Howdy all. Sorry for the silence on my part – things have been so hektik, and it seems that Thando and Kags have been holding down the site (tho I’m still hoping to even out text and images soon!!!!). I’ve seen some wonderful old friends (tho not wonderfully old), done another day of art-hopping in Chelsea, spent some time in Brooklyn, and chilled with my college roomy, Tony (an astrophysicist now!).
Mark Dion’s The Curiosity Shop was an interesting installation – a log cabin room filled with Siopis-like nostalgia-ites. Michael S Riedel’s Neo was probably my favorite of the day, where he took snaps of Zwirner Gallery as the show before his was being de-installed, and hung huge, to-scale, images of the space back on itself, but sometimes slightly displaced. Edgar Arceneaux, at the Kitchen, also did a much smaller scale architectural remix.
I think it was probably the Tim Noble and Sue Webster show, the glory hole, that all four of us gallery-goers agreed on: beautiful welded sculptures of found objects that project a curious formal intrigue, but whose shadows cast concrete images of faces, bodies and other recognizable shapes in their negative and positive spaces.
from left : marek walczak, t whid (of MTAA), doron golan (mica scalin below) yohana wife of marek, liza and mark napier
Admittedly, the highlight of the week for me was when t. whid, from mtaa, invited me to a dinner among friends of his. It was like walking into the NYC net.art scene (and then some) concretized in a lot of ways: Lauren Cornell and Francis Hwang from rhizome, doron golan of computer fine arts (who owns the restaurant), several cats from the thing, Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich from postmasters gallery, mark napier (who should need no introduction, in my not so humble opinion, but who currently has a solo show at bitforms gallery), and the list goes on. They were all warm, excited to hear about the South African art scene, generous with their questions and answers, and humble about their own work. The following day, I checked out a beautiful Mary Kelly exhibition at Postmasters, as well as the aforementioned Mark Napier show – stunning, painterly software art.
Today, I am making a turkey, as my parents decided to have thanksgiving one day late this year — family schedules just worked out that way. It’s Simon and Bronwyn’s first Thanksgiving! (well, sort of. I explained that thanksgiving in SA can be any time, and usually involves slaughtering a cow – different thing….)
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