Though they never really left us (I caught a new show every other week this summer), Bushwick art openings are reviving in bulk starting this Friday night. There are 10 new shows to see, so as soon as you’re off work, it’s time to head back to your old stomping ground of 56 Bogart and other favorites around the neighborhood!
#1 “I, Robot” @ Galerie Manqué (FRI 7-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
Galerie Manqué greets returning art-goers this Friday night with “I, Robot,” a three person show by Claire Jervert, Luisa Whitton and Paul (just Paul). The pop-up gallery chose work that examines the global phenomenon of humanoid robots, as roboticists from Japan to Russia, and China to the U.S. are developing humanoids intended not only to physically resemble human beings, but to possess the related skills, knowledge and emotion, raising the overall question of what it means to be human.
#2 “Seeing Sound” @ ODETTA (FRI 6-8 PM)
229 Cook Street
Coming off its enigmatic site-specific installation by Thomas Lendvai, ODETTA Gallery takes a more sensate route with it’s returning opening of “Seeing Sound.” Featuring new works by Jane Harris, Alex Paik and Gelah Penn, we are led to enter an imagined space where the work no longer needs to be defined by disciplines, media or intention; the work is meant to resonate inside and out in a poetic and visceral transformation.
#3 “Where the Heart is” @ Fresh Window (FRI 7-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street, lower level
“Where the Heart is” takes on the tried and true challenge of our notion of home and what it signifies to us. Taking on this perception of home are artists Fanny Allié, Nora Maite Nieves and Courtney Puckett. We thereby see Allié’s ideas of memory and the mark we leave on places and others, accompanied by Nieves’ idea of attachment to places, things, countries and people. Puckett transforms items from everyday domestic life into unexpected abstractions, applying the disciplines of painting and sculpture.
#4 “Low Ropes Course” @ NURTUREart (FRI 7-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
Jesse Harrod takes us through a “Low Ropes Course” of the political entanglements of material history, queer-feminist survival and craft practice. If ever there was a back-to-school art pick, this would be it. Throughout her work, Harrod uses brash, vernacular and lowbrow materials to tell about the marginalization of craft within contemporary art. There lies a signal as to how, when transformed, these materials can take on personalities that assert queer and anti-normative ways of being, knowing and relating.
#5 “The World As Of Yesterday” @ Black & White Project Space (FRI 6-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
Swedish artist Anastasia Ax makes her New York City premiere at Black & White Project Space. In a performance staged as a live intervention, “The World As Of Yesterday” involves the destruction of paper cubes and the compression of shredded paper bales as Anastasia uses her body and the splattering of black ink to tell the story.
#6 “Change of Seasons” @ Fuchs Projects Lab Space (FRI. 6-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
Fuchs Projects actually spent the summer experimenting in the lab! This Friday they’re opening a new library-lab space inside 56 Bogart, beginning with Rafael Fuchs’ latest works on paper from the series “Change Of Seasons.”
#7 “The In-between” @ Los Ojos (FRI 6-9 PM)
12 Cypress Avenue
Floral specimens, rough-hewn pottery and knives call attention in “The In-between,” opening Friday at Los Ojos. Through these familiar objects, painter Brian Matthew Blair’s starkly split canvases raise questions on observation, documentation, sociology and economics. Abrupt endings and revealing glimpses of these everyday objects therein reveal the in-between.
#8 “Rapture by Proxy” @ Amos Eno Gallery (FRI 6-8 PM)
1087 Flushing Avenue, inside The Loom
Susan Camp and Samantha Jones are up in this two-person installation opening Friday at Amos Eno Gallery. In “Rapture by Proxy,” both artists explore the relationship between material culture and human desire for control over the environment, balancing between rural and urban, constructed and natural, calling into question the motives of human manipulation and the subversive forces in our collective psyche.
#9 “Really, Socialism?!” @ Momenta Art (FRI 7-9 PM)
56 Bogart Street
Momenta Art presents “Really, Socialism?!” curated by David Xu Borgonjon. Through this exhibition the artists examine the past of the socialist image as they speculate on the future. Their intimate involvement in the aesthetic legacies of socialism lends a stimulant to viewers as they reappraise post-war art and its relevance for strategies of exit from the world-as-market.
#10 “Bankrupt” @ SARDINE (SAT 6-9 PM)
286 Stanhope Street
Familiar and traditional, the long-standing elements of the TV game show “Wheel of Fotune” come into play in Jacob Goble’s series “Bankrupt”. Opening Saturday, September 12th at SARDINE, the icons, color and language from this old-school show solicit nostalgia through Goble’s new template. He points out that in the over 30 years that it’s been on air, the show’s rules, prizes and hosts have remained the same. Through his hand and vision, we get to see a new way to play.