This Week’s Must See Events: No Rest for the Weary

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on March 31, 2014 Events

Barney Furnas at Sargent's Daughters

Barney Furnas at Sargent’s Daughters

Any art nerd who’s dreaming of taking this week off needs to take another look at their calendar. Galleries across the city are opening new shows, and there are plenty of talks too.  Between art star Matthew Barney’s tell-all talk with Sir Norman Rosenthal at The 92nd Y this and upcoming talent Sara Cwynar’s show opening at Foxy Production this Friday, you’ll not lack art to see and discuss.

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Mon

MoMA

11 West 53rd Street
7:00 PMWebsite

Museum Hours (with introduction by writer and director Jem Cohen)

A quiet movie about a friendship between an American woman who learns a distant relative is in the hospital and a museum guard. No grand revelations occur while looking at art, which generally speaking mimics the role of the museum in the lives of most of us.

AVA

34 East 1st Street
7:00 PM to 9:00 PMWebsite

Ephemera: A synesthetic installation combining scent, sound and visual elements.

An exhibition that would please author of Perfume, Patrick Suskind; Ehemera: A synesthetic installation combining scent, sound and visual elements. The nose behind this project is Berlin-based Geza Schoen, who is known, according to the press release, for “various avant-garde/conceptual scents.” We’re a little confused about what defines a conceptual scent, but we’re told that musicians Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) have created sonic raw material which Schoen then reinterpreted to create three different scents: Noise, Drone, and Bass, respectively. These scents, named after sounds, are then used to develop more sounds.

Different days will feature the various sounds and scents, as follows:

Tuesday April 1st – Bass

Wednesday April 2nd – Drone

Thursday April 3rd – Noise

Friday April 4th – Bass

Saturday April 5th – Drone

Sunday April 6th – Noise

Ephemera is curated by Małgorzata Płysa and Mat Schulz from Unsound.
Artists include: Geza Schoen, Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, Steve Goodman, Manuel Sepulveda, Marcel Weber

Tue

92nd Street Y

Kaufmann Concert Hall Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street
8:00 PM, Tickets start at $29.00 eachWebsite

Matthew Barney and Sir Norman Rosenthal

29 bucks should be worth hearing Matthew Barney explain his work a little. Known for work that combines sculptural installation, performance art and video, Barney looks at the physical limits of the body and the mutability of sexuality. His films typically work with little to no narrative. Former Secretary of Exhibitions 
at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Sir Norman Rosenthal will be interviewing Barney. Rosenthal was the curator behind the controversal traveling exhibition of 1997.

Wed

80WSE Gallery at NYU Steinhardt

80 Washington Square East
5-8 PM Website

NYU MFA 2014 Thesis Exhibition in Three Parts

Take a gander at some untested talent. NYU’s MFA Thesis exhibition (in three parts) begins this Wednesday. The schedule below:

Part I: Cheryl Bentley, Don Edler, Yi Xin Tong

4/2/14 – 4/12/14

Opening Reception 4/2/14 5-8pm

 

Part II: Azi Amiri, Sofi Brazzeal, Samantha Fretwell, Tyson Robertson

4/23/14 – 5/3/14

Opening Reception 4/26/14 5-8pm

 

Part III: Jordan Albaugh, Nathaniel Axel, Lauren Klenow, Megha Mattoo

5/14/14 – 5/24/14

Opening Reception 5/14/14 5-8pm

Thu

Gagosian Gallery

821 Park Avenue
6:00 PM to 7:30 PMWebsite

Urs Fischer, Last Supper

If you like Pawel Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress, where visitors are drawing on the walls in the New Museum, then you’ll probably want to head to Urs Fischer’s two-part show Last Supper. The show will take fired sculptures from his MOCA show, “YES,” an open house where 1,500 volunteers made clay sculptures.

And if you think the show’s “unprecedented directness” smells like bs, then you can at least check out Gagosian’s latest plunder, a brand new uptown space.

Pace Gallery

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

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton attempts to shed some light on a gun battle that happened almost fifty years ago, between the Black Panther Party and the police. In a recent video, the artist shadows David Hilliard, a founding member and former Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party, through Oakland. The show was sponsored by SF MoMA; Pendleton presents the video along with silkscreens and painting.

Fri

EFA Project Space

323 West 39th Street, 2nd floor
6 PM - 8 PMWebsite

Several Circles

“The circle is simultaneously loud and soft” Kandinsky wrote once in a letter to a friend. He had some authority on the subject; Kandinsky had what’s known as “synesthesia”, a condition often described as “color hearing”. This exhibition takes things a step further by working with a concept of “ideaesthesia; a phenomenon in which concepts evoke perception-like experiences. The explanation of what this means is a little murky in the press release, which offers the scenario of understanding that “mu5ic” actually means “music” as one example but that’s fine. We expect the artists’ work—Joe Brittain, John Cage, Mia Goyette, Vladimir Havrilla, Rachel Higgins, Music Animation Machine (Stephen Malinowski), Mamiko Otsubo, Irgin Sena, Slobodan Stošić, Alina Tenser—will demonstrate show’s thesis.

Curated by Marco Antonini.

Foxy Production

623 West 27th Street
6 PM to 8 PMWebsite

Flat Death, Sara Cwynar

“Kitsch is the means through which complex human experience is distilled down to simple, sentimental motifs and ideas,” Sara Cwynar observes in her ad for Kitsch Encyclopedia. This might explain why, though Cwynar’s photos embody the “fading glamour” of old tchotchkes, their fruity essence still makes us drool. (Disclaimer: we know from our benefit auction).

Theodore Art

56 Bogart Street
6:00 PM to 9:00 PMWebsite

Oliver Wasow, Studio Projects

This event gets a write up even though there’s no press release to speak of, because we like the portraits we’ve seen. There’s two in total, but both photographs capture people in front of painted landscapes that appear to be hundreds of years old. It’s a simple juxtaposition of old and new, but it makes the work feel eerie at times.

Signal

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

Hayden Dunham, Meriem Bennani; Paste

Together, Hayden Dunham and Meriem Bennani have kickstarted their quest to communicate with a parallel world. Now, they will transform Signal Gallery into a site-specific quasi-liquid state.  We suspect this may involve seran wrap and plastic, but we can’t be sure until we go; stay tuned.

Sat

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

535 West 22nd Street
5th floor, New York
12:00 PM to 7:00 PMWebsite

Nancy Holt: Daylong Tribute Screening

Land art pioneer Nancy Holt, who passed away in February, is probably best known now for her “Sun Tunnels”: 9-foot-wide tunnels aligned with the sun on the winter and summer solstices, and with holes lining up to constellations. So EAI is paying tribute to her video and film work with a marathon screening of her films and videos. Despite the mega fame of her husband Robert Smithson, Holt is still not known to mainstream audiences. EAI will be showing, among others, “Underscan” (1976), “Revolve” (1977), “Pine Barrens” (1975), and collaborations with Robert Smithson, including “Swamp” (1971) and “East Coast, West Coast” (1969).

The Suzanne Geiss Company

76 Grand Street
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Website

Particular Pictures

What is it about weird specificity, that makes the surreal humor of David Lynch so appealing? “Particular Pictures” might have some answers to that question, with its title lifted from Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper: “Acetylcholine neurons fire high, voltage impulses into the fore-brain. The impulses become pictures, the pictures become your dream. But no one knows why we choose these particular pictures”.

Curators Joshua Abelow and Emily Ludwig Shaffer have combined works spanning four decades by both emerging and established artists.

Artists include: Gene Beery, Brian Belott, Robert Belott, Anna-Sophie Berger, Jonathan Borofsky, Mira Dancy, Cheryl Donegan, Lukas Geronimas, Laeh Glenn, Daniel Gordon, Peter Harkawik, MacGregor Harp, Chris Johanson, Gregory Kalliche, Liegh Ruple, Rose Wylie

Good Work Gallery

1100 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
7 - 10 PMWebsite

First Responders

It’s good to great to see emerging artists like Kyle Petreycik paired with more established names like Ariel Dill and Michael Bell-Smith.  According the gallery and curator Zach Smith, “First Responders” brings together work by a group of artists that demonstrates the “primary urge to draw”. Basically, it’s a bunch of work that evolved from sketches and gestures.

Artists include: Ariel Dill, Michael Bell-Smith, Marley Freeman, Deanna Havas, Ben Horns, Katie Loselle, Orion Martin, Sam McKinniss, Kyle Petreycik, Eric Shaw

Sun

Sargent's Daughters

179 East Broadway
New York, NY
6 PM - 8 PMWebsite

Dee Ferris, Barnaby Furnas and Annie Lapin

Sargent’s Daughters seems to be living up to its name, with a show of historically-grounded paintings by Dee Ferris, Barnaby Furnas and Annie Lapin. If that means more like Furnas’s epic Moby Dick squeegie paintings last year, then we’ll be happy.

247365 Manhattan

131 Eldridge Street
https://www.facebook.com/events/1407399709529745/?notif_t=plan_user_invited

And since it’s in the neighborhood, check out the new show at 247365 Manhattan. Our brains are too puny to understand this press release, but it has something to do with secret messages, rumors about the moon, and a movie scene taking place in “a downloaded 99¢ store on the moon”. Readers might have more luck deciphering this.

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