This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Melon Bra and Digital Nails

This is a cook-out where you get to mingle with the artist Jaimie Warren while she talks to you about her process, George Michael, and snacks. We love Jaimie Warren. Her particular brand of smart-but-accessible pop combines internet memes, horror movie aesthetics, identity-remixing self portraiture, and (frequently) playing dress-up with children. This will almost certainly be the most fun you will ever (legally) have at an artist talk.

P.S. Pork tacos will be served.

Hurry up and you can catch many of the late Chris Burden’s many films, TV commercials, and other on-screen appearances. Videos include the 30-minute “Big Wrench” (1980), in which Burden talks about his personal relationship with “Big Job,” a truck which stands for a “metaphor for insanity,” according to the artist; and a 14-minute reel of all four of Burden’s TV commercials. The entire program screens three times throughout the day, from 11:30 a.m. – 1:25 p.m.; 1:30 p.m. – 3:25 p.m.; 3:30 p.m. – 5:25 p.m.; and for the “I can get off work early enough” crowd, 5:30 p.m. – 7:25 p.m.

As part of an exhausting month-long series of queer daily interventions, “Bad Asians Pt. 1 and Deux!” promises a large amount of sound art plus the work of a long time favorite artist of ours, Patty Chang. Has anyone else seen this video of Chang sawing off half a melon encased in her bra? So good. So bad-ass.

I only know Buenos Aires-based cyberfeminist Emilio Bianchic’s work from the internet (which is really its native habitat) but it is equally adorable and clever. I’m curious to see what a brick-and-mortar exhibition is going to look like. Nailture is based around the premise that the interwebs is not the democratic sphere it is frequently hailed as: it’s privatized space that is inaccessible to billions of people. Bianchic proposes finding freedom of expression in a different kind of “digital”—the manicure! Because everyone has nails. And you don’t have to call yourself an artist to paint them.

You know what’s lacking from artist panels and discussions surrounding resale royalties for artists? Justice Barbara Jaffe from the New York State Supreme Court. The event, the first in a series organized by the W.A.G.E. Artists’ Resale Rights Working Group, will have Dr. Theodore Feder and Janet Hicks of the Artists Rights Society outline what’s happening with the American Royalties Too Act, or ART Act, among other speakers who know their stuff when it comes to artists’ contracts and the history of resale royalties.

Starting on Thursday, you can attend a conference all day everyday where you can hear sound, art, and data experts give papers given on “Totalizing technologies and code materializations – the subtle politics of contemporary audiovisual data art“ or, perhaps, a just-as-heady topic, “Exploring the aesthetics of procedure in the context of interactive software.” Truly for the specialists.

Sorry Natalie Portman fans, this is The Black Swan from 1942. And it’s not about boring ballerinas, it’s about kick-ass pirates. Harrr, there’s probably some really lame joke to be made about heterosexual-movie date-night compromises! But argggggg, we don’t succumb to the low-hanging fruit of gender stereotypes on this ship, matey!

Another last chance to see Faith Holland’s Technophilia before it closes on July 25, and with several oddball, contrarian, digital-minded female performers. They’re using the occasion to create new performances that will interact with the works in the exhibition. Maybe they’ll just interact with that huge bottle of unused lube that (we expect) still sits in the gallery. Goo girls?

Curator Shlomit Dror is hosting a discussion with a trio of artists as a closing for their current exhibition Story of a Story. The show features work by Jisun Beak, Bruce Campbell, Samantha Fein, Eduardo Gil, Hadassa Goldvicht, Jeremy Jams, Margaret Lee, Kwantaeck Park, Stass Shpanin, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Masha Vlasova, Alisha Wessler and Brett Day Windham. The speaking artists—Gil, Wessler, and Windham—all allude to narrative through inventive displays of found objects. As stand-ins for audio or text, these orphaned readymade components can serve as reference points to their specific histories, materiality, or semiotic significance. Alternately, they can open the door for viewers to invent alternative stories based on their own experiences.