Let’s start with my catching up with yesterday information about Flow.
Arthur Roger Gallery (New Orleans) is showing Nicole Charbonet (top) whose built and developed paintings are a new interest if mine – I became interested after seeing them in ArtPapers magazine and in person they are as strong as they seemed.
Kenise Barnes (Larchmont NT) is showing Robert Flynn (above) who does these amazing charcoal and graphite images of sod. I know this sounds weak – but it’s just the opposite. These are amazing images and deserve your attention. A recent work is based on trophies and “boy toys” (my phrase) – well worth searching out. I understand he also does some amazing sculpture of items found in Home Depot – it sounds good so I’m waiting for that.
Miller Block (Boston) is showing Lori Nix who was gotten enough words from me in the last few days. So you know that you should be looking at her work a good bit.
After Flow yesterday, I had even lower hopes for the Bridge show. So I walk in and am handed the second largest and physically intimidating catalog of the last week – its almost the size of “Parabola” that I mentioned on wednesday ok, it’s half that size – but its still big -like an old issue of “Interview”. Again Flow is probably the best of the fairs after ABMB and I was also surprised by the high quality at Bridge as well. I really did think these two shows were just me too art fairs – I was so wrong. Both of these shows have set the bar very high, in fact it might be that these “late bloomers” are the real future of what is going on in Miami for the next few years as far as growing the orbiting events. Neither one is using the whole location, nor are they tied to any single location giving these events the ability to grow and shrink with almost no downside. Don’t get me wrong, AQUA is a great event, however the AQUA Hotel is already full so what’s next? Other than a deeper editing in the gallery selection process, I’m not sure.
So lets get to what I saw… Johnnie Winona Ross (above) is showing a painting and a great set of prints at Elin Eagles-Smith (San Francisco) – since we last spoke about JWR – he has developed a waiting list for his paintings – but a few prints are still available. I’m as thrilled with his work as I was last year.
Trillium Press has some great things going forward, including a book of David Mamet Cartoons.
Front Room Gallery (Brooklyn) is showing works by Emily Roz Who creates large grids of images taken from movies and television. Using Polaroid film she is able to mimic the look and feel of images flickering on screen. She also is able to hold up a mirror depicting formula and genre of the american landscape.
PierreFrancois Ouellette (Quebec) is showing John Latour as a re-staging of his show, “Lost Words”. Latour is one of four who make up this show – his work occupies a space between Joseph Kosouth and edited FBI documents.
Andrew Edlin (NYC) is showing swiss photographer Mario del Curto (below) photographic the work of architect Richard Greaves. These feel like the work of someone photographing the folk art of the American south however most of these were shot in Canada – and it hardly matters. The images are eccentric and familiar, yet have are fascinating in a way thats hard to ignore them.
Back to AQUA
I meant to spend a few moments with Isaac Layman, however when I as there he was pretty busy with some folks so I put off the conversation with him for a later date. That said, lets touch on his work a little so you can see where my excitement is coming from. IL’s work sits in a relationship between the detail and the whole – it shows that the parts are more complicated than the larger whole. These images recall a sort of updated cubism that is all the more fascinating in that he is building images based of many smaller images toward a collective whole. A macro/micro type approach. Isaac Layman is showing at Soil
Platform had a number of nice Jaq Chartier’s paintings. These are always a strong and continue to impress me with the vernacular of the image that is built and referenced throughout all of the works.