Get ready Bushwick! This weekend’s openings are back-to-back, so let’s hope you rested well over the holidays. Egg nog and sparklers aside, it’s time to get back into the he(art)beat of our one and only Bushwick—and make 2015 the best mid-century year ever!
#1 “Gabriela Salazar: My Lands are Islands” @ NURTURE:art (FRI 7-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street, lower level
NURTUREart starts the year with an ingredient-inspired solo show by Gabriela Salazar: “My Lands are Islands” exhibits small serial works made of a rudimentary clay from coffee grounds—an ingredient that comes out of the artist’s family’s history as part of Puerto Rico’s coffee trade. She utilizes forms of minimalist sculpture in this way, and in essence opening up an intersection between coffee’s simplicity and the social/cultural textures of her home city.
#2 “Body in Eden” and “Goodbye Times Bitch” @ Brooklyn Wayfarers (FRI 7-10 PM)
1109 Dekalb Avenue
“When we look at fragments of the body, or an implied body, can we for a little while, cease to be ourselves?” — Brooklyn Wayfarers asks this in their first group show of 2015: “Body in Eden,” curated by Margaret Coleman. Wayfarers teams up with collective Art Shape Mammoth to explore memory and body parts as fragmented and obscured, real and implied. In some ways they’ve already found that the mere trace of the body may be all that marks the final work…
Jen Shepard kicks off the TOBY project wall with bright calligraphic works inspired by the phrase “Goodbye Times Bitch” in 80’s flick Made in the USA—from a scene staging the protagonist’s getaway from the post-industrial, diazinon-polluted ghost town of Times Beach.
…that’s how I feel when I’m toiling away on my crudely fashioned sculptures and drawings among the detritus and filth of the post-industrial wasteland that we like to call Brooklyn: I want to jump in the car and take off, shouting, ‘Goodbye Times Bitch!”
#3 “Targets” @ Fresh Window (FRI 7-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street, lower level
In a lost, in-between world where objects appear both imaginary and real, German artist Alexa Hoyer captures an array of discard in her photo series on homemade gun targets at illegal shooting ranges across Nevada. Fresh Window’s first exhibition of the year, “Targets” gathers random cutouts, album pictures, pin up characters, and mannequin parts, etc. as the photos observe an act of disappearance, capturing the ghostly residue of the desert’s experience.
#4 “Zach Nader: channel surf” @ Microscope Gallery (FRI 6-9 PM)
1329 Willoughby Avenue #2B
Zach Nader will be screening from the walls of Microscope Gallery, employing the misuse of software editing tools and the technology behind digital image-creation in “channel surf.” New videos and inkjet prints reveal a search for new aesthetic realms, pushing the processes to extremes its effects on the advertisement/viewer relationship.
#5 The Two States of WW @ TSA New York (FRI 6-9 PM)
1329 Willoughby Avenue #2A
Microscope Gallery has a new neighbor over on Willoughby Avenue! TSA New York just moved in with their first show of the year: “The Two States of W.W.” Breaking Bad fans will see their favorite anti-hero Walter White as part of the show’s inspiration; “two people, two personas, two states of mind,” whereas for “The Two States of W.W.” exhibition the cities of Sante Fe, NM and New York, NY represent two polemics: “the culture of the East versus the West, the urban versus the pastoral, verticality versus horizontality.” The precedent for artists living in both states as well as their vast contrasts will be explored and revealed.
#6 Working Knowledge” @ Lorimoto (SAT 6-9 PM)
1623 Hancock Street, Ridgewood
Lorimoto’s first show of the year comes as a dynamic group exhibition organized by Ryan DeWalt and Robert Otto Epstein. All of the featured artists share a desire for a certain level of process or ritual in their forms, with works by Eric Amouyal, Ryan DaWalt, Robert Otto Epstein, Rico Gatson, Tamara Gonzales, Sheryl Oppenheim and several others. “Working Knowledge” will consider the construction, treatment and mechanical systems of an object in a complex unfolding of its surrounding landscape.
#7 “Tim Bruniges: HORSES” @ CHASM Gallery (SAT 6-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
Saturday night openings kick off with an immersive audiovisual installation from Tim Bruniges (we last saw Bruniges in SIGNAL’s “MIRRORS” exactly one year ago!) In “HORSES” the artist continues his exploration of space and time through a chimerical vision: viewers will be treated to a commune of horses in a frosty landscape which he filmed during a wintry residency in Iceland. With a sensitivity to his subject matter, Bruniges captures an unfurling of the horses’ movements, accounting for light, sound and space amid the landscape’s endless horizon.
#8 “Gary Petersen: Not now, but maybe later” @ THEODORE:Art (SAT 6-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
With a knack for showcasing geometric abstraction as it reflects our vulnerability and uncertainty in the world, Gary Petersen further investigates the sharpness of the line—how it contains, defines and suggests. For THEODORE:Art’s first show of the year, Petersen’s subtly eccentric abstractions depict a cosmic merge of sorts with both a traditional and pop sensibility. Chaos and harmony come together in a geometric toy of optics and incongruously shifting planes and colors of excitement.
#9 “Second Nature: Mark Dorf + Julian Lorber” @ OUTLET (SAT 7-10 PM)
253 Wilson Avenue
It was an awesome year for OUTLET, and they’re starting this year with the natural route of “Second Nature,” an exhibition of work by Mark Dorf and Julian Lorber. We’ll see how both artists demonstrate an alternative view or a second way of looking at landscapes and nature; the digital world and its relationship to our natural origins make their way into Dorf’s mix of photography and digital media, while Lorber invites contemplation of his works that abstractly depict the natural environment. Through both artist’s application of color and deep understandings of the nature, they call into question how the Western world tends to take its environment for granted.