The frost bite obtained from running around to last weekend’s back-to-back openings wasn’t so bad. You should be healed by now and on a daily dose of Vitamin C along with your regular spoonfuls of weekend art openings. I recommend a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice in the morning and a few hours set aside each night for Bushwick’s latest art openings at The Parlour Bushwick, Songs for Presidents, SIGNAL and more!
“PAY TO PLAY” @ ODETTA (FRI 6-8 PM)
229 Cook Street
We couldn’t help but name their last show “Becoming” as one of our absolute favorites of 2014… now prep yourself for ODETTA’S latest group splash: Joe Amrhein, Rico Gatson, William Powhida and Rita Valley are bringing you “PAY TO PLAY” this Friday. ODETTA warns: these artists keep a sharp tongue and a keen eye on the bottom line. William and Rita are bringing deadpan humor, hard truths, and cool remove as Rico and Joe’s let satire seduce their takes on today’s economic issues.
James Sheehan “at the lek” @ Songs for Presidents (FRI 6-9 PM)
1673 Gates Avenue (lower level), Ridgewood
Songs for Presidents makes their mark in 2015 with James Sheehan, “at the lek” – a new body of paintings regarding the nature of creativity, mortality and what it means to make a mark. Sheehan purposely avoids the freakish spectacle of painting “on the head of a pin,” inviting the viewer to trip into a playful dialogue with a single image as an experience. Embracing his painterly dilemma, he acknowledges that the act of seeing is something that we do with our whole bodies, not just with our eyes… see the scale and absorb the imagery for yourself.
56 Bogart Street
Discover the worlds within Fran O’Neill’s “painting her way home” as part of Life On Mars’ first exhibition of 2015, also featuring Benjamin Pritchard in LOM’s Project Room. O’Neill’s sensual works on paper and large-scale gestural paintings pack her works with emotion; “bold and intimate, full of color and movement, with an immediacy and simplicity in the mark, the work draws us into her world of seeing,” (LOM). In Pritchard’s works another intimacy of scale takes place, bending the language of abstract painting into a most personal and singular expression. Minute and intense adjustments reveal his search for truth and meaning amid the rapidity of the surrounding works.
“Viewing Room” @ GCA (FRI 7-9 PM)
119 Ingraham Street #315
New to our weekly picks, but not new to the Bushwick art scene itself, GCA (stands for Group Club Association) opens with “Viewing Room” on Friday night. Artists Cooper Holoweski and Clive Murphy formally invite us to the viewing room of GCA where ritual and illusion take place in plain sight. Engaging theatricality, “VIEWING ROOM” conjures the cult of mid-century Modernism and the essence of American-style capitalism and then it turns everything on its head. Holoweski will display odd and lustrous scenes with a tense exchange of criticism and worship with Murphy’s sly sculpture displays as they bring bit of light to the tasteful classical blackness.
“n=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse” @ SIGNAL (FRI 7-10 PM)
260 Johnson Avenue
Visitors to Friday’s opening at SIGNAL will experience gravity like never before in a one night only installation where the live game play will display inside the gallery in real time. Rachel Rossin’s “n=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse” is a “virtual reality simulation that employs the structure of side-scrolling game play to create an immersive, Oculus Rift-based experience,” (SIGNAL). “Descending into a 3-dimensional Dantesque underworld, the viewer navigates a landscape of hacked architectural and video game imagery, algorithmic collages… These radiant environments provide participants with a window to sights unseen…”
Philip Taaffe @ Luhring Augustine (FRI 6-8 PM)
25 Knickerbocker Ave
A solo that’s become entwined with itself—Philip Taaffe’s second exhibition at Luhring Augustine masterfully synthesizes the old with the new in an energetic range of visuals and techniques. An alchemist of painterly form, Taaffe combines silkscreen, stencil, collage, marbling and staining as he integrates the following opposites: decorative + narrative, natural + man-made, ancient + modern.
“Show #14” @ The Parlour Bushwick (SAT 6-9 PM)
791 Bushwick Avenue
The Parlour Bushwick enters 2015 with Show #14: four distinct artists share a common tendency of collecting and combining odd imagery to create a dynamic visual vocabulary. Imaginative characters come to life in Ryan Michael Ford’s surrealist works–it’s funny yet slightly disturbing. Pictures of lifeless insects create a stillness next to life-like flowers in Bobby Neel Adams’macabre series of photographs. A psychedelic cascade of colors and images come into focus through Jeremiah Teipen’s icy piece, and then melt away in an unconscious stream of colors and shapes that shadow the workings of the conscious mind.