By Terri Ciccone
Imagine taking a tour of an art gallery through someone’s mind, where each and every fold of the brain is another corridor leading you to a brilliant piece someone had once seen or thought of. What I Know, a group show curated by Jason Andrew is currently on view at NYCAM Gallery in Chelsea feels exactly as a physical tour through an art gallery of the mind.
What I Know is a show that features over 40 artists from the tight nit and burgeoning art scene in Bushwick that the curator and collector himself is very much a part of. The opening night was packed with a sort of who’s who of the Bushwick art scene, those one would normally see hanging around Norte Maar or Storefront. It was as if a space ship had sucked them all up and dropped them off in Chelsea. Some speculated that this was the slightly less than unintentional plan of Jason Andrew himself, to swipe the artists from their homey-digs as Chelsea big-wig Luhring Augustine opened their new space in Bushwick on that very night.
There is less than a visual theme that ties the show together. Paintings seemed to work with drawings, drawings with sculpture, sculpture with collage. But despite a theme not being visibly apparent, it was clear that these pieces were tied together by community. In a statement in the gallery, Andrew ponders the fact that we live in a very uncertain era, and all we can really rely on is our creative wits. So whether it was Paul D’Agostino’s collage of clock cut outs ticking along near Brooke Moyse’s abstract painting “Kalied,” or Ben Godward’s giant blob of paint that looks like it had once wreaked havoc on a street, swallowing bottles and license plates in its colorful path – these ideas juxtaposed against one another in one space created a solidness and a comfort.
What we know, or can take from the show, is these great works are being thought of and created, and don’t just exist in a Bushwick vacuum. The show is unapologetic in being simply a massive collection of great, solid pieces. And because of that, there was a different feeling in the air in Chelsea that evening. A shift, a change, a quake could be felt in the art world.
