October 22-December 4, 2010
508 West 26^th Street, 8^th Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 463-7770

Gedi Sibony was the only artist in the New Museum’s Unmonumental, the inaugural show of its current Bowery space in 2007, invited to create a site-specific  installation for that exhibition.  His corner, behind the elevators, offered a moment of quiet amidst the din of a lot of flashy, trashy art.

Sibony’s second solo exhibition at Greene Naftali is likewise a retreat from the cacophony of Chelsea. The Cutters (2007), a section of bare wall with a doorframe cut into it, and garnished with a simple drape of tawny fabric, stands at the entrance to the gallery. Rather than act as a blockade or a symbol of masculine power, like the brick and steel wall similarly placed at Dan Colen’s solo show at Gagosian, The Cutters frames another installation lying deeper inside the gallery space, inviting the viewer to enter.

Sibony’s constructions are not concerned with facture, or the treatment of surfaces but with the careful arrangement of objects in a space. Architectural details of the gallery such as water pipes snaking across the ceiling and industrial rolling doors are not superfluous but become integral to an installation that employs similar building materials. The industrial and discarded materials Sibony chooses are often slightly decayed, implying a personal history between the found objects and the artist. It is difficult to discern what has been found, made, or altered, but each element is in conversation with the work as a whole. The scraps of wood and framed posters and chunks of sheetrock may be detritus, but they have each been carefully chosen.

Leaning against a wall, draped from the ceiling, or jutted into a corner, the relationships of materials to one other and to the gallery space result in an air of theatricality and romanticism. For example, The Brighter Grows the Lantern (2010), perhaps the most straightforward piece in the show, consists of a swath of white vinyl hanging limply from the ceiling, lit from behind with colored spotlights. The purple and red light slide down the slick vinyl surface, evoking curtains from a miniature stage or a melted Helen Frankenthaler painting. The glow of the warmly colored light seeps dramatically out of the open doorway of the side gallery into the main space, where two installations in tones of gray, white, and browns lie under natural light from nearby windows.

The teetering, half-painted wood structure titled Asleep Outside the Wall (2010), on the other hand, feels contrived and self-consciously artsy. The more labored process involved in the making of this sculpture, as well as a jumbled collaborative installation with Diana Lyon in another back room titled Who Attracts All That is Named (2010), prove the artists’ simplest gestures are the most striking.

It is tempting at first glance to consider the work in terms of Minimalism. Industrial materials and a reductive appearance aside, however, Sibony’s work isn’t cold or monotonous. His materials have been lived with. The surfaces are not fussy, but worn. Because there is a distinctly narrative, romantic quality to these objects, a more apt comparison that suggests itself is with the artists of the Arte Povera movement, who employed everyday materials in a humble condition. And yet, Sibony’s show manages to feel simultaneously anachronistic and extremely contemporary making us less inclined to question the artists’ placement in art history, and more free to enjoy the simplicity and poetry in his arrangements.

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September 11-October 16, 2010
531 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-206-9100

Providing an immersive experience through the lush use of color, images, and sound is a signature of Pipilotti Rist’s installations. Captivating and disorienting, her current show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Heroes of Birth, completely transforms the three-room gallery space, as only Rist can, yet it falls short of her own high standards, an innocuous version of earlier work.

Upon entering the gallery you are wrapped in warm pink light and pulled into another world. All or Nothing (alles oder nichts) (2010), in the entry gallery is an altar-like installation, comprised of a three-part video screen, with offerings of grains, fruit, flowers, and a water dispenser with cups displayed below on a minimal white shelf.  On each visit to the show I found myself spending the most time with this simple piece which offers the viewer a moment to pause and reflect before entering the interior gallery. The video on display, a candy colored kaleidoscope of twirling hands and bouncing male genetalia, is mesmerizing, hilarious, and slightly embarrassing. Meanwhile the food and drink give you an excuse to stand and stare for a while. Inside the main gallery space, Layers Mama Layers (2010) is a multifaceted and slightly overwhelming installation. A video of fluffy sheep frolicking on lush green hills is projected onto and through four gossamer sheets of white fabric that have been hung from the ceiling. Fluorescent green circular patterns grow to fill the room, then recede. The sounds of a slowly tinkling music box fill the room eerily. Walking through the rows, the videos are projected through each sheet of fabric and onto you and the other viewers, resulting in an entirely cohesive yet disorienting experience.

The body parts from All or Nothing return in the back gallery, in the form of wallpaper. A human kaleidoscope lines the walls of a room lit by Massachusetts Chandelier (2010), a hanging structure crafted from pairs of large, unsexy underwear.  This room is also filled with the innocent sounds of the music box, but the chandelier overshadows the other works in this gallery. Lit both from within and by colored lights projected onto the sculpture, Massachusetts Chandelier is funny, disturbing, and quite beautiful in an off-putting way, but is conceptually flat.  Like the green graphic patterns in the main gallery, this piece feels decorative, a visually enthralling and funny way to fill space.

Themes of childhood, sexuality, and gender are threaded throughout the work, but no clear stance has been taken on any of these contentious issues. New techniques and tools are employed in Heroes of Birth, providing a trippy, out-of-body-experience, but the imagery feels recycled from Rists’ previous work.

Her massive installation at the Museum of Modern Art last year, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), for example, impressively transformed MoMA’s cold, modernist atrium into a swirl of hot pink light, and large-scale moving images of nature. Each aspect of the installation, including the rounded projector casings on the wall, the donut-shaped couch with soft cushions, and video projections of fruits, flowers and a female figure, were a gentle yet subversive move against the inherent masculinity of such art institutions. In a review in New York Magazine that was brimming with girly adjectives, Jerry Saltz declared that “Rist makes the institution ovulate.”

More explicitly sexual than Pour Your Body Out, Heroes of Birth is engaging in the use of dichotomous imagery: the masculine and feminine, salacious and infantile are all mashed together. Yet the show is a watered down version of what we know the artist can do.  The work is titillating and enjoyable, but not as subversive or profound as Rist can be.

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June 25-August 28, 2010
195 Bowery at Spring Street
New York City, 212.741.9955

San Francisco-based artist Brion Nuda Rosch is a dark horse. At first glance, his solo debut at DCKT Contemporary is deceptively simple, but through repetition of color and form   it slowly reveals itself to be complex and of subtle wit.

The show begins before you enter the gallery, with a turquoise wall facing outwards onto the Bowery, but you don’t realize it until you are halfway through, at which point the saturated hue (Pantone 15-5519 to be exact) reveals itself as Rosch’s trademark. Covering several walls and sculptures, and also incorporated into many of the collages, the color has a breezy, tropical effect, but is saved from being flashy by expanses of bare white wall, simple architectural forms, and a limited palette of said turquoise, brown, black and white.

A series of small sculptures aptly titled Balanced Significance (2010),Unknown Accomplishment Unknown Hero (2010) and An Object’s Significance Removed (2010), are first found in the front room atop hip height pedestals, then clustered on a table in the back as if on sale. Their beginnings as small found statuettes or toys becomes clearer with further inspection, despite the fact that they have been covered in drippy, clumpy plaster and painted all over with a matte brown.  This treatment recalls early works of Rachel Harrison, but their scale and simplicity diverges from her influence.

As in the sculptures, Rosch begins each collage with a found object, here an image taken from a 1970’s encyclopedia or magazine. Small, rectangular cut outs of paper painted the same brown as the sculptures seem to float on top of images of billowing clouds, mountain ranges, or geologic scientific illustrations. Abstract, at times almost decorative, there is a sharp contrast in form and scale with the images beneath. This strange, humorous juxtaposition brings to mind anything from censor lines to modern sculpture parks.  In pieces such as Sunset Eyes (2010) the process is further simplified, becoming subtractive, as Rosch has cut the same angular shapes directly out of the found pages. Powerful images of seascapes, gushing geysers and storm clouds hang, droopy and impotent, from nails in the wall, sans frames.

The artist has put together a sprawling yet restrained multi-media installation encompassing several series of sculptures and collages. They are grouped together according to medium and process, but interact conceptually with each other in a way that makes it difficult to discern where one installation begins and another ends. I found myself walking in circles around the gallery, making new connections and needing to give most pieces a second look.

The repetitive color, humble materials and simple geometric forms lend a narrative quality to the work. Small-scale collages and sculptures teetering on unconventional pedestals branch off from the same starting point. Nature in the human form or as landscape are deliberately brought towards abstraction with small moves, collaging over an image with bits of painted paper, or obscuring a figure through erasure of detail. Altered only slightly in a methodical, additive process, the best pieces linger in a dreamlike space between the familiar and the strange.

Rife with contradictions, the show is contemporary yet nostalgic, minimal yet decorative, austere yet warm. The simple processes and concepts at play here demand time and contemplation.  Ultimately, Rosch asks many questions of the viewer, and offers few answers.

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