It’s as good a weekend as ever to traipse the Bushwick art playground for new openings at the galleries of 1329 Willoughby and 56 Bogart and over in Ridgewood at Kimberly-Klark Gallery. The latest shows feature a media mix of moving image, text and plaster, with new photography techniques instilled by Paolo Gioli’s show at Microscope Gallery, text as pretext at STUDIO 10, and Modernist passion in the form of combustions and caricatures at CHASM Gallery.
#1 “POLITICS” @ Transmitter (FRI 6-9 pm)
1329 Willoughby Avenue
Transmitter shares a collection of compelling and entertaining works with their latest group show “Politics.” Not just a provocation of world events, the artwork meets the challenge of making attractive artwork that addresses complex political subjects with both grace and skill. Matthew Connors captures historic uprisings that speak to the interests of an artist rather than a reporter, as Lisa Sanditz’s lush landscape paintings reveal environmental crisis created by endless consumption and misuse. Michael Scoggins’s point of view creates a fascinating prism for world events; his works resulting in insights about current events that are at times beautifully simple, loud or demonstrative.
#2 Andy Ness “Nothing Nice and Easy” @ TSA New York (FRI 6-9 pm)
1329 Willoughby Avenue
Andy Ness’ bizarre narratives and visual subjects ring boldly in “Nothing Nice and Easy,” opening at TSA New York. Imagery and color palettes recorded from the artist’s visits to Rome and Morocco in the summer of 2013 present visions of Moorish architecture and the massive ruins of a once grand empire. The works, seeming as though they were formed by memories simultaneously surfacing and fading, showcase Ness’ ability to bend and collapse time and space with a sophisticated poetic fluidity, maintaining an underlying humanity within it all.
#3 “BANG BANG” @ CHASM Gallery (FRI 6-8 pm)
56 Bogart Street
In a playfully estranged homage to the sensory pleasures of the Baroque era, Australian artists Belem Lett and Genevieve Felix Reynolds re-ignite the Modernist passion for color and dynamism in “BANG BANG” at CHASM Gallery. Lett’s caricatures exceed limitations of the picture plane with puffy plaster frames that give the illusion of balloons about to burst, shimmering with metallic pigment and intimate color fields. More combustions and implosions take place in Reynolds’ tunnels of opaque and translucent layerings of color through protrusions and recedings through which one can glimpse the history of the work.
#4 Paolo Gioli “Volti” @ Microscope Gallery (FRI 6-9 pm)
1329 Willoughby Avenue
Microscope Gallery brings Italian artist Paolo Gioli to the gallery for “Volti (Faces).” Gioli, who is among the artists representing Italy at this year’s Venice Biennial, works with 16mm film and photography, altering and reinventing photographic techniques to achieve new uses of light and chemicals for his photographic series. Through his own techniques, like slipping fragments of other images into the camera’s aperture, Gioli addresses the changing nature of the self, merging the human with natural elements.
#5 “Pretext” @ STUDIO 10 (FRI 7-9 pm)
56 Bogart Street
Studio10 has put together a group of artists dealing with text and the margins of language for their next show, “Pretext.” In Audra Wolowiec’s installation Habere, sound recordings of breath synch in and out with each other as the listener becomes aware of their own breath. The practice of triboluminescence takes place in Isa Barrett’s images of printed words peeled away with Scotch tape, and de stijl compositions can be found in Bjoern Meyer-Ebrecht’s texts from discarded books. Lastly, Amrhein’s visual vocabulary stems from his learnings as a sign painter by layering text and speaking to the notions of art criticism.
#6 James Hannaham “Lengthy Statements/Brief Statements” @ Kimberly-Klark Gallery (SAT 7-10 pm)
788 Woodward Avenue, Ridgewood
In seeking out a place where art and non-art become one, where art stops “looking like art,” artist/writer James Hannaham takes his work to the scale of vinyl wall text and further interpretation, his main goal to undermine authorities and orthodoxies. With “Lengthy Statements/Brief Statements,” he asks questions about the nature of art objects vs. interpretive signage and the way in which we allow anonymous authorities to govern those parts of our lives.