Chelsea Gallery Visits

The Andrea Rosen gallery showed Josiah McEiheny's work and I think what I liked best was the fact that his work (which was architectural) was laid out in a progression of prints, photos, and the sculpture that was very logical for viewing his work. It was like I was back in architecture school looking a a layout for a final crit. The entry room contained a few prints of sections and plans of a building as if it were the beginning stages of something to be built and then was followed by the main gallery room that contained his three dimensional works and some photos. The centerpiece was his eight foot skyscraper sculpture and then on the wall were related sculptures as if he had focused in on a detail of his main piece. The relationship of the prints, photos, and sculptures made it easy to move around the room. In a back room was another smaller show about using beautiful color to convey ugly images. For some reason a few of the pieces were hung bellow eye level and I didn't feel like there was a good reason for them to be.

At Robert Miller, Barthelemy Togou had too much going on in the one space. Though it was kind of separated into different rooms the photographs, video, watercolors, and installations was too much to take in. It was very obvious he was trying to make a political statement and too predictable that throughout all his media he was using the softness of some of his art like the drippy watercolors and installation to try to soften his hard and violent images.

Mitchell Innes & Nash showed Enoc Perez's very architectural paintings. The gallery had columns down the middle of it and instead of an obstruction I loved it. It focused me on sections of the wall. I leaned up against them and looked at each painting-I was really able to focus on the paintings as individuals and then step back and see them as a whole. The columns were like blinders if you so chose to step between them. Perez's style was loose, soft, and colorful, but it built incredibly detailed spaces. I recognized almost all the buildings. I really loved the palette too.

The Aperture Gallery was my favorite. I was surprised by the show which I figured were going to be "landscapes" as in rural country and yet they were urban and industrial-artificial landscapes. The scale of the photos was awesome to me and the way the gallery was set up with an inner and outer wall to revolve around made a clear path as to how to navigate the work. I liked that the images were grouped yet scattered. It was organized, but seemed free flowing.

The Luhring Augustine Gallery didn't interest me in terms of the work by Janine Antoni, but the space combined with the nature of the work was cool. The first room contained images, the second room had a video and sound, and the third room had images. The gallery was linked by long corridors between and without that sound in the middle gallery I don't think I would have been curious to continue.

I was glad to see so many shows having architecture- I felt like everything could help me with my paintings.