Leave behind your domestic comforts and escape with a group of art shows that have been successfully bred to get along with the neighborhood inhabitants. From the taming of painterly expression at TSA to hunting narratives of Scottish landscapes inside Air Circulation, these wild art picks are charging through Bushwick this weekend!
#1 Vince Contarino: For Your Eyes Only @ TSA New York (Fri 7-10 PM)
TSA (acronym stands for Tiger Strikes Asteroid, in case you didn’t know) tames the wild animal of painterly expression with the solo exhibition of abstract painter Vince Contarino. Safe inside the gallery walls, these bold works entice the viewer with slashing gestures and hard-edge forms which ultimately lend a feeling of grace and control. The motions and expressions in Vince’s paintings guide the viewer through an experience of intimacy and subjectivity, bonding the viewer and maker like the taming between wild animal and master.
#2 Drunken Angels @ Life on Mars Gallery (Fri 6-9 PM)
Gentle and calm in nature yet fleeting like a bird, angels are free to fly away, not to be tamed or contained. Angels approach us when they want, and come in many forms whether by dream or imagination. In Drunken Angels four individual artists come together in sharing a painting practice defined by an “attack” with rapid, direct, violent, passionate advances drunk with materiality.
“These rapid attacks are created with an intimacy so delicate, the paintings flutter with the touch of angel wings,” says Life on Mars Gallery director Michael David. Like “angels drunk on the act of painting, carnal in their physicality, sacred in the search for that honest moment, manifesting a natures sublimity.”
#3 Paint and Clay @ Theodore:Art (FRI 6-9 PM)
Twisting and bulging like an animal captured inside of a net, sheets of fired clay hang on the wall inside Theodore:Art, emanating light and wildly animating the space. The perforations and penetrations in sculptor Joyce Robins’ work create a brightness operating in two ways: colors sinking into her mix of paint and glaze, and colors reflecting from the surface, resulting from her natural instinct to manipulate and make new discoveries with color, tone and texture.
#4 Identity @ Loft 594 Gallery (Fri 7-10 PM)
After a fierce group of live enactments during Loft 594’s Identity performance night on May 2nd, the gallery is back with a two-week run of works depicting the time-honored topic of how one self-identifies. Though rather broad as well as potentially (and endlessly) open-ended, this brave venture into the unique oneness that inhabits us all is likely to surprise.
#5 Jillian McDonald: Valley of the Deer @ Air Circulation (FRI 7-9 PM)
If you can’t tame then, join them! Canadian artist Jillian McDonald shares Valley of the Deer, a video of wildly augmented characters filmed across Northeastern Scotland. Her hunting narrative of Scotland’s landscape features masked actors who appear in outdoor areas ripe with wildlife: fairy knolls, mossy glens, lochs and foggy terrains. These majestic settings are prime backdrops for the collision of nature, weather and wildlife (including wolves!), mixing magical realism and live action.
# 6 Lil’ Artworld @ Harbor Gallery (SAT 7-10 PM)
Lil’Artworld will be Harbor Gallery’s last show inside 17-17 Troutman and will be on view during Bushwick Open Studios, May 31–June 1, 12-7 PM.
