This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Authenticity as Commodity

Drawing inspiration from sources such as Jean Baudrillard’s “Otherness Surgery” and the Pantone/Sephora endeavor to index the world’s skin tones, Colleen Asper and Kate Cooper consider the impact of the screen upon the body, and vice-versa: humans aspiring to mimic idealized representations of humanity and the ever-steeper descent of the uncanny valley. Cooper’s CGI animations and installations present body-image-centric rituals such as plastic surgery and fitness routines through the lens of a dystopian cult of marketing. Asper’s oil paintings ambiguously represent human figures through the lens of the screen. If, as Willem de Kooning famously said “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented,” what can be said of silicon?

There’s a ton of new Japanese flicks to check out in the final week of the festival, but from an art perspective, we recommend “Pieta in the Toilet.” A loner artist, and failed painter, might be dying but can’t bring himself to tell his family. Cue the tiny violins, the tears, and family heartbreak.

First off, Lyles & King is a very new, very fresh gallery in the Lower East Side. Go to the opening just for that, or you can go to see something you probably know very, very little about from dealers Isaac Lyles and Alexandra Lyles-King. For the gallery’s second exhibition, artist-turned-dealer-now-artist-again Dan Ivic (who we cannot find much information on, so he might be a ghost artist, or that lack of a trail could be related to him going by the name Kineko).

Kids these days are obsessed with curating their constructed identities. From nightlife to social media, the aspiration of demi-celebrity seems to be an all-too-serious preoccupation. Then again, it’s always been a concern of New York’s twenty-somethings. Now, everyone’s publishing their own “Page Six,” 140 characters or less at a time. Sydell plunges headfirst into that pursuit with an ambiguously sincere/ironic conviction that’s not always clear as a straightforward critique. Molly Rhinestones has a performative/craft/garment practice that has involved everything from collaborations with AFC favorite Jaimie Warren’s Whoop-Dee-Doo to a career as a nightlife personality. In both her costuming and figurative sculpture here, however, there’s an optimistic vulnerability that outshines any cynical associations one might have with the cult of celebrity. Rhinestones approaches gendered childhood fantasies—from fairytales to Disney princesses—and enacts them with a deadpan wit and serious (albeit hot-glue-loaded) craftsmanship. Her elevation of craft store kitsch and decidedly un-glamorous, democratic materials like foamcore and cardboard to semi-precious realizations of girlhood aspirations is strangely uplifting. Like a fairytale ending, the heroine seems to be saying “Dreams can come true,” “I won’t grow up,” and almost certainly, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”…out of styrofoam, tempera, and glitter.

From artisanal kale-infused soap to ecotourism and the pastoral-romantic gaze, “authenticity” seems to be the hottest commodity right now. But how do we come to terms with the seemingly fruitlessness of that desire when almost every experience is mediated within some construct? The chance encounter, found object, or photograph of a serendipitous composition are frequently pre-considered, not the result of “organic” occurrences. In Peter Scott’s High Line Billboard, we see a tourist snapping a photo back at the artist. It’s an apt abstract for the concerns of the artists in this show—the photo op, the canned experience, and the framed natural or urban experience are what we’re often left to work with.

Artists: Tyler Coburn, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Peter Dreher, Denise Kupferschmidt, Zoe Ghertner, A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, Geoffrey Hendricks, Miljohn Ruperto, Margaret Honda, Peter Scott, Kelly Jazvac, and Jonathan Bruce Williams

The Bruce residents this year are like an Annie’s orphanage of net-art misfits. And there ain’t nothing wrong with that in our digital age.

Artist Nandi Loaf has a DeviantArt profile. Orlando Estrada dances to Madonna in front of a fake-ass cartoon beach in his “Paradise Island” series. Artist Ariel Jackson sometimes goes by the name “Confuserella,” a Panfrikan space traveller, and projects her performances on all types of soft sculpture.

Dude, all this sounds better, and more honest, than whatever reified commodity you were planning on seeing in Chelsea this week.

There’s not much information from curator Amanda Schmitt about this group show, but it caught our eye. The artists involved are known for playing with the tension or dissonance between images and the objects that they represent or are. Lea Cetera’s installations involve projections interacting with real-world sculptures. Luca Dellaverson is known for assemblages that read like paintings but often comprise broken mirrors, resin, and sculptural elements. This looks like it has potential to be a good show. And we trust Signal.

Artists: Meriem Bennani, Antoine Catala, Lea Cetera, Luca Dellaverson, Dan Herschlein, Jessie Stead, Will Stewart, Philip Vanderhyden, and Kyle Williams

Get out of town. The Bard MFA show opens this Saturday in Red Hook (no, not Brooklyn). The low-residency program isn’t media specific, so you’ll see a little bit of everything under the upstate New York midday sun. (P.S. And you may as well visit the other galleries, like Retrospective, that have been burrowing upstate for awhile now.)

How to get there:

Take a train! To the Rhinecliff Amtrak station. (From the Bard website: for shuttle reservations from Rhinecliff Amtrak station, call: 845-758-7481.)

Drive! Parking is available in the lot at 7401 South Broadway and on Garden Street.

Artists: Genji Amino (writing), Gill Arno (music/sound), Daisy Atterbury (writing), Ian Burnley (film/video), Theo Darst (film/video), Taryn Haydostian (photography), Benjamin Heyer (photography), Laurie Kang (photography), Shambhavi Kaul (film/video), James Kelly (music/sound), Theodore Kennedy (film/video), Zak Kitnick (sculpture), Bernd Klug (music/sound), Natalie Labriola (sculpture), Cecilia Lopez (music/sound), Nora Mapp (writing), Felipe Meres (photography), David Roesing (painting), Matthew Sepielli (painting), Barb Smith (sculpture), Krista Belle Stewart (photography), Ezra Tessler (painting), Kyle Thurman (painting), Johanna Tiedtke (painting), Wilder Alison (painting), Nathan Young (music/sound), Kyle Zynda (sculpture)