Mar

The Armory Show

By Sarah

As promised, today’s post is a mini review of The Armory Show, a big art to-do that happens every year in NYC.

As I mentioned in my Pulse post, I had a better time at the Pulse-NYC show than this one, but that’s because The Armory Show is a bit pretentious and I feel like the vagaries of the art market dominate the scene which can lead to cynical or trend driven art-world-insider type work at the expense of work created from listening to one’s individual voice or desire to create something deeply aesthetically pleasing or powerful.

But that said, I did see a lot of wonderful things and I thought I’d share a few of them here: (I’ll start with my favorites first).

I was actually blown away by this piece by H C Berg called Visual Vortex, and of course, I couldn’t take a decent picture of it.

I really loved how it glowed and was luminous–it’s hard to explain how it looked, but it’s a large curved piece of iridescent mylar lit up somehow with laser cut acrylic shapes hanging in front of it that shimmered.

The image actually extended out a few feet in front of the piece itself–reflecting or projecting, I’m not sure. So it had this very modern, plastic film kind of feel to it, but it was all airy and ethereal at the same time:

And I loved this piece below made out of liquor bottle top foils (the metal bit at the top that you can peel off) by El Anatsui. His site is under construction, but if you want to see more of his work, click here and here. Here’s my photo from the show:

I’m a huge Magdelena Abakanowitz fan, so it was fun to see several of her large repeated sculptures as I haven’t seen too much of her work in person:

I quite liked these carved book sculptures below, but unfortunately, cannot read my handwriting to tell you the artist’s name. I just sent a note out to the group that I went to the show with–if I find out, I’ll amend this post later. In the meantime, here’s some pix:

I was struck by these small totemic wire sculptures made in the seventies by an artist called Philadelphia Wireman. I looked him up online and Wikipedia had an interesting story about him–a bunch of these sculptures were found in the street by an art student in 1982, and folks surmise that they were just thrown out after this unknown artist died. I really like them:

I thought this painting was beautiful and haunting (and it reminded me of Hendrik Kerstens‘ work. I also managed to not write this artist’s name down somehow either–when I find out, I’ll amend the post:

Glitter and sequins also had a presence at both Pulse and The Armory Show so I must admit I enjoyed that: Here’s a photo of a cluster of small sequin “paintings’ by Daniel Gonzalez (I liked these best) and next to it are a couple of cut paper and glitter collages by Devin Troy Strother:

And finally, when I opened my bag, I realized one of my pencils was stuck inside a folded piece of paper and had made its own drawing while I was walking around.

I quite liked the delicate line quality–who knew my pencil was such a sensitive arteest! (I call it Mixed Feelings at The Armory. Graphite on 28lb printer paper. )