Nicholas di Genova and Sean McCarthy at Fredericks Freiser.
February 12 - April 2, 2005

AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shockheaded Peter is playing in New York!!!! SO EXCITING! The play (musical!) consists of dark/hilarious vignettes from The Struwwelpeter (along the lines of the The Gashlycrumb Tinies). Favorites include Pauline who plays with matches, the huntsman (hunted by the hare marionette style), fidgety Philip, Augustus who refuses soup and wastes away to nothing, and Conrad who won't stop sucking his thumb (Shockheaded Peter cuts his thumbs off).

From the site:
"In the spirit of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey comes this hilariously gruesome and wildly acclaimed musical staging of a classic 19th Century picture book. Deliciously morbid, occasionally chilling, and entirely unique, Shockheaded Peter illuminates a series of cautionary tales about a horrible cast of disobedient children with a whimsical combination of grand guignol, puppetry, and Victorian melodrama."

Maybe it's the programmer in me, but the Pace Wildenstein Logical Conclusions show is getting me off my butt and over to Chelsea. Saturday is the closing date for the show - fifty plus works of rule-based art (using "objective systems to explore the complex and chaotic realms of the subjective" haha.)

Very exciting - Michal Rovner: Data Zone from the 2003 Venice Biennale (which I've only seen in pictures) will be there. Sol LeWitt, Jenny Holzer, Paul Pfeiffer and Tom Friedman too.

While out west, will probably catch the Diana Cooper: Swarm at Postmasters, Cao Fei: COSPlayers at Lombard-Freid, Nicholas Di Genova and Sean McCarthy at Fredericks Freiser, Aziz + Cucher and other artists-in-residence in Remapped Realities at Eyebeam, Marjetica Potrc: Drawing Cities at Max Protetch, and Casey Reas at bitforms. Wahoo!

Further north (save for later): Yeondoo Jung's Wonderland at Tina Kim

This Satuday, Giant Robot is opening a new store in New York! Plenty of asian goodies for everyone. The opening reception will also feature artwork by the hot Eishi Takaoka (delicate sculpted heads on medicinal glass bottles for everyone). Takaoka worked at Takashi Murakami's Hiropon factory and was recently part of Plum Blossoms' Psionic Distortion show.

Giant Robot New York - Store Grand Opening
437 E. 9th St. (b/w 1st Ave. and Ave. A)
11:30am - 10pm

and for later in the day, Alan Cumming will be at the Apple Store Soho, with his creative team, talking about his new fragrance, "Cumming." Why? To show off how it was 'Made on a Mac.'

Apple Store Soho, 103 Prince Street, NY
Saturday, June 25, 7pm - 8pm

Oh wow. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are going to have one of their installations at Sundance! Our Second Date is featured in the 'Frontier Live' session. From the Sundance announcements: "The McCoy's latest installation is a miniature movie set gearred for live robotic cinema that puts the production, post-production, and exhibition of a film all in one room." (via the IFC Blog)

They also have a show coming up at Postmasters, March 4 - April 9. Hooray!

One last bit of good news. They have started documenting all of their projects on Flickr! Check out these fantastic mccoyspace photos.

Two shows from last summer I enjoyed --

Nicola López at Caren Golden. López creates wonderful inks/collage supercities that spread across the walls and down from the ceilings.

Andre von Morisse at McKenzie Fine Art. Von Morisse paints fantastic alternate futures in grisaille oil and then photographs them to create large prints. By blowing up 8''x8'' originals into 42"x41" prints, the image looks like out of focus real documentation. Or, as the curator put it, "The resulting soft-focus, selenium-toned silver gelatin prints recontextualize the painted images into the often unquestioned realm of photographic truth." Ha.

A quick trip through ArtCal yields some neighborhood shows I'd like to hit up before closing time.

Structuring Perception at NURTUREart
475 Keap Street, Nov. 4, 2005 - Jan. 15, 2006

A group exhibition in which the artists translate their perception of the built environment into objects that have a physical impact on the viewer.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga at Momenta Art
72 Berry Street, Dec. 9, 2005 - Jan. 23, 2006

Drawing from public text submissions to an online repository of personal perspectives on Nicaragua, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga constructs a revisionist history portraying the ebb and flow of Latin American Marxist revolution. At a time when the U.S. government considers possible flaws in its current interventionist strategies, and as South American socialist leaders challenge U.S. policy, the installation FALLOUT: What's Left collapses the past with the present in an attempt to rattle the U.S.'s media amnesia. The installation will feature propaganda posters commissioned for the installation from four designers: Isabel Chang, Enrique Sacasa, Ed Adams, and David Ulrich; a new video game by the artist "Always Go Left;" a mini FM public radio station, and free Skype sessions during the holiday season for migrants separated from family.

Cheryl Molnar, The Life and Death of a City at McCaig-Welles
129 Roebling Street, Suite B, Jan. 6 - Jan. 26, 2006

In her recent paintings and works on paper, Cheryl Molnar captures through the use of found materials the rapidly changing Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront and surrounding neighborhood. Her found materials include paper -- related mimeographed blueprints, engineering plans, and diagrams as well as documents from her own personal history --and cardboard collected from solitary walks that explore Brooklyn's few remaining industrial neighborhoods. Collaging and often staining these materials with oil paint, she documents her vision of Brooklyn's past, present and future urban landscape.

Brian Dewan and Leon Dewan at Pierogi 2000
177 North 9th Street, Dec. 31, 2005 - Jan. 31, 2006

Leon Dewan and Brian Dewan are Dewanatron -- a collaborative team who make hand-crafted, semi-automatic, electronic musical instruments. This exhibition will feature 12 wall-mounted, analog, solid-state instruments that produce occasional electronic utterances at ever-shifting intervals of time. Also included in the show are parlor and concert instruments such as the Swarmatron and the Dual Primate Console. Visitors will be able to play the Coin-Op Melody Gin, an arcade instrument in which 25 cents buys the customer a four-minute electronic music-making-odyssey with knobs and toggle switches.

Too Art for TV! at Stay Gold
451 Grand Street, Jan. 13 - Feb. 13, 2006

Artists in the industry must be the best draftsmen and painters that art schools produce, yet their careers leave little time for individual creativity. Too Art for TV! pools together the toys, prints, drawings, paintings, and comics of a talented workforce breaking free. Featuring the artists that bring to life beloved cartoons such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Fox Network), Code Name: Kids Next Door (Cartoon Network), Stanley (Disney TV), Venture Brothers (Adult Swim), Daria (MTV Animation), Blue's Clues (Nick JR), and more.

Superlowrez at Vertexlist
138 Bayard Street, between Graham and Manhattan, Dec. 17, 2005 - Mar. 14, 2006

Superlowrez is an experiment in re-visiting a historically significant moment when pixel and bitmap were in their infancy.

Wahoo! Scott Snibbe is speaking at the jihui salon this month.

Scott Snibbe presents recent works that explore interaction between cinematic projections and viewers’ bodies along with his most recent work, Blow Up, which amplifies human breath as a large field of wind. He discusses the philosophical divide between language and visceral perception that motivates his creation of interactive media art. Working with technologies at the forefront of contemporary research including computer vision and synthetic touch, Snibbe explores how a minimal intrusion of technology can provide insight into the nature of observer's minds and their sense of self. Works shown will range from large-scale body-centric physical installations to interactive sculpture and screen- and web-based interactive graphics.

Friday, February 24, 2006 @ 6:00 pm
Body, Space and Cinema

jihui - Digital Salon
Chelsea Art Museum, 3rd fl.
556 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

During the 1930's, local governments began to use photography as a tool for appraising real property for taxation purposes. New York City was the largest municipality to adopt this technology. The result was 720,000 35mm black and white images of every property in the five Boroughs. NYC Department of Records - Tax Photographs.. $30 for an 8"x10" print, $45 - 11"x14" print, add $4 s/h.

There's additional excerpts from the city's municipal archives, which includes crime and criminals, the census c.1820, and a united jet crashing into park slope in 1960.

Got a Film Forum flyer in the mail. Two that I'm looking forward to are Michael Kang's The Motel and Jan Svankmajer's Sílení (Lunacy).

In The Motel, thirteen-year-old Ernest Chin lives and works at a sleazy hourly-rate motel on a strip of desolate suburban bi-way. Misunderstood by his family and blindly careening into puberty, Ernest befriends Sam Kim, a self-destructive yet charismatic Korean American man who has checked in (played by Sung Kang, the self-destructive yet charismatic Korean in Better Luck Tomorrow). The main reason I want to check it out is the 'Love and Other Disasters' section of Jeff Yang's Give Me Puberty, Or Give Me Death article.

As the topic of adolescent relationships comes up, Mike and I play a game of Top This.

...

"I remember going to the local Dairy Mart all the time to see this one Filipino girl, because one time when she gave me change, she accidentally sort of scratched my hand with her finger, and my whole body went completely crazy," he says. "I would go in there and buy candy bars all the time, just hoping that she'd touch my hand again."

I admit that in fifth grade I kissed a girl I liked on the back of the head when she wasn't looking. "And then I fell down trying to run away, so it was totally obvious that it was me."

"There was this girl in seventh grade, and it took me weeks of agonizing to call her up," he says. "And when I finally asked her out, she was like, 'I can't.' I hung up and started riding my bike around the whole neighborhood, totally juiced, because she didn't say no, she said she couldn't. Which to me meant she would if she could. Of course, I never called her again, because I didn't want to screw it up. That was the closest I got to a girl in junior high."

I tell him about the popular-crowd girl with honey-blond hair and cool glasses who came up to me on a dare and asked me if I liked anyone. Dizzied by her presence, I stammered out a yes, only to have her start rattling off names, trying to pin down my crush's identity. I could see a faint terror rising in her eyes as the list of remaining female classmates grew shorter and shorter, until I finally let her off the hook by saying it wasn't anyone in our year. Exhaling with relief, she announced that she knew exactly who it was: It was Wendy, a sixth grader and friend of my little sister, the only Chinese girl in school that wasn't a member of my immediate family. It wasn't, and we both knew it.

Game over. It's a draw: We're both huge losers.

Oh man, everytime I read it, it kills me. The Motel plays at Film Forum, Wednesday, June 28 – Tuesday, July 11.

Jan Svankmajer's self-described horror film is based loosely on The Premature Burial and The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fether by Edgar Allen Poe and inspired by the Marquis de Sade. In nineteenth-century France, Jean Berlot is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis to spend the night in his castle. The Marquis later takes his guest to a surreal lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. And, of course, there is a lot of stop-motion raw meat animation sprinkled in (it's a Svankmajer film!). Trailer available here.

Lunacy plays at Film Forum, Wednesday, August 9 -Tuesday, August 22. Check here for additional screenings.

Check out these New York City Subway Historical Maps dating back to 1888! David Pirmann has run nycsubway.org since 1995 as a hobby. The site does not contain any banner ads and is sponsored by donations... it does contain a ridiculous amount of information on the new york subways (the interborough rapid transit subway, abandoned station guides, subway art guides, retired cars, and on and on).

Update: New York Transit Museum Prints

I'm still pissed at myself for missing the NY Polish Film Festival screening of Zbigniew Rybczynski and Mariusz Wilczynski shorts last Thursday. Rybczynski 's Tango is one of my favorites (I can't believe it's on YouTube?!)

But! There's still time to catch the Kihachiro Kawamoto program at BAM Rose Cinemas, running June 1-3, 2006. Kawamoto has been making stop-motion animated films since the 1950s. Films include the NY premiere of feature-length The Book of the Dead, and two programs of shorts, themed Demons, Poets, and Priests and Absurdities, Legends, and Fairy Tales. Kawamoto studied briefly under Jiri Trnka after the Czech stop-motion legend responded to a letter from Kawamoto and invited him to visit his studio in Prague. It's kind of crazy when you read midnight eye's interview with Kawamoto and realize travel out of Japan was far more rare then, and how the kindness of strangers stayed with Kawamoto.

Also-
Something to look forward to: Animation Around the World, July 17-31 at BAM
For the first time we are presenting the best of various shorts filmmakers and festivals from around the world with filmmaker's hand-drawn, stop-motion, computer-assisted works. Programs include: Best of Ottawa 2005; Best of Animateka (Slovenia); Best of Clermont-Ferrand; Animation Block Party; and Paul Driessen Program

Oh man, Sunday, July 9 is going to be a big one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

• 2:00PM Giglio Sunday: The Lifting of the Giglio & Boat
  
  The 116th Annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Saint Paulinus of Nola, otherwise known as the Giglio Festival. In Italian Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the residents of the community look forward to the annual Giglio Feast held every July since 1903.
  
  The Giglio Tower is a heavy structure weighing about four tons and standing sixty-five feet in height. The front of the structure is divided into six panels of paper-mache saints, angels, flowers, a map of Italy, and a statue of San Paolino. The tower is anchored on a square platform, large enough to accommodate a band and singer/M.C. The entire platform rests on I-beams that are lifted by 112 men who carry it forward twenty to forty yards at a time. Each lift lasts from one to four minute and can vary in style including a complete rotation (called a 360); a backward march, a quick drop and lift, (called a #2 and a favorite of those who appreciate the difficulty of such maneuver), as well as swaying and bouncing of the giglio. The lifters repeat this scenario again and again for several hours. At the same time, one block away, the boat crew is dancing la barca in separate lifts. The boat also contains a band and singer, the Turk, and young boys, dressed in Arabian costumes who shower the audience with confetti.
  
  The high point of the day occurs at the cross streets of Havermeyer and North 8th. At this juncture, the giglio and la barca meet; the front ranks of each structure clasp hands in the symbolic re-enactment of the historic return of San Paolino to Nola.
  
  It even has a MySpace page.
  
  
  


• 2:00PM 2006 World Cup Finals: Italy vs. France
  
  Who knows how crazy the Giglio Festival is going to be with Italy in the finals AT THE SAME TIME as the Dancing of the Giglio & Boat? Maybe the streets will be empty? Maybe the streets will be insane?
  
  
  


• 2:00PM McCarren Park Pool Party (shows start at 3PM, runs until 8PM)
  
  JellyNYC is pleased to invite you to Pool Parties, a Summer 2006 Brooklyn concert series in the pool at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Every Sunday afternoon from July 9th through September 3rd, you and some of the best bands and DJs from Brooklyn and beyond will sweat together in the city's most spectacular new venue — the 50,000 foot refurbished ruins of a community pool.
  
  As at any good pool party, there will be plenty to get you hot and keep you cool: when you're not pogoing, you can try your hand at full-court dodgeball, get a cold cup of Brooklyn's finest, grab a burger from the hut, set up a towel and tan your tatoos, or slide your way down a 27-ft inflatable slip n’ slide.
  
  Shows are all free and entrance is on a first come/first served basis. Les Savy Fav, Beans with Holy Fuck, Dragons of Zynth, and Proton Proton will be performing. Finger on the Pulse will DJ.
  
  

The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre presents "Once There was a Village," a puppet opera adaptation of Yuri Kapralov's book about the lives of immigrants in the East Village and Alphabet City in the 1960s and 1970s.

The story:

The play follows generational cycles of immigration, during which a tenement "village" rises out of the tidal marsh just north of New Amsterdam. Native Americans who find food and refuge in the swamp are displaced -- or worse -- by Dutch settlers, whose farms are swallowed in turn by shipyards, ironworks, tobacco factories, sweatshops and tenements. Newcomers escaping the nightmares of pogroms, famine and war bring their dreams to this slice of the New World, another frontier village that in its own time is burned and ripped apart by cultural conflict.

Music by the Hungry Marching Band. It's a three week run, January 25 - February 11, at La MaMa. Thursdays through Sundays at 7:30 pm with a Sunday matinee at 2:30. Tickets are $20 plus $2.50 convenience charge.

(via NewYorkology)

Haven't made it out to the galleries in a bit. Went on an ArtCal binge. I'm excited to check out some of these...

Anthony McCall - Between You and I (2006) and Long Film for Four Projectors (1974)

I've never seen McCall’s work in person, but freaked out the first time I saw documentation of the lovely formalist film-meets-sculpture Line Describing a Cone and Long Film for Four Projectors. I was also interested to see his recent work lists materials as "computer file, digital projector" rather than "16mm film". The gallery has some images here.

Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly Gallery
February 2 - March 17, 2007
528 West 29th Street
Tuesday - Friday, 11am - 6pm and Saturday, 10am - 6pm

Michael Schall - Big (2005)

Michael Schall's graphite works blow me away every time. Can't wait to see the new work!

Michael Schall at Pierogi 2000
February 9 - March 12, 2007
177 N. 9th St. (Brooklyn)
Opening: Friday, February 9, 7pm - 9pm

Brian Knep - Drift (2004)

I had the chance to Drift and some of Brian's other work at Siggraph a couple years ago. I love the closed-circuit system that is algorithmic/procedural and organic/random. Watch a twenty-second preview here.

Brian Knep at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
February 10 - March 10, 2007
31 Mercer Street
Opening: Saturday, February 10, 6pm - 8pm

Also--

International Flipbook Festival at Secret Project Robot (through Feb. 11)
Andrew Krieger at 511 Gallery (through Feb. 17)
Kevin Cooley at Massimo Audiello (through Feb. 17)
Mark Esper at Dam, Stuhltrager (through Feb. 18)
Networked Nature at Foxy Productions (through Feb. 18)
Move#15 "These Bagels Are Gnarly" at Cinders Gallery (through Feb. 18)
New Prints 2007/Winter at International Print Center NY (through Feb. 24)

Michael Velliquette at DCKT Contemporary (Opens Feb. 8, 6pm-8pm)
Iter-iter-ation at Nurture Art (Opens Feb. 8, 6pm-9pm)
Megan Pflug at V&A (Opens Feb. 9, 6pm-8pm)
The Building Show at Exit Art (Opens Feb. 17, 7pm-10pm)

Michael Velliquente - The Intuitive Jungle (2006)

Thought I'd get one with some color in there. Ha ha. Reminds me of Jen Stark.