The Serious Joke: The Objects of Jay Heikes

For the past five years, Jay Heikes' work has revolved around one big joke. In the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the artist showed stills from a video that showed him as a stand-up comic, puppet in hand, telling a joke about a pirate and its obstinate parrot. Shot in one take while Heikes was finishing graduate school at Yale, So There's This Pirate (2005) follows the parrot's refusal to obey its owner and the pirate's resultant identity crisis, mimicking the artist's constant evaluation of his own work.
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Vested Histories: Shinique Smith

Painting has a romance with itself, and its history; fabric's attractions are always to someone else. An intrinsically disembodied medium, fabric connotes apparel. Yet what it suggests—nudity and erotic intimacy; the line in the sand between profanity and propriety—seems too loaded to be properly unpacked. Fabric seems to always ask "who?" As in: who wore it, owned it, discarded it, designed it, sweatshopped it, mass-marketed it­, knocked it off, etc­­. When fabric is used in the construction of an artwork, this whisper of "who" follows the work, disrupt the object's autonomy. In the case of artist Shinique Smith, whose sculptural work primarily comprises used clothing, re-configuration and re-contextualization are uncertain steps toward that autonomy.

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The Road to Somewhere

To get to the elusive Mildred's Lane, in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania, one must drive 100 miles northwest of Manhattan, moving from the highway to increasingly poorly-marked roads; then to dirt roads, and finally a hand-drawn sign for a half-mile-long driveway through woods and ferns. On the other side is a sloping clearing dotted with small buildings, finished and unfinished artistic and architectural projects, one newly constructed residence, and a slumping two-story home that dates to the 1830s.

Says J. Morgan Puett, Mildred's Lane's proprietor, "Some of my local friends who have worked here tell a story about a portal along the lane, and that once they have passed through it, they have looked at each other with wonder and remarked that they don't have any idea what time it is, what day it is, what year it is—it may be another country or planet..."
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Nate Lowman Does It for the Kids

Nate Lowman's new installation at 80WSE Windows, "Stay In School," features recycled images, ripped from magazines and newspapers, which capture young people engaged in violence and tomfoolery. They're simply "weird situations," Lowman says.

For "Stay In School," Lowman constructed sheetrock walls in the exhibition space, and then took a hammer to them. Pairs of images are displayed on the walls and within them. On one wall, the jagged hole reveals a black-and-white photograph of boys in military garb; below, a pixilated image of the poster for the film about disturbed adolescence, Thirteen. Next to it, Lowman posts a newspaper image of a baby dressed as a suicide bomber (an unfortunate joke made by the New York Post), above a blown-up photograph of 1980s-era California skate punks, framed in torn-up sheetrock. The third and final window frames a photo of a young couple, the man holding a gun against his girlfriend's head, above a tabloid cover chronicling the scandal over Prince Harry's Nazi Halloween costume.
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