Sunday, March 17, 2013

Passages @ Daniel Cooney Fine Art



Not a bad eclectic group show. It features a nice minimalist sculpture by Hermes Payrhuber of two dark-stained wood planks with an improbable bend that looked like a yet to be installed shelving unit from Gattaca. The piece’s sleek, dark, cool looking boards lean against the wall with an intentional casualness, which went wonderfully with my favorite piece in the show, Gina Dawson’s fantastic wood plank covered in a blossoming spring field, made by hand out of paper (in full disclosure, I along with other friends helped cut the paper that was then hand-crafted into flowers and grass). As impressive as the craft is, the act of covering the board leaning against a wall was an aggressive step in transforming the masculine seventies performance art of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, or Techching Hsieh that lives on as contrasty photographs, into a colorful field of hand-made flowers, a craft that I would imagine has some lineage in the hobbies of older women. Dawson managed to repurpose masculine avant-garde work with a traditional feminine craft art to make performative craft art, a genre of art unto herself (I am gonna ignore Forcefields macramé outfits at the Whitney Biannual). I also liked the photograph of a naked woman in an empty field bent over a horse by Benjy Russell & Rya Kleinpeter. The picture may have been aver-the-top, but once attractive, naked women get into the artistic mix, I start to question my judgment, so I think it was good, but I am not entirely sure.


Through Apr. 27th

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