—- Tsarina Katarina, fetch the tuning fork for Clover’s twittering machine. From where I transcend as this manger’s manager, a proper script morphs twins as badgered duplicate, batty cinemaddicts, prickling neckbraces. Speaking insectually, freckly Shawnique may borrow your legs and you her arms, drawing upon truncated centipede haunting walls that encircle the garden that belongs to the vicar of vicariousness.
 
—- Ya, ya. Truly trivial, but trivially true, too.
 
—- Please step forward. C’mere! C’mon. Feel right at home.
 
—- Thanks, but my trusty rifle’s a trifle rusty. Thump desire. Sunshine, so tickled when Hapsburg snow melted. Shy eyes lie. Ree and Tomas bow their heads, now braver than any war world apart. Kiss bonded, mind and heart weaving silken shrapnel.
 
—- Attendez! Close your yap! Show some respect! Through corridors fire ants wriggle and sashay through the U.S. of A., a story line that hammers vital organs into teasing shrugs after the annunciatory blue angel smoke releases. Far behind the braided ropes please linger.
 
- Charles H. Lynch

Rosanne Olson
Rapture ( series )
May 8 – June 16, 2013
 
The Robin Rice Gallery is pleased to present Roseanne Olson’s third photography exhibition, Rapture. The opening reception will be held Wednesday, May 8th, from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
 
“The magic of the pool—the un-weighted body, the solitude, the distortion, that has always fascinated me.” In the invitational image, Bournee, a woman is suspended in soft hues of blue water but appears to be floating upwards, ascending into the clouds. Arabesque, her model in the pool is turned gracefully upside down, arms outstretched, in a gossamer dress fanning against the backdrop of faint clouds in the sky. Her color images come off dreamy, surreal and mysterious. In most of the images there are reflections on the water and refractions of light, like watercolors bleeding together, with undefined shapes leaving us with more with the feeling of a painting.
 
Olson describes Rapture as, “a biography of my dreams,” intrigued by the world that lies just beyond our consciousness—where time shifts, gravity loosens and we slip into dreaming. She conveys the dreams she’s had since childhood—women donning 100 year-old vintage dresses suspend languidly as though they are defying space and time, floating through the sky. In reality, Olson is photographing them from above in swimming pools in Seattle, Oregon, where her female models appear to be tumbling and turning, falling and slipping out of dresses. The effect is ethereal. Her models could be construed as angels.
 
Despite each image’s balanced composition, Olson claims the process of capturing floating objects on film is haphazard and spontaneous. She shoots instinctively on the fly, reacting as clothing and body position continually change. Yet when it comes to her models she strives to create a meditative situation, “the subjects need to be relaxed so the water is calm, which is hard to do when gravity is pulling down.”
 
Rosanne Olson works in both fine art and commercial photography. She obtained her master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Over the past 25 years, her photographs have won many awards and were included in numerous photography annuals including, Graphis and the cover of Communication Arts. Her work has also been featured in View Camera Magazine, Lens Work and Photo District News. In 2008 Rosanne authored a book titled, “This is Who I Am—Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes,” a book about women and body image. She teaches lighting, portraiture and creativity at various photographic schools, colleges, and conferences. Roseanne is represented by Robin Rice Gallery in New York and galleries in Aspen and Boston. This is her third solo show at the Robin Rice Gallery.
 
To view all the images from the exhibition go to www.robinricegallery.com

Studio10 is pleased to present The Devil Tricked Me, an exhibition of work by Matt Freedman. The exhibition is organized around the recent publication of Relatively Indolent but Relentless, a graphic journal Freedman wrote last Autumn.
In July 2012 Freedman learned that he had Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, a rare and slow growing cancer. Treatment entailed thirty-five days of radiation and weekly doses of chemotherapy over seven weeks. Just before treatment, a friend gave Matt a blank notebook and suggested he should fill it up. Matt did complete the therapy and the notebook as well. He said, “It seemed like it would in the end give me the last laugh over my cancer treatment.” This exhibition serves to extend Freedman’s experience of his treatment, the subject of the journal, into the six months that have now passed between the end of treatment and this exhibition’s opening.
All thirteen works take as their subject bad luck. This idea is embodied in Freedman’s iconic constructions that portray folk admonitions. These signs seek to control bad luck by taking such precautions such as avoiding walking under ladders or opening umbrellas indoors. Another significant component of the show is the notion of disability. Freedman continues to feel side effects from his treatment as well as from the drugs he takes to quell those effects. Though functioning effectively, the fact that he should not drive because the narcotics would render him technically “under the influence” is for Freedman an objective marker of what he feels and knows to be true: He is not himself or at his best.
The idea of disability is communicated by hand written signs of explanation, which function as the conceptual framework for the exhibition. Freedman’s sign details the reasons for the restrictions he placed upon himself for the creation of the work: each work consists of totally “de-skilled” labor. He collected objects either from the street; broken umbrellas and cigarette stubs, or from his house and studio; A couch, a collection of pennies. He also allowed himself to use components from previous work repurposed for the show.
Matt Freedman is a sculptor, performer, writer and curator. He has exhibited with Valentine Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, vertexlist, Flipside, Fivemyles, The SculptureCenter and Long Island University. Venues of performances include PS 1 MOMA, The Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, Brooklyn Fireproof, Brooklyn Academy of Music at Fivemyles, Galapagos Performance Space. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at The University of Iowa, Parsons the New School for Design, The Pratt Institute, The Rhode Island School of Design. NEA Sculpture (1987, NYFA, Fiction (2000). Freedman has written for Art News, Review and Cabinet, among others. For more information and images, please contact Annelie McGavin at (718) 852-4396.

Natural Selection engages the idea of the ‘natural’ from multiple angles: from a purely retinal and aesthetic perspective, from social and cultural points of view and even from a somatic, experiential vantage.
 
Lee Arnold’s Winter Light seeks to represent natural light as pure abstraction. The images take the form of digital collages, which are derived from scanned photographs (shot on film) that were subsequently scanned, cropped, digitally manipulated and output as inkjet prints. These works date from the winter of 2012-2013.
 
Rick Caruso creates paintings by culling abstract forms from intersecting exterior and interior spaces—the industrial, the domestic, the landscape, the cartoon—and transforming these fragments into something analogous to a visual narrative.
Christina Kelly’s installation work is part of her ongoing project: A Field Guide to Office Plants. Here she displays actual potted plants (Sansevieria, Pothos, and the Janet Craig Dracaena form part of the selection) and, through drawings, text and photographs, explores these popular office plant’s source and how they landed in our cubicles.
Michael Krondl utilizes very large photographs derived from fragments of the natural world that locate the viewer in an uncomfortable and even dangerous space. He is exhibiting new work that engages ideas of falling and drowning.

et al Projects is excited to present new artwork by Julian Lorber. This is Lorber’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will mark the second anniversary of the gallery’s new location in Bushwick with Lorber’s vivid works that include a multidisciplinary display of paintings, photography, and sculpture. Coming off his recent solo exhibition in Europe this past February, which was titled Externalities, Julian Lorber’s exhibition at et al Projects is untitled and continues this momentum with a display of his ability and drive to create intriguing, dynamic art.
 
Lorber has created works from observing the visual effects of urban soot on architecture and interiors and the paint build-up from graffiti writing and outdoor mural painting. Other sources for his works include makeup and automotive spray coating. What these materials and applications are actually adding to the language of painting is part of what the artist is interested in showing us. His process of mixed media layering is what he considers as creating his own “architecture of pollution.” The artist has also included window soot into some of the works as a material metaphor. Moving towards the surface, the artist intensifies the viewing experience with color shading and has an illusory balance of surface and depth. Thinking about economics and the growth of industry and its effects on our culture, Lorber asks questions about a system that is a disconnect between the society in which we live and the natural world that the system relies on. Subverting material hierarchies and confronting the negative and positive externalities around him, Lorber presents his art as a science fiction, and puts the urban environment as the driving force behind human visual experience.
 
May 17 thru June 17, 2013
Opening Reception: May 17, 7pm-10pm
Artist Talk: June 16, 12pm
 
Julian Lorber is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He produces art using paint, drawing, collage, video, sculpture and installation art and has exhibited internationally. He has been interviewed in NY Arts Magazine, Frontrunner Magazine and LVL3. His works have been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Arte- Fuse and Studio Visit Magazine, curated by Ian Berry, Senior Director at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.
 
et al projects | 56 Bogart | Brooklyn NY | 11206 | info@etalprojects.com | 914-498-8328

Art Talk Series: Jennifer Wynne Reeves
 
Tuesday, June 18th at 6:30PM
RSVP at trestle@brooklynartspace.org
www.trestlegallery.org
$5 donation
 
Reeves has enjoyed numerous exhibitions internationally including one person shows at Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome, Max Protetch in New York, Ramis Barquet in New York and Monterrey, Art & Public in Geneva, The Wooster Art Museum in Massachusetts, Joan Prats in Barcelona, Gorney Bravin Lee in New York. The many reviews of her exhibitions include The New York Times by Holland Cotter, The New Yorker by Alexi Worth, New York Magazine by Jerry Saltz, Art in America by David Ebony, Art forum by Donald Kustpit, The New York Times by Ken Johnson, The Village Voice by Kim Levin and in Art in America by Sarah Valdez.

Arieff is Content Strategist for the urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR, and is a contributing columnist for the New York Times. Previously, she was the Editor in Chief of Dwell Magazine.

Eve Bailey, Rachel Bernstein, Ryan V Brennan, Artists: Diana Heise, Roxanne Jackson, Coralina Meyer, Sono Osato, Malingering Uvula (Camilla Ha and Michael Merck) Gabriela Vainsencher.
 
Curated by Sarah Walko
 
The exhibition “The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague” permanently on display at the Kafka Museum was the impetus for this exhibition. Kafka’s relationship with cities through his surreal lens coupled with his imagination and during the context of his time brought the simultaneous nightmare/dreamscape of the budding technological age into the realm of the real in his stories, projecting super psyches onto our cities.
 
The artists in this exhibition are all exploring the surreal space of our time now. Large cultural and philosophical shifts due to massive environmental and economic challenges and the level of technology we are reaching and working with daily is all ushering in new branches of consciousness and new approaches to how we live. The artists, like Kafka did, address our current cosmic predicament in various ways; our relationship with nature, our relationship to self within today’s technological tools, and with objects of alchemical/shamanic ritual and ceremony. They are writing out the dreamscapes of our now and a vision of the future that lacks the pasts’ patriarchal aesthetic and imagines the opening up of a future with more feminine traits, including acts of reclamation and the healing of our past and ourselves within our cities.
 
About the curator:
 
Sarah Walko is a multimedia artist and writer. She is currently the executive director of Triangle Arts Association. El Cadaver Exquisito, a feature length experimental documentary collaboration film she created with with director Victor Ruano and Rossemberg Rivas, is currently in festival circuits and her second film Lux/Nox with collaborator Malado Baldwin is in post production. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published by While Whale Review Literary Journal and Hyperallergic Art Blog where she is a regular contributing writer. Her visual artwork has been published by The Dirty Goat, Redivider, Blood Lotus, Apple Valley Review, 2 River, A Capella Zoo, Awosting Alchemy, 5x5 Literary Magazine, Bathhouse, Cincinnati Review and Host Publications. Her recent exhibitions include Preternatural at the Museum of Nature, a science museum in Canada, Codex Dynamic in New York and Wonder Cabinet at Flux Factory in New York. She has participated in many artists residency programs including one currently at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York and she is working on new sculpture/installations, film and a novel.

THE PARK: PAINTINGS BY ERIK BENSON
ON VIEW IN THE ARSENAL GALLERY
May 2 – June 20, 2013
 
The City of New York Parks & Recreation, in partnership with Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, is pleased to announce the exhibition, The Park, by Erik Benson. This new series of paintings, created with thousands of shapes hand-cut from dried sheets of acrylic paint, depict colorful but eerily abandoned playgrounds in stark urban landscapes. Drawings from this series, as well as a stop-motion video documenting Benson’s unique painting method are also on view. These exquisite compositions of urban landscape will be exhibited in the Arsenal Gallery from May 2 through June 20.
 
Benson, known for his austere cityscapes, uses his intensive compositional technique to capture the interplay of construction and creative destruction, urban density, abandonment and open space in images that that have elements of decay and hope. The Park focuses on his interest in playgrounds, which are void of inhabitants but enticingly geometric and colorful. He first began to study these spaces in early graduate work at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was particularly interested in the play structures’ boldly unnatural and manmade coloring. The jungle gyms appear to sit on top of the surface rather than integrating with the landscape—a metaphor for his own painting techniques.
 
“Originally I was interested in creating a painting vocabulary that depicted the plasticity and temporality of unexamined things such as playgrounds and construction sites,” says Benson. “These interests have been growing into ideas and concerns that deal with the urban landscape, such as how cities grow and shrink, and what these issues mean to the inhabitants.” In these new paintings, Benson considers how playgrounds and parks play a role in the community and surrounding neighborhoods that are oftentimes blighted. These oases of saturated color and abstraction provide a much needed escape from the daily grind. These playgrounds are strikingly familiar, and while they are inspired by the play spaces around Benson’s neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn, they are not exact representations. In fact their archetypal structure can be found in neighborhoods throughout the country.
 
Benson’s paintings are in equal measure foreboding and optimistic and cause us to question the nature of urban development. Gallery owner Edward Tyler Nahem was impressed by “Erik’s clear-eyed view of the intersections of the urban environment and nature - the winners and the losers of this quotidian struggle between “development” and nature, “progress” and tradition.”
 
Benson has a laborious appliqué technique that is more akin to the construction of the buildings on his canvases than to traditional methods of painting. First, he pours acrylic paint on large panes of glass and lets them dry into extremely thin sheets. Once they have dried, he uses an X-Acto knife to cut shapes from the sheet and then layers them atop each other, like a collage or the memorable children’s toy Colorforms. Appropriately, Benson’s meticulous method of constructing his paintings literally brick by brick has also been likened to modular and pre-fabrication designs in architecture.
 
During the reform era of the early 20th century the New York City Parks Department was a pioneer in recreational space, and in 1903 opened the country’s first municipal playground at Seward Park on Manhattan’s the Lower East Side. Under Commissioner Robert Moses, who served from 1934 to 1960, the Parks Department increased the number of playgrounds in the city from 119 to 777, most were based on a standard model that was quick and cheap to build and easy to maintain. In the 1960s and 70s Parks experimented with adventure playgrounds, which used natural materials to integrate the play area into the land itself. The playgrounds were muted in tone and blended structural building materials such as cast concrete with natural materials such as ropes and large–size timbers. By the 1980s, with increasing safety standards many playgrounds were retrofitted to eliminate hazardous conditions. Critics also found the aesthetic to be brutal, harsh, and un–park–like. Newer playgrounds relied on more colorful catalog of model equipment, similar to those in Benson’s paintings. Ushering in a new era of playground design recent models, such as Imagination Playground in Lower Manhattan rely on children having the ability to manipulate their environment. Today the Parks Department maintains nearly 1,000 playgrounds throughout the city.
 
Born in Detroit, MI, Benson currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Benson is represented by Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art and his most recent exhibition in 2010 Detouring, opened to critical acclaim after popular showings of his work at the Armory show and Art Basel Miami Beach. Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art also organized the popular pop-up gallery show, Erik Benson: All City in Madrid, Spain February 2- March 1, 2012. He has had solo exhibitions at the former Roebling Hall, Brooklyn and included in group exhibitions at Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University; Salon 94, New York; Flag Art Foundation, New York; and the Newberger Museum, Purchase, NY. Benson was part of the Bronx Museum of Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, and in 2008 he awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship. He recently completed a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. In addition to the exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery, Erik Benson will be featured in an exhibition at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art September 26 – October 25, 2013.
 
The Arsenal Gallery is dedicated to examining themes of nature, urban space, wildlife, New York City parks, and park history. It is located on the third floor of the NYC Parks & Recreation headquarters, in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for holidays. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.nyc.gov/parks/art or call 212-360-8163.

The Hole is proud to present the second solo exhibition by Holton Rower at the gallery where we will present a selection of new pour paintings and debut a new body of work, “focus paintings."

The Hole is proud to present a sister exhibition to our current survey of figurative painting, XSTRACTION, that surveys new approaches to abstraction. Expanding upon the themes introduced in the two exhibitions at Deitch Projects “Substraction” curated by Nicola Vassell and “Constraction” curated by Kathy Grayson, this show will present all the various strategies young and established artists are using to make abstract painting exciting and urgent. The exhibition will be accompanied by an “encyclopedic” book of the same title available June 1.

“…I’m beginning a new book to have a companion, someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at the moment.” —Hervé Guibert
 
To The Friends Who Saved My Life,
…an exhibition prompted by the introduction of Francesca Woodman’s work to Heinz Peter-Knes and Danh Vō. They in turn suggested a parallel to Hervé Guibert, unknown to us at the time. About a year later, we learned that Nightboat Books, the companion enterprise to Callicoon Fine Arts, was newly engaged with Guibert translations, a publication plan that in turn prompted the gallery to introduce Guibert’s photographs to an American audience. Shared images and writings closed a circle that we hadn’t known of before, including our own works, those of Rona Yefman, an Israeli photographer living in New York, Heinz, Danh, and a single Francesca Woodman, as our starting point.
 
Guibert’s best known book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, is a memoir of crisis and roller-coaster years of rushing between doctors and lovers. With extraordinary recall and dispassion, that is, with a photographic voice, even towards his own diagnosis and decline, Guibert maps the early years of the AIDS crisis. In those times when human friends became “friend[s] whose company I can bear at the moment,” perhaps it was photography that eased them through the door.
 
Among the many formal similarities between Woodman and Guibert, it should be noted that both spent time living and photographing in Rome, where Heinz and Danh were recently in residence, and that the images Woodman and Guibert made there are steeped in its light and shadows. Rona Yefman did not know of Guibert, but she was known to us through her extended photo essay on her brother, and through a pair of striking one-minute films. Moyra’s bottles, Jason’s Polaroids and Rona’s sibling study, all keep the images close to home. Danh and Guibert absorb the Villa Medici residence through its physical effects upon its residents, past and present: the erotics of place carry by association, the knowledge of who was there before. So too does Heinz’s discovery of his own face plastered on the red-lit bathroom wall of a bar, and in his portfolio of black and white prints. Seemingly following an order that appeared in the unedited rolls of 35mm film, flared end frames included, Heinz’s box of prints return us back to the place of the photographer sorting the moments of seeing.
—Jason and Moyra
 
To The Friends Who Saved My Life: Moyra Davey, Hervé Guibert, Heinz Peter-Knes, Jason
Simon, Danh Vō, Francesca Woodman, Rona Yefman
 
Exhibition dates: May 19 - June 21, 2013.
Opening reception: Sunday, May 19th, 6 to 8pm
 
CONTACT: Photi Giovanis, info@callicoonfinearts.com, 212 219 0326

Jacob Love - “STATES”
Exhibition dates: April 26 to June 21, 2013
Opening Reception: April 26, 6-8 PM
Artist talk: April 27, 2-3 PM
 
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
Wooster St. Window Gallery
26 Wooster Street, New York NY 10013
 
“STATES,” by London based photographer Jacob Love, is a project of landscapes and portraits and a work in progress inspired by the utopian scenes in the Jehovah's Witness magazine, “The Watchtower.” Inverted landscapes depict the same continental landmass photographed in different physical states of being, suggesting that the only consistent truth is change. Figures in his portraits emerge from darkness re-enforcing the idea that to come out as “queer” is not a single act, but a continual process celebrating the notion of differentiation. “STATES” on view twenty-four hours a day in the street level Wooster St. Window Gallery located at 26 Wooster Street, New York City.