This week, the REVERSE art space in Williamsburg is celebrating its inaugural exhibition, Uncharted Waters, with an event on Friday, April 12th at 7pm. The event will feature new work by emerging and established artists. Herradura Tequila will provide cocktails.
REVERSE also participates in “EVERY 2:ND,” a recurring event on the second Friday of each month when local art spaces and galleries stay open until 9pm. The monthly events “showcase cutting-edge exhibitions, performances and conceptual soirees,” a REVERSE organizer tells FREEwilliamsburg.
REVERSE is at 28 Frost Street, ground floor. Press release after the jump. (more…)
We love this, but can’t recall any Bedford, Lorimer, or Wythe Ave shout-outs:
After schooling New Yorkers on etiquette via numerous unsanctioned interventions, artist Jay Shells channeled his love of hip hop music and his uncanny sign-making skills towards a brand new project: “Rap Quotes.”
For this ongoing project, Shells created official-looking street signs quoting famous rap lyrics that shout out specific street corners and locations. He then installed them at those specific street corners and locations.
Sadly no Brooklyn phones were included in this project, but we still think this is pretty cool: Via The Awl:
In association with the exhibition at the New Museum, they’ve installed 5000 New York City pay phones with recorded messages about what was happening around you in 1993. Find a phone, call (855) FOR-1993, and suddenly Robin Byrd and James St. James (girrrlll!) are telling you about the good times.
First, a compulsory “Oh right, it’s Armory Week” note: Oh right, it’s Armory Week. Keep it local this Saturday, March 9th, ’cause it’s Brooklyn Armory Night and the 11th anniversary of Williamsburg Afterhours. Galleries in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg will be open until 10pm with participating bars/restaurants; thanks to WAGMAG and Pernod, there’s an app to make you a well-informed lushexcursionist.
Second: Here’s a list of some other picks, much shorter and sweeter than a 12-hour filibuster.
I know nothing about clay except for the fact that it makes me think of Patrick Swayze, shirtless, in Ghost. Uncouth? Maybe. Rachel de Joode, a Berlin-based artist and founder of META Magazine, has thought about it differently after talking to a Mexican shaman about the Mayan belief that human bodies came from clay. With this in mind, “The Hole and the Lump” is corporeal in more ways than one. Through March 17.
Interstate Projects
66 Knickerbocker Ave
Brooklyn NY 11237
Inspired by the sounds of Björk, Meg Wachter brings the Icelandic landscape to photographic life in Nature is Ancient, a hyperballad of big time sensuality in hidden places, somewhere between human behavior and pagan poetry. Did you get all those greatest hit references? Did you? When she’s not trekking along mountains and volcanoes, Wachter has one hand in Brooklyn Skillshare and the other in Got a Girl Crush. Don’t miss tonight’s vespertine (!) reception at The Yard, from 6-9pm; if you can’t make it, take a peek at photos from her visit here.
When my alarm goes off, I immediately think: “Still winter. What would Louis CK do?” I figure I can order a pizza at 7:00am, Hour of Darkness that it is, and swim in a combination of shame/disgust, but I stick to a milder routine: mumble some made-up obscenity, wave a middle finger in the general direction of my window, and stare at my economy-sized container of Vitamin D supplements, all while mopping up an endless stream of poisonous, pitch-black tears. What I’m getting at is this: Stop crying and pack up your sun lamp, ‘cause this seasonal affective garbage is almost over.
Before we push the clocks forward, though, there’s Kevin Cooley’s Skyward at The Boiler and its blue stretch of surreal Los Angeles sky. The video installation—a single tracking shot that starts downtown and takes us to Palos Verdes—plays 40 feet above a plot of artificial turf, where you can sprawl out like a stargazer—like you’re kicking back in a convertible—and make the misanthropic monstrosity of MTA rush hour take a backseat. And that’s nice, isn’t it?—trading out underground asphyxiation for something kinder to human maladjustment? Something that doesn’t involve a subterranean stranger shaking down your idea of personal space and breathing so hard on you that he must think you’ll cut him a check with a dollar amount that matches MPH? Yeah, that’s nice.
What’s also nice is a prescription of airplanes, palm trees, freeways, and feathered creatures. Here’s to temporary teleportation—to daydreams of Malibu Barbie and Ryan Gosling, ca. 2011. Through March 17.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—shit, there, I did it. How does that sound? Too cliché? Are you going to tell me that Dickens is rolling in his grave? Drama.
Point is, Sean Hemmerle’s Rust Belt has the pulse of A Tale of Two Cities, except it’s about ten, twenty cities—more. It’s the Motor City, the Magic City of Steel; it’s Waterville, Ohio and Braddock, Pennsylvania. And while it’s at The Front Room, it’s about looking in from our city, and about figuring out what that means and where that’s going. It escapes dilution—this is not “just” about Detroit; this is not “just” about abandoned automobile factories—but also risks perpetuating the fly-over state fable of economic undoing, of irreversible urban decay, of industrial architecture forever suspended in animation. Are you ready to have the ol’ ruin porn (ooh, cringe) debate? Don’t play dumb; you saw that coming. You can condemn the bleak memorialization of “lost” grandeur, but there are plenty of tents pitched in that camp and it’s starting to feel a little hot in here, AMIRIGHT? Use this as an opportunity to move the conversation forward. C’mon, New Yawwwk; make like Linda Richman and discuss. Through March 10th.
I could pull a cheap trick here and talk about V-Day, but I think we’ve exhausted ourselves whining over PDA and the unoriginality of expensive flowers paired with shitty chocolate. For those of you who want to step back because the coming stockpile of engagement announcements on Facebook is like the end of the world, ease up—we still have the ends of the earth. See what I did there?
In celebration of invented, alternate universes in which we can find solace in solitude, here’s what you should check out in the coming weeks. I’ve never taken an art history class. Trust me?
Selected for the Arctic Circle residency program in 2009, Biggs was brought to Svalbard, an archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, where there’s midnight sun, polar winter, and a population just short of 3,000. Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, befittingly installed in a darkened room, pours forth the extremity of isolation with a two-channel video installation. Referencing the failed (and tragic) expeditions of nineteenth century polar explorers, in addition to notes from her own journal, Biggs accompanies the visual magnitude of place/space with wistful narration, underlining the “destabilizing” force of nature and solitude. This one’s for wanderers. Part of the Brooklyn/Montreal Exchange; through February 24.
David M. Cook is the architect of a mischievous microcosm. Amicable and unassuming, he hardly seems the “type” to consistently and skillfully crank out such a lewd labyrinth of work, but the cheeky hedonism comes all too naturally. Based in Brooklyn but originally from Louisville, Kentucky, David (who also answers to Bonethrower) uses no shortage of fine lines to design a world that is equal parts modern mysticism and memento mori—at the end of the day, it all sinks in like a psychotropic drug.
Making room for where peepshow meets purgatory, Mikhail Bortnik and Greg Rivera of global streetwear brand Mishka are kicking off 2013 with a show of David’s new, never-before-seen work. With a foolproof history of integrating fashion and music (Danny Brown was in their Spring 2012 lookbook and they released Das Racist’s Shut Up, Dude mixtape with Greedhead in 2010—need I say more?), the brand has defined itself with an unapologetically chromatic display of presence, which is to say that David fits right in. To kick things up at the show, Mishka is releasing a limited edition Мишка X Bonethrower t-shirt. If you’re familiar with David’s aesthetic, you know they’ll sell out fast; if you’re not, now you do. Don’t miss the openingthis Friday, January 25th, from 7-10pm. Guard your pretty little loins.
CHUG THAT RED BULL, GRAB THAT PAINTBRUSH, AND WERK!
Colin Young-Wolff/Red Bull Media House
Red Bull has come up with a really cool art competition – turn a standard Red Bull refrigerator and turn it into a work of art. Or, as Red Bull puts it: “The medium? A Red Bull refrigerator (covered in canvas). The mission: Create.” And create they did!
Elizabeth Harper/Red Bull Media House
25 New York artists gathered at Villain on Sunday, September 9 to create and fulfill this “mission.” Of these 25 works of art, only 3 will be coined winners. And these winners will be revealed tonight, September 13!
So what are they competing for – what’s the grand prize? A chance to show at the “Scope art fair during December’s Art Basel in Miami Beach, the biggest international art event on the calendar.”
Again, the event takes place TONIGHT, September 13 at Villain at 9:00 PM. Go and enjoy the art!
This week, the REVERSE art space in Williamsburg is celebrating its inaugural exhibition, Uncharted Waters, with an event on Friday, April 12th at 7pm. The event will feature new work by emerging and established artists. Herradura Tequila will provide cocktails.
