June 3 to July 16 2016
600 Washington Square South (at South 6th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 629 1000

A day in the life of a dying metropolis: At noon, a building collapses under glaring sunlight. At dusk, an orange glow washes over an overgrown rail viaduct. At dawn, banners flutter in from every direction, carrying a cryptic message to the city’s empty streets. Suddenly, flying shards of material adhere to the sides of a crumbling warehouse, resurrecting it as a luxury loft. Such is the transformation that artist Tim Portlock depicts in his video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4 (2013), from the exhibition “Ash and Gold,” at Locks Gallery. It is a transformation one sees in cities throughout the United States, in which whole neighborhoods disintegrate and new development takes root at the blink of an eye.

Bookending Portlock’s video are two bodies of prints that blend photography and computer rendering, one based on blighted scenery from the East Coast, the other on similar landscape in the West. The older prints show a city derived from, but not identical to, Philadelphia. Salon (2011) overlooks a dramatic V-corner, denuded of most of its structures and populated by wild dogs. Abandoned factories loom in the background, and behind them a structure that resembles Philadelphia’s massive city hall clock tower — topped not by the statue of founder William Penn, but a hulking figure that might be a staggering corpse from The Walking Dead.

Anyone who has travelled to Philadelphia by rail will find this desolation familiar. Yet Salon is not one site in particular but a distillation of Philadelphia scenes, and by his own admission, the artist has omitted certain objects and inserted others to capture what he considers to be the city’s essence. Portlock has been deliberate about the alignment of details, putting, for example, the sun’s glowing fireball directly behind the menacing clock tower statue in — much the way Thomas Cole cast dramatic sunlight on figures locked in struggle in his 1836 painting Course of Empire: Destruction.

Although his images depict a cycle of decline and gentrification unique to today’s city, Portlock has stated that they are inspired by the 19th-century American landscape art of painters like Cole. Those Hudson River artists also manipulated the scenes they painted in order to embed in the landscape a deeper vision of the American character. They bathed mountains, rivers, and wild animals in a quasi-religious sunlight, identifying nature with broad themes such as sin, redemption, harmony and conflict.

If Portlock’s Philadelphia scenes are like a painted 19th-century jeremiad, his West Coast prints are more like the thin rants of a modern-day religious television show. Many are based on San Bernardino, California, where the washed out colors of the Mojave Desert create a relentlessly even light. Instead of color cast from the sun, the artist uses the artificial colors of signage and advertising to create visual drama. In Yellow Dancer (2015), for example, he inserts a deflated acid-yellow AirDancer in the foreground. Collapsed over a wire, the figure’s deformity, coupled with its artificially happy hue, embodies a void more profound than that of Philadelphia’s decay.

The AirDancer is the closest thing to a human presence in any of Portlock’s work. The artist has said that he omits the figure in order to avoid the tendency, seen in much realist art, to show people as embodiments of their victimhood rather than depicting them as human beings in full. Instead he draws attention to the forces that create such forlorn scenes. Like the fluttering banners in the video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4, the Air Dancers also serve as metaphor for the weightless condition of U.S. cities, in which stone, steel and asphalt float on the worthless paper of land deeds and advertisements. The trail of false promises these documents embody enables a landscape of endless freedom, and also of endless emptiness.

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December 22, 2015 to January 30, 2016
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, (215) 629-1000

The process of drawing is an excursion through ideas, a means by which an artist can test out theories and apply one surface to another, without the commitment of three-dimensional materials. Joan Tanner, whose large-scale installations are like a chess game played with limitless pieces, experiments in equally compelling ways in her drawings.

In the same way that stories are made of words that we recognize, a sculpture is made of materials that can come with meanings. When those materials are themselves complete objects, the reading of the piece is hemmed in by its components’ known uses in society. An artist can put these parts together in challenging or ironic ways, but she cannot completely ignore prior functions.

A drawing, however, is more slippery. Line can merely suggest meanings and not have to contain them. Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, a line holds whatever meaning the beholder assigns it. One calls it a live creature, another, a finger puppet. Tanner’s drawings make ample use of the medium’s ambiguities, suggesting a wide range of possibilities but never constraining us to a single reading.

Ambiguity of scale is a major tool in Tanner’s box. Donotellmewhereibelong #32 (2014), for example, is an accumulation of fine lines on a smudge of blue chalk in the midst of a white page. The lines coalesce into a central form that could be as large as a rock hollow in the side of a cliff or as small as a side of fleshy tissues under a microscope. Never fully divorced from the flat surface, these marks dissolve into a crisscross pattern on the form’s periphery.

Endofred #3 introduces ambiguity of viewpoint as a modus operandi. Thick red oil stick splotches cover undulating lines that resemble winding rivers viewed from above. Envisioned in profile, this same set of marks is a grotesque rooster hopping on one foot, or a cloud of debris kicked up by a small tornado. These very different readings coexist within a remarkably cohesive composition.

Tanner’s marks often straddle the line between the mimetic and the schematic. She freely mixes lines that suggest form and surface with others that resemble an architect’s plans. Donotellmewhereibelong #19 (2014), for example, contains a thicket of ruled graphite lines that converge in the manner of the orthogonal foci of perspective diagrams. Covered with smudges of turquoise and green, however, these triangular configurations also suggest a bay full of sailboats and waves. Tilting toward the side of an otherwise white page, this entire nautical configuration appears to drift into outer space.

The frequent appearance of a lonely clump of matter in the midst of a void lends a kind of alien spaceship aspect to the work. However, the drawings’ fierce openness keeps them out of the sci-fi illustration territory of, say, Roger Dean’s Yes album cover art. At once flat and pictorial, and seen simultaneously in plan and elevation views, these drawings have too many complications to be illustrative.

The openness of Tanner’s graphic work relates to the working process she uses for her sculptures and installations. An online video of her assembly of the piece On Tenderhooks (2006) shows a flurry of activity, with assistants bringing objects into the gallery, rolling them around, nailing them together, taking them apart, then removing them altogether. Along the way, Tanner traces all possibilities inherent in the form, in the same way that we as viewers run through many alternative readings as we engage with her drawings. The topsy-turvy orientation of this exhibition’s various pieces is equivalent to the drawings’ ambiguous scale and viewpoint, and the choice to omit elements resonates with the drawings’ vast voids. Tanner demonstrates a comparable level of persistence in the making of her three-dimensional work and her drawings, albeit of a different kind. The one involves hitting the same path repeatedly until she arrives at her destination; the other, hitting every path until she finds the right one. It is not surprising, therefore, that her drawings encompass a level of openness impossible in the more resolutely determined works.

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What is Turps Banana? How do the pieces fit together: the school, the journal, the gallery?

The magazine came to be not by design but organically ten to twelve years ago. I suggested to a friend, the painter Peter Ashton Jones, that a magazine would encapsulate his interests because he had published poetry before and we had been interested in talking about painting, specifically. I didn’t have many painter friends who could talk in depth about the medium. They usually wanted to talk about other things; money, or bullshit having to do with the mechanics of the market. But he and I really clicked on talking about painting and I thought there was a need for a structured organ that could house that. A no-bullshit version of some of the art journals out there. We talked about it for a few years and it became sort of a joke really, that’s why we ended up with this ridiculous name that I kind of regret.

How did you name it?

Well, we had all sorts of ideas and our friends said, “what are you going to call it? Smock? The Beret? The Palette ?” So we started referencing the yellow journal, which was a famous late 19th-century literary and artistic publication associated with Oscar Wilde’s circle, so banana came into it and Turps came into it and we started to use it just as a name to wrap around the project.

And it stuck?

Yeah it stuck. When we got the first edition together we still didn’t have a name so we used Turps Banana and it stuck. We knew that we would shorten it to turps and just use the symbol because the symbol is used as a symbol out front of academies and kunsthalles in Europe.

The title also reflects our interest in modern-and-tradition as a kind of way to not being about fashion or the new but what a painter finds interesting about painting. So then we decided that the only people who should be writing in it would be painters, not exclusively because we have technicians in it, like paint manufacturers or the odd gallerist, but we try not to let critics anywhere near it.

So we kicked it out to anyone we knew who had some interest in painting that was good or unfashionable or overlooked because that was always something that was important for us to probe. It comes out twice a year and has become indivisible from our lives as artists.

A lot of the painters this put us in contact with are teachers. And the message we got from them is that art education is in terminal decline. Without question they said it was an appalling environment.

What’s the problem?

The problem is that its run as a business by institutions that have lost sight of what art education ever was for. They’re bureaucratically top heavy so it squeezes out all of the fun and experimentation and excitement from the operation. It squeezes out the space, because space is at a premium especially at London colleges. So if they can figure out a way to make you think that you can use a computer or be site specific in terms of preparing your work, that’s a good way of filling studios with more people.

I rather enjoyed teaching, and my own education was good because I was taught by artists who were continually showing, and there didn’t seem to be any division really, between students and the teachers.

You went to Goldsmiths College.

Yeah, it was good. There was plenty of room. It was serious. We talked about replicating the idea of an art school but without the bureaucracy and bullshit, sort of like the magazine, keep it lean, mean, and cheap, then perhaps we could do it. After about three years of talking about it we put the art school together which is essentially studios with a mentoring structure.

And the correspondence program?

Well, I was reading a thing in the Observer about online education and thinking, “what a horrible thing.” Distance learning is encroaching on real learning. It was just another profit tool for institutions while at the same time doing less. And then I thought, all our material comes to us online, we edit it online, the magazine can exist online, why can’t we have an educational project online and I re-evaluated my position.

It works like this: the participants upload work on a specialized art viewing app five times over a year and receive a response from their mentor in the form of an essay about the work and issues around it. The idea is that your work then assimilates the feedback so there is some development next time you come to upload and so on.

That has proven to be a very effective tool because it throws a kind of structure on someone who could be anywhere around the world who is interested in painting and looking for a way to be re-energized and focused but maybe has kids or a job and a limited amount of time to do it and just needs that little bit of help. What they get is a really great mind, someone who is participating in the swim of it in London or New York. The participants on the correspondence course immediately start doing stuff together, you get emails “oh we’re all meeting up,” to have chats and shows and that was an unforeseen bonus.

A load of them all trooped off to Norway one year to do some painting and this was independent of Turps but was brought about by their participating in the online course.

And it’s painting specific?

Absolutely, yeah.

Why?

That’s my medium. That doesn’t exclude the use of photography or film but there is no kick there. There are no technical advisers with that kind of expertise, but painting is obviously a broad church. Its not just brown and oil but you create an enormous amount of traction being so specific. You attract people who know what they want to do.

Painting is not well served in art schools. It’s very present in the market. So if I say that painting is marginalized they go “what are you talking about? It’s everywhere.” That’s just because it’s easy to sell. It’s the most prominent thing in the market, but it’s marginalized in schools because people don’t know how to teach it. Its not vocationally targeted, so you can’t major in it as an outcome.

Is it critically out of fashion in certain circles?

Absolutely, yeah. So with us it’s a celebration as well as an education. There’s not a huge amount to say about painting which is why it is critically not in fashion. What critically is in fashion are things that people can be critical about because it pays their mortgage. Whereas if it was something you couldn’t talk about, how many hundreds of people would be out of work who feel they have a right be be at the table?

And we have a gallery now, which is again, painting only.

Is it a not for profit? Or would there be a relationship with the market?

Obviously, yeah, there would be. We pay the market rent for the space that we’ve got. It can’t come out of the [school] fees. Although, I don’t believe there will ever be any profit in this. If there is I’ll just pay people more.

So let’s talk about your painting. I was doing some research and I was struck when I saw the show, it seems like there has been this gradual transition from overtly political, culturally specific work with an element of caricature to this current work which seems almost archetypal. Can you talk about that change?

My work has taken some stylistic shifts, which are almost never dealer friendly. So once I was aware of that I was able to exploit it, almost. I didn’t have to maintain a style. Although there are some serious stylistic urges in there. Obviously, the materiality of the paint is one. An acknowledgment of the importance of photography as our primary visual agent in visual culture is another. The frustrations around and the truth of it have been a sort of driving force in what I do, to somehow re-viscerate the photograph.

All my work is in the past. It is all culturally specific and about a kind of British history. It is much narrower than it appears actually, in terms of its interests.

The only specifically British thing I recognize is Margaret Thatcher’s head. The sculptures feel Greek in origin and the treatment of landscape in the paintings could be very American, or Germanic.

But they are quite specific and quite political.

How so?

I showed Ablus, 2009 at White Cube that year and people couldn’t look at it. Jay Jopling referred to it as “the painting.” They’re all over the place with the PC bullshit in England. It looked like a painting of an English defense structure, which is what it is. Anything that underlines an island geographically without trumpeting multiculturalism is seen as reactionary. It was seen as right leaning and that is the way it was digested.

There is no room to explore anything in a piece of work in the present climate. People are literalists. Soon they’ll be looking at paintings of the crucifixion and saying, “the painter hated Christ”.

So to have an island in the sea, I couldn’t have it be anymore specific than that. I took out as much as I could, to get this sort of frank basic truth. It becomes a sort of caricature. I kind of feel the work becomes a sculptural, physical, political cartoon. Things are stripped down to their formal essence to tell a story. I also think there are underrated graphic qualities in cartoons, the formal tension is also what drives the meaning. So if they are activated with an element of materiality, that’s almost enough for me. You can then put your hand back into abstraction and pull some of the force of Serra and Hofmann and Rothko back into a contemporary statement without having to push it too far into something specific to loose its power.

So they are quite specific depending on where you are and I was quite shocked at the way people reacted to them.

I detect throughout your work a kind continuous sense of gravitas, even at the level of palette. The choice of black and white feels very heavy.

I tend to look backwards really. There are people who look forwards, visionaries and people who feel very positive. I tend by looking forward to look back. The black and white obviously gives historical gravitas. That palette is history, isn’t it? I would like to get away from it actually but it is very useful. I few years ago I would have thought that it wasn’t noble to use inkjet prints with painting but I decided that making paint look photographic was somehow unethical, so I started to use them.

Unethical? How so?

I found that using paint to imitate photography lost credibility because it doesn’t liberate paint to do what it needs to do. And using a two speed effect where you use painted photographic effects to play against painterly effects seemed unethical as well. It seemed over rehearsed. But I couldn’t move away from the idea of how important photography is visually so to deny it also would be naive.

It seems to me that for people who are dealing with the visual history of a specific thing, in your case a nation, the most visual evidence of the past is the photograph.

Yeah. It’s the truth. It has a truth to it. So incorporating that and working against it with the paint seems to be the best tension. The photography allows the paint to be its most animal expression of itself, while being contextualized in a photographic panorama. They’re both vital mediums for me. To bring them together in the painting while developing the extreme sculptural qualities of the paint feels like a way forward. Obviously tons of artists have done it before me.

I saw in an interview that you said sculpture begins for you in two and a half dimensions.

That’s the destination for me, really. My sculptures are fully in the round but they’re supposed to be viewed from the front. It’s exciting to go around and see what’s on the back but I think of them in a 180-degree view really. Otherwise you get into the realm of pure sculpture but my work is situated in the theatre of the flat. So they tend to be painterly, theatrical, and frontal.

How does the work with the Turps Projects filter back into your studio? Or do you see them as discrete?

It is nourishing and it is inspiring. There’s a certain feeling of responsibility, really. Having set up this thing, I need to be evidence of what it claims. They blend in nicely to one another. The only thing sometimes is the time constraint but you learn how to delegate to your team.

You work alone in your studio?

Yeah. I’ve done that for years. There aren’t many jobs where you don’t interact with anyone all day long, and I’ve been doing it for decades. So the idea of working with people on a positive project, managing, trouble shooting on a modest scale, is rewarding as well.

As a counterpoint to the studio practice?

As a complementary thing. My experience in the studio motivates that side of the Turps project. It is harmonious.

I see painters going where they need to go to and I get to participate in that process. I think artists and painters who like what they’re doing really like to teach. Like scientists and writers, they really like sharing the medium, making it a celebration.

Marcus Harvey: Setting Sons at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, September 11 to October 24, 2015

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November 7 to December 31, 2014
600 Washington Square
Philadelphia, 215 629 1000

Thomas Chimes, long heralded for grand landscape paintings and canvases laden with Greek and Christian symbols, was shown to different effect in a focused exhibition at Lock Gallery late last year of mid-career, predominantly sculptural works. Alluding to an interior world of secrets, irony and obsession, these fastidiously constructed boxes, dating from 1965 to 1973, articulate the literary impulses and ontological states that animate his better-known later works.

After a decade of working in New York, in the 1950s and ‘60s, in a scene still bearing the imprint of Abstract Expressionism, Chimes retreated to his hometown of Philadelphia, slowly embracing a hermetic existence. It was in 1965 that Chimes decided to abandon his explorations as a colorist and began to craft work informed by his deep love of modernist and symbolist literature, his evolving affinity for Surrealism and the enigmatic philosophies and practices of Marcel Duchamp. And yet, the work in the exhibition reveals how much he also felt the need to remain relevant in a technologically driven world. An influential lecture by Marshall McLuhan at the University of Pennsylvania impacted his shift from painting to sculpture, according to art historian Michael Taylor, as well as his deepening personal association with Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Duchamp.

Bouts with depression may also have encouraged him to shun the limelight of New York. He found in the confines of Philadelphia a sense of familiarity and the isolation needed to discover who he was. In doing so he was following the edict of Duchamp, who advised young artists to go underground.

The metal boxes are an amalgam of divergent sources: Art Deco, Pop Art and Minimalism. In some instances, they look like mechanical devices that have specific functions: too large to be hand held they nonetheless feel intimate. At the forefront of modern design directives, Chimes’s boxes infused with sexual, electronic and mathematical motifs, are evidence of his “desire for structure and structuring desire.” In tune with the “Sexual Revolution” of his time, Chimes liberally laces his imagery with female and male genitalia, incorporating an eroticized sense of play into his symbolic lexicon. In elegantly structured works like Cathedra (1970) and Untitled (1969), the viewer can get lost in the fluidity of cut and collaged aluminum forms.

It is curious that Chimes segued so effortlessly from painting to metal construction. Yes (1965), a work that marks this transition, contains vestiges of earlier painterly impulses as well as Matisse-like cutout forms, and a configuration of Artaud’s alter ego, Mômo as a bird, are neatly contained within a composition of rectangular and square forms. This is a work that marked Chimes’s transition to constructions. Also during this year, he was commissioned to design the jacket cover for two books by Bettina L. Knapp on the work of Artaud. It is telling that his esteem of Artaud’s life and work predated his decision to move toward making mixed media metal boxes. Possibly Chimes felt that the box form itself served as a vessel/vehicle to sort through new symbols of mysticism and playfulness that emulated Artaud’s aesthetic.

Some of Chimes boxes open, while many are sealed shut with cut away areas, exposing layers of different materials and markings. Engaging in Pataphysics, the anti-theoretical philosophy coined by Alfred Jarry, Chimes throws together fragments of quasi-scientific elements and mathematical diagrams into a jumble that give mere hints to their origin in meaning. Chimes orders these chaotic insignia with humor and aplomb. Works like Exhibition Calculator (1969) evidence an ironic tone, one that pokes fun at the art world itself.

Chimes’s evolving aesthetic was certainly less than linear and not completely sequential. He appears to be driven by ideas and less by the tendency of the time to stick with a signature style. Maybe he was marking time and secretly coding his life traumas and inner secrets. This show ends with a selection of white paintings of moderate size, some of which were like palimpsests of unintelligible script. The hint of landscape behind the vast whiteness of Untitled Rose Landscape (1980), for instance, is indicative of the type of investigations that consumed Chimes until the end of his marriage in 1984 when he expressed his forlorn state in a poem “Winter is white/ Everything is cold/ Mutterings are distant now.”

In addition to landscapes, he revisits the visage of Albert Jarry, a reoccurring portrait within a whitened vapor, as well as the embossed helmeted head of Artaud. It is notable that between his construction series and white paintings from 1979 to the 1990s, Chimes spent nearly a decade devoted to his obsession with literary figures, by painting portraits of such literary illuminati as Jarry, Artaud, André Breton, James Joyce and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

The overarching themes in the esoteric works presented at Locks may sometimes seem to outweigh their delicate and precise execution. In spite of the rigid materials used, however, it is perhaps the appearance of fragility that Chimes intended to portray, alluding to the vulnerability of the human mind and the ephemeral quality of thoughts translated into plastic form.

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April 5 to May 10, 2013
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, 215-629-1000

Decoration provides an occasion for superimposing one reality on another. Unlike paintings, wall hangings or vases don’t attract notice when they carry images that disagree in scale, viewpoint and level of completion. Jane Irish’s paintings, drawings and ceramic vases on view in Sông H’u’ong: Withdrawing Room at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery take advantage of decorative tropes to boomerang the viewer from pastoral pleasantries to the horrors of war.

The images, colors, and materials with which we surround ourselves express beauty, but also power, as they allow us to order space according to our wishes. Irish’s works draw their inspiration from the chateaux of the corsairs of St. Malo from France’s colonial era, who incorporated loot from the world over into their rococo interiors. Irish has spent ample time studying the hôtels particuliers of this quiet Breton town, and her beautifully colored works would serve as a tourist guide to this regional style—except that her own decorating choices are different from the seafaring oligarchs’.

A typical strategy for the muralist is to bring the outside in. A series of ceiling height egg-tempera panoramas in the exhibition’s namesake, Sông H’u’ong (2013) fill the gallery with sky, and seem to invite the viewer to step into another reality. Vignettes of temples and picturesque cityscapes from Vietnam’s Sông H’u’ong, or Perfume River, crowd each panel. Although its colors beckon, the painted egg-and-dart molding at the mural’s base reminds you that you are looking at wallpaper. This tension between encompassing and repelling the viewer is evident throughout Irish’s work.

Irish’s St. Malo interiors lead us, Alice in Wonderland fashion, from genteel interior straight to the conquered lands. In her tempera painting Yellow Room (2012), for example, a doorway on the left opens into another Asian panorama with river, temple and brilliant-hued sky. The painting veers from strict two-point perspective to collection of vignettes, with no clear dividing line between rational and irrational space. The right side opens into a completely different Far East exterior space, and a third opening is visible through a window in the room’s distant corner. It’s as if the chinoiserie jumped off the walls and ambushed the home from three different angles.

Vietnam in particular has been a concern of Irish since she organized the Operation Rapid American Withdrawal show in 2005 at Philadelphia’s Crane Arts Building. The exhibition united artists, Vietnam veterans and antiwar activists in a multimedia event that commemorated a 1970 protest march through New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Since that time Irish has often made the veterans’ poetry a part of her work

Irish’s ceramic pieces, modeled after Asian pottery, flank Yellow Room. The vignettes on these pots are less than benign. Amidst the brilliant red hues of Thousand Yard Stare Urn (2012) are black and white images of men who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of their service in the war. On display in the upstairs portion of the gallery is a drawing, also titled Thousand Yard Stare (2013) that combines ornate interiors with the writings and faces of activist Vietnam veterans.

As a point of comparison, David Salle’s work from the 1980s also juxtaposed flat patterns, interior views, linear illustration, and objets d’art from colonized lands. Whereas Salle’s combinations had the randomness of a Mad Libs game, Irish’s seem to have point. The Vietnam War was a Franco-American collaboration, started as the War in French Indochina.  Some would argue that American war profiteers have plundered just as eagerly as their French predecessors. Rapid withdrawal from violent conquest everywhere can release us from the miasma of bloody vignettes that fill our minds and living rooms.

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Nordic countries provide the special Armory Focus in its third edition this year.  A Nordic Lounge at Pier 94 will feature 19 galleries from Helsinki,Copenhagen, Stockholm, Osla, Malmö, and Reykjavik while Armory Performance will include A Symphonic Poem about the Financial Situation in Iceland from Örn Alexander Ámundason, Performed by Metropolis Ensemble on Wednesday afternoon at the Wall Street Journal Media Lounge.

Elsewhere on Pier 94: Leon Golub’s Transparency, an installation created from works from an early 1990s series by the late artist, will feature at Ronald Feldman Booth 824.  CRG survey small paintings by LA-based Tomory Dodge at Booth 811.  On Stellar Rays has Clifford Owens at Both 521 and Horton Gallery has Wallace Whitney at Book 530.  Edward Tyler Nahem debuts new work from Andres Serrano at Booth 604.  Josée Bienvenu has a solo spot for Guatemala City-based Dario Escobar at Booth 526.  Winkleman, in their first presentation at the Armory Show, are devoting their booth, 536, to a solo spot for gallery artist Jennifer Dalton.

Uptown at the ever-confusing show at the Armory that isn’t the Armory Show, The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, P.P.O.W. presents important historic work in Fleshing out the Grid: David Wojnarowicz and Hunter Reynolds.  The Art Show tends to feature more blue chip historic materials than the Armory: Peter Freeman has prints, paintings and a photograph by James Ensor, for instance, while Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings on baked enamel steel plates from the early 1970s until last year. Philip Pearlstein is the focus of a solo display there at Betty Cuningham Gallery

Some galleries of course bridge the divide and show at both.  Nicole Klagsbrun, for instance, has Xaviera Simmons at the Art Show at the Armory and Patrick Jackso at the The Armory Show at the piers, at Book 532, Pier 94.

And just to clarify (or perhaps intensify) the historic confusion, Fountains Art Fair takes place at the 69th Regiment Armory at 68 Lexington Ave, at 25th Street, the locale of the historic 1913 Armory Show from which the whole jamboree takes its name.  Bob Clyatt shows new sculpture at Lambert Fine Arts while Dacia Gallery features Tania Marmolejo among others.

Many arts organizations think beyond the box of any fair location.  Art Middle East, for instance, presents Amir Baradaran’s augmented reality installation, SamovAR and “The Tempest in the Teahouse” at 10 Downing Street on March 10 from 6-8 pm.

Neighborhoods entice visitors on themed days. The Lower East Side has its Armory Arts Week Day on Sunday March 7, featuring on the hour guided tours of the neighborhood leaving from the New Museum from noon to 3pm.  Saturday sees Soho Night: The Phaidon Store, for instance, at 83 Wooster, previews their newest collectors edition from Pawel Althamer.  And on March 10th it’s Brooklyn Armory Night in Williamsburg where selected Parker’s Box artists will project videos at local bars Banter’s, Clem’s and Iona, amongst them John Bjerklie’s Do Not Be Afraid, 2006.

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