The famed bike by artist Crocheted Olek [ web ] locked up in LES before it got tattered, got stitched back up, appeared in "Metro", and was eventually removed by NYPD. 2010. Olek has since done ever more daring crocheterventions, including wrapping the Wall Street bull sculpture. (Ward is a proud Bull-level Olek sponsor.)
Cordy Ryman at a NYC gallery opening --pictured both front-on and in profile thanks top the shadow and the attentive eye of photographer Robert Chapman.*
Unknown British Girl With Rust-Colored Hair looks at camera preview of Unknown British (?) Tourist after the former posed afront the rust-colored wall of Jim Kemper Fine Art. (Kind thanks to the gallery for bestowing a Jim Kempner Gallery "secret honor mug" to Ward circa 2012.)
More reflections in the blood art. Everyone asks: it is not human blood ---cows usually. The artist's website says "salvaged from slaughterhouses."
Photos do not do the art justice. Fist-deep multi-layered glassy resin sandwiched with metallic effects, scorch effects, and dried redness sealed in place. It is cliche to remark that art coated with resin "has such depth to it" (of course, when one views paint through a quarter-inch of clear topcoat), but this art has SUCH depth.
Psychological depth too ---seeing the reflections flicker and fade in the glassy surfaces becomes memento mori and the old phrase ars longa VITA BREVIS comes to mind. Art is long. Oh life is short. One also ponders human life's primal beginnings ---person emerges from mixing of body fluid. Even without knowing the pigment's origin, one can admire the post-painterly color-field designs made so bold with the scale and use of unusual clear-box "canvas".
Detail of the metallic blobs and resists artfully added to the blood.
Portrait of artist Jordan Eagles by Robert Chapman ArtPhotos. Eagles was humble and kept trying to redirect photographers' attention to the art.*
Finally a picture of Robert Chapman [ web ] of Robert Chapman ArtPhotos.***
iHuddle. The grouped figures looked somewhat like the observers in Dr Tulp's [ wiki ] lesson. In Booth 303, Minneapolis' Weinstein Gallery yet again showed itself a peer to the NYC galleries. Weinstein (disclosure: author has one of their photos) could have brought in classics from the home gallery like the Maplethorpes or the classic August Sander pastry chef [ web ] ---or maybe something from McDermott & McGough who are so popular here (previous Ward article here). Instead, they took a risk with haunting wall-sized edgy Alec Soth images expressing irony and social isolation. Powerful pictures.
Booth 427 ---HIGHERpictures. Gallerist Kim Bourus with the wall of cops. This is a monochrome scene, but the splash of color from a freeform oil on canvas first got the reporter's eye. It can be a challenge for art galleries to show at a photo-art show: does one only show one's photos (and thus give the false impression that you're photos-only?) or does one perhaps scare off the photo-lovers by including paintings. Mixing paintings and photos makes "no difference" to Bourus, who cheerily said it is "all part of the same thing." ** 
Booth 221. Yancey Richardson Gallery. Large (some car-hood-sized) photos with themes of abandonment or architectural deterioration ---especially intriguing when the booth was also empty and feeling abandoned.
AXA art insurers demonstrated with a cutaway display of damaged (formerly) glass-faced art exactly how not to ship a $60,000 Cindy Sherman photo. If the Sherman is real (versus a doctored display copy) there were enough surface scratches from the glass action to represent a $59,800 value loss.
At Postmasters gallery
So it is time to declare wall-removal an art fad for 2011.
More of the Rirkrit Tiravanija show at Gavin Brown [ web ]. This is the soup zone seen from the weatherdeck.
Stove's eye view of the holy soup pot. Rirkrit Tiravanija wasn't making soup himself ---delegated to artist Danny Baez.
Some of the spices.
Artist Danny Baez, chief cook and bottle-washer during this phase of Rirkrit Tiravanija at Gavin Brown.
Some opening attendees at a show at Winkleman [ web ]. Ward article: here.
Reflected red light colors the slowly-turning cubes of a George Rickey kinetic sculpture at a Smithsonian-affiliate site where Ward art hung in 2009.
Dennis Christie (the DC in DCKT Contemporary [ web ]) near part of Cordy Ryman's Windowboxing installation ---thus also giving an idea of the piece's ambitious scale. Ward article: here.
Another view of Luiny Rivera Gelpi reporting from the Sofia Maldonado [ web ] opening at Magnan-Metz [ web ] with a portion of Sofia's 42nd Street mural which was reinstalled at the gallery. Ward article: here.
Artist Nelson Loskamp performing one of his Electric ChairCut [ web ] pieces in Duarte Squate on Canal Street. 2010.
Gallery visitors at a Brandon Morse [ news ] video piece. 2011.
More Morse viewers.
Even more.
And more.
Close-up of a Jens Praet table's surface: resin-dipped shredded magazines ---"Art In America" in this case. This is an under-surface; the table-tops are glassy-smooth.
Artist Mike Lash's [ web ] "paintings for scotch" Dada sales attempt at the Juneteenth BarterTown on Canal Street.
Artist Mike Lash's "paintings for scotch" Dada sales attempt at the Juneteenth BarterTown on Canal Street.
Nighttime shadows upon a gallery courtyard wall of a Cordy Ryman [ web ] leaned-slats piece.
Artist Brandon Morse [ web ] in profile against his own video piece High Pressure System.
Chelsea ---where there are so many galleries, the non-galleries must flag themselves lest they be interrupted all day by art-tourists. At least one sign like this was quoted in the Jerry Saltz Art Studio Door Signs book.
Nor is this a gallery, but this sign across from Conner Contemporary Art is a big hit on nights of gallery events when the first three letters of UNISEX short-out. The sign, already circulating all over the web and sure to appear on FailBlog, is located here: [ GoogleMaps StreetView of the famous "SEX BARBERSHOP" sign ].
BillboardVan advertises a CultureFix exhibit in LES.
A computer-assisted DJ at a New York opening ---someplace. (Venues can blur together after a while.)
Exhibit set-up at the Met. An edgy painting rendered semi-surreal with the addition of temporary anti-dust wrap: Lucian Freud's 1991-2, Naked Man Back View. Photo circa 2008?
Harry Kulkowitz and Dad outside the 2006 Nathalie Djurberg [ web ] exhibit of puppetporn claymation video [ web ] at Zach Feuer gallery. Harry was a principal at the former Kenmore Gallery [ search ] in Philly (early booster of Ansel Adams and of Claes Oldenburg) before leading the renovation boom of Cape May. Cartoon voice balloon behind them says, "LOWLIFE SCUM AND FREAKS."
Streetside Chelsea
Outside a gallery --shattered glass in the gutter
Crushed into hot pavement
Still in places sparkling and intriguing,
But fragmented and fading --doomed.
Like the dreams of a thousand artists.
(Any you're not reading a caption, but a poem --"BoopBidda-BUMmm" goes the bongo drum.)
Film crew takes over all parking outside Chelsea Art Museum [ web ] ---rather amusingly over-signed.
Stray bullet hits the Met's plate glass walls (of the Egyptian temple gallery) from Central Park ---whose treeline is faintly visible in the background.
Shadows and antishadows cast by the X-thousand holes of Artist Michael Enn Sirvet [ web ]'s hemisphere-piece Millenia [ web ]. Photo: 2011.
More shadows and antishadows cast by the X-thousand holes of Artist Michael Enn Sirvet [ web ]'s hemisphere-piece Millenia [ web ].
Do not touch or climb the artists either.
At Booth 201, Joshua Mann Pailet from NOLA's A Gallery For Fine Photography explains a mixed-media photo process. The married art-photo duo Louviere And Vanessa created the pictures resembling old engravings or scrimshaw or tattoos. In fact they were close-ups of world currency illustrations printed onto uniquely-textured gold-painted backgrounds with visible brushstrokes, fingerscoops, and script lettering. The word counterfeit appears in each. A resin topcoat gives the whole a glassy surface and makes one wonder if the brushstrokes are 3-d or are just printed there.*
At Booth 201, Joshua Mann Pailet from NOLA's A Gallery For Fine Photography explains Louviere And Vanessa's mixed-media photo process. There was plenty of irony-talk about the use of banknote-imagery in art during the late soft-Depression. The metallic backgrounds with resin-infill create color-shifting effects evocative of new currency's anti-counterfeiting bi-color inks.*
At Booth 201, NOLA's A Gallery For Fine Photography shows Louviere And Vanessa's mixed-media photo process.*
Artist David Greg Harth holds the namesake of his epic 20-year relational aesthetics piece, The Holy Bible Project 
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Photo credits:
= Terry Ward aka GrumpyVisualArtist.
* =Robert Chapman ArtPhotos [ web ].
***=Ladimor Films.
**** =Courtesy of respective gallery.
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