A Chelsea Stroll in March

NYC is simply a dense cluster of little villages and nowhere does that notion ever feel truer than in Chelsea.  I had a little time to catch a few shows back after making an art delivery back in mid March.

I saw two colleagues from MoMA at the Andrew Kreps Gallery.  I ran into a designer I was helping install this week at Bard CCS.  I ran into Amy Lipton on 11th Ave.  Amy told me about a new gallery in Beacon that I hadn't even heard of.  It's called Estuary Gallery.  It's located over at the loft project off of Rt 52.  Amy said she tried to go to the opening of the inaugural show the previous Saturday, but couldn't find the place (it can be confusing to navigate that area if you're not familiar with it, especially at night.)

At the Josh Smith Show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, I met Jerry Saltz, who was marvelling at the great awfomeness (my word, a cross of awesome and awful) of Smith's work - which has provided me with at least a couple of hours of entertaining conversations.  Peter Acheson and I caught his previous exhibit from last March at Luhring Augustine.  His latest painitngs seem to be striving more for awesomeness than awfulness (something I'm not sure could be said of previous groupings) - aside from those stop signs;  I was challenged by Mr. Saltz to put something that awful in my next show.  That will be priority one, next show I have. 

I also met Phong Bui, editor of the Brooklyn Rail who was at the Augustine with the artist Joel Shapiro.  I spoke with Phong about recording an interview with him for Dead Hare Radio. I was actually capturing ambient sounds during my walk through the galleries and created a sound collage for show #3 of Dead Har Radio.

Let's see....what did I see?  Some unexpected and weird videos - in 3D by Gary Hill, “of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment,” at Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY through April 23.

I watched Terence Koh edging his way around a mound of salt on his knees at Mary Boone.  Some black and white reliefs of Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks, I believe.  A Tara Donavan at Pace(?) that was a bit too prim for me.  Also, Richard Butler had a show at Freight and Volume.  I'm back and forth with his work, but I'm digging some of his new larger heads.