It's 4pm on a Friday. You stand in front of the jam-packed boardroom finally giving the presentation that will make or break this career you've worked so damn long to build. Your eyes dilate, your palms sweat, and the hair on your neck stands on end. This is it–this is really it isn't it?–but you can't remember a single solitary word. The only word that runs through the blank slate that was once your mind is an atonal one, abrupt and unrelenting. "Gallery."

Girl, it's Friday though! Stop worrying about that work stuff, dab on some aftershave and let's get this rumpus started!

Thursday May 16, 2013

Denise Bibro Fine Art – “Ordinary Unhappiness” Opening – 6-8pm

"…Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness,” wrote Freud in his apparently-uplifting Studies on Hysteria. This lighthearted news from everyone’s favorite psychoanalyst proved the inspiration for artist Jerry Meyer’s latest sexhibition–whoops, was that a Freudian slip? Despite the topics, a series of Joseph Cornell-like light boxes, photoshopped texts, and a new large-scale installation are sure to make the opening a whole lot sunnier than the sticky insides of Freud's mind!

Robert Mann Gallery – “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes” – 6-8pm

Artist Richard Finkelstein makes his Robert Mann debut with a new series of his slyly manipulated photographs. Finkelstein focuses in particular on photographing small dioramas and creating trompe l’oeils, like a photo of spectators viewing spectators viewing spectators viewing photos. Just be careful when you go that Finkelstein isn’t lurking over your shoulder, turning your observation into fodder for his next show.

Sundaram Tagore Gallery – “Time’s Pace” opening – 6-8pm

Wood! Painted plexiglass! Collage! Artist Susan Weil deploys the whole toolkit in her new exhibition, an exploration of her familiar themes of “time, movement, and space.” A prominent fixture on the New York art scene since the 1950s, Weil’s work here should achieve some interesting new shading in the context of Sundaram Tagore, a gallery dedicated to exploring intersections between Eastern and Western cultures.

Friday May 17, 2013

TSA Gallery – “Unnatural Selection” Opening – 7-10pm

Japanese-American artist Naomi Reis’s new exhibit explores how well human civilization has conquered nature, and how much it hasn’t. With a series of pictures that depict natural life in mostly urban environments– a print from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, for example– Reis asks whether we’ve tamed the natural world, or just tamped it down.

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise – “Lotus Beaters” Opening – 6-8pm

Artist Joe Bradley’s sweet, simple, large-scale works on canvas most certainly fall into the “my kid could do that” school. But the childishness is most certainly deliberate and taken together the works have an affecting feel. Between the hors d’oeuvres and the gallery beauties hobnobbing over wine, it’ll be a satisfying adults-only evening.

Saturday May 18, 2013

Harbor Gallery – “Surface Intentions” Opening – 7-9pm

Featuring work from artists featuring artists Corydon Cowansage, Mark Dorf and Shawn Powell, “Surface Intentions” explores the concept of landscape painting with a twist. Certain works verge into the abstract, while others (by Dorf) take traditional landscape photographing and interrupt it with geometric computer manipulation. No place to come if you’re looking for sheep grazing images, but a nice place to get a 21st century twist on the landscape.

LMAK Projects – “Intersections” Opening – 6-9pm

In 1966, artist Edward Ruscha created The Sunset Strip, a photo documentary book depicting each house and building along the Los Angeles strip. Here, artist Claudia Joskowicz adapts the work, creating her own video installation from footage she took of the Avenida Alfonso Ugarte in Bolivia.

DODGE Gallery – “appositions: still / birth / shit” – 6-8pm

Plastic hair, thorns, snakeskin and more delightful objects are the main materials for artist Lorna Williams’ sculptural explorations of the body in various states of evolution, decay and (best of all, my ducklings) defecation. There’s a whole plethora of weird and wonderful displays on the way in this one, but stool, a meditation on the substance created from a reptile carcass, is no doubt going to be the highlight of your and my Saturday evening.

Article by Christopher Shea

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