This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Avoiding Anything Armory Edition

Just before midnight every night in March on Times Square’s electronic billboards, a GIF collage of a quickly-moving sunrise over the peaks of mountaintops will appear, looped to coincide with a zen-like deep inhale and exhalation. Paddy’s written further about Lorna Mills’s GIF, as we’re obviously excited about this pioneering presentation of a GIF work in the public art realm.

Lana Lina and Cauleen Smith programme an evening of four experimental non-fiction shorts exploring our “ecological sorrows”. The programme includes Loretta Fahrenholz’s dystopian post-Hurricane Sandy sci-fi street dance film Ditch Plains and Amir George’s Shades of Shadows, a collaboration with psych soul band The O’Mys exploring spiritual mysticism. The work, commissioned by Chicago Film Archives, was made completely with archival footage.

Featuring films by Loretta Fahrenholz, Melissa Friedling, Amir George, Cate Giordano

After five years of six-month-long solo artist “seasonal” programming, the LES-based non-profit and exhibition space Artist’s Institute is moving uptown to a new and even bigger home: a ground floor space in a Hunter College-owned townhouse. For its eleventh season, the Institute will be exhibiting an “emotional retrospective” by the inimitable Hilton Als. Even though Als has a reputation as a critic for the New Yorker, according to director Jenny Jaskey, “people many not realize that Hilton has a history of making visual art,” as told to Artnews’s Andrew Russeth. “In the ’90s he made collaborative works with the photographer and filmmaker Darryl Turner.” He’ll be organizing three shows at the space, including what appears to be a photo-based show revolving around the history of trans woman in 1970s New York.

To some extent, all humans throughout all of history have felt like they were living in the end times. Our generation is (somewhat justifiably) no different. Here, three artists present vaguely post-apocalyptic work. In Stephen Eakin’s sculptures we’re presented with artifacts from our not-so-distant past rendered fossilized or otherwise devoid of functionality. His assemblages provide a glimpse of what it would be like to observe a future archeologist dissecting our ruins—there’s a hint of nostalgia that makes detached criticality all but impossible. These are surrounded by the sci-fi landscape-inspired neon and mirror sculptures of Esther Ruiz and paintings by Sarah Mullin—where human figures are absent and the mark-making implies a sense of ethereality or instability.

As part of Greater New York’s performance schedule, the transgender multi-disciplined musician and performance artist will present a two-night stand of a work that we’re curious about solely on the event description, which appears to channel an array of imagined and perhaps real characters: “Tennis Player 2.0 talks to Mom with a new instrument. Two women are black, and two women beat odds with excellence and excellent service and egg salad. Holes in the servant and the service is on hold. Smile though your heart is breaking.”

Former FUG fellows reunite for a show about how digital experiences inform our sense of collective nostalgia and personal memory. What might this look like? We have no idea, but we’re guessing something akin to one of those Buzzfeed listicles like “You Know You’re a Child of the 80’s if….” but much smarter and more relevant to concerns other than click-baiting. At any rate, the press release sounds great and it’s hard to not love anything BHQF puts together!

Featured artists: Rebecca Aston, Andrew Birk, Parker Bright, Adam Echahly, Nina Freeman, Winslow Laroche, Azikiwe Mohammed, and Andrew Ross

The flier for this show features a horrifying oil painting (by Aaron Johnson) of a smiley face with tube socks for teeth. Other highlights include a Barnaby Whitfield painting of a naked punk boy reclining sprawling between The Yellow Brick Road and a flower-filled pond that looks like an allusion to Millais’s “Ophelia” while an assortment of animals make eye contact with the viewer. I’m thoroughly sold.

Feature artists: Aaron Johnson, Balint Zsako, Barnaby Whitfield, Chris Gullander, Christian Rex van Minnen, Dawn Frasch, Irena Jurek, Jade Mac Townsend, Jennifer Caviola, Jenny Morgan, Marci Washington and Rebecca Morgan.

Right now, I’m lulled by Dizzy World’s press release mix. It’s very lone cowboy, opening with a “Fistful of Dollars”, and then going into moody chill downbeats and a drum and bass burst then back into a corny cowboy song and then so on and so forth. It’s like film soundtrack muzak playing in an elevator, or what might be heard playing in a studio on deadline mode, with two screens playing films from Hulu and Netflix, respectively. Anyways, beyond the press release-cum-text, by Benjamin Niznik, not much else to glean about this show — oh, wait, here’s documentation from the show Delacruz and Matranga did together at Baltimore’s Rope last fall.

This inaugural biennial by Flux Factory presents the work of 24 artists on Chinatown bus routes from New York to Boston, Philly and Baltimore. Each Saturday in March the bus hits a different city; this Saturday, the bus will be making its way to Boston. During the trip, riders will experience artist-created works that respond to the individual bus lines’ histories and infrastructure. The works will be present enroute, touching on themes like travel, leisure or the impeding migration of emerging NYC spaces due to gentrification. Ticket prices range from $36.87 to $47.12, and can be purchased here.

Featured artists on the Chinatown Boston-bound bus route: Marco Castro, Eric Doeringer, Fan Letters ( Alex Nathanson and Dylan Neely), Sunita Prasad, Joshua Caleb Wiebley, Ariel Abrahams and Rony Efrat, Magali Duzant, Keith Hartwig and Daniel Newman, Seth Timothy Larson and Abigail Entsminger, Manuel Molina Martagon, Kristoffer Ørum, Ruth Patir, Pines / Palms (Emily Ensminger + Sophie Trauberman), Jonah Levy, Roopa Vasudevan, Tereza Szwanda

It’s that time of the year to beef up Wikipedia’s art and feminism-related entries. This year’s edition of the communal edit-a-thon will kick off with a talk on feminism and digital culture featuring writers Orit Gat and Jenna Wortham, and will be followed by afternoon breakout groups for beginner to advanced Wikipedians. Bring a laptop, power cord and ideas. Tutorials, reference materials, on-site childcare and refreshments will be provided.

Last chance to see this solo from the French installation and performance artist, which features two projected videos that seem to bookend the works I saw at last year’s Venice Biennale. The works there, included in the Arsenale group show, featured her naked blood red-painted body frenetically dancing through the rooms of a high ceiling luxury European apartment. The mounted screens were surrounded by tall iron rodded curtains in soft shades, printed with protest sign block texts: “GHOSTS…/SPIRITS…SHADOWS…/FLUIDS…THIS IS A CULT!!!!!” (Yes, it was five exclamation marks.) It was probably the only overtly sexual-political-racial work in that show. Appropriately enough, the new work at Clearing has the red body moving through the empty spaces of Arsenale — perhaps an intimate institutional critique? — with printed silk twill scarves of the body with O’Keefe floral on a red carpet.