This Week’s Must See Events: Is Criticism Headed for a Skewering?

by Paddy Johnson on May 23, 2016 Events

Jordan Kasey, Tired Thumb, 2017

Jordan Kasey, Tired Thumb, 2017

There are all kinds of screenings and events to see this week, from Dirty Dancing at the Queens Museum, to Brian Alfred’s flattened renderings of Japanese train stations and Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, to Rob McLeish’s sculpture show and potential skewering of criticism at Kansas. We’re looking forward to all of this, but we’re perhaps most anticipating painter Jordan Kasey’s new show at Signal. We can’t think of a more unsettling figurative set of works and we mean that in a good way. There’s a quite dread behind that fruit loops stare above. More of that please.

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Tue

CUE Art Foundation

137 West 25th Street
6:00 PM to 8:00 PMWebsite

Art Handling workshop Learn how to pack 3-dimensional artworks

Want to know how to pack your art safely? This workshop will help you. The focus i on small-scale 3D objects and sculptures. Painters, I guess you’re out of luck. Led by artist, Alex Branch.

Light Industry

155 Freeman Street
7:30 PMWebsite

Two Videos by Adrian Piper

Funk Lessons, 1983, video, 15 mins
My Calling (Card) #1 Double Meta-Performance, 1987-88, video, 58 mins

Two well-known and smart performances screened courtesy of Light Industry. In Funk Lessons, 1983, artist Adrian Piper plays friendly instructor who guides a largely white audience through the basics of dancing and funk. It’s great. In My Calling Card #1, she offers cards at a cocktail party in response to racist remarks.

Wed

Queens Museum

New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park
2:00 PM to 5:00 PMWebsite

Dirty Dancing And The Beat Goes On: Music-Making On Film

We recommend Dirty Dancing screenings every summer, and this summer will be no different? Why? Because Jennifer Grey was formative influence on AFC founder and editor Paddy Johnson and pretty much anyone else who is in their late 30’s to early 40’s. This movie will help you understand culture.

The plot:”A young woman (Jennifer Grey) is liberated by charismatic dance instructor Patrick Swayze during a family vacation in a Catskills, NY summer resort.” The movie is being screened in conjunction with the Queens Museum exhibition on the Ramones.

The New Museum

235 Bowery
7:00 PMWebsite

Cally Spooner: A Lecture On False Tears and Outsourcing

“On False Tears and Outsourcing” stages situations in which demand for communication drives people to create to ready-made languages, gestures, and protocols.

Thu

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

525 West 22nd Street
6:00 PM to 8:00 PMWebsite

Brian Alfred

Last year, artist Brian Alfred took a month long trip to Japan to create animations in relation to the Genbi Shinkansen, a high-speed railway service. These animations are not mentioned in the press release, but we are promised a series of small paintings on canvas that reflect the views Alfred found during his travels. Characteristically, the paintings are flattened surfaces, without the kind of voluminous rendering that describes the work of more realistic painters. Sarah K. Rich, poetically describes this in her catalogue essay for the show, writing, “His paintings search for shadows— for poetic elusiveness—that might yet stretch across our otherwise blunt and over-lit world.”

P·P·O·W

535 West 22nd Street
6:00 PM to 8:00 PMWebsite

Karen Arm, Light + Heavy

Lovers of abstraction rejoice. Karen Arm has spent to decades exploring the micro and the macro, the mark and the object, the structure and the line. Expect more of that here. The works in this show call to mind images of outer space—specifically stars and planets. Essentially, these are landscapes of the future.

 

Jack Hanley Gallery

327 Broome Street
6:00 PM to 8:00 PMWebsite

Julia Benjamin, Sarah Braman & Nicole Cherubini

No press release with this show, so we can’t tell you why these artists were paired. But, the colored abstract sculptures of Sarah Braman consistently put smiles on our faces, so it gets a listing.

Kansas

210 Rivington Street
6:00 PM to 8:00 PMWebsite

Rob McLeish, Thanks Criticism!

Based on McLeish’s previous work we feel comfortable predicting this show will be a bit dude-y and include a bunch of made and assemblage-esque sculptures. No images for the show exist yet, but it gets a listing regardless for its title, “Thanks criticism.” We assume that’s a bit of sarcasm, and we appreciate it.

Fri

SIGNAL

260 Johnson Avenue
7:00 PM to 10:00 PMWebsite

Jordan Kasey FREE TIME

Everyone needs to see this show. Kasey paints surrealist-type figures—a block head that looks like a paper bag, a woman in a bathing suit, a dude on a roller coaster—all in an other worldly palette. It’s a bit unsettling, but in the best possible way. Kasey will be a super star.

Sat

SculptureCenter

44-19 Purves Street
5:00 PMWebsite

In Practice Performances by Phillip Birch

Phillip Birch is worried about the rising rates of schizophrenia and psychosis. Or at least he can imagine a future in which Vivisystems have eroded the distinctions between the biological and the technological, and these diseases become uber present. His performances examine these scenarios.

Sun

The Bronx Museum of the Arts

1040 Grand Concourse
12:00 PM to 4:00 PMWebsite

Boogie on the Boulevard

Get ready to Boogie! On the last Sunday of each month from here through August, the center lanes of the Grand Concourse starting at 162nd Street will be closed to cars. In their place will be free music, art and fitness programs hosted by organizations from the Bronx and beyond. Time to party!

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