Freeman's Alley: Take That, Paris, 10/27/11

-->

Freeman's Alley, gallery round up.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/freemans-alley-take-that-paris/1895/

Photo: Call My Lawyer (detail), by Jimmy Trotter.

Let’s face it—New York is great, but it’s not Paris. It doesn’t have that beautiful pale stone palette, that uniform low horizon, that radial street layout that gives it a geographical heart, all those brasseries. But Freeman’s Alley, near the Bowery, actually feels just a little bit like Paris, if you squint your eyes to blur the New York coarseness and thin coating of grime. And if you stumble upon it the way I did, it feels all the more magical.

I happened into Mulherin + Pollard gallery at 187 Chrystie Street, where I saw Jimmy Trotter’s exhibition, The Sweetest Kill(through Oct 30), plus an engaging group show, Daydreaming Animals. Trotter uses various media to draw, paint, and layer text and cartoon and pop imagery in serendipitous, yet highly satisfying compositions. It’s like a cross-section of the content of his brain, laid out in plain sight. Your eye is tugged from one image cluster to another, noticing along the way an overlaid geometric structure camouflaged in white. Words process differently than images, so it feels like your brain is being massaged while being fed candy. Another work features a bunch of glued-on pom-poms (Puff Balls) that made me smile. So did Babylon, an installation featuring an shrine of plastic figurines and small toys sheltered within a grotto made of 100+ drawings and scraps.

The Bowery: Gritty Art Elbowing Grit, 4/15/11

-->

The Bowery: Gritty Art Elbowing Grit: a gallery roundup

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/the-bowery-gritty-art-elbowing-grit/1188/

Katy Grannan, Anonymous, San Francisco, 2010, 2010 Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper mounted to Plexiglas 39 x 29". Edition of 3.

The Bowery gallery area is still sparsely populated with galleries so that it’s not mentally and physically overwhelming, as Chelsea can be. The art venues sit jarringly in contrast to the still-present Bowery Mission residents and restaurant supply wholesalers, and Whole Foods, Pulino’s and DBGB Kitchen lord conspicuously over the corners of Houston. So the tipping point can’t be far, but at the moment, it’s still exciting and somewhat untrodden.

Salon 94 now has two spaces: one at 243 Bowery, and another (Salon 94 Freemans) on the gritty yet Parisian-like Freemans Alley. Both are exhibiting the work of Katy Grannan (through April 30), a two-part show calledThe Happy Ever After.Boulevard, at the Freemans space, is a haunting series of color portraits of people on the streets of San Francisco and LA, all taken in front of a white stucco wall strafed with that white California light. While we know nothing of the subjects (all the titles are “Anonymous”), we get the sense that many are outliers who have recreated themselves in a specific, idealized image, and that all have a strong sense of self, despite their unconformity. Despite perhaps being societal castoffs, they live enviably within a liberated sense of their remade selves. These portraits sit within sleek new galleries amid folks not wholly unlike Grannan’s subjects, but for want of some self-actualization and grooming. Salon 94 Bowery, with its elegant grand staircase descending to the basement, is screening Grannan’s video, The Believers, a kind of intimate animated version of the portraits, shifting between documentary and spy camera.