The Arts in NYC 2010

Daniel Canogar Trace
I found Daniel Canogar’s work to be extremely insightful and interesting. His primary material is garbage that he finds in nearby dumps. For his Spin piece, he mounted 100 DVD disks on the wall and reflected a short part of the movie onto the opposite wall. The reflections were not in perfect lines, so some of the circles looked particularly distorted. In this piece Daniel was trying to show our culture’s fascination with flickering images while simultaneously expressing the alarmingly short life of pop culture. Each of the movies represented took an enormous amount of work to create and distribute, and they all end up forgotten and in the trash. The short sequence of each movie that is show also serves to show that most movies or other media are only remembered for one very small part of the whole. His other pieces in the gallery were made out of old telephone and computer wires. Daniel rigged up the wires so that there is light coursing in and out of them, simulating the sound energy that once flowed through them. Here we see the same themes of having a short lifespan and the utility of garbage.

Abelardo Morell The Universe Next Door
This exhibit was very interesting in that it used a photography technique, camera obscura, that I was not very familiar with. All of the photographs in this gallery used this technique, which essentially allows you to project an image onto another image. There were many very intriguing examples of juxtaposition in this gallery, including an image of a bed projected onto an image of New York City, which plays around with the phrase “the city that never sleeps”. Another photo projects an image of a crowded bookshelf onto an image of some kind of rural countryside. Here you can also see themes of time, industrialism and cycles.

Mary Temple Among Friends and Enemies
One of the pieces at this exhibit was very similar to the Herald Tribune piece from the Guggenheim Museum Haunted exhibit. In fact, it was pretty much the same idea except the papers were from a recent time period. The same concept of taking out the words and letting the pictures and the position of the pictures tell the story was present, however. I find it very interesting that this is the way most people read newspapers now. The news companies are very careful about the facial expressions of the political figures in relation to where they are on the page. Another piece in the gallery was of a beaver stuffed with paper designed for learning how to write script, with the signature of the matriarch of the Astor family all over the papers that were in a haphazard, crumpled pile below the beaver. This piece was apparently referring to a scandal where her son forged her signature and tried to take her fortune when she died. The beaver was the family’s symbol.

Roxy Paine Distillation
This piece was essentially a huge metal structure that looped around and went through the walls, filling the entire space of the gallery. The construction takes up a large portion of the space, so even though there is a lot of empty space, you are forced to move within the space in a very specific fashion. In another room, there was a large metal board hanging on the wall that was covered in metal mushrooms, creating a kind of simulacrum with the way the industrial (the metal mushrooms) was attempting to impersonate nature. The mushrooms looked as though they could be real.