P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
NYC is endless when it comes to awesome galleries and exhibitions of your favorite artists. The first one on my list of things to see throughout my time in N Y is PS1. When my friend Luke (who is an endless book of knowledge on this city) told me that there was going to be a DJ playing only cassettes through old boom-boxes that afternoon, I knew the time had come for me to finally check this place out. PS1 is part of MOMA but on Long Island and is a converted Public School. Very cool feeling to the old hallways and they even kept the toilets the same as what they were when it was a school. Awesome but also a little creepy. There is a certain eerie feeling that you get walking around this place. Anyways here are some of the things we saw.... including the boom-box DJ!!!
Swimming Pool by Leandro Erlich is known for installations that seem to defy the basic laws of physics and befuddle the viewer, who is introduced into jarring environments that momentarily threaten a sense of balance or space.
Robert Boyd presents Conspiracy Theory, the first part of his forthcoming project TOMORROW PEOPLE. A synchronized two-channel video installation, Conspiracy Theory addresses issues of social paranoia and civil distrust in an era of questionable politics. The video covers topics from government involvement in the September 11 attacks to government cover-up of aliens at Area 5l, world domination by the "high priests of globalization" known as the Bilderberg, human invention of the HIV/AIDS virus, and the bizarre "reptilian agenda" that reveals reptilians as rulers of humanity. Incorporating audio and video excerpts from syndicated radio talk show hosts, international conspiracists, amateur documentary filmmakers, and the mysterious Commander X, Conspiracy Theory addresses some of today's leading conspiracies relayed by their most evocative proponents. Set to a fast-paced dance track, the work functions as both a critique and parody while raising the question-what if all is not as it seems?
New York based photographer Patrick O'Hare presents thirty intimate color prints in the third floor hallway. Working within the medium of photography, O'Hare documents the contrast between man-made environment and nature through landscape shots in which people have largely vanished. He searches in overlooked places like highway overpasses, construction sites, parking lots and trailer parks with the intent of creating order out of chaos and upheaval without losing subtlety and mystery. Influenced by the New Topographic photographers of the 1970s who cast a critical eye on suburban sprawl, landscape painting, and the novels of Don DeLillo, O'Hare finds the modern landscape as it is: shards of architecture in a state of entropic transition and decay.
NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, an exhibition co-organized by The Menil Collection that brings together a multigenerational group of North, South, and Central American artists who address the value of ritual in the artistic process and the wider implications of spirituality in contemporary art.
Sæthre’s work engages and alters the immediate surrounding architecture while guiding visitors through fairy-tale imagery and seamless futuristic design. Each room transports the viewer into otherworldly scenarios in which Sæthre’s use of materials divorced from their previous contexts, such as acoustic tiles, and LED lights, function as compositional elements within this totalizing installation. Furtive display devices create glimpses into idiosyncratic worlds inhabited by poised animals, oddly disjoined from the overall décor to create awkward sites for voyeuristic activity. Anachronistically frozen in space, his mythological taxidermy hybrids insinuate elements of surrealism, drawing from an ancient register that collides with futuristic settings. Enigmatic outlines are drawn by the structures of Sæthre’s environments (sculptural and reconstructed interiors, light, and soundscapes), but films and photographic tableaux tend to interject more personal narratives. These are often made optional through various cloaking devices, such as semi-transparent glass panels, long corridors, windows that one may uncomfortably peek through, insinuating the complicity of the viewer. Viewers will encounter unlikely temporal juxtapositions, as futurisms of the past collide with Surrealistic images drawn from a mythological register.
