This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Punk for Cyberpunks

by Michael Anthony Farley and Corinna Kirsch on July 6, 2015 Events

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What you’ll see at P.P.O.W. this week.

This is one of those New York City weeks that gets off to a slow start and then builds up to a Friday night of frantically running around to see it all. It’s also one of those great weeks that reminds you the city is still full of people doing awesome, cheap projects with a DIY ethos. Wednesday night, the Lower East Side collective Con Artist is having a $20 art sale as a gesture to inject a little accessibility back into the art market. That night, Center for Architecture is hosting a discussion about artists appropriating the concerns, aesthetics, techniques, and materials of architects. That event is followed up by a sister exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery on Thursday night. From there, it’s thankfully only two blocks to Anthony Iacono’s opening at P.P.O.W.

Friday night won’t be as easy to coordinate. Continuing in the vein of democratic offerings, Hrag Vartanian is curating a yard sale in Greenpoint by the artist Jade Townsend. This is happening the same night as appropriation-friendly shows at James Fuentes and bitforms back in Manhattan. But the most DIY events of them all are the other direction on the L Train: Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair and Latino Punk Fest are both having events a few blocks away from each other. Luckily, the yard sale and zine fest are going on all weekend, so don’t feel too bad if you have to miss one of the openings in your triage.

Finish out the weekend at Hester, where Andrea Crespo promises to offer us a glimpse of the future of subversion. Cyberpunk’s Not </>.

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Wed

Con Artist Ludlow Gallery

119 Ludlow St
New York, NY
7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.Website

The $20 Art Show

Con Artist is an art collective that’s been running shared studio and exhibition space in the Lower East Side since 2010. For this exhibition, they’ve taken inspiration from the Bread and Puppet Theater quote “Art is food! You can’t eat it, but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap and available to everybody.” This means you’ll be able to pick up works of art from collective members for the low, low price of $20. This is a welcome change from the recent headline-grabbing news of sales totaling more than the GDP of some Sub-Saharan nations. Our advice: get there early. At events like this, there’s usually a few diamonds in the rough that go fast.

Center for Architecture

536 Laguardia Place
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Panel Discussion and Reception: The Architectural Impulse

Alois Kronschlaeger, Jean Shin and Elise Ferguson will speak about the influence of architectural materials, processes, and concerns in the visual arts in a panel moderated by Jing Liu. It seems like many artists are somewhat obsessed with direct or stylistic references to the built environment—a trend that was especially noticeable when I (Michael) visited Boston last month.

This discussion is being followed by an exhibition curated by the architect Warren James at Cristin Tierney Gallery (540 West 28th Street) which opens the following night at the same time. The group show features work by Aziz + Cucher, Filip Dujardin, Elise Ferguson, Richard Galpin, Carmen Herrera, Barbara Kasten, Alois Kronschlaeger, Jennifer Marman + Daniel Borins, Jean Shin, Jorge Tacla, and Francisco Ugarte. This looks like a winner.

Thu

Andrea Meislin Gallery

534 W 24th St.
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Party Beuys: What Comes after Farce

Curator Daniel Bauer attempts to grapple with the weight of art history in a contemporary cultural landscape characterized by artifice and irony. It’s easy to imagine this show turning out to be a lot drab construction materials making tongue-in-cheek references, but the press release is beautiful: “These are the dressings we use to renovate the museum’s ruins which by now are composed more of conjectural Bondo than any single solid meta-narrative. Yet why not teach a history of art history in a Home Depot while we shop for our supplies?” Are there hints of optimism on the horizon of the discourse? That remains to be seen, but this looks like it’s going to be a smart show. The exhibition will include works by Ilit Azoulay, Ronnie Bass, Assaf Evron, East River School Painters, Lilly Hern-Fondation, Sarah Hewitt, Gareth James, Anthony Romero and Josh Rios, and Jeff Whetstone.

P.P.O.W.

535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Anthony Iacono: Crudités at Sunset

P.P.O.W. has been on a roll. From Anton van Dalen’s impressively serious, though cartoon-y representations of East Village life to what looks like another showing of less-than straightforward, and eccentric presentations of identity, in all its guises, with Anthony Iacono’s solo exhibition. We’re given an image of a man (most likely) on all fours, with a potted plant hanging from one sagging nipple, and what look like purple breasts straddling a house vase with a lemon set in the corner. Curious to see more.

Fri

Auxiliary Projects

212 Norman Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 p.m. (Runs through the weekend)Website

Jade Townsend’s Crazy Amazing Garage Sale! Curated by Hrag Vartanian

What the heck is happening at this all-weekend garage sale? Watch the trailer, and you’ll see some patriotic spin resulting in a little girl handing her pennies over for a shard of art. What we think this means is that there’ll be an art garage sale, with really cheap art for you to buy. There’s also a lemonade stand, run by Jade Townsend and William Powhida. Wacky.

James Fuentes

55 Delancey Street
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.mWebsite

Conor Backman: Emiter

New paintings, sculptures, and wall-reliefs from Conor Backman, an artist who has a keen sense of traditional materials and how they can stand-in for how we experience screens and other forms of mediated experience in our digital age. If that sounds a little heady and vague for you, you can always go and enjoy his works for what they are: sleek and eye-catching. Plus, we’re told that some of the paintings will be of rose bushes. Flowers—pretty much everyone likes them.

bitforms

131 Allen Street
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Memory Burn

Get excited for an exhibition about death. Okay, it’s really an exhibition about “observ[ing]  mortality and death in relation to recording devices,” which is a topic we all deal with, artists and otherwise, with every new update to our software. In addition to the opening on July 10, bitforms will host an online exhibition along with gallery exhibition. The GIFs and videos that are already online look appealing, dealing with the affective loss through digital materials.

Daniel Canogar, exonemo, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sara Ludy, Sarah Rothberg, Angela Washko, Andrea Wolf

Curated by Chris Romero

Signal

260 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. (Runs through the weekend)Website

Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair 2015 Preview and Reception

All the books and zines by Bushwick’s best and other up-and-comers. Totally chill, and relaxed, unlike an Armory-type fair, and less balls-to-the-walls with net bros than the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. New this year: a selection of independent publications and zines from Detroit. For real, it’s always a fun event.

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE: ART VANDELAY, Birds, LLC, Bodega, BOMB Magazine, Cinders, COCAINE, Endless Editions, Hassla, Christopher Kardambikis, Christina Kelly, Aidan Koch, Miniature Garden, Mixed MediaMOSSLESS MagazineNURTUREart Non-ProfitPacket BiweeklyPapercut Press, Pau Wau Publications, PeradamPrimaryInformation, Nikholis Planck, Publication Studio Hudson, Secretary Press, Slow Youth, Small Editions, Sorry Archive, Stranger Than Bushwick, Matthew Thurber, TOTEM, Ugly Duckling PresseVUU Studio

Don Pedro

90 Manhattan Ave
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 p.m. Website

NYC Latino Punk Fest Benefit

Ok, this technically isn’t an art opening, but we’re including it for several reasons. First, it’s a short walk from Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fest, and it’s the perfect afterparty for that event (this starts at 7:30, but it will probably be going strong long after the Franzia has run dry at galleries). Second, Desidencia Subversiva is playing and they are legends from the Mexican underground scene in the 80s. Mostly, though, Latino Punk Fest is awesome and should be an inspiration to the whole creative community—it’s an entirely DIY festival put on with no sponsors, investors, or promoters. It’s truly a labor of love from a group of volunteers and their friends who donate time and resources to make something great on a shoestring budget (without selling out). The main festival happens in August, but get a taste of the DIY awesomeness tonight with music from Flykills, Ezcasos Recursos, Gun Culture, and, of course, Desidencia Subversiva.

Sun

Hester

55-59 Chrystie Street, Suite 203
New York, NY
6:00 p.m.Website

Andrea Crespo: polymorphoses

Andrea Crespo’s work reframes post-net art aesthetics with a feminist/queer perspective. Think cyborgs and avatars questioning the inherently arbitrary nature of their genders and identities. This solo exhibition at Hester was announced with a press release that’s just a link to a Vimeo file. There, text scrolls across a glitchy black background—recalling ICQ conversations or MS DOS—detailing the libidinal effects of a virus that could be of either the computer or organic variety. As the virus recodes its hosts, the narrative meanders into the poetic or ASCII images. I know we’re not supposed to use the term “cyberpunk as fuck” anymore, but damn.

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