Andres Serrano @ Yvon Lambert Gallery

Andres Serrano is a controversial Latino photographer best known for this image:

If you're not familiar with it, it's called Piss Christ. (You can see why he stirs things up) He's interested in the universal themes found in bodily fluids, death, and sex...

His latest interest is in shit (it's at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Chelsea). Yes, it's a show of 8 foot tall close-up photos of different types of SHIT. The backgrounds are cheerfully colorful, the excrement becomes abstracted, and the titles are highly amusing. He sees images in the shit like when I look at clouds. There's Bull Shit, Freudian Shit, Hieronymus Bosch shit, holy shit, etc. Once you get past over the gross factor, it becomes rather interesting and borderline beautiful.

I looked everywhere online for pictures I could copy and post here, but had no luck. (I knew I should have taken my camera!) So if you'd like to see a slideshow of all the beautiful shit that the Village Voice put together, CLICK HERE.

Midori Harima @ Honey Space

I mentioned Honey Space a while back...it's a gallery that I dig over on the West Side Highway (btwn 21st & 22nd) that's left open unattended during the day.

Anyway, right now they feature this cool installation by Japanese artist Midori Harima. The room is super dark, with this bright white sculpture of a carousel greeting you as you enter. The details of the carousel itself are projected onto the white sculpture, so it looks rather surreal in person! Flat yet three-dimensional, like an old photograph that's come to life. (I've seen this technique before...but for the life of me couldn't remember which contemporary artist it was! It was a feminist artist...that's gonna drive me crazy)

Dali @ MOMA

MOMA had an exhibit that ended recently on Dali and his work in film, which was so interesting and bizarre (of course). Here are links to two of his more interesting collaborations...

Dali and Disney might sound like an odd pairing to work together, but remember how experimental Fantasia was? They worked on a creating a short animated film called Destino but the project was eventually dropped. More recently the film was finally completed based on all Dali's original storyboards. It looks strikingly modern but it VERY authentically Dali.


Another really interesting collaboration was with Alfred Hitchcock, where Dali designed the dream sequences for the film Spellbound. Hitchcock didn't like how dreams were usually shot in films as being fuzzy or unclear, because dreams are vivid and strong. I think their two visons worked together quite harmoniously...

Buckminster Fuller

Our contemporary world is very concerned with energy-efficiency. Sustainability. Affordable housing. So I found the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney especially timely! I didn't know anything about him beforehand, except that he had something to do with that "geodesic dome thing." As an individual raised in an environmentally conscious generation, I found that by reading his theories for the first time from my 2008 perspective was rather refreshing and poignant.

He was an American visionary who was determined to find sustainable solutions that would be as economically and materially efficient as possible. He reimagined how houses could be built and how cities could be designed in such a truly inventive and humanitarian manner. He based many of his structures on the tetrahedron, which he claimed was the the essential building block of nature.

Here is one of his famous geodesic domes. His greatest done was built for the US Pavilion in the Montreal Expo in 1967...


This is a model of his innovative Dymaxion House, which was designed to actually be shipped and assembled. Wonderfully thought out, but it never took off...


He even delved in cartography, striving to create a world map free of distortion...


Here's his three-wheeled energy-efficient Dymaxion Car that could hold 11 people...

Sex Lives of Animals

I secretly have been wanting a good excuse to visit the Museum of Sex, and their current exhibit on the Sex Lives of Animals was a perfect reason! It was a wildly interesting exhibit. Who knew that animals engage in oral sex, some creatures have multiple genders, or that there are necrophiliac birds! Here are some pictures of some of the sculptures in the exhibit...

There is something mildly disturbing about watching two fuzzy-cutesy panda bears going at it on video...and even stranger to learn the pandas are actually shown panda porn in order to help get them into the copulatin' mood.


My friends Nick and Peter took the exhibit very seriously.


These female chimps are engaged in the common practice of "gigi rubbing," a term which made us all giggle. (I never heard about homosexuality in the animal kingdom really before this exhibit...)


Behold...two smiling male dolphins! They look so innocent, but wait...one male is penetrating the blowhole of the other male! I'll never look at dolphins the same way again...

Kehinde Wiley @ Studio Museum Harlem

Oh, that Kehinde Wiley.

Not only is he technically flawless as a painter of portraits, but he's inventive, culturally conscious, timely, wields a diverse visual vocabulary, is widely acclaimed...AND he's only 31! The nerve. He's making the rest of us artists look bad! But I gotta hand it to the guy, I really respect what he does and I think his pieces have a lot of substance to them.

He's done this sort or portraiture in China previously, but for this show at the Studio Museum he moved to West Africa for his inspiration. He portrays his young black models in traditionally heroic poses in these large scale paintings. The colorful patterns interact with the figures beautifully, by reflecting in their skin tones or overlapping with the models themselves. This show made me all nostalgic for the bold colors and patterns of Ghana...and the beauty of the people who I got to know there. It all looked so familiar! Sigh...



This last piece here wasn't isn't in this particular show, but it's from a more famous series of his that you might find familiar...

Ewelina Ferruso @ Ad Hoc

When I was checking out the show 5 Identities 5 Destinations at Ad Hoc there was one artist who really stood out to me...Ewelina Ferruso. I was surprised to learn that she's new to the gallery world (like myself), this being her first real show. And she's a sweetie to boot! I found myself visually digesting each one of her paintings slowwwly, like I was working my way to the middle of a tootsie pop but in no rush to get there.

Her paintings are visually yummy, with complex textures and elaborate compulsive patterns...which ALWAYS appeal to me. Her imagery is about her childhood, imagination, and escape from the harsher aspects of reality. The polka dot giraffe inspired by an actual toy she still keeps in her studio, and the little girl in her paintings is a self portrait of herself as a child. Here are a couple pics I took at her show!