Five Questions for Ryoji Sasamoto
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Saturday, June 5, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Call Me Leamhsi: Bill Shannon circumnavigates the Financial District
Bill Shannon and "Rejected Skin" at 77 Water St. photo by Catherine Peila
Bill Shannon has gone ¾ of the way around the tip of Manhattan, retracing in retrograde the route famously described by the narrator Ishmael in the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick. And, like his fellow traveler, he pauses to wax philosophical.
Shannon perches on his crutches atop the white painted concrete platform that frames Rudolph de Harak and William Tarr’s public sculpture Rejected Skin, (1969) beneath one cantilevered corner of 77 Water St. at Old Slip. He begins a slow descent to an almost prone suspension. Having rested a found (presented by a construction worker, actually) gallon bottle of commercial iced tea on part of the artwork, he twirls and flashes first one specially made round-ended crutch then the other as he embodies the tension between flesh and rigid exoskeletar form at the heart of his unique dancing technique. The entire time he suspends and descends, he continues to discuss the challenges inherent in matching mind and muscle to metal and gravity and the constant risk in his exploration of new form and expression.
“Sometimes,” he says, his nose finally flush with the pavement, “it can look like failure.”
right: Bill Shannon caught in a "wall stall." photo by BC
And suddenly, the 40 minutes we have spent following Shannon through Traffic -
A Transient Specific Performance, suggest a larger simulacrum for human endeavor. Think Mideast peace, perhaps, or the Obama presidency.
Episodically, mesmericly, our Pequod of a chartered bus has been trying to keep up with his skiff of a skateboard as the tiny crutch powered craft buffets the tempests of rush hour traffic, and waves of tourist and commuter crowds down Broadway from Dance New Amsterdam, at Chambers, to the edge of the Battery, and back north along Water. The mother ship carries its captive audience in its hold, along with all necessary equipment and expertise -- a DJ, a VJ and two videographers -- to render the quarry. We can hear the music being pumped into Shannon’s radio headset, which, equipped with a microphone, intermittently feeds back to us his voice and the sound of his wheels. Those outside the bus can hear only the latter.
This extends to skateboarder Mike Wright, an old friend of Shannon’s, who has happened into the mix near the beginning of the performance. Signing on for the rest of the journey, he becomes the Queequeg/Daggoo of the piece, participating in encounters with passersby, cops and construction workers. Such happenstances, but perhaps without Wright, promise to mark each of the remaining performances, which continue each afternoon through Friday, June 4, beginning at 4:30 pm.
“How do you make the [members of an] audience feel like they are on a skateboard?” the event’s press release asks.
I don’t know about others, but Shannon’s fluid meanderings through these madding crowds took me back to my high school days. Whenever bored of a winter’s class, I would escape to the frozen puddle that covered much of the school’s roof, don my hockey skates, and glide above the unsuspecting heads of my classmates.
Watching Shannon now, I become acutely aware of the three-dimensionality of his art, space opening and closing across the “blab of the pave,” mind calculating with intuitive speed the warping of space time all around its body. Pausing abreast of a curbside advertisement, he suspends almost horizontally on his crutches in one of his signature "wall stalls," creating a flesh and blood bas relief against the commercial grain.
Shannon scouts the route of "Traffic" by winter light
Three years in the making, Traffic’s metaphorically rich, imaginatively provocative and downright audacious adventurousness augurs well for the revitalizing Artist in Residence Program at DNA. Not to be missed, the 20 accompanying videos by the same artist that play along DNA’s gallery walls add another dimension to Shannon’s chess game with the laws of physics and those of Downtown Manhattan traffic.
In the clip playing out into Chambers St. adjacent to DNA’s entrance east of Broadway, the artist appears in jacket, tie and jaunty hat traversing the plazas around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. In dress, manner and movement he recalls, in his own unique style, the pizzaz and allure of another Pittsburgh native, the late Gene Kelly. Such talents do not mark all generations. When such a one, at the peak of his powers, wheels before you, you owe it to yourself and your children to catch him if you can.
Bill Shannon has gone ¾ of the way around the tip of Manhattan, retracing in retrograde the route famously described by the narrator Ishmael in the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick. And, like his fellow traveler, he pauses to wax philosophical.Shannon perches on his crutches atop the white painted concrete platform that frames Rudolph de Harak and William Tarr’s public sculpture Rejected Skin, (1969) beneath one cantilevered corner of 77 Water St. at Old Slip. He begins a slow descent to an almost prone suspension. Having rested a found (presented by a construction worker, actually) gallon bottle of commercial iced tea on part of the artwork, he twirls and flashes first one specially made round-ended crutch then the other as he embodies the tension between flesh and rigid exoskeletar form at the heart of his unique dancing technique. The entire time he suspends and descends, he continues to discuss the challenges inherent in matching mind and muscle to metal and gravity and the constant risk in his exploration of new form and expression.
“Sometimes,” he says, his nose finally flush with the pavement, “it can look like failure.”right: Bill Shannon caught in a "wall stall." photo by BC
And suddenly, the 40 minutes we have spent following Shannon through Traffic -
A Transient Specific Performance, suggest a larger simulacrum for human endeavor. Think Mideast peace, perhaps, or the Obama presidency.
Episodically, mesmericly, our Pequod of a chartered bus has been trying to keep up with his skiff of a skateboard as the tiny crutch powered craft buffets the tempests of rush hour traffic, and waves of tourist and commuter crowds down Broadway from Dance New Amsterdam, at Chambers, to the edge of the Battery, and back north along Water. The mother ship carries its captive audience in its hold, along with all necessary equipment and expertise -- a DJ, a VJ and two videographers -- to render the quarry. We can hear the music being pumped into Shannon’s radio headset, which, equipped with a microphone, intermittently feeds back to us his voice and the sound of his wheels. Those outside the bus can hear only the latter.
This extends to skateboarder Mike Wright, an old friend of Shannon’s, who has happened into the mix near the beginning of the performance. Signing on for the rest of the journey, he becomes the Queequeg/Daggoo of the piece, participating in encounters with passersby, cops and construction workers. Such happenstances, but perhaps without Wright, promise to mark each of the remaining performances, which continue each afternoon through Friday, June 4, beginning at 4:30 pm.
“How do you make the [members of an] audience feel like they are on a skateboard?” the event’s press release asks.
I don’t know about others, but Shannon’s fluid meanderings through these madding crowds took me back to my high school days. Whenever bored of a winter’s class, I would escape to the frozen puddle that covered much of the school’s roof, don my hockey skates, and glide above the unsuspecting heads of my classmates.
Watching Shannon now, I become acutely aware of the three-dimensionality of his art, space opening and closing across the “blab of the pave,” mind calculating with intuitive speed the warping of space time all around its body. Pausing abreast of a curbside advertisement, he suspends almost horizontally on his crutches in one of his signature "wall stalls," creating a flesh and blood bas relief against the commercial grain.
Shannon scouts the route of "Traffic" by winter light
Three years in the making, Traffic’s metaphorically rich, imaginatively provocative and downright audacious adventurousness augurs well for the revitalizing Artist in Residence Program at DNA. Not to be missed, the 20 accompanying videos by the same artist that play along DNA’s gallery walls add another dimension to Shannon’s chess game with the laws of physics and those of Downtown Manhattan traffic.In the clip playing out into Chambers St. adjacent to DNA’s entrance east of Broadway, the artist appears in jacket, tie and jaunty hat traversing the plazas around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. In dress, manner and movement he recalls, in his own unique style, the pizzaz and allure of another Pittsburgh native, the late Gene Kelly. Such talents do not mark all generations. When such a one, at the peak of his powers, wheels before you, you owe it to yourself and your children to catch him if you can.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Painting the Town Rocha: Mad Men meet the Ladies @ Galapagos
Jenny Rocha rides into view.
photo by Melody Mudd
Jenny Rocha and her Painted Ladies have developed a following in this town since their debut in 2006. So has trumpeter, singer and bandleader Brian Newman. The two have each featured for some time now as performers in the intermittent Floating Kabarette productions of the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, and both, in at least a part of their individual oeuvres, exhibit an interest in reclaiming and revitalizing the production values and styles of a bygone era of swanky supper clubs and New York nightlife.
So when the two teamed up at Galapagos on May 20, for their first ever shared evening of song and dance, you might have been forgiven for expecting a collaboration. As it turned out, Rocha’s production alternated segments like half-innings in a gender-specific ball game; the visiting boys of Newman’s jazz trio batting first.
Brian Newman. photo by Mark Pierson
Newman proved a genial host, except when beset by a recurring short in the microphone cord as he fondled his boxy 50’s style stand mic. Ahead of his polished side men -- Paul Francis on drums and Alex Smith on electronic keyboard -- he took the “pit,” what would normally serve as the audience left “pod” closest to the stage in Galapagos’ pool-bridging orchestra level seating scheme. Nattily tailored in a single-breasted dark suit complete with pocket square, a black pinstriped shirt with a white pointed collar and a white silk tie – Saville Row meets Bugsy Malone -- Newman welcomed the audience before turning his warm baritone, fiery trumpet and band mates loose on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” He then introduced his hosts:
The red velour curtain parted on the home girls half of the inning to introduce all five black bra attired Painted Ladies astride white stage boxes from which they launched into a rhythm dance to recorded music by the Black Eyed Peas. Four minutes later, the jazz trio picked up to cover the set and costume changes before the Painted Ladies next number, playing a version of Marks & Simons’ popular standard “All of Me,” followed by the trio’s take on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The evening’s pattern had been established.
photo by Melody Mudd
Rocha’s pieces, kitschy, sometimes witty amalgamations of modern and jazz dance styles in vaudeville frames with burlesque accents, lean heavily on their props as well as on their often creative, always well executed costumes. In her own dancing she welds a fierce attack to a sexy sensibility and a sense of humor. Her company: Shevaun Smythe Hiler, Jillian Hollis, Molly Merkler, and Jessy Smith, while obviously well-trained and accomplished, only rarely exhibit the same commitment and pizzaz.
This does not hold true for the rousing tap trio in which Hollis and Smith match the choreographer flap for heel, all while keeping their pastie-crowned boobs from flopping out from beneath cropped faux fur vests until the proper moment for the big titillation. The choreography often builds to such peeks and distributes 28 flavors of fan kicks and pelvic thrusts among its compositionally classic canons and counterpoints.
photo by Dmitri Wildfong Nishman
For me this happy hoofer pas de trois proved the movement highlight of the evening, save for the offhanded instant in which Rachel Prescott, a member of the wait staff, found herself momentarily suspended in action and spotlight, her back to us, in front of the red velour and the jazz trio’s rendition of Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” For all the Karole Armitage like intensity and artisanal stage craftiness of Rocha’s creations, this haphazard moment of vulnerability and human indecision sang out as truly arresting.
Meanwhile, back at the sangspiel, Newman and his merry band kept up their half of the bargain, toodling through samples of the Great American Song Book with a quick sidetrip through a Jobim Bossa Nova. Newman’s approach to his music defies easy categorization: In his singing he channels a little Tony Bennett, a little more Mel Torme, a little less Harry Connick, Jr. He attacks his trumpet solos with be-bop like flourishes and flying fingers.
Rocha likes to fly, too. One fondly hopes that these Painted Ladies and mad tailored men will someday find “a little old place where we can get together. Love shack, baby.”
photo by Melody Mudd
Jenny Rocha and her Painted Ladies have developed a following in this town since their debut in 2006. So has trumpeter, singer and bandleader Brian Newman. The two have each featured for some time now as performers in the intermittent Floating Kabarette productions of the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, and both, in at least a part of their individual oeuvres, exhibit an interest in reclaiming and revitalizing the production values and styles of a bygone era of swanky supper clubs and New York nightlife. So when the two teamed up at Galapagos on May 20, for their first ever shared evening of song and dance, you might have been forgiven for expecting a collaboration. As it turned out, Rocha’s production alternated segments like half-innings in a gender-specific ball game; the visiting boys of Newman’s jazz trio batting first.
Brian Newman. photo by Mark Pierson
Newman proved a genial host, except when beset by a recurring short in the microphone cord as he fondled his boxy 50’s style stand mic. Ahead of his polished side men -- Paul Francis on drums and Alex Smith on electronic keyboard -- he took the “pit,” what would normally serve as the audience left “pod” closest to the stage in Galapagos’ pool-bridging orchestra level seating scheme. Nattily tailored in a single-breasted dark suit complete with pocket square, a black pinstriped shirt with a white pointed collar and a white silk tie – Saville Row meets Bugsy Malone -- Newman welcomed the audience before turning his warm baritone, fiery trumpet and band mates loose on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” He then introduced his hosts: The red velour curtain parted on the home girls half of the inning to introduce all five black bra attired Painted Ladies astride white stage boxes from which they launched into a rhythm dance to recorded music by the Black Eyed Peas. Four minutes later, the jazz trio picked up to cover the set and costume changes before the Painted Ladies next number, playing a version of Marks & Simons’ popular standard “All of Me,” followed by the trio’s take on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The evening’s pattern had been established.
photo by Melody Mudd
Rocha’s pieces, kitschy, sometimes witty amalgamations of modern and jazz dance styles in vaudeville frames with burlesque accents, lean heavily on their props as well as on their often creative, always well executed costumes. In her own dancing she welds a fierce attack to a sexy sensibility and a sense of humor. Her company: Shevaun Smythe Hiler, Jillian Hollis, Molly Merkler, and Jessy Smith, while obviously well-trained and accomplished, only rarely exhibit the same commitment and pizzaz.
This does not hold true for the rousing tap trio in which Hollis and Smith match the choreographer flap for heel, all while keeping their pastie-crowned boobs from flopping out from beneath cropped faux fur vests until the proper moment for the big titillation. The choreography often builds to such peeks
photo by Dmitri Wildfong NishmanFor me this happy hoofer pas de trois proved the movement highlight of the evening, save for the offhanded instant in which Rachel Prescott, a member of the wait staff, found herself momentarily suspended in action and spotlight, her back to us, in front of the red velour and the jazz trio’s rendition of Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” For all the Karole Armitage like intensity and artisanal stage craftiness of Rocha’s creations, this haphazard moment of vulnerability and human indecision sang out as truly arresting.
Meanwhile, back at the sangspiel, Newman and his merry band kept up their half of the bargain, toodling through samples of the Great American Song Book with a quick sidetrip through a Jobim Bossa Nova. Newman’s approach to his music defies easy categorization: In his singing he channels a little Tony Bennett, a little more Mel Torme, a little less Harry Connick, Jr. He attacks his trumpet solos with be-bop like flourishes and flying fingers.
Rocha likes to fly, too. One fondly hopes that these Painted Ladies and mad tailored men will someday find
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Love & Dance: Nora Petroliunas / The Pharmacy Project present Bricks & Honey at 100 Grand, May 7 & 8
below: (from top to bottom): Hsaio-Jou Tang, Amber Morgan, Tess Igarta, Sarah Rose Bodley, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri. photo by Mistral Hay
The audience has just been moved. Literally. The handsome couple, who have perched so exquisitely atop the coffee table placed against the mirror at the west wall of 100 Grand, find themselves momentarily separated when the musical chairs-like redistribution of spectators-in-the-round calls for us to claim new seats. But across the gap now between them, he beckons her to an adjoining empty chair. Their union restored, an open seat now offers itself next to me. Soon, Bill Young, the loft’s proprietor sidles into it.
As the action onstage resumes, he leans over and whispers conspiratorially, “I just love her work.”
And I have to now admit that I do as well.
And what’s not to love? Nora Petroliunas has always, in the two years that I’ve been watching her art develop, been more than generous with her audience. She has already established a knack for serving up quirky and surprising sensual feasts that fully exploit the imaginative possibilities of the architecture, the furniture, and the dancers that she selects to frame her visions. With Bricks & Honey, her very first one-woman show, she has emerged as a first rate dance maker as well.
In this she owes a great deal to the performers with whom she has long been collaborating. In this case they include Sarah Rose Bodley, Tess Igarta, Amber Morgan, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri, Hsaio-Jou Tang. Only Morgan is new to me. I have never seen the others dance with such consummate ease, grace and unabashed sensual beauty. The quality of their five-fold collective realization of the creator’s compositional craft proves enough even to touch the heart of a dance curmudgeon such as me.
Hsaio-Jou Tang attached to Amber Morgan
photo by Paula Lobo
The weight of touch; the gravity of desire play key roles in the troupe’s investigation of space. In repeated patterns of partnering, we see relationships rendered as leg irons as, one after another, individual dancers struggle to walk with a prone partner grasping one ankle. First Bodley and later Igarta execute electrifying and virtuosic solos, each of which includes an extended series of jumps taking off from and landing on the performer’s shins as her legs remain folded beneath her.
These two represent only the first among equals in distributing the simple gifts that Petroliunas flings around. Bodley has often featured in the choreographer’s canon, and her two solos here seem to build on and extend her role as muse-in-chief. (That’s mis-chief to you, buddy). Igarta, on the other hand, who also plays the loft’s piano to accompany Bodley’s first solo, breaks through as a master of the kind of weighted lyricism that has begun to emerge as a Petroliunas leitmotif.
left: Tess Igarta
photo by Paula Lobo
Olivieri, subsequently, charms and intrigues in an introspective passage in which she builds a ziggurat of furniture using as foundation one of the loft’s sturdy kitchen tables. Atop of this she sits to imbibe a wistful glass of wine that she pours from one of the 32 bottles that have been lined up like footlights along one edge of the space. Soon the other four perform a kind of barnacle ballet along the edges of the supporting table.
The wine bottles, almost all partially filled with water, along with several similarly ablutionary clear glass jars, have been handed out to arriving members of the audience and later collected by the dancers just before the big move. In case you might have misapprehended that Petroliunas would be leaving you alone to sit back in anonymous idiot peace during her show, greeter Sarah Oppenheim has also handed you a book of matches at the door with “the pharmacy project” scrawled in black ink across its white cover. Souvenirs, as usual, to be had, and used, at the spectacle.
Meredith-Lyn Olivieri prepares her ziggurat
photo by Mistral Hay
The further deployment of these elements, as well as those of such inveterate Petroliunas creative touches as table lamps, other furniture, a galvanized washtub and water buckets, and musical compositions ranging from those of contemporary collaborators Ed Donohue (donny hue and the colors) and Saul Simon Macwilliams to recording artists Doris Troy (Just One Look) and Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts (Angel of the Morning) I’ll leave for later. I encourage the reader to see this piece, should it ever be revived, and wouldn’t want to give away the plot.
But I have a personal confession. I found myself somewhat reluctant to commit to attending this production, enamored as I have been of the creator’s past efforts. Like an infatuated lover, I felt afraid of the possibility of finding myself let down, and equally skittish of the idea of making anyone my “critic’s darling.”
I needn’t have worried. Here I sit on a soft and lovely Spring evening, gazing across Bill Young’s lovely, haphazardly cluttered, workaday loft through a veil of gorgeous dancing and a compelling lack of drama at other members of this audience and the choreographer herself, hard at work on the sound score controlled by the Macbook on her lap. And I find myself absorbed into her dream; taken by the possibilities the poet Auden proposes in his Lullaby:
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
The microcosms Petroliunas shapes play their parts almost completely in poetic terms, many footed and raw. There exist “certain evenings when the heart relaxes.” Bricks & Honey provides plenty of suggestive space in which one can be persuaded to try again. When an artist can open her heart, and mine, to the possibilities of new life even in the face of inevitable loss, and do it in the wordless wonder of dance, I consider myself glad to have made the trip and lucky to be a witness.
The audience has just been moved. Literally. The handsome couple, who have perched so exquisitely atop the coffee table placed against the mirror at the west wall of 100 Grand, find themselves momentarily separated when the musical chairs-like redistribution of spectators-in-the-round calls for us to claim new seats. But across the gap now between them, he beckons her to an adjoining empty chair. Their union restored, an open seat now offers itself next to me. Soon, Bill Young, the loft’s proprietor sidles into it.As the action onstage resumes, he leans over and whispers conspiratorially, “I just love her work.”
And I have to now admit that I do as well.
And what’s not to love? Nora Petroliunas has always, in the two years that I’ve been watching her art develop, been more than generous with her audience. She has already established a knack for serving up quirky and surprising sensual feasts that fully exploit the imaginative possibilities of the architecture, the furniture, and the dancers that she selects to frame her visions. With Bricks & Honey, her very first one-woman show, she has emerged as a first rate dance maker as well.
In this she owes a great deal to the performers with whom she has long been collaborating. In this case they include Sarah Rose Bodley, Tess Igarta, Amber Morgan, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri, Hsaio-Jou Tang. Only Morgan is new to me. I have never seen the others dance with such consummate ease, grace and unabashed sensual beauty. The quality of their five-fold collective realization of the creator’s compositional craft proves enough even to touch the heart of a dance curmudgeon such as me.
Hsaio-Jou Tang attached to Amber Morgan photo by Paula Lobo
The weight of touch; the gravity of desire play key roles in the troupe’s investigation of space. In repeated patterns of partnering, we see relationships rendered as leg irons as, one after another, individual dancers struggle to walk with a prone partner grasping one ankle. First Bodley and later Igarta execute electrifying and virtuosic solos, each of which includes an extended series of jumps taking off from and landing on the performer’s shins as her legs remain folded beneath her.
These two represent only the first among equals in distributing the simple gifts that Petroliunas flings around. Bodley has often featured in the choreographer’s canon, and her two solos here seem to build on and extend her role as muse-in-chief. (That’s mis-chief to you, buddy). Igarta, on the other hand, who also plays the loft’s piano to accompany Bodley’s first solo, breaks through as a master of the kind of weighted lyricism that has begun to emerge as a Petroliunas leitmotif.left: Tess Igarta
photo by Paula Lobo
Olivieri, subsequently, charms and intrigues in an introspective passage in which she builds a ziggurat of furniture using as foundation one of the loft’s sturdy kitchen tables. Atop of this she sits to imbibe a wistful glass of wine that she pours from one of the 32 bottles that have been lined up like footlights along one edge of the space. Soon the other four perform a kind of barnacle ballet along the edges of the supporting table.
The wine bottles, almost all partially filled with water, along with several similarly ablutionary clear glass jars, have been handed out to arriving members of the audience and later collected by the dancers just before the big move. In case you might have misapprehended that Petroliunas would be leaving you alone to sit back in anonymous idiot peace during her show, greeter Sarah Oppenheim has also handed you a book of matches at the door with “the pharmacy project” scrawled in black ink across its white cover. Souvenirs, as usual, to be had, and used, at the spectacle.
Meredith-Lyn Olivieri prepares her ziggurat photo by Mistral Hay
The further deployment of these elements, as well as those of such inveterate Petroliunas creative touches as table lamps, other furniture, a galvanized washtub and water buckets, and musical compositions ranging from those of contemporary collaborators Ed Donohue (donny hue and the colors) and Saul Simon Macwilliams to recording artists Doris Troy (Just One Look) and Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts (Angel of the Morning) I’ll leave for later. I encourage the reader to see this piece, should it ever be revived, and wouldn’t want to give away the plot.
But I have a personal confession. I found myself somewhat reluctant to commit to attending this production, enamored as I have been of the creator’s past efforts. Like an infatuated lover, I felt afraid of the possibility of finding myself let down, and equally skittish of the idea of making anyone my “critic’s darling.”
I needn’t have worried. Here I sit on a soft and lovely Spring evening, gazing across Bill Young’s lovely, haphazardly cluttered, workaday loft through a veil of gorgeous dancing and a compelling lack of drama at other members of this audience and the choreographer herself, hard at work on the sound score controlled by the Macbook on her lap. And I find myself absorbed into her dream; taken by the possibilities the poet Auden proposes in his Lullaby:
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
The microcosms Petroliunas shapes play their parts almost completely in poetic terms, many footed and raw. There exist “certain evenings when the heart relaxes.” Bricks & Honey provides plenty of suggestive space in which one can be persuaded to try again. When an artist can open her heart, and mine, to the possibilities of new life even in the face of inevitable loss, and do it in the wordless wonder of dance, I consider myself glad to have made the trip and lucky to be a witness.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Counting Cards at Grandma's: Nan Swid and Donald Kaufman Recent Work at Gallery 9E
I leaned down to speak to a charming young girl in a maroon dress staring candidly up at Nan Swid’s Combination Wall 2 (2009) at Gallery 9E, 508 West 26th St. in Chelsea, Thursday evening.
“What do you see?” I asked confidentially, hoping for a pithy, surprising, funny or illuminating quote.
The light of the golden hour transfigured her blonde curls as she turned away from the window and the roughly 24 square foot wall-mounted construction, fashioned from panel, disassembled book paper, and nails, variously coated by encaustic wax that stood before us. She leveled her clear and steady gaze at me.
Nan Swid’s Combination Wall 2 (2009) at Gallery 9E
all photos by Rodin Banica
“Grandma’s art work.”Well, that threw me for a loop.
“How often do you see it?” I queried, regaining my friendly poise.
She looked puzzled. I changed tactics.
“How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“You’ve been seeing it your whole life, then.”
right: Nan Swid's Day Window (2010)
Duh, her blankness seemed to say as she flipped her hair turning away towards the window. I might have been the only one counting.
I did a lot of counting at the show of recent work that Swid shared with Donald Kaufman at 9E. I counted the disassembled books in Swid’s wall relief’s, framed assemblages building from materials similar to those of the the wall mounts, to foil-like assemblages of dark to brightly colored and clear cellophanes, leading finally to ones encrusted with gold leaf over index pages from manila legal files: N – O, or Z – X for instance.left: Donald Kaufman's Graph 2010
In Kaufman’s room, around an open L-shaped corner, I counted cards. His 19 gauche on paper works present jarring as well as subtle juxtapositions of color. Said to have been inspired by architectural color samples, they depict variegated rectangle shaped single color fields in repeated flat patterns. Within each image, these rectangular color fields keep to a more or less uniform size and their arrangement suggests to the mind a set of overlapping cards upon a table as seen from above. The “table top” consists of a single, often strong, color that serves as background or field framing the arrangement of the card-like smaller rectangles.
My notes for these pieces read something like: “12 on olive” for Canyon (2010), or “7 on NECO” for Graph (2010) the latter color recalling in its gouache texture, the kind of plum brown I remember from NECO valentine Sweethearts. Across from Swid’s relatively expansive pieces, often amplified by their simple but elegant frames, Kauffman’s unframed jazz riffs on Albers, which, all in portrait orientation, range in size from only 70 to 432 square inches rectangular, look diminutive.
The design and even the fashion pedigree of both artists can easily be discerned in the way they handle their materials, while the counterpoint of Kaufman’s dry understatement with Swid’s sometimes playful sometimes sultry sensual and textural interplay proves effectively complementary. The show continues through Sunday, May 9.
Above: Donald Kaufman's room at Gallery 9E, 508 West 26th St, New York
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