2009 in Review: Gallery Exhibitions
Published: December 29, 2009
Just when you thought that the real estate market and the economy couldn’t get any worse, Lisa Kirk encouraged us all to embrace the absurdities of our current predicament with her installation Maison des Cartes, at Invisible-Exports. Kirk constructed a shack inside the gallery, and pushing the idea of “shabby chic” to its most absurd, had real estate agents found through Craigslist to walk one through the structure’s “amenities,” ending the conversation with a pitch to buy a time share in the artwork’s reincarnated location in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The ramshackle nature of the shack — sporting amenities like “running water” generated by collecting rain water and a toilet consisting of a bucket — stood in stark contrast to the sales personnel’s polished, comedic performance. The exhibition invited viewers to take a step back and have a good laugh at some of the anxieties generated by the dilapidated market, while also questioning what led to the bust to begin with. — Amber Vilas Matt Keegan “New Windows” at D’Amelio Terras, February 28 – April 25, 2009 Visitors to Matt Keegan’s “New Windows” at D’Amelio Terras were greeted by an awkwardly placed tall vertical slab of drywall looking like the remnants of a partially constructed wall. The barrier bore phrases from the 1989 film Field of Dreams, in which Kevin Costner’s character is haunted by a voice saying “If you build it, they will come.” Matt Keegan did indeed “build it” for his exhibition, which tackled ideas of construction and deconstruction, memory, and interior versus exterior space. Six photo collages collectively titled New Windows featured images taken in Keegan’s apartment as his super repaired a window. He altered the photos to change the location of the tools in the room and position the figure both inside and outside of the window he’s repairing. Other interventions into space manifested themselves in the form of a hole cut into the gallery’s wall and revealing a photograph of the sun coming through foliage and an aluminum-mounted picture of the artist’s cat Neptune unassumingly resting on the floor. Done by anyone else, Keegan’s conceptual logic may have seemed heavy-handed and dry, but given his playful yet considered choices it was the perfect balance of conceptual grounding and whimsical intervention. —AV Troy Brauntuch at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Sept. 10 – Oct. 17, 2009 Coming on the heels of “The Pictures Generation” at the Met, “Troy Brauntuch” at Friedrich Petzel Gallery was a comprehensive survey into the work of one of the exhibition’s featured artists. Spanning 30 years, the exhibition not only offered a collection of meticulously executed, conceptually driven pieces, but also exposed Brauntuch’s working practice through the display of his reference materials and handmade rubber stamps. Brauntuch’s monochromatic conte-and-cotton paintings of everyday objects and images of extreme violence, with their subtle shifts of gradation, are compelling on their own, but the sketches, paintings, notes, and photographs used as source materials help flesh out the media-driven work. Exposing the objects influential in the work’s construction demystifies Brauntuch’s haunting, mist-veiled final products. — AV “Allan Kaprow: Yard” at Hauser and Wirth, Sept. 23 – Oct. 24 This fall, the global blue-chip gallery enterprise Hauser & Wirth opened its highly anticipated New York space with a decidedly noncommercial exhibition: an interpretation, by performance artist and interventionist William Pope.L, of commodification-defying artist Allan Kaprow’s seminal Environment Yard, first presented at the same location in 1961. Visitors to the tony new space on East 69th Street were invited to pick their way through an incongruous-seeming maze of precariously arranged automobile tires in the dark before moving upstairs, where they would be treated to a survey of documentation of various interpretations of the work, as well as other projects. The, exhibition, which also included further (offsite) interpretations, by Josiah McElheny and Sharon Hayes, was a welcome happening in a season of uncertainty: a celebration of work created well before the boom, by an artist who embraced participation and experience over cash and commerce. — Kris Wilton |
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