first friday
the very first thing i saw that day at 'three walls' gallery was this photo:
and i thought, "well, whatever, someone photoshop-d a picture to make it look like there's invisible box in the corner". but then i saw this...
...in the corner of the room, and i realized what the artist was doing! he photographed the corner from different angles then printed the pictures, covered a box with the photos and placed them in just the right spot.
neat huh. (Cayetano Ferrer Eight Corners)
next, in the same gallery i saw my other favorite work of the night, Chris Millar's Boiyd Howses and Other Hatstands. extravagant pieces with such detail that you needed a magnifying glass to really tell what was going on in them. looking almost like collages but all hand painted comic book style, r. crumb inspired i bet (not just visually but with crumbesque 'adult themes' and dirty language), maybe a bit of mad magazine, his pieces are jumbles of people and word baloons, each with a loose theme or story. one devoted to post cheers dr. frasier crane, a lost episode of his spin-off perhaps, were frasier ends up turning into a werewolf, with the next piece a sequel where the crane brothers find themselves in japan on a mission to cure frasier's transformation problem only to end up addicted to little japanese chocolate candy sticks pocky. then another to the various criticisms he's received as an artist, and an earlier work a lost episode of early star trek where kirk and spock practice perverse sex acts.
these cellphone pictures could never do the work justice - it's something that needs to be witnessed in person or atleast shot by a professional. i spoke with the 30 year old canadian artist briefly whom the gallery brought down for the past month especially for this show. he took me to his temporary studio in the back of the gallery and showed me his next piece, which he told me should be done in about two months, though maybe longer as he was already a few months in and it was less than half finished, a whole canvas devoted to the RPG game dungeons & dragons. he broke out a crate of the old user guides and manuals that go along with the classic game, ranging from what looked like the early seventies to the late eighties.
the next gallery we went to, Rhona Hoffman, had multiple rooms devoted to one artist, with an amazing installation piece made of cloth over wood frames hanging from the ceiling:
the opening room was all white cloth in various shapes and consistencies.
...and as you ventured in further there were all kinds of shapes and colors:
there are just a couple shots - every five or six feet a new theme would start. once again, to be in the midst of the space was a much different experience than a photo could ever give.
as the night went on the quality of art went down as well as the quality of booze (three walls provided individual bottles of 'grolsch' beer, the only twelve ounce with a bottle stopper attached with metal hinges...classy! a personal fav.) eventually shannon and i took to posing in front of certain pieces and before long we knew it was time to go home.
purely
decorative.