November 22, 2014 to February 22, 2015
41 Franklin Street (between Broad and North streets)
Stamford, CT, 203 253 0404

“About Like So: The Influence of Painting,” recently on view at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, Connecticut, was a cogent group show on the effect of painting — its “histories, forms, materials, and other qualities” as the curator, Terri C. Smith, concisely puts it — on contemporary art and its conceptual grounds. An expansive exhibition, it succeeded in showing a wide spectrum of ways in which painting has goaded contemporary practice, extremely effectively. All of the ways painting can rear its head in contemporary art making, in media other than what we traditionally know as painting, were on view, which was quite a feat in the three-room space.

Franklin Street Works opened in the center of Stamford in September 2011 in one building of a row of brick townhouses constructed in the late 1800s. The community has evidently embraced the on- and off-site arts programming, experimental music nights, site-specific performance art projects and community gatherings offered by the space, which includes an adjoining cafe. Smith, creative director since its inception, wrote an informative gallery handout to accompany the gathering of works. This noted that the catalyzing question for the exhibition was, “In an era where painting no longer has the art historical primacy it once did, what can it contribute to the dominant art practices of today — art that is often not medium specific and is rooted in the theory driven practices of conceptual art?” The exhibition revealed that painting still has plenty to add to current art-world conversations, in ways apparent and less so.

Some of the connections came easily. A collaborative 1993 performance by K.R.H. Sonderborg, Wolfgang Hannen, Günter, Christmann and Paul Lovens, presented as a video, was the earliest example shown of painting seeping into other media. It’s a good backdrop from which to consider the show at large. Action painting is performed along side experimental music as the two dip in and out of sync. In moments it appears as though each medium has nothing to do with the other, before painting either falls into a type of symmetry with the sound or appears to lead it.

Leslie Wayne’s series, Paint/Rag (2012 and 2014), where the surface of a glossy, seemingly still-wet painting has been peeled from its flat surface and draped over a hook like a damp towel, was sensorially enticing. It was almost like the artist had taken a novel approach to hanging them up to dry; I so badly wanted to touch what I knew was a sturdy sculptural piece that was imploring me to explore its folds.

Ragnheiður Gestsdóttir’s As If We Existed (2010) mused on the theme of the pained, but enigmatic artist stereotype. Featuring performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson as the troubled, wordless painter, repeating tasks from day to day against the setting of Venice’s glinting canals, it was food for thought on the “baggage” of painting — what histories and assumptions follow the medium and those who use it.

Taylor Davis’s 2012 sculpture, TBOX No. 1, made new the tradition of trompe l’oeil. The artist’s birch plywood box construction is plastered with blue painters’ tape arrows, that, on very close inspection only just betray themselves as a illusion. They are, of course, not tape but a painted replication of it.

In a show where conceptual links were being made in so many different ways, the handout was important for understanding some of the conversations between painting and ideas in individual works, and served as a type of wall-text document to facilitate the making of intellectual connections. Occasionally more information was needed. The challenge was that in many of the pieces, painting, as a concept, was not necessarily the primary theme at play.

The multiple conversations in Tameka Norris’s video projection, Purple Painting (2011), which snatched the viewer’s first glance on entering the space, were hard to access with so much happening around it, and the work could have benefitted from greater explication. Similarly, some works that appeared to have a simple relationship to painting, like Paul Branca’s Untitled, for Rodchenko (2013), where monochrome paintings in bright red, yellow, and blue are made on canvas tote bags, could have been helped by more explanation on how this fits into Branca’s practice (the tote bags are a recurring theme), and what concepts outside of painting he deals with in this work and in his practice at large. In both cases, the connection to painting was clear but the works perhaps suffered by not being able to tell any other stories.

The amount of work that came together in three rooms, with 20 artists and 34 works, was impressive. “About Like So” showed the pervasiveness of painting in a whole horde of ways. The beauty in the show was its freedom. You didn’t have to love every work there, and indeed it would be rare with such a diverse grouping. But in each the argument for the conceptual link between the piece and this storied medium was undeniable, and overall the show made some important connections between the art-historical canon and current conventions and functions of art that any contemporary art viewer will benefit from having in mind.

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The Staten Island Ferry makes over 100 trips and carries about 70,000 passengers on a typical weekday, shuttling New Yorkers between Manhattan and the island that some ostensibly neglected residents refer to as the “forgotten borough.”

To admit that I only made my first trip out to this fifth of New York last month, after four years in the city, doesn’t do much to discourage the argument that Staten Island is underappreciated. But after my first ride out one crisp, fall afternoon, I’m inclined to think that Staten Islanders lay claim to one of the best parts of this city, certainly at least, when it comes to municipal services: their unique mode of mass transportation, the ferry itself. It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is entirely free, and also the best DIY sightseeing tour around. On Staten Island’s side, the St. George Ferry Terminal is home to a recently opened exhibition space nestled among the usual assortment of “grab-on-the-go” transport-hub dining options, just steps from the boarding area. The Culture Lounge is designed to “turn passengers into participants — engaging them with art, and inspiring them to venture past the terminal and into the cultural hotspots found all over the island.” William Corwin and Neil Greenberg’s “The Great Richmond: Find Yourself a Borough,” the second exhibition to open in this space, accomplishes exactly that.

This interactive installation is a game of sorts, one without a beginning, or even necessarily any conclusion. At one end of the room, large timber shelves house hefty playing pieces representing eight different categories, each embodied by an amalgam of imagery cast out of plaster and painted in one bright monotone. The eight pieces correspond to different aspects of Staten Island life: housing stock, contemporary culture and entertainment, commercial architecture, infrastructure, history and culture on the Island, agrarian aspirations, connectivity, and institutions of government and authority. Objects you’ll find fused together in these plaster bricks include potatoes, yards of rope, the Buddha, wagon wheels, escalators, a makeshift Catholic shrine known as a “bathtub Madonna,” and a bust of Henry David Thoreau, who came to the island as a live-in tutor to the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother.

The rules of activation are quite simple. Each visitor is allowed to take two of these pieces from the shelves, placing them on any of four color-coded tables representing the type of place Staten Island could become: agrarian, suburban, urban, or seceded. After that, the visitor is also allowed to move one piece already in play to another place or onto another table. The rules are posted on the gallery wall and also available in a short catalogue created for the exhibition, which includes an excellent essay by New York-based art critic Gregory Volk. In addition to writing the rules, Greenberg’s contribution to the piece includes large, hand-drawn posters of what the island might look like if its trajectory were to drastically swing towards one of these futures, with multi-lane highways crisscrossing one aerial view, and expanses of pastures and fields dominating another.

“Find yourself a borough” here does not mean choose one of five; rather it means discover your ideal path for the place you live. Corwin jokes that at the opening the agrarian table was quickly filled up with a sea of red pieces, suggesting that if the arts and culture workers in attendance had their way we’d all be living in fields, surrounded by art galleries.

The choices at first seem pretty straightforward, or the rules do at least, but on approaching the shelves I found myself hesitating. Of course I wanted to strengthen the presence of those red arts and culture blocks, but what else needed to be in place for arts and culture to thrive? I chose to stack my red block on top of a purple government and authority piece, indicating that institutional power should form the foundation to support and strengthen the arts on an individual and institutional scale. For my last move I eventually used an orange connectivity piece (inspired by the ferry) as a bridge between my newly made tower with a double stack of housing stock, but not without a moment of doubt. Orange is my least favorite color.

The appeal of“The Great Richmond” ultimately lies in these questions: ones of stacking and bridging and colors. It’s back to the building blocks of your childhood and a reminder of why they always maintained a certain appeal: the endless possibilities out of seeming simplicity, the expanding of your imagination. And it’s in asking these simple questions that something interesting happens. Are you playing a game, or contemplating in earnest the future of your surroundings? Do we need multi-lane highways crossing the island and want bigger, better shopping malls? How do different elements of infrastructure, culture, and government act together to make up the local space surrounding you, and what would you change in your ideal world?

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When George R. Lawrence took his first aerial photographs in the early 1900s he used a train of 17 kites to launch a 50-pound camera and a stabilizing rig almost 2,000 feet skyward. The picture he captured of San Francisco in ruins after the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires, which destroyed 80% of the city and cost nearly 3,000 lives, is arguably his most famous and became something of an emblem of that tragedy. It represented the scope of the devastation in one sweeping image, but also demonstrated how such a view could offer important information to residents on the state of their surroundings.

His photograph serves as the backdrop to apexart’s “Decolonized Skies.” Curated by the High&Low Bureau (the duo Yael Messer and Gilad Reich of Amsterdam and Tel Aviv), the exhibition looks at what is communicated through the aerial view — how it has been controlled by state and corporate entities who own the technology, resources, and access, and who dole out information as they see fit. The advent of the age of unmanned aerial vehicles — known colloquially as “drones” or UAVs — has made this issue even more pressing. “Decolonized Skies” looks at the activists, scientists, and artists attempting to reclaim this space and highlights some rather startling facts about the use and abuse of the bird’s-eye view.

“Some drone-fired missiles can drill a hole through the roof before burrowing their way deep into buildings, where their warheads explode,” the text on a backlit tabletop by Forensic Architecture titled Drone Strikes, Threshold of Detectability (2014) explains. It goes on, “The size of the hole the missile leaves is smaller than the size of a single pixel in the highest resolution to which publicly-available satellite images are degraded. This has direct implications for the documentation of drone strakes in satellite imagery, which is often as close to the scene as most investigators can get.” Forensic Architecture’s two accompanying videos show how their team gathers spatial analysis in the wake of attacks, with the aim of creating legal evidence for international prosecution teams, political organizations, NGOs, and the United Nations. But as they point out, the perpetrator of a drone strike executes it with far better information than they and other investigators have access to. If this seems contradictory to the normal way of things, where the state investigates when crimes have been committed, it’s because in drone warfare the roles are reversed: it’s the state agencies doing the killing and independent organizations doing the forensics.

The Pentagon’s fleet of drones numbers approximately 10,000. The Federal Aviation Administration predicts that in less than 20 years there will 30,000 flying over U.S soil alone. Ruben Pater’s Drone Survival Guide (2013) is essentially a field guide for UAVs and was created with these facts in mind. The poster — which is provided free to viewers — identifies the shape, country of origin, and purpose of the most widely used drones; describes a number of methods that can be used to avoid detection; and gives a short paragraph on drone hacking, explaining how the data link between the pilot and the vehicle can be intercepted, remotely transferring control to the interceptor.

The thought of citizen interference with government or corporate technology may be more unsettling than the fact the technology exists at all, but it at least marks a change from the status quo of government or corporate control and manipulation of the information, and especially images, that this technology provides. Elements of Composition (2011), from the collaborative duo Bik Van der Pol shows the alteration of Google Earth’s supposedly objective image of the artists’ public intervention, where the text “As Above, So Below” was painted on the parking-lot bitumen near the Essex Street Market and was proven visible through commercially available satellite photos. Originally conceived as daily walking tours of the Lower East Side, this project’s presentation in “Decolonized Skies,” as a lengthy audio piece, 48-page booklet, and framed image, make it hard to take in.

What seems at first to be a sparse show actually requires a huge amount of time. It was wise of the curators not to attempt to include anything more; at the same time, not all the projects were presented in a way that was conducive to understanding.

Peter Fend’s Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen Or Read Or Done (2012) collages try to explain the pioneering work that he, with Ocean Earth Development Corporation, conducted in the early ‘80s, reinterpreting the data seen in images of geopolitical hotspots like the site of the Chernobyl disaster. But the large 35-by-50-inch handmade posters with scrawled-text printouts, magazine clippings, and colored-pencil illustrations did not feel like the best way of communicating this research, and viewers would need to do a fair amount of their own interpreting to grasp Fend’s explanations and discoveries.

So while some of these projects are clearly more effective at communicating a point than others, all make attempts to provide vital information on what is at stake in the aerial view. While it’s almost a little too much to take in at once, the exhibition does manage to elucidate on some hitherto little-known facts about how we are being observed from the sky that will open any viewer’s eyes. It’s said that knowledge is power; does that apply when one is being made aware of their relative powerlessness?

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Australians pride themselves on being a nation of art-goers. In a country where debate runs high and fiery about which city is Australia’s arts capital (main competition: Sydney vs. Melbourne, with Brisbane getting a look-in every now and then) hot contenders for the most-visited museums in the country are the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery. In 2012, the mantle was passed back to Victoria when the Art Newspaper’s annual report on worldwide museum attendance put the NGV on top with 1.5 million visitors, surpassing the Queensland Art Gallery’s 1.4 million. Figures since then have hovered around the same mark. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted at the time, NGV, which records the residential locations of their visitors, draws a staggering 70 to 75% of its attendees from Melbourne and the surrounding area.

Australians may flock to the big blockbusters and internationally traveling shows that visit their official state galleries, but when you ask them what they’ve seen recently, it’s not usually what’s showing at the major museums that they mention first and foremost. In the most recent census data released in 2011, about 26% of the population aged 15 and over reported visiting a visual arts venue over the past year. The state museums clearly draw big crowds, but what Aussie art-goers talk about when you ask them what’s new and interesting are the exhibitions they’ve seen at smaller spaces, commercial galleries, and artist-run initiatives.

Alex Winters, an independent curator and the Curator and Exhibitions Coordinator at the popular performance and visual arts venue Brisbane Powerhouse, says there is definitely a feeling of excitement for art “at its emerging stages, presented in underground or lo-fi settings.” The wealth of artist-run initiatives, or ARIs, which can be found in art centers in cities around the world but exist in abundance here — and are an integral part of the exhibition ecosystem — speak to this excitement for low-pressure exhibition spaces. Don’t misunderstand, this is not your “art-party” scene (though they do throw a good opening) but professional, polished exhibitions that keep production costs low by pooling the resources, time, and effort of those who run them. They’re for artists, by artists, where you can find a tight-knit community of creative professionals supporting their city’s arts scene, and where gallerists and curators go to find “the emerging.”

Brisbane-based artist Sam Cranstoun describes his start as a typical one. “The best opportunity for young artists to exhibit straight out of university is with the many ARIs that have emerged locally,” he says. “These exhibiting platforms for emerging artists are really important, and they manage to regularly present high-quality work given the early nature of the artists’ careers.” After exhibiting in a few of these spaces, like Boxcopy, inbetweenspaces, and Accidentally Annie Street, he was offered representation from the Brisbane-based Milani Gallery. There he joined a stable of notable and established names such as Judy Watson, Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell, Eugene Carchesio, and the estates of Gordon Bennett and Ian Burn.

Ron and George Adams, founders of the artist-run initiative MOP Projects, in Sydney’s Chippendale neighborhood — one of a few arts “hubs” in the city — were careful to make the distinction between ARI and commercial when in 2012, after 10 years running MOP, they opened Galerie pompom. Situated in a smaller space next door it serves the moneymaking function while preserving MOP as a space for all things emerging and experimental without a focus on profit.

That’s not to say that the two don’t inevitably overlap at times. An upcoming and eagerly anticipated exhibition, “Acid/Gothic” (August 20 to September 14, 2014) will take over both exhibition spaces. Nick Garner of Das Platforms, a quarterly print magazine and online media project covering art and culture, is curating the exhibition, which features notable Australian artists Gary Carsley, Pia van Gelder, Tracey Moffatt, Sarah Mosca, Tomislav Nikolic, Jess Olivieri and Giselle Stanborough, as well as the German artist Peter Weibel. Corresponding with the next issue of Das Superpaper (the print component of Das Platforms), the exhibition will also be presented as a “short film of an exhibition,” but shot in a separate location — the historic colonial Elizabeth Bay House. George Adams explains that “the formal and theoretical underpinnings of the project were to ask ‘How do we remember, how do we relate to each other and how do we navigate this universe together?’ while the film prompts the question ‘What can conventions of exhibiting works learn from the evolving conventions of film?’”

How the idea of a film of an exhibition will pan out remains to be seen, but the project has attracted institutional support from the Australia Council for the Arts, and it falls in line with a current trend in arts programming that ignores borders of print, film, performance, or virtual vs. physical presentation, while exploring new ways to construct what we know as an “exhibition.”

Winters notes that the Brisbane Powerhouse is mindfully pursuing programming that could fall in a number of categories and “producing more whole venue events to bridge the gaps between art forms.” The upcoming “IRL,” to be launched in May 2015, will be a “Whole-venue festival celebrating the convergence between live arts, visual arts and digital and gaming culture.”

Similarly, “Framed Movements,” at Melbourne’s Australian Center for Contemporary Art from October 10 to November 23, 2014, focuses on the way that both dance and the visual arts engage with movement, or choreography, as an exploration of time and space. A part of the citywide Melbourne Festival for theatre, music, dance, visual arts, and multimedia events, the exhibition will be accompanied by a full run of performances.

This type of production in small to medium size spaces provides a way for funding to cross borders as well. It’s part experimentation and part practicality. Interdisciplinary projects that span multiple art forms make themselves eligible for grants from a larger pool of supporters who concentrate on print, film, performance, technological advancement, or other media. A 2013 change in government, and resulting and forthcoming cuts to arts funding, have left many anxious for their futures. The newest proposed budget plans to cut A$87.1 million to the arts over the next four years, taking the bulk out of Screen Australia and the grants awarded by the Australia Council. Support for individuals and small arts projects and organizations will be hit hardest, but the cuts are expected to bring reduced budgets and job cuts to entities large and small. Already a turn to more philanthropic avenues of funding is being seen, but how this will affect the Australian art scene and the country’s gallery-going habits, only time will tell.

Recommended current and upcoming exhibitions:

Sydney
·Archibald, Wynne, and Sullman Prizes 2014 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, July 19 – September 28, 2014.
·Annette Messager: Motion/Emotion at the Museum of Contemporary Art, July 24 to October 26, 2014.
·Matt Hinkley at Sutton Fine Arts, August 2 to 30, 2014.
·Gunter Christman at The Commercial, August 29 to October 4, 2014.

Melbourne
·Julie Fragar at Sarah Cottier Fine Arts, October 9 to November 1, 2014.
·Bridie Lunney, There Are These Moments at Gertrude Contemporary, July 26 to August 23, 2014.
·Optical Mix at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art, August 16 to September 28, 2014.
·The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier at the National Gallery of Victoria, October 17, 2014 to February 8, 2015.

Brisbane
·Stuart Ringholt, IMA at Ksubi at the Institute of Modern Art, August 2 to September 6, 2014.
·Tyza Stewart at Heiser Gallery, August 5 to 30, 2014.
·Platform 14 at Jan Manton Art (presented at Metro Arts), August 14 to 30, 2014.
·Tom Nicholson: Comparative Monuments (Ma’man Allah) at Milani Gallery, September 5 to September 20, 2015.

Perth 
·Wildflower Dreaming: Shirley Corunna and the Coolbaroo League 1952-1962 at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, July 15 to December 14, 2014.
·Shaun Gladwell: Afghanistan at John Curtin Gallery, August 1 to September 14, 2014.

Adelaide
·Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, In–Habit: Project Another Country at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, August 1 to October 3, 2014.
·The Extreme Climate of Nicholas Folland at the Art Gallery of South Australia, July 19 to November 30, 2014.

Canberra
·Beauty & Strength: Portraits by Michael Riley at the National Portrait Gallery, March 21 to August 17, 2014.
·Arthur Boyd: Agony and Ecstasy at the National Gallery of Australia, September 5 to November 9, 2014.

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It feels at first like Tom Friedman’s exhibition of new work, on view at Luhring Augustine in Bushwick, might be playing a trick on viewers. But it isn’t smoke and mirrors, it’s paint and Styrofoam. All of it; there’s nothing but those two elements adorning the gallery walls and floor. Yet it appears like there must be something more in the mix. There’s so much precision, so much detail. A microphone, chair and guitar without strings stand in one corner. It takes pretty close inspection to confirm that the wood grain is, in fact, the work of a paintbrush. In faux-assemblage wall pieces like Blue (all 2014) and Toxic Green Luscious Green — each comprised of a single color, with a dense section of detritus either clinging to the top edge or falling to the bottom — it seems unbelievable that everything collected in the messy, three-dimensional pile of scraps is only made out of the materials proclaimed by the exhibition’s title. The apple-core, the slice of pizza, the paper plane — all from flimsy Styrofoam?

Since the early ‘90s Friedman has been exhibiting his brand of inventively fabricated sculptures, which have drawn comparisons to 1960s Conceptualism, Arte Povera and Minimalism. But his work fits into none of these categories completely. Taking many different forms, they are unified by the nature of the material they are made from — inexpensive, ubiquitous and disposable — and the great care Friedman takes in crafting them. Earlier works (not on display here) have included an untitled self-portrait from 2000, appearing to be the artist’s body splattered on the floor after a horrific accident; it is painstakingly cut out of colored construction paper. Another self-portrait is carved out of a single aspirin. Thirty-thousand toothpicks stuck together form a giant starburst. Fishing line, sugar cubes, plastic cups, chewed bubblegum, roasting pans and soap inlaid with pubic hair have all been fodder for Friedman’s transformative hand.

As with those earlier pieces, here it’s in making something to marvel at, using very ordinary elements, that delights viewers at the outset. Despite one’s skepticism, assistants at the gallery assure that all the works in “Paint and Styrofoam” are made purely from these two resources. And the works here really are marvelous, but for reasons beyond their material trickery.

Each wall piece is monochromatic — frame (also carved of Styrofoam) and all. Tonal variations are created by texture and shape. What becomes clear is that Friedman is, in effect, painting with form. In Blue Styrofoam Seascape, the distinction between ocean and sky is made by the cusp of a subtle, beveled vertex that juts out towards the viewer, drawing a horizon directly across the baby blue surface. The sea darkens as it recedes, forming a perfect division between water and air.

Similarly, the self-portrait created for this exhibition is painted meticulously. The artist wears glasses and has a feather in his hat, looking out over his shoulder. It’s also painted in a blindingly bright canary yellow. Detail comes from the paint’s texture, as it does in the work exhibited directly to the left. That painting, Night, is recognizable to the viewer at once. It’s Van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece Starry Night replicated exactly, down to the folded canvas edges, but painted not on canvas, of course, and devoid of any color except for a tarry blackish-blue.

A bite-sized nick in the corner of the outwardly standard white plinth, upon which a bulbous, Pepto-Bismol pink sculpture snakes toward the ceiling, is the only moment that Friedman reveals what’s behind the curtain. About a foot off the ground, the break in the stand reveals just a few inches of the foamy, aerated plastic that’s all around, but covered everywhere else in a solid layer of acrylic paint.

Friedman refers to the wall works as “sculptures of paintings.” With the chipped plinth in mind, one can’t help but feel that the floor works are likewise sculptures of sculptures. They imitate what is traditionally found in an exhibition space: paint, canvases, frames, pedestals, items of worth and value because of their material expense, maker’s name, or historical significance. Some of these elements are here, legitimately. Others are a careful emulation of what we expect to see. But each piece asks to be questioned, opening exploration into the space between what is actually present and what can be seen.

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