MoCA

Last night at MoCA Cleveland, Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape. She sculpts in graphite, and uses the idea of reflection and surface. Kind of nice. Good people-watching too.

gorgeous!

I've never been more attracted to a tattoo.

Dead or Alive

Guess what? It's summer! Evidence comes in the form of heat rather than vacation (unfortunately). Today Katie and I hid in MAD for a little while. The big show right now is called Dead or Alive. I'd like to take home Tim Tate and Marc Petrovic's Apothecarium Moderne. Above is a closeup of the bottle labeled "Ennui." Made me giggle... hope that's not disrespectful. The bottles are filled with found and made elements, covered in etched writing, topped with themed stoppers. I like that they're not made totally of found pieces, that there is obviously some glass-making going on here (if that makes sense). The Ennui bottle stopper has a tiny exclamation mark blown into it.


Also really cool (and weird) is the work of Levi van Veluw. He basically landscapes his own head.

Picture Yourself

Well, well. I've been waiting to mention last week's PopRally at MoMA because I wanted to link to the photos they took. The PopRally is an inexpensive after-hours party - this most recent one showcased some of the new photography out on view. In addition to the art, drinks, and music, there was a "photo booth." In my head I imagined one of those old booths with a little curtain and a slot spitting out black and white photos (I should have thought harder on this...). They took amazing digital photos in front of a green-screen, and then we got to choose backgrounds designed by the photographers featured that night!

reunion

Alison and I were lucky enough to snag our grad school classmate Sam for the weekend! We covered quite a bit of ground, beginning with our local bar scene Friday evening. On Saturday we took her to the Brooklyn Flea and the Union Square market before eating crazy sandwiches from the Peanut Butter & Co. sandwich shop. Those were intense. We took ourselves to the American Wing to show off all that hard work last year. And I ran into my good friend Jonathan Dwight. We spent the evening out with more former classmates and other NYC dec arts superstars playing scrabble over drinks. We only got on our soap boxes about museums and our quarter life crises a few times! It's been too long, friends.

Sunday included nail polish and textiles, as well as a visit to the Brooklyn Museum. It was such a nice walk from our apartment, and there were new things to see. My favorite new installation is Reception, by Vadis Turner (2009). The mixed media piece includes Bibles, ribbons, and birth-control pills (among many other things). It's always great to be reminded of how great New York (this includes Brooklyn!) can be. Safe travels home - and thanks - to Sam!

accidental preview?

The Yinka Shonibare mid-career survey opens at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on June 26th. Because June 26th has not yet occurred, I was recently surprised to see a little bit already on view. Described on the BMA website: "a site-specific installation created for this presentation titled Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play will be on view in several of the Museum’s period rooms."

Um. Let's start with the state of these rooms without any headless mannequinns. Sad. Up until the later nineteenth-century, the period rooms there are pretty bleak. Despite their house-like groupings, these rooms do not feel like "real" interiors. For some reason they just feel like unfinished shells. Which is actually kind of creepy. Add the current installation, which often took me by surprise, and, well, I'm still digesting. Has anyone seen these rooms recently? Thoughts?

Another side note (i.e. ramblings about period rooms): BMA has a few rooms that visitors basically have to peer into through glassed-off doorways - this means no walking into the room, no facing the scene head-on. I felt that this made the spaces better. The visitor becomes the voyeur, much more than in the usual installation, in which the fourth wall is either behind you or absent. Feeling like you're naughtily sneaking a peek into someone's living room instantly humanizes (for me) the otherwise uninhabited interior. I could bore you for a long time about the wonderfully crazy world of period rooms. Good, bad, awesomely bad: I think they are always worth seeing.

tableness and chairness

I just spied the review of the MAD's Gord Peteran exhibition in the Times. This show was at Winterthur... oh, two years ago? Gord himself came for a lecture, and then my roommate and I ended up chatting with him and curator Glen Adamson into the wee hours in one of the scholar's residences on the estate. Funny stuff. Anyway, I'd like to see what the show looks like at MAD - I love seeing multiple installations of exhibitions. I like the pieces that have pretty obvious references to history... like "chest on chest" and "ark." You should go see them!

Cool photos by a cool girl.

Love them.

Michelle Erickson

If it isn't obvious, Michelle Erickson is COOL. I met her very briefly last year during Antiques Forum at Williamsburg (though I'm 100% sure she has no recollection of meeting me - you know how it is...). She makes reproduction ceramics, but I love her contemporary work in which she references the past in some pretty cheeky ways. My favorite from her website is this pickle stand, which is like a Bonnin & Morris example that we recently installed on the balcony, but with "made in China" added. When I saw some of her work last year, there were some really cool pieces... one I think had gilt ammo incorporated, if I remember correctly.

13 Most Beautiful...

On Saturday evening I went with the usual suspects to Mass MoCA, where Dean & Britta (formerly of Luna) performed their “13 Most Beautiful… songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.” The show was pretty packed, and looking at their website now I realize we were actually kind of lucky because it looks like they aren't really performing this again until June (unless it's taking place at other museums and isn't posted on their site). Warhol's screen tests and D&B's music were good together; they would each have been less interesting on their own. The screen tests were pretty heavy, very intimate, and were a little depressing in light of the fact that a number of these people died from drug-related accidents or took their own lives. As far as assessing Dean & Britta, I felt that Dean was in charge, and I preferred Britta or the two of them singing together. The music sounded pretty much like what I know by Luna. It was cool, but I was not sad when it was time to leave and get a drink.

Palace Necklace

Soooo, today I ordered this Holyrood necklace. Maybe the coolest necklace ever, rivaled only by the rest of Tilly Bloom's creations. She was even nice enough to put this up for sale at my request! My other top pick is the pair of little rolleiflex earrings, but every design is so cool, and nicely priced. Perfectly suited for the overeducated and underpaid.

Cutlery, Cutlery, Everywhere

Going along with my last post, here are two more cutlery-related objects. These, however, are affordable enough for me to own (which I do). The ribbon comes from the Cooper-Hewitt museum shop and was designed by Laura Foster Nicholson. The bag is from Target, of all places. Unlike the ribbon, the bag is pretty poorly made (only $10, what do you expect), but the fabric itself seems fairly sturdy, so I'm contemplating buying a couple more, just to use the material for some other project (pillows or place mats, maybe?).

Delicious Lighting

The New York Times personal shopper slide show in the Home and Garden section features this chandelier designed by Jose Esteves, in France (but you can buy it in New York). He calls it the Brocante Chandelier, and you can buy single tier versions, as well as two sizes of the multi-tiered one. I'm starting to think my future holds business ownership: I love any decorative art within a decorative art, and there is so much out there, I think a whole shop could be devoted to these sorts of objects.

These lighting devices also remind me of undergrad, when I used to spend a lot of time in the jewelry studio. I wish I knew then what I know now (isn't that always the case...) about decorative arts and the possibilities of things I could have made. I want to go back and make objects like this.

Claire Coles Wallpaper

My mother, an awesome librarian at the Cleveland Museum of Art, often sends me books, articles from magazines and newspapers, and other tidbits that relate to what I study. She used to work in the library where I pretty much live now, and she is one of the few people who fully understand what I do and why. Anyway, a few days ago she sent me some material from the museum of wallpaper in Alsace, as well as a little clipping about Claire Coles. Coles is an artist and designer who makes a variety of objects including ceramics and wearable art, but the article was about her wallpaper creations. She uses old "forgotten" papers she collects, and stitches them together, sometimes adding leather and other materials. My favorite design from her website is this one with lamp shades, because, of course, I love the decorative art within the decorative art.

John Derian

I bought this John Derian plate in Savannah at the Paris Market & Brocante. I'm poor, but I have a hard time not buying things with decorative arts imagery, so this came home with me, along with a roll of more affordable chandelier printed wrapping paper. Derian is popular: you can buy his stuff in his own store, as well as tons of other places internationally. Here is a description of his process, taken from his website, "John Derian, an avid collector of antique fruit, flower and animal prints, hand-paints borders over centuries-old ledgers and letters. He combines all these elements into charmingly eccentric collages, which are reprinted and pieced together in layers under glass accessories."

So, if I'm reading this correctly, does this mean he does indeed alter some of the original materials, and it's only the finished collages that are reprinted, not the originals? If this is true, it seems sort of wrong. Maybe it's only because I'm curatorially-inclined, but I would rather reproduce the images first, and then create collages from those. In examples like the chair plate there isn't really any collage going on, just the straight image. There is no reason to alter the originals in these cases, so I'm assuming he doesn't (just when there is actually a collage). Some of the collections feature multiple images from the same book, often botanical volumes, and I hope that he isn't cutting the pages out simply to be reproduced on plates.

All that said, I still bought this plate. It's only 5 3/4" in diameter, so I still haven't found the right place for it in my apartment. I planned on hanging it on the wall, but I think it needs companions.