Weekend Arts Agenda: ‘Movable Types’ September 04 2014
Plus: Say goodbye to artist Darrick Ryan.
- Courtesy the artist
- Still from Cécile B. Evans, “How Happy A Thing Can Be,” 2014, HD video, dimensions variable
At the Ponce City Market, ART PAPERS opens Movable Types, featuring Rosa Aiello, Jennifer Bonner, Budd Dees and Galen Olmsted, Cécile B. Evans, Jill Frank, and Fernando Pessoa — all commissioned artists for ART PAPERS’ magazine and website, with the exhibit functioning as “fold-out.” This encourages, according to the organization, “a multi-dimensional, fluid, and immediate engagement on the part of our shared audiences.”
“Folding is an inherent part of the process of printing, so the thematic is, first, a reference to what ART PAPERS does as a print publication,” Editor Victoria Camblin told me. One piece, Cécile B. Evans’ How Happy a Thing Can Be, “for instance endows inanimate objects — a pair of CGI scissors, a comb, and a screwdriver — with human sensitivities and emotions, making ‘hard’ objects pliable,” Camblin says. With an opening from 7-10 p.m. on Friday.
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FRIDAY
- Courtesy whitespace
- Taryn Lee Crenshaw, “SpinalCord,” unstretched canvas, 30x40 in.
Esoteric Lore’s Rites of Passage will open tonight at whitespace. The collective is composed of female African-American artists from around the city, gathered around a common cause: to “counter the revisionist history behind the black female experience.” The new show is not devoid of politics — it just couples that with other things, and many styles. With an opening reception from 7-10 p.m.
- Courtesy Stan McCollum Gallery
- Eric Hancock, “Fireside chat,” acrylic on canvas, 53x72 in.
Eric Hancock’s solo exhibit, Following Redlands Road, has a singular inspiration: Stanley Spencer’s 1956 watercolor painting of the same name. Hancock’s show is a riff on Spencer’s “draughtmanship,” itself a riff on the insouciant boundaries between memory, observation and imagination. Put another way: “Painted without the aid of references, Hancock’s images are derived from the slippery terrain of memory,” according to the gallery’s official announcement. But Hancock’s braininess (he’s a frequent contributor to BURNAWAY, among other rhetorical pursuits) is belied by strange eye, how for example dark greens can be streaked with spray-paint pink. With an opening reception from 7-9 p.m. at the Stan McCollum Gallery.
SATURDAY
- Courtesy Blue Tower Gallery
- Derrick Ryan
It’s your last chance to see Beats Unseen , showcasing “belated artist” Darrick Ryan, at Blue Tower Gallery. Which means the show is drawn from Ryan’s collection of “illustrations, graphics, paintings, sculptures, music, fashion and personal projects” — things he was “fickle” about, according to the official description, to the point of a kind of perfection with no end. He could paint and repaint a work for years. The quality of incompletion is almost epistemological, but the works themselves require your full attention for their offhanded aesthetic density and even abstraction. With a closing reception, celebrating Ryan, at 8 p.m.