Freight + Volume is honored to host the most recent edition of Spry Lee Scott's Art Is Healing conversation series. With wellness at its core, the Art is Healing series explores how creators use their art to not only heal themselves but also inspire healing in BIPOC communities. This edition will feature gallery artist Will Watson whose commitment to community rests at the center of his artistic practice. 

A closing reception will be held on Saturday, March 30, 2024, from 2:00 - 5:00 pm and will feature an opportunity for hands-on drawing in the gallery with the artist.

 Freight + Volume’s vaulted Tribeca showroom is the perfect amalgam of its previous spaces in Chelsea and the Lower East Side: a charming and spacious boutique, ideally suited to paintings. Jared Deery’s tightly curated solo show “A Liminal Light”, includes large, portrait-oriented canvases featuring magic-marker-inspired motifs of drips, loops, blobs, and streaks that conjure still-life flowers and their imagined domains. In entering the gallery, they appear as natural and seamless as a screensaver at an internet cafe waiting for a patron to connect to Netscape. They are simultaneously retro and futuristic, borrowing from 1990s cyberpunk and catapulting its very obsolescence into a commentary on physical gallery space.

Born in Chicago, Karen Finley received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Working in a variety of mediums such as installation, video, performance, public art, visual art, entertainment, television and film, memorials, music, and literature, she has presented her work worldwide in various venues such as The Bobino in Paris, The ICA in London and Lincoln Center in NYC.Finley lectures and gives workshops at universities and museums internationally. Her work is in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary art and the Pompidou, and she is the recipient of many awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYSCA and NEA fellowships. In 2015 she was awarded the Richard J Massey Foundation Arts and Humanities award. She is an Arts Professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University.

Finley’s was one of the “NEA 4,” a group of artists who in 1990 sued the National Endowment for the Arts after the withdrawal of their fellowships, whose outcome and legacy were detailed in a recent New York Times article.

Her booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, “Karen Finley: Redacted,” presented a selection of works that she produced in the 1980s and 90s, including a documentation of “We Keep Our Victims Ready” (1990), a provocative performance piece that outraged the Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who enacted the campaign to have her NEA grant withdrawn.

While nostalgia and the yearning it precipitates may be gripping the art world, Cordy Ryman’s gently dazzling painting installations, on view at Freight + Volume, are unapologetically about the here and now – that is, what’s happening in one place today. Titled “Monkey Mind Symphony,” the show captures the distractions we encounter day by day, minute by minute. What could be more apt for our time than a visual language comprising small objects? Logically, they are the physical manifestations of tweets or threads, crafted easily, sometimes beguilingly unfinished in the traditional sense of the word, and arranged so as to radiate Ryman’s idiosyncratic energy.

Like his previous show, Constellations, at Freight + Volume in 2021, Cordy Ryman’s Monkey Mind Symphony features variegated matrixes of humbly painted receptacles. These assemblages, which use triangular and rectangular wood strips, are proportioned with ample empty space, sprawling the expanse of an entire gallery wall. Unlike the previous exhibition, however, Ryman’s new show also presents an array of self-standing boxes. These acrylic-on-wood boxes are no less self-effacing than Ryman’s assemblages and, in their own modest way, similarly play with spatial incongruity.

Exposing raw talent

Fairgoers wandering the fair's aisles may be unaware that in a discreet corner of one stand are life-drawing models taking part in a radical initiative. Karen Finley's installation Go Figure, at Freight+ Volume's stand, was due to go on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1998, but the museum cancelled the show shortly after Finley and three other artists lost their court case against the National Endowment of the Arts, which had withdrawn grants on the grounds of indecency.... 

By Julia Halperin

Reporting from Miami Beach.

Dec. 6, 2023, 1:24 p.m. ET

Very few visual artists have been the subject of a Supreme Court case. Karen Finley, 67, is one of them. A member of the so-called N.E.A. Four, Finley — along with Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes — sued the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 after the organization withdrew their fellowships.

The federal agency was under scrutiny for financing art — including Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine — that the religious right deemed indecent. A performance in which Finley covered her body with chocolate frosting, red candies and alfalfa sprouts to make a statement about society’s treatment of women was another attractive target. On the Senate floor, the Republican Jesse Helms called Finley’s work “pornographic” and “obscene.” A nationally syndicated newspaper column dismissed her as nothing more than “a nude, chocolate-smeared woman.”

Interview with Kathleen Cullen 

Freight+Volume @ UNTITLED Miami Beach
Booth C24   -  December 4-8, 2019   -  Ocean Drive and 12th Street , South Beach, Miami, FL

Jennifer Coates on the genesis and creation of "Spring Trees" for BOMB Magazine.

Freight + Volume footage begins at 16:35 

"The Still Life Show" is at Park Place Gallery 661 Park Place, Brooklyn, NY, opening Friday December 15th 7-10pm, gallery days Saturday & Sunday December 16th – 17th 11am-6pm.

Artists included: Alexi Worth, Eric den Breejen, Irena Jurek, Robert Otto Epstein, Kristen Schiele and many more.

“In Paper We Trust” - Group Exhibition at The Dot Project Gallery (London, UK) featuring Peter Schenck, opening Wednesday, July 26th – September 30th

On June 21, a new exhibit, NSFW: Female Gaze, opened at the Museum of Sex in New York City. The exhibition showcases more than 20 female artists who will, through their preferred medium, interpret the female gaze featuring Sophia Narrett and Rebecca Goyette.

The roster ranges from New York painters like the emerging Samuel Jablon and the veteran Rochelle Feinstein to 40-something Angeleno Amy Bessone, who contributes ceramics and paintings, to, in a nod to the artists’ forebears, a video by the late artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Whitehot Magazine on NSFW: Female Gaze, an all female-identifying group show at the Museum of Sex, co-curated by Marina Garcia-Vasquez, Editor-in-Chief of Creators at VICE Media and Lissa Rivera, Associate Curator of the Museum of Sex​

To celebrate the first day of summer, artnet News has sought out the best in public art in view across the city this year, with works in all five boroughs to get out and enjoy.

Artsy asked 18 of their favorites to help compile an eclectic, artsy summer reading list, which includes everything from nature guides to Toni Morrison, Playboy, and a history of psychedelics.

 Robert Hodge and Tierney Malone present a collaborative exhibit exploring the resistance to slavery and the lasting effects on black culture in Houston.

BULLETT caught up with Sam Jablon to discuss art, poetry, politics, and the joys of binge-watching something mindless after a long day of fighting the demons that be.

"Robert Hodge may best be described as a keeper of history—American history, urban history, black history, the experience of black people in America . . ."

The opening will feature readings by poets Jeremy Sigler, Todd Colby, and Marine Cornuet.

The title of the mural is adapted from lyrics of the legendary East Village band, The Fugs. Their song, titled “Exorcising the White House” ends with the chant “Out, Demons, Out”. We face a presidential administration utterly lacking in humanity, it is time to take them down and throw them out.

Opening Reception: Friday May 26th, 7-10pm. On view May 27th and 28th, 10am – 6pm at Park Place Gallery - 661 Park Place Brooklyn, NY. 

Participating Artists: Rachelle Agundes, Tess Bilhartz, Ryan DaWalt, Grady Gerbracht, Dan Gratz, Michael Holden, Zachary Keeting, Chung Park, Chris Schade

“THE TYRANNY OF COMMON SENSE HAS REACHED ITS FINAL STAGE” at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University

"Artpace Spring Artist-in-Residence Exhibition" by Neil Fauerso

"Digging into the History of Cake at Mrs. Gallery", written by Benjamin Sutton

Featuring the work of Jessica Stoller, Nicole Gugliotti, Rebecca Goyette, and author Dani Sigler, "Rock-Hard Feminism" hones in on the rise of female ceramists and their relation to Fourth Wave Feminism, which Sigler describes as focusing on "technology, a strong online presence, sexuality, body -and sex- positivity, and the self as subject". The article showcases Goyette's Horsies and Butterflies Bride as one of many examples of the artist's use of clay as her mode of commentary in her Bride series, based on female-oppressive marriages carrying sexual and childbearing 'obligations'. Goyette undoubtedly fits into this Fourth Wave Feminism with her "blunt" and unapologetic imagery. 

Artwork pictured: Horsies and Butterflies Bride, hand-built ceramic sculpture with silicone dildo insert, 19" x 8" x 8", 2008.

The Review Panel at the Brooklyn Public Library will discuss Jennifer Coates' exhibition All U Can Eat on April 4th. The Review Panel, organized by artcritical.com, now in its eleventh year and its second season in Brooklyn, is a monthly critics' forum in which moderator David Cohen is joined by three other critics for a live discussion, with an audience, of selected current exhibitions of contemporary art in New York City. The event is recorded for later podcast. 
All U Can Eat is on view at Freight+Volume through April 16th.

Jennifer Coates talks to Jennifer Samet of Hyperallergic about her paintings in All U Can Eat, on view at Freight+Volume March 4th to April 16th, 2017.

Samuel Jablon discusses the generosity and vulnerability of Mike Cloud's paintings. 

Alec Egan would like to invite you to "Welcome Home", a solo exhibition of his work at the California Heritage Museum, opening on March 17th until May 21st. He is also pleased to announce the publication of a book of his work by Ampersand Gallery and Fine Books that debuted last week at the LA Art Book Fair.

Opening Reception: Friday March 17th, 2017, 6:30-10:00pm @ The California Heritage Museum - 2612 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Hosted by The Victorian & Calamigos Ranch. 

Reviewed by Seph Rodney

James Kalm has reported on the work of den Breejen for several years and brings viewers this walking interview with the artist as a recap of his latest body of work. With “Song of the Earth” den Breejen has shifted the focus of his text based paintings from images of Rock-n-Rollers and celebrity bad actors, to more abstract color and poetry based near abstractions. Melding ideas from color theory and Concrete poetry, these pieces probe and disrupt the standard notions of textual structure and syntax, bringing elements like font scale, color intervals and directional layout into play. He thus requires the viewer to rethink their learned habits of reading and deriving “meaning” from words. This program was recorded November 20, 2016.

Sophia Narrett is turning a traditional craft on its head, stitching escapist narratives into expertly layered works of art.

Since the very beginning of election season, the political art scene has been alight with anger directed almost entirely at Donald Trump. The latest group of artists to oppose Trump have gathered in an exhibition not so subtly titled “Why I Want To Fuck Donald Trump.” 

D/railed Magazine spoke with Sophia Narrett in an exclusive interview about her unique choice of medium and the inventive narratives that arise throughout her work. 

From a sex scene outside a local bank to a sleazy round of golf in a finished basement to a shrine to Entourage’s Ari Gold with a nearby copy of Aziz Ansari’s book Modern Romance, Brooklyn-based artist Sophia Narrett combines the surreal and abject with popular culture and the everyday.

In radical wall-mounted textiles Narrett challenges the aged associations between embroidery and femininity, filling her works with distinctly contemporary, psychologically charged scenarios. 

The Artist Studios host artists and designers daily as they produce their work in a live studio environment. Visitors to MAD meet working artists who openly welcome questions and dialogue, and discuss their processes, materials, and concepts with diverse members of the public. This program serves as an innovative model of interactivity and engagement that benefits local artists and Museum visitors through observation, making, and discussion of creative processes. Come visit Sophia Narrett at MAD every Wednesday from 10 am - 5 pm until January 27th, 2017. 

One could describe Sophia Narrett’s fantastical, semi-narrative embroideries as “painterly” were it not for their refusal to stay in one figurative plane. Fruit-bearing vines spill out from surreal vignettes, threads dangle down, and negative space such as a window in an interior might open to reveal the bare wall behind it. The press release speaks of “hedonism” and “escapism”, and it’s easy to apply those concepts here in more than one way—Narret’s work is an immersive feast for the viewer’s eyes, but must also be an all-consuming passion for the artist’s hands. It’s easy to imagine the artist losing herself to process for hours upon hours in the construction of a single piece.

Sam Jablon writes his paintings. They begin with a deceptively simple group of words. Through the process of editing, the painting is built up in multiple layers of acrylic. Letters are pushed to the foreground, some bedazzled with jewels or shards of mirror; others are erased, but their trace remains. The poem-paintings are extremely physical, often completely covered over, or sanded down, or built up thickly. They’re painted fast, but take a long time to resolve themselves in the studio.

Arte Fuse interviews Freight+Volume artist Samuel Jablon on the occasion of his solo show "Over Heard" at Diane Rosenstein in Los Angeles, up until October 15th, 2016. 

Tequila & Denim recently caught up with up and coming artist Sophia Narrett in her Bushwick studio to talk embroidery, eroticism, and the power of melodrama.

It seems that artist Rebecca Goyette made some weird and bizarre porns during these years. At the very beginning, the “Lobsta Girl” series would be some kind of great hits: Artist Rebecca wears a special lobster costume she made, performing a sexy tease by taking the “shell” off, or having a sex party with some “male lobsters”. The series’ idea was inspired by the shocking sex position that nature lobsters always take:

By Jennifer Wolf 

At once crude yet intelligent, entertaining yet political, Rebecca Goyette’s summer exhibition at Freight + Volume, Ghost Bitch U.S.A.,takes a pornographic poke at our social mores. Conceived in part as a tribute to her ancestor Rebecca Nurse, who was convicted and hanged as a witch in Salem, Goyette constructs the character Ghost Bitch that populates the videos, paintings, drawings and sculptures in the exhibition.

When I first saw Degas’s Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source” I felt like I was experiencing the actual ballet as an audience member might have, accessing the elusive suspension of disbelief that allows viewers to get swept up in the narrative experience. Theatrical bracketing has always interested me. The title tells us that the figures are on stage, and this location alone suggests that any action that might take place could be scripted. Yet the set design for “La Source” actually incorporated a live horse and pools of water, so in some ways the image maintains a realistic spirit, and might be a depiction of a pause in rehearsal, as Eugénie Fiocre’s cast off ballet slippers hint.

Freight+Volume, Arts+Leisure and the Bowery Poetry Club will host the closing reception and book launch of Samuel Jablon's exhibition, Life is Fine. Bob Holman will host a poetry reading featuring Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Raphael Rubinstein, Vincent Katz, Todd Colby and Jeffrey Grunthaner. Jablon's Poet Sculpture will be the platform the performers engage with. 

This event is free and open to the public. 

Image: Life is Fine, Freight+Volume (97 Allen Street). On view through May 15th, 2016.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Grunthaner

According to Edith Newhall, "the presence of Lipke... that makes this show the quirky delight it is"

As a part of the group show "Repeater" with Mark Brosseau and Lee Arnold at Tiger Strikes Asteriod in Philadelphia

Leah Ollman describes Johnson's exhibition at Young Projects as "magnetically compelling"

3-person photography show located in the F+V viewing room will coincide with AIPAD, running Wednesday April 13th - Sunday April 24th. Light food and refreshments will be served on Sunday, April 17th from 12-6 pm. The artists will be present.

Sophia Narrett discusses her work with embroidery and what drew her to the medium after her foundation in painting.

Interviewed by artist Rashawn Griffin, Samuel Jablon discusses the language of his work and the ways he combines poetry and painting in his practice. 

Profiled by Ed Winstead in a studio visit, Samuel Jablon discusses the process behind his new exhibition, Life is Fine

In an interveiw with Adam Henry, Samuel Jablon discusses his painting process, his poetry, and how the two converge in his current artistic practice.

Conversation captured by Zach Keeting, Meg Lipke discusses her artistic practices for her works. 

Interviewed by Leah Constantine, Meg Lipke discusess growing up in the arts and the evolution of her practice from two- to three-dimensional works.

Sophia Narrett discusses her practice, her studio, and life as an aritst in New York with [Silence Is Accurate]

In a talk with artist Hayley McCulloch, Richard Butler discusses his artistic practice.

Blouin Art Info released slideshow recaps of all the art fairs during Armory week and featured George Jenne's Invisdus Vermem One as a highlight of Moving Image New York 2016.

Meg Lipke was visited in studio by Maria Calandra, who draws artists as she interviews them.

Little Star is a journal of poetry and prose founded in 2009 by Ann Kjellberg and Melissa Green.

Three paintings by Richard Butler, whenisaidilovedyouilied (2012), thelastaugeriesofjuanitadelacruz (2013), and naturalhistory (2014) were published in Harvard Review 48. 

In 2015 New American Paintings' jurors reviewed the work of more than 20,000 individual works of art by over 5000 artists. Their jurors had the impossible task of selecting the 240 artists to be featured in the 6 issues of New American Paintings. Of those artists, twelve (two from each issue) were distinguished as being “Noteworthy,” by the juror and their editorial staff. Readers then voted to select the best of the best.

Samuel Jablon mixes poetry and painting fluidly. His work challenges the viewer to step closer and dig deeper. Spending time observing the intricacies of his paintings, one realizes that they are far more than just words. Samuel sat down with us to talk about upcoming projects, his performance pieces and the themes that drive him forward.

Conceived and created by artist Samuel Jablon, The Poet Sculpture is an installation and moveable platform comprised of soapboxes of various sizes. Each individual box is designed for an influential poet, and the formation and words of poets are then configured during each performance to define the sculpture. The Poet Sculpture is continually in flux as poets physically interact in real time with the structure to create and manipulate a three-dimensional visual poem while performing their own language based works.

In a paradisiacal world, Sophia Narrett would play with dolls all day.

“I had this doll house that my dad and brother made me,” Narrett recalls of the wooden structure in her hometown of Ellicott City, Md. “I made tons of things to go in it … and I was always acting out narratives between the dolls.”

She was 8 years old.

"Many artists are inspired by the world they inhabit, and the current exhibition, 'Environmental Impact: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation,' showcases some artistic views of a changing environment."

"Originality in concept and medium is at times difficult for artists to achieve. Sophia Narrett has developed a style and body of work that is distinctly moving, and completely her own."

"Notable works in this series include Dawn, featuring two wooden boards covered in white acrylic and gesso, and Ohio Living Rooms With Trees featuring a zigzag pattern of tree branches and leaves." 

Freight + Volume is excited to participate in Salon Zürcher in Paris taking place from October 19-25, 2015. The gallery will exhibit works by Samuel Jablon, Michael Scoggins, Sophia Narrett and Cristina de Miguel. 

For more information please click here

Stranded in a House, 2013, presents a simple narrative of a male figure moving through a series of rooms. Johnson uses the pages of furniture catalogs to represent domestic interiors. On these pages, he paints the figure moving through each room and onto the next. The man-figure is loosely rendered in wet paint which helps spread an idea of continuous motion. Sometimes he is replicated with each forward step until occupying the whole room, while at other times he leaves behind an unctuous cloud of wiped-away paint. The figure’s cyclical motion and fluid physical shape create an increasing sense of existential anxiety that is thematically underscored by the film’s title borrowed from a line in Bob Dylan’s 1967 song, The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest—a song that in its closing phrases also includes the line; “one should never be where one does not belong.”

Moving Image was conceived to offer a viewing experience with the excitement and vitality of a fair, while allowing moving image-based artworks to be understood and appreciated on their own terms. Participation is by invitation only. 

For more information please click here

The Seattle Art Fair showcases the vibrant culture and diversity of the Pacific Northwest by building on the region’s existing momentum to create a truly unique, innovative art event that further establishes Seattle as an influential player in the global art landscape.

Freight + Volume is pleased to announce its participation in the inaugural Seattle Art Fair.

The Seattle Art Fair will showcase the vibrant culture and diversity of the Pacific Northwest by building on the region’s existing momentum to create a truly unique, innovative art event that will further establish Seattle as an influential player in the global art landscape.

Booth 505

July 30 - August 2, 2015

Location:
Century Link Field Event Center

 

Too often, critics argue right off the bat with a work of art, as though it were a political campaign statement, when it would be more profitable, not to say enjoyable, to relax and let it wash over them. 

See BroLab at Baltimore's free art festival, Artscape, this July. Check back for more details.

BroLab will be showing in Home Improvement on Rock Street.

"Mi Ju is a master of visualizing the smallest inhabitants of the largest worlds. It has taken her nearly two years to produce all the paintings and drawings for her new show, “Nest,” which runs through May 16 at Freight + Volume Gallery in Chelsea. But that’s an impressively short amount of time considering just how meticulously detailed her pieces are. Look closely, and you’ll discover an entire ecosystem in a square inch."

 

"Mi Ju went out West. She ate a tangerine one night, and the fruit dribbled all over her dreams, which were suddenly sweet and orange - tinted and bizarre. Later, in her Long Island City studio, a painting was born from this citrus - soaked fantasia, one aptly titled I Dreamt a Big Cat After Seeing a Tangerine."

Waterfront New York Tunnel
269 11th Avenue
Between 27th and 28th Streets

Moving Image

Freight + Volume is pleased to present Cristina de MIguel's Extraños en la noche intercambiando miradas: 8 Recent GIFs.

Opening reception: 
Thursday, March 5,  6-8pm 

Daily Hours:
Thursday March 5 – Saturday March 7, 11am – 8pm
Sunday, March 8, 2015: 11am – 4pm

Freight+Volume will be at Booth 213 at the Art On Paper fair.

We will be featuring Michael Scoggins' paper plane pieces, Dogfight, along with other works by: Joshua Abelow, Donald Baechler, Cristina de Miguel, Peter Hutchinson, Mi Ju, Peik Larsen and Jeffery Shagawat.

Hyperallergic mentions Art On Paper fair in their "Concise Guide to Armory Week 2015".

The Poet Sculpture is a performance based sculpture that is performed by poets. It was conceived and created by artist Samuel Jablon.

On March 2nd the Bowery Poetry Club will host a performance of the Poet Sculpture to raise funds for a new book filled with the poetry from and performance photographs of the poets who have performed on the sculpture.

Poets:
Sam Jablon
Nikhil Melnechuk
Steve Dalachinsky
Yuko Otomo 
Amiee Herman
Homa Zarghamee

Tickets: $10 online advance / $15 at the door

Curator Alejandro Jassan is proud to present Material Transaction, a curatorial project on view at SPRING/BREAK Art Show. The works in the show feature artworks that reveal the process behind the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning, and moreover the initiation of actions and proceedings. Material Transaction will present works in a variety of media by Christopher Beckman, Christian Berman, Samuel Jablon, Christian Maychak, and Anne Vieux.

Scott Indrisek selected "Down the Rabbit Hole" as one of his 5 Must-See Gallery Shows 

"The Freight + Volume gallery in Chelsea is currently presenting a collection of new works by Margaux Ogden for the exhibition Down the Rabbit Hole. For her first show at the gallery, Ogden unveils some rather imaginative drawings and paintings where she is not bounded by rules or convention. The title of the show references the alternate universe that Alice, the heroine in Lewis Carroll’s classic novel Through the Looking Glass, enters into where she encounters new and unusual creatures and characters."

"Talking Heads: Erik den Breejen’s Paintings Speak Volumes"

New York-based alumnus Erik den Breejen’s (BFA Painting 1999) paintings from afar read as simple pop art portraiture, but from up close they acquire another dimension entirely.

Lecture Series part of the Critical Dialogues Seres. 

Location: Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Tyler Auditorium- B004

Vampires must never live alone. And in New York they don’t. A visible river of imagination, inspiration and vision has long coursed through our city, sustaining, feeding, and feeding off of artists. Artists staying up late together, working alone, in groups, or away from prying eyes. All living interior lives in our midst. From the earliest days of America to today New York has been an extraordinary creative estuary where tens of thousands of artists have lived and worked, struggled and made art here. Some of them are known, most are not. No matter - all had lives lived in art. I often think that we ought to honor our artists by placing plaques on the buildings in which they lived or worked or gathered. These would be silent witnesses to something epic, a creative miracle of almost never ending talent happening all around us all the time. With the amazing database of painter-mapmaker extraordinaire Loren Munk we pay a little tribute to a small number of them here.

New Jersey-born Shagawat lives and works in New York City. He attended The New School, where he developed an eye for portraiture and urban landscapes. Using vintage cameras, hand-printed processing and film, Shagawat eschews digital manipulation in favor of the traditional analog approach. His work has been displayed in galleries across the U.S. and abroad including Anna Kustera and Freight+Volume in Chelsea; 116 Suffolk in LES, the Parallax Art Fair in the Flatiron, the Salmagundi Club in the West Village; the Scott Eder Gallery in DUMBO ; Produce in Phoenix ; Dream Space Gallery in London ; and Cafe Diskaire Gallery in Lille, France. In Los Angeles, he has shown at Unitard, 72 Degrees & Sunny, UCLA Med School, Melt Down Gallery, and Eat Your Art Out III & IV.

F+V will be at Miami Project with works by the follwing artist.

Katherine Bradford, Richard Butler, Erik den Breejen, Joshua Dildine, Alejandro Guzman, Peter Hutchinson, Samuel Jablon, Mi Ju, Cristina de Miguel, Greg Miller, Loren Munk, Römer + Römer, Tom Sanford, Michael Scoggins, Andrew Smenos, Damian Stamer and Peter Wilde.

"Words become visceral things in the mosaics of Samuel Jablon, who creates beautifully messy concrete poetry by affixing bits of mirror, fused glass, precious metals, and semiprecious stones to painted wood panels. Certainly, there was a crafty folksiness to the pieces in this show “Word:Play,” but that didn’t make them any less cerebral."

Very few of us would reveal our shameful memories or hidden issues to the public, but artist Michael Scoggins isn’t afraid of putting his inner self on display. A new show atFreight + Volume, “if you can’t say something nice...,” captures Scoggins’ confessional sculptures, which are realized as chalkboards or over-sized pages torn out of a journal.

"Samuel Jablon's wonderful paintings indicate a worldview both joyful and anxious."

In this way, the erotics of the art object become Johnson’s subject. In the gallery’s back room he presents a seemingly ludicrous comparison: “Ser” (2011), a tiny painting of two flamboyantly fleshy hands stretching Saran wrap, and “Der, Die, Das” (2014), three enormous sponges made of Polystyrene, resin, bondo, enamel that could be props for a children’s show. The Saran wrap, erotic and tactile, is reminiscent of translucent skin, yet the materiality upon which Johnson insists renders what should disappear into something concrete. Paint becomes flesh and vice versa, begetting a corporeal layering that imbues the canvas with a life of its own.

"JJ Manford and Max Razdow each practice a lush, expansive, almost hallucinatory kind of picture-making; exhibited together, their distinct but mutually resonant bodies of work suggest that visionary pictoriality has returned to the vocabulary of younger painters (and draughtspeople). This new visionary art not only accepts but goes beyond the illustrative macabre of Pop Surrealism, allowing for both naïve figuration and neo-art nouveau, painterly abstraction and psychedelic bedazzlement. Manford and Razdow have developed highly sophisticated, extremely aware and even syncretic styles, but have determined those styles specifically to serve the description of ecstatic, impossible conditions."

Freight + Volume is proud to have artists Erik den Breejen, Sam Jablon, and Michael Scoggins exhibiting in a new exhibition at the Children's Museum of Art, Drawn to Language.

"In Drawn to Language, words are given visual form. Letters, words, or phrases are transcribed, visualized, verbalized, symbolized, morphed into patterns, scrambled, or even erased. While the works in the exhibition vary conceptually – from amusing to political to philosophical – each work is defined by its use of words to create an image, a deeper meaning, or both."

Armed with sticks of white chalk, an eraser and the requisite chalkboard, Brooklyn-based artist Michael Scoggins has created a new work for Miami entitled Chalk as part of the Bass Museum of Art’s tc: temporary contemporary program in Walgreens’ windows at 2300 Collins Avenue.

Jablon's art quite literally incorporates the phrasal aspects of poetry—at times using quotes from canonical writers, such as Frank O'Hara or Samuel Beckett—without conceding to the "on the page" linearity that written language tends to follow. It's as though absorption in the spectacle of language become hyper-graphic has created a new prospect of poetic textuality—words can now inhabit the space intuited by the body as distinguished from the representational space reserved for works on canvas. Following a recent studio visit, I decided to ask Jablon about how his practice has developed, the insights guiding it, and the relationship between language and art.

When you walk into Samuel Jablon’s debut solo exhibition at Freight + Volume, the first thing you notice is the surprising physicality of the work. Maybe it’s memories of Christopher Wool’s thin, nearly monochromatic retrospective last fall, but generally when I think of text, I think flat and uniform. Jablon’s work is quite the opposite: they are big, bright, sensously labored three-dimensional objects that exude an authentic joy of process and heterogeneous thought.

A series by artist and writer Jacquelyn Gleisner, “Styx & Stones” is a monthly column that features short, experimental interviews with visual artists of all backgrounds.

Each interview highlights the relationship between music, artists, and the creative process. Posts the second Tuesday of each month. 

Text based art practice is not an easy endeavor, albeit a noble pursuit within our hyper-visual, daily lives. Artists attempting these methods find out quickly how vast the shadow cast by Holzer, Ruscha, Nauman, Kruger et al can be. With such a strong tradition, creativity of presentation as well as impeccable text selection are paramount. This is where Samuel Jablon excels. The title of his first solo exhibition at Chelsea’s Freight + Volume Gallery, Word:Playsums up nicely the tone of these paintings as both a visually playful and structurally complicated group.... 

September 2: Andrew Ginzel's list of NYC shows and events

"Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway gets crossed, causing you to smell a word or hear a color. Word:Play, a new body of work by Samuel Jablon isn’t exactly poetry, painting or sculpture: it is a crossing of senses that opens a new way of seeing.  Now on view at Freight+Volume in Chelsea, this exhibition presents a very strong collection of paintings of all sizes, colors, and textures."

“It’s the art of language, rather than the language of art, that surfaces in the visual phrases of artist, poet, and performer Samuel Jablon. Hybrids of poetry, painting, and sculpture, Jablon’s works are crafted from found materials and texts, created from vibrant swathes of paint, sequins, mirrors, and tiles. This fall, Chelsea gallery Freight + Volume welcomes Jablon’s mixed-media poetry in a new solo exhibition titled “Word:Play.”

F+V represented artist Loren Munk is Bant Magazine's May 2014 cover story. Included is an interview with the artist himself entitled, Logistics of Art: Loren Munk

View the interview here.

Readings by Anthony Haden-Guest will be conducted at Cutlog Contemporary Art Fair, from May 8th-11th, presented by Whitebox Art Center.

Details here.

The Creators Project features Römer + Römer on their blog.

"But what are they really? Are they pixelated digital photos? Could they be photos processed to look like pixelated art? Or, better yet, are they digital photographs of digital art then passed off as digital art?"

See what else The Creators Project's Bogar Alonso has to say.

According2g is a blog dedicated to showcasing the latest in music and art.
"Everything you need to know from A to G and beyond."

Check out what Geoffrey Dicker said about Party-Löwe

Powered by Artspace, Bomb Magazine's Silent Auction is currently live for advance bids. Check out the artists and their works, which includes F+V represented artist, Sam Jablon.

View the auction here.

The Italian online magazine promotes Römer+Römer's latest show in NYC here at F+V.

Check it out

Freight + Volume's upcoming exhibition of RÖMER+RÖMER: Party-Löwe was featured on the Wall Street International

Read Full Article

F+V represented artist, Damian Stamer, travels to Berlin to the Galerie Michael Schultz for his upcoming show on March 1st till April 5th.

Check out the exhibit here.

Hybrid Dynamics
Saturday, January 25, 2014 4:30 – 6:00 pm

Freight + Volume is excited to present a discussion panel featuring Tim Rollins as moderator, with members of KOS, William Powhida, and BroLab. Organized for BroLab's solo exhibition, Dead Lift, this conversation is part of the ongoing panel discussions associated with the malleable installation, Moses Transpo, which first premiered at Untitled, Miami Beach in 2013. This panel will focus on themes surrounding models of sustainable collaboration, the art of community engagement and the dynamic design found in socially engaged art.

To be followed by a Q&A.

Black Lake, made up of artists Susan Jennings and Slink Moss, are launching a new album this Spring with production assistance by SEEK-ART. Stay tuned for further release details and events hosted by Freight + Volume.

Read more.

"Peter is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2005, he graduated with an MFA from Hunter College. He’s exhibited in Ireland, Germany and throughout the US. In 2008 he was one of our first residency artists, and has remained a close friend.."

View full article.

Michael Scoggins solo show "ART STAR" exhibited by Guest Spot at The Reinstitute in Baltimore, Maryland on view from January 10, 2014 to February 15, 2014.

Read more.

See Article Here!

The Undergrowth Podcast Episode 26 featuring Rebecca Goyette discussing "Masshole Love," on view at Freight and Volume until November 16, 2013.


Read Article & Listen to full Podcast here.

"For paintings that employ such dark and mossy palettes, transporting viewers literally to dark holes in forgotten forests inhabited by the society’s outliers, Dorn’s landscapes manage to be strangely inviting..."

Read more here.

"Dorn further explores a distinctly haunting wooded world and its unsettled inhabitants. With a nod to horror movies, hippie counterculture, and the rural Southern landscape of his youth, Dorn’s distinct landscape paintings are not as concerned with an idyllic representation of nature..."

See full article here.

Three articles featured in ArtLoversNewYork by Nancy Smith. Read full articles below.

"The Decline and Fall of the Art World/ F+V"

"The Decline and Fall, Part II... The Exhibit"

"a little more Laurina Paperina please"

Freight+Volume at Texas Contemporary 2013, October 10th - 13th in Houston, TX.

Please visit Booth #207!

View more pictures.

"As the sequel to one of this summer's most highly praised and critically received exhibitions, The Decline and Fall of the Art World, Part II presents works by a younger generation of artists. This group of recent art school grads share a similar innocence and naivety along with a "slacker" nonchalance and de-skilled aesthetic. Featuring works by: Damien Crisp, Cristina de Miguel, Noah Lyon and Laurina Paperina."

See full video here.

"Do not miss two terrific group shows that have little more than a week to go.

Yes, Rowan University is a hike from the usual urban art enclaves, but Dialogic, an engrossing and thoroughly entertaining show of 17 artists who explore language and its hidden, implicit, and contradictory meanings, is well worth your time and the bridge toll. There are more than a few internationally known artists here - Lesley Dill, Erik Den Breejen, Barbara Hashimoto, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, and Jaume Plensa among them - and some local talent as well (Keith Brand, Buy Shaver, Chris Vecchio, Susan White)..."

See full article here.

"This morning we take a look at the work of South Korean-born artist Mi Ju. Mi received her BFA in painting at and later went on to earn and MFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.."

See full article here.

Freight + Volume at Berliner-Liste 2013, September 19th - 22nd. Berlin, Germany.

Please visit Booth #G 0.32!

View more pictures.

"The Decline and Fall of the Artworld Part II: The Other 99%" with paintings and media by Cristina de Miguel, Damien Crisp, Noah Lyon, and Laurina Paperina.

Check out the show anytime from 9/12/13-10/12/13!

See the full article here.

Please come visit us at Booth # G 0.32 from September 19th - 22nd!

"The nature Kent Dorn paints would make the Hudson River School turn over in their collective graves. Dorn gives us forests, clearings and ponds tainted by human occupation–the wandering dirt bag stoner variety..."

View full article here.

"With The Decline and Fall of the Art World, Part I: The One-Percenters, Freight + Volume assembles several subversive gestures that expose the various dysfunctions and inequalities of contemporary art production. Michael Scoggins produces oversized replicas of ruled notebook paper bearing incendiary messages that mock the collector’s impulse and the value system that supports it..."

Read full article here.

See Full list here.

"As the values of the contemporary art elite veer ever farther toward commerce, art with a social justice conscience is rallying in New York—arguably the center of the global art market. This summer, three prominent artists known for their political consciences have been drawing attention for thoughtful, research-heavy projects..."

Read article here.

Read full article here.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend are back with a satirical drawing of a lurid battleground where artists, posers, critics, dragons, Internet trolls, and Modernist ghosts fight for their lives

View Here

"Just as every New Yorker has a love-hate relationship with the Big Apple in lieu of its ridiculous rents to its steamy summer subways, every participant in the art world has a similar love-hate relationship with the current incarnation of the art world..."

See full article here.

View Here

The standout part of the show is the map paintings by Loren Munk, and the best of the best is The East Village, a large-scale love note to the distant eighties scene. It is jam-packed, to the point of being dizzying, and an incredible historical document of this time of parallel universes.

See the full article here

"In case you hadn't noticed, the art world is not perfect. This six-person show takes a lighthearted look at the baleful effects of big money on bohemian neighborhoods and the camaraderie they once fostered..."

See the full guide here.

"In Loren Munk’s painting “An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg, 1981-2008” (2008-2011), now on view at Freight + Volume in Chelsea, I recognized a slice of my own history in a place I had known well. After a lifetime of looking at paintings, this experience was oddly new to me."

View article here

"This group show takes as its muse, quite clearly, not the art world, but the Art World, and in doing so it might be aimed at reaffirming the validity of variably understood lower cases. Or maybe not..."

See the article here.

Click here to see the full article.

We are pleased to announce our participation at artMRKT Hamptons 2013.

Please visit our booth (#106) at the fair!

Erik den Breejen paints FASHIONHEROESBOWIE on Rag & Bone's Houston Wall in Soho, located on the corner of Elizabeth St. and E Houston St.

See the in-progress photos on our Facebook page.

To see Global Graphica's coverage, click here.

And for another great shot of the mural, click here.

"Erik den Breejen, the guy who paints images of musicians using lyrics from their songs, presented three small studies on canvas along with some larger work @ St Nicholas Studios."

For more Bushwick Open Studios pictures, click here.

Pictures from the opening of Peter Hutchinson: The Logic of Mountains
1963-2013: A 50-Year Survey of Constructions, Collages, Books and Film...

See the pictures here.

In 1989 Dora Koch, the widow of Academy member John Koch (1908-1978), left the Academy a bequest to establish an award in art to be given from time to time to a young artist of figurative work.

Check out the article here

"MIE: A Portrait by 35 Artists," on view through Feb. 25 at Freight + Volume gallery in Chelsea, is one of the more unusual group surveys of the new season, and casts a fresh light on the venerable theme of artist and model. The show includes a few star artists (Alex Katz, Robert Frank), many who have stirred recent critical interest (Ryan Schneider, Kurt Kauper, Andrew Guenther, David Humphrey), one pop-cult figure (Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky) and several participants who, well-known abroad, are emerging in the West (Lin Yilin, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Qi Zhilong). Even more striking is the curatorial approach. The exhibition was co-organized by gallery owner Nick Lawrence with the portrait subject herself—Mie Iwatsuki, a Japanese-born model and independent curator who has lived in New York since 1999.

Check out the article here

この展覧会は35人の世界中から集まった巨匠や新進気鋭のアーティストたちが、それぞれバラエティーに富んだ表現方法で、共通のモデルを対象にポートレートを制作するという画期的な試みだ。全アーティストのモデルを務めた「MIE」（岩月美江さん）は、モデルとしての「第３の観点」から、フルカラーの展覧会カタログに、それぞれのアーティストとのポートレート・セッションでの体験を「モデルの声」として緻密な文章で記述している。

　This exhibition is a groundbreaking attempt masters and emerging artists from around the world of 35 people, in a way that a wide variety of expression, respectively, to produce a portrait that target the common model. Served as a model of all the artists "MIE" (Mr. Mie Iwatsuki), from the model as a "third perspective", in full color exhibition catalog, the experience in portrait session with each artist " has been described in the text dense as the "Voice of the model.

Check out the article here

Perhaps no one was more excited by the long-awaited release of the Beach Boys’ unfinished 1966 album Smile than Erik den Breejen. Even before Smile came out late last year, the young painter (and lifelong Beach Boys fan) had set to work on a series of paintings that transformed the lyrics into brightly colored text-blocks, assembled into shapes of ocean waves and smiling lips.

Check out the article here

Having posed for some 10 paintings by Alex Katz, Mie Iwatsuki—a Japanese model and independent curator based in New York—collaborated with dealer Nick Lawrence to solicit portraits of her by an additional 34 artists, ranging from Robert Frank to DJ Spooky, from New York's David Humphrey to China's Lin Yilin and Korea's Min Hyung (who, in one of the show's most imaginative leaps, depicts Itwatsuki as a male Maasai warrior in Kenya).

Check out the article here

The Freight + Volume Gallery in Chelsea is currently featuring an exhibition titled Mie: A Portrait of 35 Artists curated by Nick Lawrence and Mie Iwatsuki. As the title suggests, the show is comprised of a series of portraits, by 35 rising contemporary artists, of Mie Iwatsuki who is regarded as a muse and model in contemporary art. The participating artists work in mediums such as painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and performance art.

Check out the article here

Japanese model Mie Iwatsuki has inspired painter Alex Katz, photographer Robert Frank and Nouriel Roubini, aka “Dr. Doom.”
On the artistic side, the results can be seen at Freight + Volume gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan. “Mie: A Portrait by 35 Artists” includes paintings, sculpture, drawings and video.

Check out the article here

Two decades ago I had dinner in Williamsburg, Va., with a business colleague and close friend of my father’s named Wilkinson, who had devoted much of his intellectual life to trying to solve the origins and purpose of Stonehenge...

Read the full article here

As painting lost prestige in the ’60s, a cult of Orpheus emerged to become a formidable influence on visual art. Since then artists from Laurie Anderson to Christian Marclay and beyond have been worshiping at the church of music, rock ’n’ roll in particular...

Read the full article here

"James Kalm never surfed in California, never drove a "Little Deuce Coupe" and never dated a surfer girl, but these images, created by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, provided a beautiful fantasy sound track for a big chunk of his adolescence. Eric den Breejen also came under the sway of this West Coast band, and has spent the last year or two making painting in homage to "Smile" Brian Wilson's legendary unreleased album. Using blocks of text and color shifts, the paintings exist somewhere between a song script and a blown up Pop Art cartoon. The works might be a manifestation of the idiom "one picture is worth a thousand words" or conversely "words are worth a thousand pictures", especially if the harmony is good."

See the video here

Read the full article here

"Pop music is a source of inspiration for den Breejen that is both primal and spiritual, though his relationship to the music he works from is ambiguous at times. Den Breejen, a musician in his own right (currently the lead singer of Big Game), uses musical experience as the subject of much of his painting, but the lyrics are the only element he appropriates. The colors, shapes, textures, and size are completely his own."

Read the full article here

Read the article here

http://vernissage.tv/blog/2011/10/03/pulse-los-angeles-art-fair/

Pulse Art Fair, too, has made it to Los Angeles. The fair has pitched its tent on the deck of a car park not far from Art Platform. The fair is dedicated solely to contemporary art. It is devided into two sections. The IMPULSE section presents galleries invited by a committee to present solo exhibitions of exhibitions of artist’s work created in the past two years. There are also large-scale installations, a video lounge, performance events, and talks. This video takes you an a tour on the opening evening on September 30, 2011.

Pictures of Andrew Guenther's Talking to a Fish and Paraphernalia Opening Reception.

See the Pictures here

"As a multi-media artist Andrew Guenther defies quick categorization. To experience his art is to embrace a combination of experiences and visual sensations simultaneously: spiritually, physically, conceptually. He trips the light fantastic between a variety of media with ease, and his new exhibition "Talking To A Fish and Paraphernalia" @ F+V is no exception."

See the article here

“like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.” – RALPH ELLISON (Invisible Man).

See more here

"Talking to a Fish and Paraphernalia. The central motif in Guenther's installation is an aquarium with a "talking fish" - a microphone immersed in the water broadcasts any communication the fish may emit during the course of the show. In addition he presents a series of new mixed-media, papier-mache on canvas collages featuring his trademark "plate-face" women and hotdog men."

See the article here

"Two Cassandras in separate but complementary shows decry our addictions to oil, drugs and competition. Mr. Critchley has mummified, Egyptian-style, a whole ’70s-era sports car using plastic bags instead of fabric as wrapping. Mr. Person offers faux folk signs that say things like “Resign” and “Accept Less,” as well as a depressed-looking inflatable representing the cartoon character Underdog."

See the article here

For the performance installation “Deep Bones,” artist Jay Critchley removed the engine of an MG sports car, and wrapped it with recycled plastic shopping bags. The hollowed out shell of the MG is parked in a state of abandon. Plastic bags hang from the ceiling. It is a solemn funeral for the planet, with the relics of recycled bags and deconstructed car chassis setting the mood.
For the second part of the installation, Critchley shows video segments from his 1988 trip to abandoned, un-built nuclear power sites and facilities in middle America. It is projected above material goods covered in motor oil. The work is on display at Freight + Volume Gallery in Manhattan through Sept. 10.

It’s not Critchley’s first mummification of a car — in the 2008 piece “Final Passage” he made a Chevy Impala into a mummy out of muslin that was installed in an abandoned Jay Critchley, mausoleum in North Burial Ground, Providence, Rhode Island. In the early ‘80s, he began to experiment with a sand car series.

"Goofball activism may be, for most, a fleeting phase of youth, but the dogged Jay Critchley has made a career out of donning odd headwear and presiding, preacher-like, over vaguely politicized rituals. Recalling his sand-encrusted cars from 30 years ago, which mocked our oil addiction, the artist has this time mummified a 1979 MG convertible—a process that involved the removal and wrapping of the automobile's "organs" and the recitation (by Critchley, wearing a leather helmet) of verses from the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

"Not to be outdone, Chad Person has designed a giant, inflatable Underdog—that canine superhero from the 1960s cartoon who always popped an energy pill for strength. Modernized, rebuking Jeff Koons kitsch, the figure slumps next to oversized meds and stares into a smartphone while, before him, a monitor reruns those long-ago rescues of Sweet Polly Purebred."

See the full review here

"The Freight + Volume Gallery in Chelsea is currently featuring a joint installation of works by artists Jay Critchley and Chad Person. Critchley’s two part installation Deep Bones features a sports car, in the main gallery area, with its parts removed and wrapped in hundreds of recycled plastic shopping bags, and placed back in the car. Right above the mummified car, there are more recycled plastic shopping bags covering the ceiling."

"Chad Person’s exhibition A Hero Never Fails revolves around themes of heroism, manifest destiny, and apathy. The primary attraction of Person’s exhibition is an inflatable balloon caricature of the 1950’s cartoon character “Underdog,” who is designed to project apathy as he sits slumped forward staring tiredly at his iPhone."

See the full article here

"Bats, along with ravens, also turn up in Max Razdow’s intricate, Rodolphe Bresdin-like ink landscapes, each of which is accompanied by a spidery poem. And the spoiled-Romantic flavor of Mr. Razdow’s work is in sync with collaborative pieces by Grant Worth and Micki Pellerano: blurry Polaroid photographs, marked with cryptic symbols of fetid-looking still lifes, all very Black Sabbath. At one point in the past I encountered drawings by Mr. Pellerano at the Live With Animals gallery in Brooklyn, and they were so odd and strong that I’ve been looking forward to seeing more, though there aren’t any here."

See the full review here

"In art as in life, desperate times call for desperate measures. That may mean mummifying an old car Egyptian style using plastic bags instead of fabric, which Jay Critchley has done as a quasi-magical ritual in the Freight + Volume gallery. He has partly dismantled a ’70s-era MG sports car, carefully wrapped its viscera — seats, engine and other parts — in strands of crumpled plastic and put it back together."

"In the rear gallery Chad Person offers a complementary solution in the form of folksy signs jig sawed from wood or collaged from pieces of United States currency. They say things like “Resign” and “Accept Less.” A giant inflated representation of the cartoon character Underdog sits irresolutely in the gallery too, while video montages show him performing frantic acts of heroism fueled by energizing vitamin pills. Two Cassandras, Mr. Critchley and Mr. Person, deplore our addictions to oil, drugs and competition. Give them credit for trying."

See the full review here

"Whether it’s Oprah or Working Girl, we’ve all been told that we can be success stories. Greed, determination, and an insatiable need to rise to the top are made to look romantic and saintly in the popular media. Gazing down pathetically at his iPhone, Chad Person’s inflatable Underdog, based on the 60s animated television show character, is the anthesis of such saintliness. The conceptual artist has taken this symbol of heroism and made him look tired and worn."

Read the full interview here

Exhibition Dates
July 9 - September 25, 2011

The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to present Syntax, an exhibition that examines the current generation of artists' interest in text, symbolism, and means of information transference. Drawn from the Hadley Martin Fisher collection in Miami, this project is the first opportunity to experience the depth of this fascinating new collection of contemporary art. More than 30 artists are featured in this exhibition, including Fiona Banner, Natalie Djurberg, Tracey Emin, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Gober, Sean Landers, Christian Marclay, Seth Price and Jason Rhoades. Matt Jones piece "Every Expression Possible" will be apart of this collection.

Matt Jones
Every Expression Possible, 2011
Alcohol-based marker, Elmer’s glue, toner and paper on wood

Click link for more information

Matt Jones’ Multiverse was a generously dense exhibition with works covering the entire gallery space including two floor-to-ceiling wall installations. Jones takes a fairly simple set of materials and through a process of contemplation and punk rock slapdash creates iconic wall pieces and propped figures. There was a video work titled Every Expression Possible (2011) that featured a masked Jones acting out many different faces and expressions against the background of a Karma Charger. As in his paintings, Jones uses repetition here to evoke a meditative calm.

See the full article here

We are pleased to announce the new institutional exhibition of Oliver Dorfer.
The artist was invited by the Museum of the City of Wiener Neustadt for a solo-exhibition at the former church St.Peter an der Sperr. Oliver Dorfer created a series of 14 paintings in dimensions of 100cm x 100cm. The paintings are made in Dorfer's unique style of reverse glass painting and as the tile "The Red Chamber" already indicates, red is the dominant color.

Migration, currently at Freight + Volume, is an intimate show with a broad title. The gallery defines the rapport between four artists as a nomadic quality that brings them to the “support and camaraderie of…large urban areas” like “New York (or London or Berlin).” And if this feels a bit too vague and general, the exhibition is minutely scaled and benefits from the attendant specificity; it doesn’t miss the mark, but it could go further.

The work is interesting less for its nomadic creators or themes – whose divergences often make cohesion difficult – than for its focus on the perceptual refractions of the physical, often-feminine and unstable body. This is especially true for the most compelling pieces on display, by Min Hyung and Eunah Kim.

See the full review here

See the video here

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present TAKE-OUT, an exhibition of works by Lucky DeBellevue, Jeremy Everett, Rachel Howe, Max Razdow, Ben Schumacher, Ramon Vega, Lyndsy Welgos, Grant Worth and Micki Pellerano, curated by Scott Hug. These artists explore formal, conceptual and metaphorical ways of removing and reconsidering the relationships between the self, the real, the virtual and the other. As each new generation grows further removed and alienated from our natural environment, this exhibition offers a response to that estrangement and to the current, prevalent culture of consumption.

See the link for more information

At the memorial service given on June 21st for Eunah Kim, I found a powerful upwelling of emotion in the talks and readings given in honor of her memory. I myself was not prepared for the deep feeling her short but exemplary life occasioned, but almost without my knowing it, she had reached me as a gifted person and sculptor. At once a practicing Buddhist (from 1998-2000 she was a nun novitiate at the Hwa Gye Sa Buddhist Temple), a devoted friend, and a committed artist, Eunah transformed her many roles into a unity that was compelling from the start and unforgettable for those who knew her. People at the service noted that Eunah passed in and out of their lives; sometimes there would be no contact for months at a time. But the joy she occasioned when she was in our presence only made us feel just how remarkable she was.

See the full article here

See the link for more information

GLASSTRESS 2011 Collateral Event
of the 54th International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia

RECEPTION: June 4
June 4- November 27, 2011


Opening in Venice on 4 June 2011 will be the second edition of Glasstress, the contemporary art exhibition in which important stars on the international scene match their talents with the use of glass. The exhibition will be held at Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti (seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti), the Berengo Centre for Contemporary Art and Glass and will include a special installation at the Wake Forest University, Casa Artom. Promoted by The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) of New York, conceived and organized by Adriano Berengo and produced by Venice Projects, Glasstress 2011 is curated by an international cadre of renowned curators, Lidewij Edelkoort, Peter Noever and Demetrio Paparoni, with a contribution of Bonnie Clearwater.


Click link for more information

This month features a special edition to the In Conversation with Kaycee Olsen series, featuring Andrew Guenther. Watch here to find out why.

Kaycee Olsen is pleased to announce Andrew Guenther: Corn, Tobacco and Other Stories, the next exhibition in her gallery at 2685 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles. The exhibition features paintings, drawings, and photographs executed over the past year. This is Guenther's first one-person exhibition at Kaycee Olsen Gallery.

See the video here

RECEPTION: June 2, 6-10 PM
June 4 - November 6, 2011

Abbazia di San Gregorio
Dorsoduro 172
30121 Venice, Italy

Click link for more information

See the full review here

Anthony Haden-Guest
In the Mean Time: The Other Ends of the World, 2010
8 x 8 inches (20.3 x 20.3 cm)
Published by Freight + Volume, NY
$20.00

New York legend and bon vivant Anthony Haden-Guest, author of The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night and True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, launches In the Mean Time: The Other Ends of the World, a book of Cartoons and Light Dark Verse, published by Freight & Volume.

Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter and cartoonist. He is also an occasional peformer and received a New York Emmy for writing and narrating a documentary about affluent Europeans in New York. He was born in Paris and lives in London and New York. He has covered war, crime and various social functions and disfunctions and continues to do so but now largely writes about the art world in newspapers, magazines and online. He still thinks he’ll get married some day. If he’s not careful.

For more information, see here

June 3 - 26, 2011

The art world experienced a caesura in the 1960s when the paradigm of the artist, working in solitary fashion, was taken apart by the advent of collaborative art. Through collaboration, the definition of what art was, and how it could be produced, shifted. No longer was the cult of the artist, producing a singular vision understood to be the only viable artistic model. Instead, this now re-evaluated model began to generate questions about authenticity, authorship,audience and methodology. Such collaborative projects as those executed by Gilbert and George, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Jeanne Claude and Christo, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay were instrumental in the development of such major evolutions in conceptual art as Body Art, Systems Art, Earth Art, and Performance Art.

The artists in Temporary Antumbra Zone have come together, collaborating through the lenses of painting, photography, and mixed media sculpture to promote collaboration as an invaluable mode of artistic production.

See the link for more information

Matt Jones’ Multiverse (closed 5/7) was a generously dense exhibition with works covering the entire gallery space including two floor-to-ceiling wall installations. Jones takes a fairly simple set of materials and through a process of contemplation and punk rock slapdash creates iconic wall pieces and propped figures. There was a video work titled Every Expression Possible(2011) which featured a masked Jones acting out many different faces and expressions against the background of a Karma Charger. Like the paintings Jones uses repetition to evoke a meditative calm.

The work here is all about contradictions and that makes it all the more exciting. Contradictions abound. On one hand Jones looks to Buddhist practices and meditation as a source of energy in the creation of his work yet everywhere we look we see Wolverine masks and Black Flag logos (originally designed by Raymond Pettibon in the late 70’s) which conjure a kind of brash male ego enterprise (the rocker, the comic book character) The use of these two archetypal symbols feel earnest. It feels as though Jones has looked back at adolescence and rescued these symbols from infinity. He dusted off these two icons, colored over them and reverently slathered them with Elmer’s glue.


See the full review here

Kaycee Olsen is pleased to announce Andrew Guenther: Corn, Tobacco and Other Stories, the next exhibition in her gallery at 2685 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles. The exhibition features paintings, drawings, and photographs executed over the past year. This is Guenther's first one-person exhibition at Kaycee Olsen Gallery.

The subjects of the work include; tobacco plants, corn stalks, women with paper plate faces, a whale, hot dogs, Grecian urns, the folds of the canvas itself, a silver sail; symbols from Guenther's personal lexicon alluding to both familiar and foreign stories. The artist used fewer than three colors for each of most paintings for this exhibition. The nature of the paintings' ground is allowed to be it's own color as is the texture of each material.

For more information, please visit www.kayceeolsen.com

At Freight + Volume Matt Jones' "Multiverse" show is packed with work in which he explores themes varying from those anchored in science (space, time, parallel universes, the Big Bang Theory) to those decidedly more pop-culture (Wolverine, Henry Rollins and his graphic expression of anarchy, "karma chargers" from the video game Left 4 Dead 2 and Star Wars). Influenced by a childhood obsession with Ghostbusters and the "science" behind the devices they used to zap their pray, Jones has created a powerhouse of a show. Head over to the gallery at 530 W. 24th St. to get karmically charged and optically dazzled!

See the feature here.

ART BLOG ART BLOG is extremely pleased to announce the opening of "Gold Records", curated by Jon Lutz of Daily Operation. This show is the first in a series of exhibitions ART BLOG ART BLOG will present at a temporary location in Chelsea, NY on the 11th floor of 508 West 26th St. An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 13th from 6-9 p.m. The exhibition runs through Saturday, May 28th. Open hours will be Wednesdays - Saturdays from 1-6 p.m. and by appointment.

“Gold Records” takes its lead from a selection of the artists whose works and interviews can be found on my former blog, The Old Gold. Though it manifests itself in very different ways, these artists have in common a type of retrospective interpretation of cultural developments from the 60ʼs on. Art history, television, consumer culture, pop music, design, news, and advertisements are integrated to the point where they are recognizable, but not ultimately decipherable. As a result, many of the works have a record-keeping aspect that is turned into a “record-recreation”. The sources are effectual placeholders for the time and circumstances of the original but the end result is a new, fragmented narrative with a definitive and original sound.

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Paper Plate people, hotdogs and drug paraphernalia. These are some of Andrew Guenther’s subject matter. Referenced from his own life and pop culture, his work is highly personal even though it may seem even the slightest bit anonymous. Guenther’s unique aesthetic sensibility combined with vibrant colored drawings and paintings, immediately grab the viewer. His silver gelatin photographs look like they could have been taken decades ago. His latest sculptures of fish and naked ladies accompanied by a photograph of the full moon seem pure and earthly.

Andrew Guenther is based in Brooklyn and was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois. Andrew has exhibited widely both in the US and abroad, and curated an artist’s storefront space in Brooklyn for a few years called Arts Tropical. He is represented by Freight and Volume Gallery in New York.

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In Remains, Kent Dorn’s New York solo debut at Freight + Volume, the South Carolina-born artist returns to his rural roots or, rather, an idealized vision of “youth in the woods.” In the painting Down by the River, a group of teens skinny-dip at night under a full, butter-yellow moon. The gallery press release describes this image as a “slacker’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe,” referencing Edouard Manet’s controversial masterpiece. Indeed, like Manet, Dorn is an able chronicler of his time (its physicality and vibe), while pushing the envelope of what painting may depict, and how.

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Far from the right wing diatribe, Anthony Haden-Guest's new book is a hilarious and terrifying ride in words and pictures through the times in which we live. "In The Mean Time" presents Haden-Guest's signature cartoons and drawings alongside passages in verse, which he explains is not poetry ("The difference is rather like the difference between cartoons and fine art, I think."), but storytelling in the tradition of the likes of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc.

Published by Freight and Volume, the limited-edition book will also be available in a smaller edition including some original artwork. It was welcomed enthusiastically by an invited audience at a January 4th reading, with music - by the author and friends - at NYC's Gershwin Hotel.

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Many young artists these days seem to be haunted by the legacy of their parents’ — and now grandparents’ — hippie revolution. Some, like the group Assume Vivid Astro Focus, try to keep the tie-dyed euphoria of the ’60s alive. Others, like the painter Kent Dorn and the video performance artist Jennifer Sullivan, who are perfectly matched in this affecting show, obliquely and sadly reflect on the lingering memories of those bygone days.

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For Benefit Plate, Okay Mountain’s New York solo debut, the Austin-based collective offers an homage to the high art and lowly failures of customization. Despite the displacement of some of its members to metropolises like Chicago and Los Angeles, the team still holds tight to its Central Texas tailgating roots. This loyalty is evident in Benefit Plate, which dissects the highly individualized subculture of customized cars and food trucks through the views of multiple players.

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Jack Kerouac once said that if you own a rug, you have too much stuff. But for many middle-class Americans, too much is not enough. That is the subject of this amusing installation by Okay Mountain, a 10-person collective from Austin, Tex.

The centerpiece is an elaborately customized barbecue trailer, a little house on fancy-rimmed tires stocked with everything a backyard chef could want: a grill, electric stovetop burners, pots and pans, audio speakers, two flat-screen televisions, a toilet, a basketball hoop and other sports paraphernalia, mounted steer horns and much more. The gallery walls are partly paneled in unfinished wood fencing, enhancing the suburban ambience, while two cartoon-style paintings, “Puke 1” and “Puke 2,” in which pea-soup-colored vomit floods backgrounds painted to resemble red-and-white picnic tablecloths, allegorize the bulimic binge and purge of mindless consumerism.

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The economy’s dead, our environment is on the verge of collapse, and responsible citizens everywhere are struggling to conserve in order to survive. Which is exactly why Trudy Benson’s luridly maximalist new show, “Space Jam,” is such a visceral, flippant punch to the gut. Large canvases explode a faux-naif wonderland — part Philip Guston, part sloppy ‘zine comic — using enough paint to cover a very large house. Reproductions of these images don’t do justice to the sheer amount of pigment that Benson has loaded on here: slathered is really the only appropriate verb.

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Space Jam is recent Pratt graduate Trudy Benson’s first solo exhibition; her large-scale “paintings”—though “paint” is perhaps a more apt description of what they are—occupy their space on the wall aggressively, physically. They are bold and bright, comprised of strokes and smears, dollops and gobs, scumbles, even. Considering that they are the products of a contemporary culture that touts, inspires, and is often comprised of the eye-roll, the esoteric allusion, the ironic appropriation, Benson’s works are refreshingly concrete, genuine. Their ontological status as works of paint on canvas is bound-up in and brazenly inseparable from its physical, material manifestation as such.

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Andrew Guenther’s most recent show, simply titled Recent Works on Paper, at Freight + Volume is easy to miss. Tucked into the gallery’s back corner, the show can appear to look like a private office, but persevere—it’s worthy of discovery. Included are eight small drawings and paintings, and most interestingly, a small table and folding chair, a mug of pens, a white noise machine, and a chained copy of the artist’s Hot Dog in a Banana Costume.

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Despite the extreme latitude of the medium, style, and approach of works in “Heartbreak Hotel,” this summer group show at Freight + Volume including 21 artists offers a galvanizing conversation on whether—despite solidity of identity—“together we are alone, alone we are together.” In this reverb and progression, implicit sadness resounds in this show’s metaphorical array. So many “walk a lonely street.” Ultimately, “Heartbreak Hotel” asks about regeneration and renewal. How appropriate, as we continue to deal with the fallout of the credit crisis, crazies at health care forums, draining effects of fighting two wars simultaneously, revelations of torture, continuing bailouts of corporate giants, and unacceptable levels of unemployment, underemployment, and general despair. None of this has been good for artists or the art market. In this show, Freight + Volume has provided a refuge for these artists—guests as well as gallery regulars—to participate in this rich dialogue across media. Importantly, they’ve been given an opportunity to regroup, rethink, and recreate their identities in a kind of “half-way house.”

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In the landscapes in Kim Dorland's second New York gallery show, both painting and nature are defiled, but bright, electric color keeps things from getting too ugly. Like many painters today, Mr. Dorland operates in the gap between legible imagery and paint's luscious, even oppressive materiality. His exaggeration of the medium has precedents in the work of artists as diverse as Eugene Leroy, Leon Kossoff and Joe Zucker.

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Face it, real country folk are as likely to toss a beer can into a ravine as they are to contemplate its natural beauty. And think that pine trees are pretty but could be improved with some initials carved into the bark.

This anti-romantic view of nature is the stuff of Canadian artist Kim Dorland’s new paintings at Freight + Volume on West 24th Street in New York’s Chelsea art district. Dubbed "Super! Natural!," the show presents landscapes done with an almost radioactive palette. Indeed, the riot of colors not only makes the eyes swim, but the sheer weight of oil paint applied to the canvases produces a heady, slightly woozy experience.

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Kim Dorland is a Toronto based painter who examines the psychic, nostalgic spaces of his upbringing in Canada through sumptuous impasto layers. At once playfully calling attention to their own physicality, as well as the nostalgia of Dorland’s personal narratives, the paintings are at once visceral and expansive. Beautiful/Decay recently interviewed Kim about his artistic inspirations, painting technique and more.

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Nick Lawrence’s paintings at Angstrom Gallery fall into two groups: small square canvases from 1997 and larger, generally rectangular ones from 2009. This split highlights the differences between the two bodies of work and reveals the core of Lawrence’s art: burrowing into life’s loamy underbelly, where plants, animals and minerals thrive and die in a cycle ugly and beautiful.

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Any experienced coyote knows the only reasonable response to a trap is to dig it up, turn it over, and defecate on it. It’s an offering to the trapper’s pride, a piss stain on assumptions of rational authority. By confusing the roles of predator and prey, the coyote keeps things interesting, reminding us we’re not the only beings with a sense of humor. Jim Lee’s recent exhibition presents a similar situation. However, where the artist’s work sits in relation to the aforementioned archetypes is unclear. Surely, deciding whether it’s trap or trick (or painting with or without a capital P) seems decidedly foolish. It’s the slippages in between that count.

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This is a first New York outing for the young Austrian Dorfer, and the works he is showing come from his ongoing “pulpproject” series, so named for his source material drawn from the pages of comic books and other cheap publications. Subjecting them to collaged and Photoshopped mutation, Dorfer then paints them on the reverse side of large sheets of Plexiglas. The remarkable results, super-smooth and more than six feet square in the full-scale pieces, meld the appearances of Pop art, shop windows, and medieval woodcuts. It makes for an unsettling mix.

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The artist devilishly flattens hierarchies of high and low, art and stuff, presenting his paintings and drawings alongside a miscellany of bric-a-brac on shelves—a cross between Carol Bove and Dave Miko. At times, the show feels breezy, as when a tattered pair of paint-splashed sandals dangles from a ledge near Guenther’s stylized seascape of soaring gulls. Over all, though, a macabre mood prevails, like that of a vanitas still-life. A sign reading “Go to Hell” and a pair of blood-red Ray-Bans share space with a painting of the cigar-smoking ghost of Monet. Through Jan. 10. (Freight + Volume, 542 W. 24th St. 212-989-8700.)

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The personal, obscure, and sometimes macabre, work in Andrew Guenther’s Looking For Culture Part III: Back to My Old Ways is charged with an uplifting and peculiar energy.

The exhibit, going on at Freight and Volume in Chelsea through January 10, presents a survey of Guenther’s old and new paintings, as well as a treasure trove of found objects, sculptures, photographs, and assemblages.

Guenther’s unique aesthetic sensibility immediately grabs the viewer. The vibrant oranges, pinks, and greens of his expressive paintings mingle with his colorful knick-knacks. These include such curiosities as used lotto tickets, a framed greeting card screenprinted by the artist, sticks of charcoal, a pack of cigarettes, playing cards, and a paper-mache sculpture of someone having sex with what looks to be a tortoise.

Paintings, wooden shelves, and accessories become one to create an overall artistic experience. The visual atmosphere is reminiscent of a thrift shop, but things are delicately harmonious rather than mismatched. Perhaps a surf shop would be a more accurate comparison, as coconuts, seashells, and sunglasses all appear in Guenther‘s visual tapestry.

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I wish Pulse Miami looked a little bit more like its New York incarnation because it would likely be a lot less cheesy. I suppose this is overkill but I visited the fair three times this week to be thorough, and each time I went I became more bothered by the quality of work. To the fair’s credit however, their building design and exhibition layout is so good it initially makes the work appear better than it really is. This is a noticeable improvement over last year; thankfully the ghastly tent ghettoizing a few lucky dealers has been scrapped.

While Pulse easily takes the second place position within the contemporary fairs here, they are still a far weaker than NADA. Certainly, you’d never see FTC Gallery’s dime a dozen stripy resin paintings by Markus Linnenbrink at the New Art Dealers Association, nor Margaret Thatcher Project’s similarly contrived paintings by Robert Sagerman. This is work that belongs at Red Dot, not Pulse.

Not to state the obvious, but the problem with the number of mediocre to outright bad booths in the fair, is that even the stronger galleries begin to look a little tacky. Torch gallery’s Yves Klein-esque Plexiglas table of pink pigment, by the hilariously named Judd Klein simply doesn’t need to be there. Meanwhile, Angles Gallery has a great Kevin Appel painting, Freight and Volume a moving Kim Dorland landscape, and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art — an unusual pick for us — a strong, if slightly limited series of Brian Dettmer altered books. All take some time to spot due to the surrounding visual noise.

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Join us for an artist's talk at Freight + Volume with Sylvan Lionni in conjunction with the exhibition "Before the Flood," from 6 - 8 pm.

Michael Scoggins meticulously creates giant sheets of notebook and graph paper, complete with binder holes and ragged edges, to emulate the larger-than-life world that children experience. Onto these surfaces he scrawls musings that vacillate between childhood innocence and adult worldliness, with a baffling sincerity. Ironic, humorous, meaningful and socially critical, these large scale works on paper utilize the perspective of a child to address fears, politics, crushes, and mass-media messages that face us all.

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As part of the Fall 2008 International and National Projects, P.S.1 has invited Minus Space, a collective based in Brooklyn, New York, to present an exhibition of “reductive art”: art characterized by minimalism and abstraction in its use of monochromatic color, geometry, and pattern. As a movement concentrating on abstraction, Minus Space bucks the trend toward figuration that took hold in the 1990s. For P.S.1, Minus Space has brought together 54 artists working internationally, ranging from Australia to Brazil to New York City, for a dense and playful show in the Café.

Artists include Soledad Arias, Shinsuke Aso, Marcus Bering, Hartmut Böhm, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Henry Brown, Vicente Butron, Bibi Calderaro, Melanie Crader, Mark Dagley, Julian Dashper, Christopher Dean, Matthew Deleget, Lynne Eastaway, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Daniel Göttin, Julio Grinblatt, Billy Gruner, Terry Haggerty, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Simon Ingram, Inverted Topology, Kyle Jenkins, Mick Johnson, Steve Karlik, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Lotte Lyon, Gerhard Mantz, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Douglas Melini, Manfred Mohr, Salvatore Panatteri, Dirk Rathke, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Tilman, Li-Trincere, Jan van der Ploeg, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer, and Michael Zahn.

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Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery’s storefront entrance on Williamsburg’s Union Avenue bears minimal signs of a commercial gallery space, seamlessly blending in with the neighborhood’s perpetual state of transformation. As such it is an appropriate setting to view the work of five artists who each in their own manner transform the “non-art” materials of urban refuse and raw construction to create restrained and complex abstractions.

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Agreement Room, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg’s video loop of hockey fights, provides the perfect metaphor for the group show curated by Jim Lee and Rob Nadeau, which features 17 works duking it out for attention in this diminutive Chelsea space.

Dominating the entryway is Daniel Seiple’s huge signboard, reading: love thy neighbor, which comes with a rich backstory: Apparently a farmer in rural Pennsylvania dumped chicken poop on the property of the local preacher—who then went after the farmer’s landlord by planting a placard in his front yard with a message telling him, in effect, what to do with the droppings. The object in the gallery is the landlord’s reply, appropriated here by Seiple to update Robert Smithson’s “non-site” series (whereby the earthwork pioneer would bring rocks and soil collected from other places into the gallery).

Wendy White, Tamara Zahaykevich and Ivin Ballen offer self-contained paintings-cum-sculptures that highlight the ongoing tussle between the ready-made and the handmade art object. But it is Rob Erickson’s diminutive, blink-and-you-miss-them Xerox wall transfers of photos of street cultures (e.g. skater punks) that are the true gems. Scattered throughout the gallery, these pieces remind us how art can create contemplative and imaginative spaces beyond the limits of real estate.

By and large, the organizers successfully utilize the well-worn group-exhibition format without crashing and burning. “Accident Blackspot,” which refers to the roadside designation for crash scenes in Britain, proves how this approach can still offer exciting results, even if, as it’s become increasingly clear this summer, other shows haven’t proved so lucky.

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loop-- raum für aktuelle kunst is proud to present its new group show, entitled "Refraction." Featuring works by gallery artists Andreas Koch, Karsten Konrad, and Andreas Schimanski, loop will also showcase Pepe Mar, Alexandra Schlund and Alexander Wagner.

The term “refraction" refers to the process of bending of light when passing from one medium to another. Karsten Konrad's perfectly epitomize this “bending of perception,where the raw source-material of found objects and furniture is still immediately recognizable even as it is consciously deconstructed and re-shaped into stylized forms. Pepe Mar also utilizes found materials in his work, but their sources are insignificant to their vivid, prismatic colors that create these anthropomorphic forms. Whereas Konrad's sculptures adopt geometric and architectural lines, Mar revels in an anarchist joys in chaos and expression. Although Alexandra Schlund works more figuratively with line and Alexander Wagner examines it empirically, the color surfaces of both of their works are blurred and broken by the power of the geometric line. Only a few, fixed points—a window, a point, or a horizon line—permit the viewer to fleetingly orient himself in the painted landscape before plunging into a flurry of color. By dissolving the usual yardstick of time and arranging and re-arranging space, Andreas Koch's video work fully explores the way that the brain classifies, receives, and refracts image information. However, Andreas Schimanski approaches the term word by word. Fine, hard lines and intensive color fields coalesce, only to break apart. But through these lines, color fields, cutouts and details, there is play, spontaneity, and infinitive imaginative possibilities.

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Q: What does the cover of a book tell you about the book itself?
A: Nothing / Everything.

Can an uninitiated reader know anything more about the contents of James Joyce's Ulysses simply from seeing that iconic, large-lettered cover? Do J.D. Salinger's white-white paperback editions offer any guidance? The little enigmatic rainbow at the top corner certainly doesn't help.

These kinds of things were on my mind as I visited the opening reception for "Cover Version," a bookishly-themed group show at Culver City's Taylor De Cordoba gallery. The premise was simple: artists had been asked to redesign the covers of their favorite books. The end result was offerings from over twenty New York and Los Angeles based artists that ranged from the literal to the oblique.

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Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Cover Version, a group exhibition curated by NY-based artist Timothy Hull. Hull has asked approximately twenty artists from around the country to create their own version of the cover of their favorite book. The only parameters are that the piece must be average book size and include the title and author in the composition. Scott Hug, Mathew Cerletty, Kadar Brock, Jennifer Sullivan, Ryan Callis and Frohawk Two Feathers are among the participating artists. The exhibition will run from June 28 – August 9. The gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday June 28 from 6-9PM.

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Erik den Breejen's first solo show at Freight and Volume gallery shows the artist enmeshed in rock 'n' roll and painterly movements.

Lyrics from rock songs are seen amid swaths of vibrant green, orange and yellow. Words, rendered in script, block lettering or individually highlighted, recede into or come up through clouds of color. Broad brushstrokes cut a path through a patch of words just as you were deciphering them.

The Who's "Can You See the Real Me'' punches its way through the paint as does a chunk of "All the Young Dudes,'' written by David Bowie for Mott the Hoople.

Reading the paintings kicks in your internal soundtrack as you recognize the music. If not, the words, some evocative, some throwaway, stand or fall on their own. It is a pleasant, hazy mix of layered text and paint. One is curious how lyrics from den Breejen's own band, Acid Crayon, might leaven the homage and cut deeper.

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I can still remember the exact moment, the exact brush stroke. I rounded a corner and fixed my eyes on “Marschland (Dangast),” a 1907 painting by Erich Heckel. I was visiting the small, secluded Brücke Museum in the Grunewald in what was still at the time West Berlin. The landscape, measuring about two by three feet, is a panorama with a couple of massed trees and a scarlet and vermilion path that angles off to the horizon. Situated in the lower-right corner is a clunky slab of striated paint which, due to its broad mass, is out of character with the rest of the surface. Because of its insistent presence (and not so much that it represented anything beyond itself), it seemed to command the rest of the picture plane. I’d seen a lot of paintings go from thick to thin by Rembrandt, Courbet and Van Gogh, but I fixed on this clump of pigment as something different, an odd mutation in my thinking about physical matter and the sticky subject of paint’s ability to change perception. When I first came to New York during the heyday of Neo-Expressionism, the question of paint as a vehicle for developing spatial illusion versus paint as a significant substance with alchemical properties embodying its own unique set of forces was a significant factor in the debate that attracted international attention to the “new” painting.

North, the New York debut by Canadian artist Kim Dorland, emphatically declares that “chunky painting” is still a viable direction for practitioners not afraid to get their hands dirty. I’ve been following Dorland’s work for years, since stumbling across it at the room of the Toronto gallery Jamie Angell during a SCOPE New York Art Fair. It wasn’t that I liked the work so much (though, as mentioned above, I’m a fan of “gooby paint”), but that I found its acidic fluorescent orange and red underpainting, clunky, quotidian subject matter, and slacker urgency—somehow evoking your favorite garage band with all the bad production values and strip mall expediency—kept resurfacing in my memory. With each subsequent encounter the works grew in scale, and the subject matter veered from a somewhat kitschy focus on deer in forests (what was the deer image craze anyway?) to a dreary rendition of kids sauntering through the unpaved back alleys of sub-suburbs, cruising among the parked pickups, RVs and camping trailers.

Alberta, identified as the site of these pictures, is known as the breadbasket of Canada. I imagine vast plains and overwhelming skies with widely scattered hamlets, a few thousand families clustered around a local railroad hub, phosphate mine or lumber mill. There’s a palpable tinge of desperation in the wandering figures central to many of the compositions in North, as if these skate punks are aimlessly trudging in search of some action, some mischief, some beer, some joints or some sex that might deaden the pain of their tedious, irrelevant existence. In “Alley # 4” and “Shortcut,” both from 2007, we see departing youngsters rendered as blocky squibs of paint walking through anonymous back streets. The figures are surrounded by haloes of hot underpaint, a kind of illuminated shade, as if they’re in the focus of some electric force-field that designates them as “slacker saints” or conveyers of a vibrant life

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Locust Projects presents Synesthetics, a group exhibition curated by local architect and artist Felice Grodin. Grodin has assembled five artists from all over the world and the US including Lawrence Blough from New York, Monica Tiulescu from Washington, Sylvan Lionni from England, Marcia Lyons from New Zealand and Samantha Salzinger from Miami. Each artist combines notions inherent in the practices of art and architecture, in an experimental exhibition that includes site- specific installation, sculpture, painting, photography and video to create five very different and exciting works. Synesthetics opens in conjunction with the Wynwood Art District walk on Saturday, March 8, 7-11pm and is on view until April 26, 2008. A panel discussion featuring five experienced architects, artists and collectors will be moderated by collector and businessman Dennis Scholl, and will be held on Thursday, April 17th at 7pm. Seating is limited.

The Greek translation of Synesthesia translates to ’together + perception’ or “joined sensation”. It has been described as a neurological occurrence that mixes and matches the different senses so that perceptual experience and information are one. Borrowing from this occurrence, this exhibition explores the notion of blending phenomenon in both a rigorous and visceral way. Unlike the endless linking of hypertext or excessive piling of imagery and data often associated with “the age of information,” the work exhibited will consist of studied and specific subject matter both in concept and execution.

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Been to the Gershman Y lately? If so, you may have noticed that its Open Lens Gallery has been temporarily transformed into University of the Arts exhibition space, the result of an arrangement between the Gershman and the university, which owns the building, that has both entities alternating programming in the lobby from now on.

What you can't help noticing is that there are no photographs on the walls, as there are when the space is the Open Lens; instead, there are paintings, or, more properly, painted constructions, in places you would never expect to find them.

I walked past Jim Lee's unassuming floor piece, a tentlike construction of battleship gray-painted canvas over a wood armature, without even seeing it, probably thinking it was something a janitor had left behind. When I suddenly recognized it as an artwork, it came into focus as a surprisingly sophisticated piece, with a cut slit for an opening that reminded me of Lucio Fontana's "slash" paintings of the late 1950s.

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MARLèNE MOCQUET: RECENT PAINTINGS This young French painter presents small, vaporous, psychologically charged canvases -- occupied by hapless, mostly hybrid beings -- that might be called illustrational, not the least for the way their titles narrate very specific events. But the paint handling is deft and dazzlingly varied and the color sense exciting. Like Indian miniatures, these Symbolist-Surrealism cartoons reward close viewing. Freight & Volume, 542 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 989-8700, volumegallery.com, closes Friday. (Smith)

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Through a wide range of media, Hull explores the dynamics of the cult of personality, the plausibility of esoteric knowledge, notions of orientalism, charismatic icons, diagrams and mysticism.

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In celebration of the California College of the Arts' (CCA) one-hundredth anniversary, Braunstein/Quay Gallery presents a group show of alumni organized by guest curator Mary Snowden, the Chair of Painting and Drawing at CCA. The five artists chosen for this exhibition are among her most recent, memorable, and talented students.

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SAVANNAH, Ga. — The Savannah College of Art and Design presents "Michael Scoggins: Now with Kung Fu Grip," on display Jan. 1–31 at Pinnacle Gallery, 320 E. Liberty St. The exhibition is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5:30 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and Sunday, 1–4 p.m.

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David Castillo Gallery is proud to present the solo exhibition of Pepe Mar, My Mirrors. Mar has created an installation incorporating many of the elements & themes recognized as part of his self-standing three-dimensional collage figures. While the three-dimensional figures still take center stage for the artist, the installation offers several innovations on the sensibilities of consumer cultural criticism, using not only new media but also new modes of installing collage, altering viewer perceptions of his work till now.

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After I inserted the seventy-two-track sampler CD that was issued to accompany the recent exhibition "Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-1981" at Freight Volume into my computer, the program that identifies music choices from a master database informed me that "Multiple matches were found online for this CD" and asked me to choose the correct title from the following list: Real Men of Genius--Budweiser Beer; Fcd201--Focus Production Music; The High Calling Volume Two--Howard Butt, Jr.; Kos--111 Dangerous--Kosinus Music. It was quite obvious that the disc was none of these, but neither was it quite what its publishers claimed. Purportedly the cacophonous outpourings of an experimental noise band formed by a bunch of disgruntled West Berlin session musicians in the late 1970s, the determinedly lo-fi recording--which vaguely echoes the likes of Can, Popol Vuh, and, of course, Faust--initially appeared to be the product of an obscure, defunct collective almost too cultish to be for real. Further investigation revealed that, sure enough, the "enormously influential" Lustfaust collective only exists in artist Jamie Shovlin's imagination.

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Pepe Mar constructs delightful, funny and scary child-size monsters in three dimensions out of glue and scraps of paper cut from all kinds of found printed material. The one- and two-footed figures have snarling faces with big, staring eyes lifted from fashion photographs and other sources, and carnivorous animal mouths or swollen human lips and dirty teeth derived from photographic images.

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Lustfaust, a little-known German noise band from the 1970's, never existed, but you'd never know it from the New York debut of Jamie Shovlin, a British artist who is pushing trompe l'oeil Conceptualism in new directions. Mr. Shovlin has assiduously reconstructed Lustfaust's history from scratch. His handiwork, conducted in collaboration with Mike Harte and Murray Ward, who are real musicians, includes a CD sampling 72 songs, an elaborate Web site (with links) and even an entry in Wikipedia that sternly warns, ''This section cites no sources or references.''

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Times like these need songs like these... Originally put together for Brecht's centenary in 1998, Mr. Wau-Wa is dedicated to performing the songs of Bertolt Brecht as set by his collaborators Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, as well as some contemporary settings by David Hidalgo - classics and unknowns played in a way that brings the 1930's ringing into the 21st century. Inspired by an old photo of Brecht with some circus friends, Mr. Wau-Wa is Gina Leishman, vocals, accordion, pump organ; Rinde Eckert, vocals, accordion, pump organ; Doug Wieselman, reeds, guitars, vocals; Marcus Rojas, tuba; Kenny Wollesen, drums

Queens-born, London-based Conceptual Artist Doug Fishbone, is best known for his installations in D.U.M.B.O., Brooklyn, Trafalgar Square, London and Poland, Ecuador and Costa Rica - using enormous quantities of bananas – at times as many as 40,000 of them - which he piles up in public places and then gives away free of charge, as well as his self-portrait sculpture made out of gyro meat. Tonight marks the US debut of his performance piece/slide lecture "You Call This Living?", based on his award-winning videos blending filthy stand-up comedy, Powerpoint presentations, the family slide show, tv news broadcasts and the dreaded academic lecture. Fishbone wallows in the grey area of copyright violation, sampling images stolen from the web to reflect some of the more problematic aspects of modern American society – greed, perversity, violence, obscenity, obesity, and, above all, indifference. His performances, a cross between Spalding Gray, Jon Stewart and a complete and utter lunatic, revel in the bizarre, off-putting, but undeniably compelling absurdities of our age. "Recent Goldsmiths graduate Doug Fishbone is the best thing to come out of that venerable YBA breeding ground since, well, the YBAs...his videos are what you'd get if you gave Woody Allen a bag of chronic and a better therapist" - Arena magazine

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In an art world crowded with eager graduates, Peter Gallo’s New York début was refreshing. Gallo (born 1959) had two solo exhibitions in New York in 2005. I organized the first one in May at White Columns; the second opened at the new Chelsea gallery Freight + Volume in November. Gallo’s mercurial and deceptively slight art – which juxtaposes a melancholic world-view akin to that of Joy Division with the dysfunctional aesthetics reminiscent of, say, Forrest Bess or Ree Morton – is littered with literary, art-historical, political and musical references. It’s reassuringly hard to pin down.

- Matthew Higgs

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On the Street Where We Live
Freight + Volume
542 West 24th Street
Through Jan. 4

Art that snares your attention with a cute and playful appearance and then reveals a dark side is a familiar Japanese export, and the Los Angeles-based Asuka Ohsawa is new and adept practitioner of the genre. Painting with gouache on paper, Ms. Ohsawa favors an extremely exacting technique and a style resembling children's book illustration. With its black outlines, restrained color and flattened perspectives, her work also mimics traditional Japanese painting and printmaking.

Ms. Ohsawa populates street and backyard scenes with dozens of characters possessing the bodies of human children and heads of pigs, rabbits, cats, ducks, monkeys and wolves. A bit of study reveals that the apparently juvenile surface thinly masks allegories of consumerism, terrorism, surveillance and war. In ''Neighborhood Watch'' a wolf spies on a group of pigs in a backyard who have captured and tied up another wolf and are using wolf dummies for bow-and-arrow target practice.

In the street scene called ''On the Street Where We Live,'' a triptych nine feet wide, a monkey riding an elephant scatters bonbons to pedestrians who scurry to gather them up while many other characters pursue food, drink and sex. Busily populated as it is, it is easy to almost miss the small rabbit in the midst of all the commotion staring at a little black bomb with a lit fuse at her feet.

KEN JOHNSON

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