This Week’s Must-See, Must-Do Art Happenings
A weekly compendium of mostly Brooklyn-based, always edifying art events.
MUSEUMOFAMERICABOOKS: FATIGUE BONES—JOHN SZLASA
John Szlasa’s solo show at MuseumofAmericabooks provides a perfect platform for hiding and seeking: a corner door mirrors hanging windows, sans reflection or view. The casts are weird but recognizable, and, as the gallery’s writing suggests, “at odds and at play with abstraction’s claims to purity and ethereality.” Szlasa’s work, sculptural and simple, tends to build space. This show stays on-trend in that sense, but allows viewers to play, too.
Exhibition open through October 3.
SARDINE GALLERY: COSMIC SPANDEX—ANDY CROSS
For this solo show, Andy Cross hand-painted the universe (a 10′ by 35′ mini-cosmos, technically) and used it to cover the walls of Sardine gallery. A constellation of drawings and paintings were framed using classic, dark brown wood—the frames were built by Cross’ late grandfather, Roger William Cross II. This familial nearness and the portrait-style quality of several works builds a bizarrely home-y, quaint personal universe.
Exhibition open through October 9.
SAFE GALLERY — JAMES ENGLISH LEARY / AINE VONNEGUT
Safe Gallery opens another season of two-person shows with this tactile, complex show full of sculpture and story. The last few shows at Safe indicate a proclivity for anything less-than-white, less-than-austere, less-than-minimal: Vonnegut certainly fits the bill with her wild, multi-material tableaus (“comedic hallucination,” explains the gallery), and though Leary’s large human-bumper-car paintings have been called “minimalistic”, their raucous content and colors are not.
Opening: Thursday, September 29 7:00PM — 9:00PM; Exhibition open through November 6
TRIPLE CANOPY: COMPATIBILITY ISSUES — A CONVERSATION
Brooklyn lost Triple Canopy to Chinatown! But their inaugural series of conversations, performances, and presentations at the new location (264 Canal Street) looks delightful. Tonight, consider the ways technological protocols shape the way we perceive: for example, McGill professor Jonathan Sterne will discuss how, when developing the National Television Systems Committee’s color standard back in 1953, engineers needed a workable theory of how we see and hear to then show us how to see and how to hear. Sterne will do a better job explaining that than I can, and he’ll appear with Hua Hsu, writer and professor at Vassar College, and artist Mika Tajima.
Conversation: September 28 7:00PM
Image: Mika Tajima, detail of Negative Entropy (Kazue Kabata, Blue, single), 2015.