For the last few years, an exhibition of the work of Jon Kessler has entailed a whirligig installation of cutout and ephemera, with live-feed cameras and monitors that scoped out visitors in a paranoid maze. His current exhibition at Pace Prints focuses on works on paper, a medium which he has only used since 2007. Political threads run throughout—the primary content of the collaged prints is the bald eagle—but the strongest correlation to Kessler's better known works is the complex, time-sensitive process he uses to develop them. Here, Kessler discusses the difference in process, the financial crash, personal influences and natural history museums:
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A sigh of relief seems to be sounding out across the booths of The Art Show, the 22nd Art Dealers Association of America, invite-only art fair held in the Park Avenue Armory building. And while Mayor Bloomberg may have quipped in his opening speech that he wasn't there to buy art but to discuss New York's cultural community, others certainly were, since sales had already been made. 55 New York galleries and 15 national dealers weathered the storm, as one gallerist expressed when discussing the last 14 months: "We made it through. We even managed to keep hold of all of our staff."
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Whether filled with concrete or crotchless, the depiction of fabric in David Rimanelli's exhibition, "Denim," at New York University's 80WSE Gallery extends well beyond the bounds of the material. Using the blue jean as a platform to clothing as a uniform, as a means of expressing social or sexual identity, the exhibition also highlights our ability to rebrand ourselves depending on our attire. Complicating the reading of literal materiality with abstraction and metaphor, Rimanelli curates a show of artworks by 11 artists created over the last 40 years. Here he explains the bias against exhibitions on fashion, and how to get more action out of your pants:
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January is not so much a re-set as an official half-time for international gallery openings. Collectors, one hopes, are back in business, rejuvenated and back in their home cities. Being as this spring marks the beginning of a new decade (and it couldn't have come at a better time!), the implications seem greater.
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Star Trek, Caravaggio and Bataille were just three of the talking points at Friday night's panel talk at the Whitney Museum, featuring art historian Lytle Shaw, lighting designer Richard Renfro and artist Walead Beshty. Arranged by the artist Spencer Finch, his goal for the evening was to assess the difference between northern light and southern light, by discussing "how different people perceive that difference, how different practitioners deal with those differences and then how that difference can illuminate and inform, in an oblique way, Roni Horn and Georgia O'Keeffe's works (whose exhibitions are currently on view at the museum)." As in many discussions, what the panelists found was that what was different was read as inadequacy of perception.
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