Art Hound

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day decadence, folks in NYC should stop by Chocolate & I, a week-long event celebrating chocolate, food and art in the city.

Paintings and installation by Ema. Photo by The City Sweet Tooth

Chocolate & I exhibit, Food for Art. Art for Thought. showcases a wide range of multidisciniplinary art around the common theme of chocolate. Artists were invited to explore the personal and societal relationships with the celebrated food, and the result is an integrated mash-up of sculpture, installation, video, and painting.

My personal favorites are Michelle Mayer’s gold-leafed chocolate bullets referencing the industry’s ties to violence and Ema’s astonishingly imaginative Hedonistic Cloud (see photo above).  Many participating artists including Elim Chang, Wang and Levy of  CW&T, Jason Krugman, Meng Li and Michelle Mayer are affiliated with the creative hotbed known as NYU’s ITP.

Another noteworthy participant, Brooklyn-based artisinal chocolatier Fine & Raw, sets the bar for exquisite design and packaging.

An awesome, enormous (sorry!) and VERY affordable show featuring work by a diverse group of North American artists. The show starts this Thursday but everything is already available online. Below are my picks.

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Rebecca Daw $70

Justin Richel $75

Christopher David Ryan $75

Kevin Scalzo $100

Lisa Congdon $125

Danna Ray $150

Laura Berger $180

Lisa DeJohn $235

Harry Stooshinoff $250

Peter Owen $300

Tim Beavis $300

Lisa Solomon $400

 

Newcomer Brooklyn gallery K&K opened their Small Prints Show this past weekend. The show’s concept is awesome: feature up-and-coming photographers from around the country and price everything at $100. The show is fun, energetic and affordable. When the gallery is closed, walls retract and the space doubles as owners’ Kevin Kunstadt and Andrew Kenney’s living room. All around, very creative.

There are two editions of each photograph. Stop by or email/call the gallery for availability.

I’m loving Saelee Oh’s new paintings from her Infinite Roots Show at Jonathan Levine. One of the things I admire most about Saelee’s work is that it exudes a child-like innocence while also imbuing an alluring sophistication. I personally get turned off by work that feels juvenile, and Saelee’s beautiful, refined work certainly does not.

Admittedly these paintings are not what I would consider affordable to most, BUT I’m hoping Oh will release prints of some of these pieces after the show. At the moment Saelee carries prints of some of her older work through LPP and her own shop. I guess I will just have to TRY to be patient..

One of my favorite artists, Jennifer Davis, has a fantastic and *affordable* show at Walker Contemporary in Boston. (Most pieces are under $700.)

For those not familiar with Davis, her paintings are fascinating in a way that makes you want to revisit them again and again.  She has cultivated her own language of symbols and creatures and other visual oddities which she talks about in the interview. Davis’ paintings are mind-bending yet beautiful and surprisingly serene.

Interview with Jennifer Davis:

AH: Tell us a bit about the work in this show.
JD: This show features a series of mostly small-ish acrylic/graphite painting/drawings that I made during the past year or so.  These paintings are reflections about my life, the people around me and trying to live as an artist in these crazy times.

AH: There are certain themes that are prevalent in your work (faces/masks, musical instruments, balloons, ferns/branches). What kind of significance do these themes have for you?

JD: Each object has a kind of invented meaning for me and I just keep returning to images that resonate. My made-up vocabulary of symbols is always growing and changing. For example, I am currently obsessed with drawing a tuba on everything.  ha ha.  I am surrounded by a lot of music/musicians so I am just using a tuba as a beautiful representation of various musical themes that pop into my head.  Nothing very deep or tricky going on there.

AH: Some of your paintings include what seem like partially-human creatures, which often blur the line between cute and strange/creepy. Who are these creatures? Do you identify with them?

JD: Absolutely.  The animals and creatures in my paintings are symbols too.  I use them as stand-ins for people.  Cats, horses, dogs, monsters all have their own “personality” traits that I project onto the people in my life, strangers, myself and humanity in general. Sweet and soft balanced with more feral qualities, as humans tend to be.

JD: I try to strike a cord by finding a balance between things I find beautiful and darker themes running  just below the surface.  If I painted my pictures with dark bold colors (as has been “suggested” to me many times) they might seem overly gloomy and depressing.  Instead, I think they celebrate beautiful things as if through the eyes of a child that has reluctantly grown up a little bit.  I take such great joy in the act of painting so it is funny/odd that they sometimes look very somber.  Maybe today I will paint some smiles!

AH: What are you painting now? What’s next?

JD: I am currently painting like crazy for a big solo show opening Feb 5th in Ontario, Canada.  After that I have a solo show of drawing/paintings on paper at First Amendment Gallery in Minneapolis (http://burlesquedesign.com/category/first-amendment-arts/).  I will also be showing at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Oct.

Thanks, Jennifer!

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The Los Angeles-based GR2, part of the greater Giant Robot family, is currently running it’s fourth Post-It Show through Jan. 13th.

A diverse group of artists drew, colored, painted, cut up and glued Post-its, resulting in a colorful and chaotic sea of paper squares. GR2 is selling each Post-it for $20- how’s that for an entry price?

If you’re interested in purchasing a piece from the show, you can select up to four artists on the website. At the end of the show, GR2 will send you a randomly-selected Post-it by one of your preferred artists. The roster includes the very talented: APAK, Marc Bell, Jill Bliss, Jen Corace, Evah Fan, Daria Tessler, Yellena James, Saelee Oh, Luke Ramsey, and dozens more!

Nahcotta’s ETA holds a special place in my heart; it was here that I bought my first original piece of art, a streetscape painting by Stacey Durand. The Enormous Tiny Art Show was perhaps the first show I attended that actually felt open and accessible, and that experience has stuck with me.

Years later ETA continues to provide great, affordable art with bi-annual shows in New Hampshire and Los Angeles. Their second LA show opened yesterday and runs through Dec. 8th. All the work is available online which makes me (and lots of other East Coasters) very happy!

Now for this week’s picks from ETA’s LA show:

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Charles Adler $50

Karen Kang $80

Joe Ryckebosch $100

Jess Fogel $200

Matt Adrian $280

Ned Evans $300

Katja Leibenath $350

Sarajo Frieden $425

 

Jason Vivona is an artist/ designer whose work is avant-guarde yet affordable- a rare combination! His colors are incredible as is his work’s underlying tension between soft beauty and repulsiveness. The drawings and paintings shown here are all from his latest show, Eternal Beauty Rest, at Gallery Six in San Francisco. All are available and priced under $150.

Aside from drawing and painting, Jason is also the Art Director for We ride at night, an innovative art/skateboard company. His work has also been published in Juxtapoz, a publication at the forefront of low-brow/ underground art.

About Jason’s work, Gallery six states that it “presents a combination of abstract expressionism, skate-punk culture, and design.” The reference to abstract expressionism took me by surprise, but it seems to refer more to Vivona’s process than to specific aesthetic qualities of his work.

At a distance, Jason’s work appears soft and vaguely cute (smiley faces! neon pink!) but up close it reveals a darker intricacy. Up close the colorful forms are actually teeming with bizarre narratives that include the juxtaposition of naked figures, robots, basketballs, stars, phallic symbols, eyes, wings and intestines. His work has a grotesque, distinctly surrealist quality, as if we are viewing the recreations of his graphic dreams. Vivona uses an unusual combination of materials to create his distinct look including latex, aerosol, gouache, ink, tea and wine.

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Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch, a San Francisco-based artist, has a great show, Megarealms, open through the end of the month, in which his bright, imaginative paintings and collages are clustered like mosaics.

In an effort to learn more, I read Maxwell’s interview for the show and was really disappointed by the presence of self-aggrandizing and hyperbolic statements.  First, Maxwell makes the claim that he “is the hardest working illustrator and artist based in San Francisco, California.” Secondly, he attempts to explain the title of his show and goes down an ugly path: “A place I have created from the conscious and subconscious mind, a Megarealm is where I explore the areas of my brain, ideas, of thought itself, as they pertain to an image.” This statement feels contrived and purposefully obtuse, and as far as I’m concerned, the gist of what he’s saying is fairly obvious, that he used his brain to create his work.

Despite the over-the-top interview, Maxwell succeeds at creating art that is fresh and compelling which, in the end, is what really matters. Below I’ve picked out my favorite pieces available through the gallery’s website.

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Static $100

Projection $350

Life Jungle $400

Heart Stretch $700

 

Exciting news! This month I’m the guest curator on the fabulous online gallery, the Beholder! The Beholder has a ton of great art which made my job of selecting just a handful of pieces difficult. I was particularly drawn to art on the site that was understated, figurative, graphic, and neutral (color-wise), which I loosely-classify as contemporary folk art. The term “contemporary folk” has a broad array of definitions, but I think this collection provides a good sampling of some of the more compelling examples of this genre.  Scroll down for my statement on the collection.

Big thanks to Suzanne Shade, the Beholder’s director/curator!