Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Chelsea

Chelsea district has been my favorite day so far.

Brian Jungens work discussed the globalization of our culture today. I remember seeing his tribal masks made out of Nike shoes in one of my art classes, they made me really sad. When seeing the work I thought of how many native tribes are losing there own traditions, language, and land. I have a few friends that are Native American that don’t practice any traditions. When seeing Jungens work it reminds me of western globalization people losing their traditions and being consumers whores. Jungen does a great job mixing them together.

I’m not sure how to word what I’m thinking and trying to say…

In the Casey Kaplan gallery press release it explains the “jerrycan”. It says that gallons such as this one, litters the landscapes, and these lands are rich in petroleum fields, but also lack fueling stations. He poked hundreds of holes in to this red gas gallon and made a beautiful dragon fly design. Representing the beaded works of native tribes.



The DIVA containers were like storage containers placed across the streets in Chelsea they were really cool I thought the way that they are all on the street for anyone to walk into at their own risk was a great concept. I found only a few but the one DIVA that stood out to me was one that had tree projector screens. Each screen had different scenes but all together were the same movie. On the left screen was a man in a cages and it was raining and the water kept rising eventually he drowns, in the middle from my interpretation represented hell, it was showing naked bodies suffering, having orgies, getting burnt by small meteors, really gruesome things. In the right screen was a male a representation of Jesus sitting in a room a lot like a jail cell and he was just sitting there just waiting for something to happen. By far this triptych was my favorite. Their was so much going on and definitely something I would like to sit and watch again carefully.
Sadly the DIVAs did not have the name of the artist or a flier to take so Im not sure who the artist was.

The James Cohan Gallery was playing a animation from what i believe is called TABAIMO, again this one was a 3 panel screen. As soon as I laid eyes on this video my full-undivided attention was set. I have a 30 sec clip of it here. This video was well animated. It portrayed a women’s public restroom, you see a women change her pad, a women dropping her phone in the toilet and a women looking in the mirror most the time, the thing about this whole thing is a perv is out side the bathroom and sends in these mechanical butterflies to take pictures of the women inside the bathrooms. Its comical and entertaining.


The other gallery that I enjoy and it showed Max Lang work. His work was very sexual which I like. Right when you walk in the gallery a video is playing at first I had no clue what it was or what was going on but as I paid close attention I noticed that objects moving around are dildos and different sex toys, and a bunny is dancing around while this psychedelic music is playing, and a dragon is moving in the background. It was such a trippy video. As you walked along the gallery you see digital images from the video they look as if the dildos were made of glass but the images were definitely digitally made.

All in all Chelsea was so much fun and it was a great time to get to know people from the group and to walk around freely in the streets with out museum security constantly telling us that photography is not allowed.