STUDIO-ONLINE

Stephen Nachamie, director; Vic DiMonda, choreographer; Kimberly Matela, costumes

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

For most people, attending the theater is a special event. Live performance gives real life all of the energy of which it is capable, and more. Bright lights, brilliant colors, period scenery and costumes, memorable songs, these are what we hope to experience from a musical. In December, as the holidays draw near, the prospect of attending a show can be the highlight of an already overcharged season. Although one may not live in or near New York City or London, there are many local productions that, thanks to the participation of talented performers, bring the professional stage closer to home. (more…)

Located in the Bronx, the New York Botanical Garden is a mere 20-minute commute from the center of the city (accessible via Metro North from Grand Central Station, as well as several city subway options). Nevertheless, a visit to these beautifully planned and maintained grounds always seems special, as if one has been transported to a green oasis far from the city’s borders. The events planned for this holiday season make the trip even more worthwhile, particularly since the admission price for the festive annual Train Show includes the opportunity to view three additional exhibits.

The Train Show is an annual treat that has been drawing families from the tri-state area for years. Miniature replicas of steamships, freight trains and streetcars travel through a landscape filled with scaled versions of the city’s most famous landmarks, including 85-year-old Yankee Stadium. (The real-life Yankee Stadium is set for demolition early in 2009.) Puppeteer Ralph Lee’s Little Engine that Could theatre is among the other features of this year’s show.

Visitors to the Train Show have access to three other exhibits, which remain on view until January 11, 2009:

Sculpture by American master Henry Moore, displayed across the garden’s 250 landscaped acres.

A celebration of the chrysanthemum, a flower revered in Japanese culture, in art, including paintings, fabrics, ceramics and hanging scrolls.

Photographs of heirloom tomatoes that serve as portraits of these rarified works of edible art.

New York Botanical Garden
200th Street and Kazimiroff Blvd.
Bronx, NY
Telephone: (718) 817-8658
Web site: http://www.nybg.org/

Xie Xiaoze. Great Hall of the People, Ink on Rice paper, 2008

Morono Kiang Gallery presents the third and final installment of the quotidian truths series, featuring the work of painter Xie Xiaoze.

Xie Xiaoze’s practice has long been concerned with knowledge: it’s origins, transmissions, and permutations. Since the late 1990’s he has been painting images from newspapers, mesmerized by the way in which violence and corruption could achieve a kind of commonplaceness when delivered to your door on a daily basis. Depicted in a simple monochromatic palette of black on white, statements are rendered, or better yet exposed, at decisive political moments that would shape China’s modern history.

Xie’s subjects operate amidst tense political exchanges in historic halls of justice and legislation, where the whims and bravado of the powerful are played out and dire ramifications for the people become unrelenting quotidian truths.

Morono Kiang Gallery
218 West 3rd Street,
Bradbury Building
Los Angeles, CA 90013
213-628-8208
www.moronokiang.com

Anthony Cuneo. Roots of a Japanese Knotweed (detail), 2008.
Pigmented inkjet print, 18 x 36 in

Amos Eno Gallery presents “Close”, an exhibit of new photographs by Anthony Cuneo, on display from November 25 to December 20, 2008.

Anthony Cuneo began work on the images comprising “Close” in 2007, shooting in venues as different as New Mexico and suburban New Jersey, and exploring subjects as diverse as the birth scars left on a landscape by seam volcanoes or the root systems of invasive plants. Working digitally from film originals, Cuneo adjust his images, on occasion combining them into pairs or triptychs, sometimes presenting them in a straight-forward manner, sometimes manipulating their colors and values in a tactile fashion.

The word “close” refers not only to the distance from which the images were shot but the sense that the resultant pictures contain meanings held close within, layered behind the ostensible subjects and needing close reading to be understood. Shot suspended in space, roots twist and curl like capillaries. Elements of landscape are treated as objects, the objects become bodies, the bodies reveal their own internal landscapes.

Cuneo received his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Pennsylvania and has been exploring photography over the last several years. His work is remarkable for its compelling aesthetics and expressive power.

See Exhibition

Elizabeth Peyton. Michelle and Sasha Obama
Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic
National Convention, 2008.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is the first survey of Elizabeth Peyton’s work in an American institution. The survey will include more than 100 works made over the past fifteen years.

Peyton’s oeuvre can be read in chapters, each of which feature portraits of friends, family, personal heroes, fleeting passions, and will offer a visual biography of the artist, and at the same time create a snapshot of the popular culture of the past decade.

From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, Marc Jacobs, and her recent Michelle Obama painting, which was added to the show November 5th. Peyton is best known for paintings that depict historical figures and celebrities that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Steeped in history, her work aspires to bridge the gap between art and life.

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222
www.newmuseum.org

Audrey Kawasaki, Two Sister’s, 2008
Oil and graphite on wood, 24 x 28.5 in

The Jonathan Levine Gallery presents the works of Audrey Kawasaki, December 5th through January 2nd, 2009, in a solo exhibition. Her works are contradictions both innocent and erotic with each subject attractive yet disturbing. Audrey’s precise technical style is influenced by both manga comics and Art Nouveau. Her sharp graphic imagery is combined with the natural grain of the wood panels she paints on, bringing an unexpected warmth to enigmatic subject matter.

The figures she paints are seductive and contain an air of melancholy. They exist in their own sensually esoteric realm, yet at the same time present a sense of accessibility that draws the observer to them. These mysterious young women captivate with the direct stare of their bedroom eyes.

Jonathan Levine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9E
New York, NY 10011
212-243-3822
www.jonathanlevinegallery.com

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1975.
Dye transfer print, 16 x 20 in,© Eggleston Artistic Trust.
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston’s great achievement in photography can be described in a straightforward way: he captures everyday moments and transforms them into indelible images. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presents a comprehensive selection from nearly fifty years of image-making.

Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta region, Eggleston showed an early interest in cameras and audio technology. While studying at various colleges in the South, he purchased his first camera and came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment (1952). In the early 1960s, Eggleston married and moved to Memphis, where he has lived ever since. He first worked in black-and-white, but by the end of the decade began photographing primarily in color.

Internationally acclaimed and widely traveled, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing all around the world, conveying intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local color. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston’s imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing, Eggleston convinces us of the idea of the democratic camera.

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Luke Smalley. Laps, Kodak endura digital C-Print

Done in and around the northwestern Pennsylvania town he still calls home, Smalley revisits themes of adolescent growing pains acted out under the guise of earnest athleticism. Teenagers compete in simple yet strange competitions meant to establish their standings amongst one another. Two youths practice boating safety procedures on a small craft that happens to be indoors, have a psychological game of tug of war with a medieval looking apparatus on their heads, and practice swimming strokes while lying on a gym floor. The photographer has painstakingly coordinated the creation of the work presented here, often making his own athletic equipment, props, tattoos and costumes.

David Gallery
5797 Washington Blvd.
Culver City CA 90232
323.939.9069
www.davidgallery.net

Andy Warhol, Rebel Without a Cause - James Dean, 1985,
Synthetic Polymer Paint and Silkscreen Ink on Canvas, 22 x 22 in

Heather James Fine Art is having an Inaugural Exhibition in a new 8,500 square foot gallery on Saturday, November 29, 2008 from 6-9 p.m. The public is invited to attend.

The multi-layered show will introduce the community to the new gallery’s directions with a number of mini-exhibitions. The main gallery will feature contemporary art icons Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In smaller, more intimate spaces early twentieth-century modern masters such as Picasso and Matisse and Impressionist painters such as Monet and Renoir will be featured. Adjacent galleries will display works by cutting-edge emerging artists like Timothy Tompkins, Peter Gerakaris, Samuel T. Adams and Kaoru Mansour.

Heather James Fine Art will feature a wide array of art ranging from Impressionist and Modern art to Post-War and Contemporary, American, Latin American, Old Master, Photography and Design. The new Fine Art gallery is an expansion and evolution of the current Heather James Art & Antiquities, which continues to operate in the El Paseo location providing fine cultural antiquities and ethnographic art from around the world.

RSVP to attend the Inaugural Exhibition.

Heather James Fine Art
45-188 Portola Avenue
Palm Desert. CA 92260
760.346.8926
www.heatherjames.com

Pedro Meyer. Devouring Saturn, 2006

The UCR/California Museum of Photography presents the Heresies Project, by Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer. This retrospective opened simultaneously in nearly 60 museums around the world. Heresies will be a major breakthrough in the way photographic work is exhibited.

Pedro Meyer is recognized widely both for his provocative and powerful images and his pioneering work in the digital imaging era. Meyer’s photographs consistently question the limits of truth, fiction and reality. With the advent of digital technologies in the early 90’s, Meyer evolved from a documentary photographer, who created “straight photography” to a digital documentary maker, who combines elements of different photographs to arrive at a digital rather than a “decisive moment.” His famous statement that every photograph, either digitally manipulated or not, is both truth and fiction, caused him to be seen as a Heretic in the orthodox world of documentary photography, thus the title Heresies.

For Heresies, UCR/CMP will show 25 recent “painted” photographs, constructed by Meyer using both digital photographic and digital painterly tools. In much of Meyer’s earlier work the “fiction” was hidden behind the superb realism of the print; in these more recent images, Meyer shows his hand. The power of Meyer’s most recent work derives from his recuperation of photographic veracity within painterly rather than photographic space. It provides us with a new and dynamic revision to the classic Pictorialism of the Photo Secessionists.

University of California Riverside
3824 Main Street
Riverside, Ca 92501
951-827-4787
www.cmp.ucr.edu