By now, we’ve surveyed the fall landscape in New York City, and we’ve seen enough to confidently air some complaints about that. If this tells you anything, Jen and Paul’s bus tour, which drives around mocking Chelsea, tops our list.
And among the other gems: a reconstruction of a 2007 installation by the late Jason Rhoades; Regina Rex’s new Manhattan gallery; and a show by Sadie Benning. And surprisingly, Paddy Johnson likes the Dan Graham pavilion on the Met’s rooftop. Those, and other redeeming shows, below.
Chelsea
Jason Rhoades: PeaRoeFoam
David Zwirner Gallery
537 West 20th Street
Through October 18th, with a special event at the Kitchen October 4th
Even if faux-factory warehouses aren’t your bag, a nod has to be given to the tremendously detailed reconstruction of Jason Rhoades’s 2007 installation. (Originally shown at Zwirner.) Reconstructing Rhoades’s lab, assembly line, and storage stacks in painstaking detail took months of research and labor; to the best of my knowledge the piece never functioned, though one gets the sense Rhoades’s studio assistants must have used the factory while they were making it. It’s a mess. Piles of raw materials—mainly peas and foam—are everywhere, including on the walls. [MORE…]
Jen and Paul’s One-Stop Souvenir City and Chelsea Bus Tours
West 24th Street
Chelsea
Through November. Check Eventbrite for tour scheduling
In Chelsea, right now, Jen and Paul’s One-Stop Souvenir City and Chelsea Bus Tours sails down 24th street like a lifeboat of fun and bad taste in a Dead Sea of Modernism. Inside the bus, you can purchase art souvenirs at upwards of $9.99: a mini Damien Hirst (a goldfish in formaldehyde), a Richard Serra mug (labelled “DICK”), and a Marina Abramovic performance art kit (a hotel bathrobe). Over the PA, Paul plays a perfect smooth talking tour guide. [MORE…]
Lower East Side
Sadie Benning, Patterns
Callicoon Fine Arts
49 Delancey Street
Runs through October 26, 2014
Images can be deceiving. At first, I had thought that Sadie Benning’s entire show of large-scale collages at Callicoon was made of faux leather– it wasn’t until I physically left the gallery that a friend informed me they were not. I had to return. [MORE…]
Erica Baum, The Paper Nautilus
Bureau
178 Norfolk Street
Runs through October 26th, 2014
Good abstract visual poetry exists. Take Erica Baum’s The Paper Nautilus at Bureau. In square photographic prints, Baum zooms in on the dog-ears on illustrated book pages– cropping the frame so that the square photograph is split diagonally from bottom left to top right corner, by the page crease. The dog ears, and the corner of the page beneath them, retain only triangular corners of illustrations and photographs. There’s no linear meaning to be drawn from these works, and yet, the mismatched pairings of triangles form a stable visual rhythm. The abstract squares resemble Josef Albers’s color studies, only in grayscale, and printed out on a dot matrix printer. [MORE…]
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, No Aloha
Rachel Uffner
170 Suffolk Street
Runs September 7 to October 19, 2014
Now that we can print on virtually anything, it’s no surprise that laminate veneers are increasingly popular amongst sculptors. I’ve seen my fair share of unsuccessful experiments in this vein in recent studio visits, but there are artists doing it right too. Rachel de Joode’s flesh-covered monolith is just one example, and more recently, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance’s striped and marbled mantelpieces at Rachel Uffner. In this show, we’ve got what looks like a great hall of plastic mesh and spray enamel drawings leading into a virtual garden of mimicked 80’s contempo-casual decor. [MORE…]
Two Two One
Regina Rex
221 Madison Street
New York, NY 10002
Runs through October 26, 2014
Most people won’t find Regina Rex’s tunnel-like basement gallery to be large in any sense of the word. But coming from a one-room studio in Ridgewood, the collective has definitely found themselves an upgrade. And with Two, Two, One they were taking advantage of that by giving each artist (Corey Escoto, Dave Hardy, EJ Hauser, and David Stein) an individual area to show off their work. Most of the time that work walked a thin line between absurdity and bleakness (if you can imagine such a thing to exist). [MORE…]
Upper East Side
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Roof Garden Exhibition
Dan Graham With Gunther Vogt
Runs through November 2, 2014
Dan Graham began making free-standing objects made of curved steel and glass back in the 1980s. He called these structures “pavilions” because they generally carved out an interior and exterior space the way a building might, but remained open enough that the space never felt quite enclosed. Often these structures were described as somewhere between sculpture and architecture. Now, I’ve never been all that interested in this work…I was surprised, then, to find the Met’s rooftop commission by Dan Graham and Gunther Vogt to be such a pleasant experience. [MORE..]
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