Appropriation
An irreverent artist slaps computer pop-up notifications onto subway advertisements and city signage.
Thanks to a genius anonymous art collective, Chicagoans can pass Go and collect a public art experience on their way to work.
You see a Facebook profile page, results from a Google Image search, or a YouTube video reel. Ken Solomon sees a work of art.
Artist Meekyoung Shin renders a genuine soap opera of ancient artifacts.
Andrea Mary Marshall has re-designed the current cigarette warnings and images that Mayor Bloomberg has successfully haunted (and then taxed) you with on the front of cigarette packets. Her warnings now read “OMG,” “Deliver us from evil,” “Have mercy,” “Holy smoke,” and “Forgive us our sins,” instead.
Using Marlboro Red 100 cigarette boxes as her literal canvases, Marshall paints on provocative symbols with acrylic paint in this series titled “Marlboro Mary.”
Instead, he collects. He accumulates everyday objects that catch his eye but would normally be overlooked. The glint of light off a marble, the color of a milk crate, or liquid sloshing around in a plastic bottle can spawn sculptures shown around the world.
Bo Joseph’s work confronts you with the process that produced it. The paper is frayed, patched together, the drawings a dense accumulation of marks that seem to have been deposited by successive generations of human habitation. Scrutinize them long enough and outlines of artifacts, ceremonial objects, and sculptures emerge. It might be a Roman helmet, a bull, a seated figure, but usually it’s just the intimation of a form that doesn’t quite come into focus. Joseph’s upcoming exhibition, Fragments of a Worldview, shores together its materials and source images into a contingent sense of reality.
When Sherrie Levine debuted her famous series of photographs After Walker Evans at Metro Pictures in 1981, the pieces provoked outrage, confusion, and most importantly, conversation. In the series, Levine rephotographed Walker Evans’ iconic depression-era photographs, raising questions about authorship and context. How are Levine’s artworks distinct from the originals by Evans? Does the new context change their meaning?
Henry Simonds has devised a taxonomical system for every strain of the Super Ball®. Those crafted to look like pool balls are called Hypersphaerae billiardus; ones made with marble compositions and primary colors are dubbed Hypersphaera primomarmoreus. They’re all arranged in tidy, neat frames like butterflies in museums. It’s an absurd methodology, and the underlying meaninglessness of the practice is precisely what Simonds explores. The Pittsburgh-based filmmaker’s Requiem for the Super Ball®, a mixed-media exhibition, runs at Charles Bank Gallery through September 11.
Littered with old checks, used condom wrappers, and magazine cut-outs, the images from Richard Prince’s newest exhibition are like polished trash. Paying homage to Jackson Pollock, the famed appropriation artist has selected photographs of the painter at work and desecrated them. Prince replaces Pollock’s head with the likes of Kate Moss and Sid Vicious, obliterating the artist’s identity along with typical notions of authorship. Though tese themes are familiar ones for the artist, this latest exhibition also reflects a more introspective turn for the artist.
They are insanely bright and look across the room at each other. I love putting handmade things into magazines and books and the internet – drawings for everyone to hold in their laps (or laptops). But there’s nothing quite like having the drawing itself, and all its quirks of color and line, out there in the world at eye level having conversations with strangers. I think they probably have great conversations with New Yorkers.
Books that don’t exist to be read but to lend their aura to the proceedings around them, from presidential addresses to pornos.
