gallery run down

So as I mentioned I went to Chelsea yesterday to see a few shows. It was a quick trip but a success.
I really loved seeing how Miriam Shapiro incorporated fiber into her paintings. The work on display was not her actual quilt pieces but paintings in which she gel medium collaged lace, ribbon, and swatches of fabric onto their surface. One piece had an apron and a few sweet little doilies incorporated.
They worked really beautiful and spoke very much about the experience of the domestic space.



Mending by Lee Mingwei was truly worth the trip. The exhibit and install is very simple and straightforward but perfectly done. What I did not expect is that each mended piece, neatly folded and stacked on the table in the center of the gallery, was attached by a long thread to the spool of thread, on the wall, that the mend was sewn with. It ended up creating a beautiful visual mend of space and physical web through space as well as forcing you, the viewer, to interact with the work in a new way. The mends themselves were also at times pretty wild with color and mess of thread. Really beautiful. Unfortunately no images on line of this transformation.
My only complaint was that they were in the process of hanging some "in process" pictures of the mending done over the time of the exhibition. The images seemed to have been taken automatically with a digital camera on a timer. BUT they were horrible, they were not balanced and therefore a glowing yellow and brown. The gallery should have know better to light balance the camera and get some decent shots:(

image not from current exhibit.

Kimberely Hart's show was a but of a disappointment. Her work was still beautifully crafted and clever but it was lacking something. It almost seemed too thought out, too gallery ready, there was no grit to the work left. I fear she might be going through the stage of having the money and success to do whatever she can imagine and her editing process and commitment to the work not being quite the level it was forced to be earlier in her career. Still worth seeing, as she has some hand made vultures that are truly lovely. But a bit of a disappoint.





Otherwise nothing too exciting- except I did really love the paintings at Susan Inglett gallery by Hope Gangloff. Her paintings are relatively large scale and read almost more like drawings than paintings, with her strong use of line and white space. She includes a lot of simply rendered fabric from bed sheets, to towels, to discarded clothing often focusing on their graphic patterns. Always centering her casually reclined figure in the comfort of a domestic setting. They are really nice work and I would love to have one hanging on my wall.



And as I think I mentioned the Bill Viola show at James Cohen is amazing. He poetically, beautifully, and simply portrays the simultaneous process of birth and death, pleasure and pain, rebirth and loss.
Highly recommended.

Tracey Emin

Now I have to get around to planning a trip uptown to see the new Tracey Emin show and this super awesome sounding embroidery, in stitches, at LTMH gallery.

Louise Bourgeois

The exhibit includes established artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Lesley Dill to more emerging artists.

Todd Knopke

I cannot wait to check it out!! I mean look at the roster of artists. You can actually see the entire catalogue online, so enjoy.