and supremely creepy,  as if made by the HAL 9000 sentient supercomputer.  In HAL’s words, “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

Steinkamp’s large-scale video projections use the kind of 3-D animation software  employed in movies such as Avatar.  Avatar’s proudly animistic and naturistic plot combined with it’s paradoxical paean to digital technology are a point of comparison to the forces at play in her current exhibition.  In the semi-dark main room at the gallery are projected three large-scale works from the artist’s new series, Premature. Though Steinkamp states that the works are about the unpredictable timing of life and death, and is quoted in the gallery’s press release as saying the images possess a “meat-like texture” resembling veins, arteries, and tendons, the writhing coils on display resemble nothing so much as robotic worms – perhaps a cyborg’s conception of human anatomy.  The texture of the pastel-colored illuminated ropes is less “meat-like” than smooth and shiny, and there is no indication of pulse or any expansion and contraction mirroring breathing to evoke life.

Premature 3 reads as an oversized, nonsensical cursive: long tubular forms several inches wide loop around mimicking nonexistent letters as they slide down from ceiling to floor.  In Premature 2 on the west wall, liquidy-looking ropes twist vertically as though vainly trying to disentangle from one another. Premature 7 has skinny tangled worms the width of a finger that seethe and writhe, undulating like a seaweed-clogged ocean.  Around the corner Premature 6 snakes vertically in a corridor, the roughest-hewn of the series and the closest to any microbiological or organic depiction.

The back gallery houses a silent symphony of color and motion encapsulated in Orbit 7, a work separate from the Premature series, depicting swaying tree branches and swirling leaves in a brilliant palette.  Orbit 7 presents the four seasons  in a heady few minutes, cycling over and over as fictional years speed by.  It would be easy to lose a decade in the room, if not two.  Summer is a harmonious interplay of mottled pale green leaves springing from lithe branches swaying in powerful gusts of virtual wind.  In the quickly-arriving fall, yellow and light brown mix in, soon followed by red and orange.  Winter comes and goes in a split second (a subtle reminder that the artist lives in California) embodied by waving branches empty save for a smattering of bright red leftover leaves from fall.  Spring arrives with a bang as buds and blooms of pink, blue, and violet burst out from the briefly fallow branches and bright yellow dots rain down the wall like sun glinting off leaves after a rain shower.  While it is easy to be seduced by the visual delight of Orbit 7, with its glorious color and kinetic motion, it is also worth noting that this work, more than any other in the exhibition, depicts the cycles of life in nature, from birth to growth to death and decay in a few short minutes.  It is both magnificent and deeply unsettling as we seem to hurtle towards inevitable demise while distracted by the beauty unfolding before us.  Enjoy yourself, says Orbit 7, it’s sooner than you think!

Jennifer Steinkamp, Orbit 7, 2010. 3-D computer animation, projected. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin

The use of cutting edge technology—digital animation in particular – serves as an apt metaphor for fleeting life and its seemingly always “premature” end.  Planned obsolescence is inherent to technological advances.  With all of our progress, glitches and viruses occur, and even the HAL 9000 proved fallible, prone to a nervous breakdown.  Humans are still vitally necessary, if only to fix the computers.

It is nearly impossible to experience Steinkamp’s animations without inserting oneself into them, as the projectors are placed deliberately low so that upon approaching the work one’s shadow is cast upon it, rendering viewer and work as one.  Effectively erasing the boundaries between artwork, technology, and people, the artist creates her own virtual reality, where complete immersion and unmediated experience are the only viable options.  Androids may dream of electric sheep, but Steinkamp clearly dreams of electric trees.

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August 31- October 2, 2010
89 Vandam Street, between Greenwich and Hudson
New York City, 212-206-1290

Tommy White, Love Comes, 2010. Oil on canvas, Diptych, 60 x 96 Inches. Courtesy of Harris Lieberman Gallery

Tommy White’s work is like a stolen glimpse at a dirty magazine, a guilty pleasure.  His recurring, sometimes highly unusual themes include striped patterns, feet, and fecal matter, delivered with technical adriotness. The artist’s latest exhibition at Harris Lieberman, his third solo show with the gallery, includes the regulars, although feet are visible clearly in only one painting and his stripes, though ubiquitous, lack his customary punk defiance and flair.  Previous exhibitions featured brilliant colors and surrealistically distorted and fragmented figures, implying a fascinatingly twisted narrative just out of reach.  In the present show, however, there is a drastically darkened palette; to those of us familiar with the artist’s past oeuvre the color feels diminished, awakening a longing for just a hint of the golden yellows and rich reds we know he is capable of.  White has also left most representational subject matter behind; only two of the ten paintings in the exhibition are overtly figural, and even then their stories are presented matter-of-factly, rather than tantalizingly hinted.  These abstractions, though adequately composed,  leave one pining for the gothic enigmas of the old White.

Worried, (2010) presents a trussed-up torso hung from a cross-bar, worrisomely missing its extremities. Two more large paintings, Day Dreaming and Hole, (both 2009) expand upon vertical and horizontal tensions – stripes and circles – in an oppressively somber palette.  The last painting in the front gallery, Love Comes, (2010) depicts splayed stocking-clad legs, one across each panel of the diptych, with some sort of evacuation clumping along the seam between the two.  In the middle of the room fifteen free-standing small sculptures are clustered together on a low platform.  White originally made sculpture to explore ideas and compositions for painting, and has only lately began to exhibit these alongside his canvases.  The sculptures, which function well as studies, are less effective as works in their own right.  Some of the plaster verticals are clothed, several in crudely stitched leather patches, one in lace, and one in a jock-strap.  Several feature uninviting pink orifices, dotted with glazed goo.  In the back gallery a row of five small paintings line the south wall, each exemplifying a different use of White’s lumpy impastos, black stripes, and newly obfuscated palette.

Tommy White, Pretty When You Smile, 2009. Oil on canvas, 114 x 90 inches. Courtesy of Harris Lieberman Gallery

Pretty When You Smile, (2010) is the most interesting painting in the show for it represents a synthesis of the artist’s past and present styles.  The colors are subtle without appearing limited: against a pale pink background bifurcated by a column of grey and black stripes a teeming mass of bulbous shapes clench and coil around one another.  A pair of black feet and gnarled hands emerge from fleshy pink ovals, as though the tumorous shapes are becoming human, one part at a time. Across the bottom of this painting the phrase “so pretty when you smile” is unevenly printed in capital letters, an example of a tendency in this new body of work to incorporate text.  The incongruous sentiment expressed is entirely at odds with the formal content – the work is anything but pretty- and yet this verbal cue adds another dimension of meaning to the visual complexity, defying any easy interpretation.  If White is intent on continuing to explore his materials in a restricted palette and to eschew figuration, he would do well to build upon the tool of language to replace the subtracted color and representational elements.  That said,  I for one continue to hope for a return to the perverse imagery and gory color of his past.  The more subversive, unsettling older work rarely failed to stimulate a flight of fancy or, at the very least, a shudder.