Great Scott! This week welcomes a slew of incredible exhibitions reaching across the Bushwick. The featured shows this week primarily showcase the position of the individual in the midst of the contemporary experience; namely, within the vast landscape of the internet and the far-reaching consequences it has. Whether it is to depict the alienation and anonymity that can come with the way we create new identities on this platform, or to experiment with the very medium that the internet has to offer, the artists seek to further understand and utilize the internet and social media to their advantage. Our weekend starts early with openings from Wednesday onward from the well-established to the newly emerged. If you’re like me and are jonesing for something new and exciting, this is the week to role up your sleeves and prepare to venture out, visit some old friends, and make some new ones – where’s my Delorian??
1. Multiple/Universal @ Storefront Bushwick (WED 6-9PM)
The new group show at Storefront will feature the art of several artists who focus on the universal expanse of the internet and how it relates to human connectivity. As both platform and content, the artists will focus on this web as a network for experience and a signifier of personal preferences, all through the guise of abstraction. Works by artists Hans Baumann, Christian Berman, Jon Blank, Palma Blank, Ted Gahl, Field Kallop, Karl LaRocca, Lyman Richardson, Kristen Schiele, and Oliver Warden utilize the universally understood language of their various forms of abstraction, creating disparate yet connected perspectives where the personal is public and planes intertwine and flatten in a truly postmodern way.
2. ‘Visuals’ by Evidence with Performances by Phillip White and Stephan Moore@ Studio10 (WED 7-9PM)
Bridging the divide between visual and auditory stimulation and experience, sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood make up the duo Evidence. From the press release, the exhibition will explore this connection with installations “based on field recordings and synthesized textures, layered into a cinematic tapestry of ambience and color.” The source material, gleaned from over 80 hours of networked improvisations over the internet, creates an interesting interplay between the immediacy of the shared music over an internet community that has been revised, edited and formatted for an entirely different context and audience.
3. Alexa Rast @ Armature Art Space (THU 7-11PM)
While other shows this week delve into the ethereal properties of the internet and its various iterations, Alexa Rast’s ephemeral and delicate works track the presence of real materials, light, and shadow on the page. The juxtaposition of a physicality of an object, like a leaf, versus the less substantial effect of light on the works points to questions of the sustainability and actual substance of the internet and its content. Armature will present various works by the artist, from the very delicate and minimal to the large and involved, offering a sense of the Rast’s range and abilities.
4. Love Letters to the Streets: Dimitrios Manousakis @ Greenpoint Gallery (FRI 8PM)
Greenpoint Gallery presents Bushwick Daily’s very own Dimitrios Manousakis in his first solo photography show. In his own words, Manousakis says, “I have found my solace in the streets of NYC. I have found beauty and stories and little by little, frame by frame I have tried capturing this world of mine.” Like many artists before him, Dimitrios will use the city as his muse for contemporary understanding and insight, while retaining a rawness and truthfulness that is reminiscent of an earlier, grungier New York of the late ’70s and ’80s. Take a field trip up to Greenpoint to root for one of our own!
5. It’s A Flat Fix! Poems and Paintings by Colin Griffin @ The Living Gallery (SAT 7-11PM)
Drawing from surrealistic sensibilities and free-flowing expressive manifestations, the paintings by Colin Griffin exude an ‘of-the-moment’ sense of urgency that is also fluid and natural. Dealing primarily with aspects of dreaming, sleeping and waking, the works seem to seamlessly interlope between these various states of mind.
6. Where We’ve Been @ OUTLET Fine Art (FRI 7PM)
Capitalizing on the nostalgia for long days and late nights, the artists – Cecilia Espinosa, Matthew Hillock, Tyler Magyar, and Justin Hunt Sloane – tap into the adventuresome, the nostalgic, and the notion of creating a relic or memory of what has come to pass. Whether to record or show, the artists’ works serve as an artifact to an event; a physical and tangible object that is the only thing left besides the memory. This is the perfect show to culminate the emotions and experiences of the summer as we enter its final days.
Check out more art openings and events in our Events Calendar, and add your own events to be featured in Bushwick Daily or get on our mailing list not to miss a single cool event in the area.