Work is not slow at all for me this week, and yet I found time to take a long lunch for a gallery crawl today:
- Diem Chau at Mark Wolfe. Chau's truncated human figures, pictured right, are embroidered onto translucent fabric stretched over cups and saucers, and are composed of delicate stitches and the occasional deliberately loose strand. The pale pottery she has chosen provides a neutral palette over which metallic thread accents her "drawings" with delightful jolts of color. I also loved Chau's delicate sculptures of people carved directly into pencils and crayons.
- Theresa Ganz's Shadow on the Green show at Steven Wolf. Ganz hand-cuts photographs of flowers and ribbons and then assembles them into complex tangled collages that invite you to peer into their depths. I was particularly drawn to a piece set in a light-box where the bright background only serves to accentuate the relative darkness of the twisted interior. My friend Sean wrote an excellent piece about the show over on Hideous Sunday.
- The Vivisect Playset Five group show at Gallery 1988. The title of the show hints at the animal theme, though thankfully many of the critters portrayed by the 30 or so participating artists are more alive than dead. Fantasy is also a common motif, from Ghostpatrol's creepy-cute boy in a bear suit to Jonathan Bergeron's Evil Penguin to Roland Tomayo's industrialized manatees. I also thought Dia's pointillist octopus was fantastic, and spent a lot of time looking at Mayuko Fujino's cut-out and collaged sci-fi anteater images. This was my first time in Gallery 1988 since it opened last year, but I suspect I will be back soon.