I’m sorry I missed this show by Eric Hollender at the fascinating little gallery around the corner from Plus Ultra, Dam Stuhltrager. Fired clay tablets!

I updated that post to add a link to Jeremiah Teipen’s home page.

Herein lies the tale of a Sunday in Williamsburg, in which our hero tours some galleries with friends, spots crack vials on Bedford, ogles hot tattooed (straight?) skateboarders with “lovely” in their vocabulary, and is accosted at Relish by people at the next table saying “Williamsburg really seems like a hotbed for real estate.”

I revisited two shows that I mentioned in an earlier post: “Decade” at Schroeder Romero and “Soft Cell” at Foxy Productions. I attended the openings of both shows, and I wanted to go back to spend a little quality time with them.

Schroeder Romero’s show is worth spending a bit of time with, since there are over 50 artists in the show. Make sure you check out the Williamsburg art timeline near the entrance. A trip to Williamsburg just doesn’t feel right without a chance to visit with Sara Jo and Lisa. They even offered to introduce my friends to some single gay men at their next opening!

I really love the work at Foxy Productions by Teresa Moro — you might have to use Internet Explorer to get the page to display. Ask to see her gouaches that they have as well. They’re exquisite.

The painting show at Black & White by KK Kozik, titled “Ashcan Rococo”, is pretty cool. There is a sly humor in them that’s not always apparent when you first see the brightly colored canvases. Those aren’t your father’s oil colors — I thought they were acrylic at first. If you haven’t seen Austin Thomas‘s sculpture out in the “sculpture garden”, go check them out. I first encountered this gallery when they showed work by my friend Meighan Gale.

The group show at Parker’s Box, titled “Grounds,” isn’t totally successful, but there are some sweet sculptures/installations by Ezra Parzybok and some photographs by Ravi Rajakumar, who collected moments in cartooons where no characters are present.

Robert Grunder

The show of paintings by Robert Grunder at *sixty seven, inspired by his growing up in a planned community, is quite nice. Don’t miss the selection of works by other gallery artists in the back room, including the video titled “Your Head is a Cloud” by Jeremiah Teipen.

Tamara Zahaykevich
smoke-pillow-ghost, 2002

I loved Tamara Zahaykevich‘s show of foam core sculptures in the back at Bellwether. The front room has work by John Bauer. I like him, and I like some of his work I’ve seen in the past — especially works on paper — but I don’t know where he’s going with his paintings lately, and I can’t say I’m excited about them.

I haven’t made it to Meredith Allen’s show at im n iL (in Greenpoint) yet, but it’s there through May 11 and I need to make a trip to see it. I ran into her on her bicycle as we were headed over to Schroeder Romero, next to Brooklyn’s most fabulous Laundromat. Have you seen that thing? It has aisles wider than my apartment! Soon I’ll be able to link to her homepage which I’m working on…

I picked up cards for a couple of shows in Manhattan that I need to go see: Anxiety at the Chelsea Art Museum, and Airport ’03 at HERE.

We spent the afternoon checking out some Chelsea gallery shows.

Lothar Hempel’s show at Anton Kern was the highlight of the day. Their web site is “under construction”, so try here for some images of his work. I have loved everything I’ve seen from him. He is a smart artist whose work is aesthetically pleasing even before you start to notice or read about the conceptual content.

The upcoming Dan McCarthy paintings show (opens May 15) at Anton Kern looks promising too.

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Noguchi Rika’s “Rocket Hill” at D’Amelio Terras: The exhibition consists of ten large-scale digital c-print photographs taken in and around the Tanegashima Space Center, an island complex from which NASDA, the Japanese space program, launches nearly all of its flights. I chose this picture in honor of Dan, since it reminds me a little bit of Space 1999.

Their next show is Cornelia Parker.

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Wayne Gonzalez at Paula Cooper is worth a visit, but I wasn’t bowled over the way I was by his previous show there.

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Omer Fast at Postmasters was really powerful. The image is an installation view of “Tank Translated”, which is a compilation of video interviews (in Hebrew with English subtitles) with four crew members from an Israeli tank, conducted separately after they were no longer in service. The one at the front was the one I spent the most time watching. At various times he talks about not wanting to be “exploited for your overseas audience”.

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Marco Maggi’s “Constructing and Demolishing” at Christinerose|Josee Bienvenu is a great show, both as installation, and for the skill of the individual works such as the drypoint on aluminum foil works. Their web site only has one image, so go here to see more.

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Philippe Parreno’s highly conceptual show, “Alien Seasons,” at Friedrich Petzel has good production values, and is visually interesting, but I don’t know if it’s a great show. I’m leaning towards “no”.

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I wanted to like Eric Ringsby’s show “The Indian Wars / Palestine” at Cornell DeWitt. I think bringing up parallels between the Indian Wars in the U.S. and Israel/Palestine question is an interesting way to start a discussion, but the work in the end is more political than aesthetic, and I believe that it is important for an artist to try to transcend the political message. I did like his use of this 1937 quote by Winston Churchill, who believed that the Jews were a “better” race than the Palestinians:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Emily Jacir’s show at Debs and Co. does a better job of achieving both political and artistic ends. That said, I give credit to Cornell DeWitt for putting on a show that many galleries wouldn’t touch.

The highlight of attending the opening at Cornell DeWitt was meeting the parents of Adam Shapiro, the peace activist who works with The International Solidarity Movement and Seeds of Peace. They received death threats after their son became trapped in Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah while it was being shelled by Israeli forces. He had breakfast with Arafat and compared the house-to- house raids on Palestinians in Ramallah to Nazi raids during World War II.