Structural Patterns

Fun music! Takes me back to my high school and college years late 80s to early 90s!

With each manipulation of the Nicaraguan constitution by Ortega and the Sandinista party, I feel a deep sadness for the impoverished country. I am also dumbfounded at the short-sightedness of the ruling party and the ignorant avarice of Daniel Ortega who will not hand over the political reigns of the country to a new generation. Prosperity has been illusive to this small country that has suffered a long-lasting dictatorship, natural disaster, a popular revolution and seemingly inherent political corruption. If only a true leader would emerge who seeks an end to corruption and the engineering of a society striving for the well-being of all its people. Unfortunately, since the Nicaraguan National Assembly elected to eliminate presidential term limits, an end to poverty and corruption appears as distant as the worst period of the Somoza dynasty. Ortega has effectively become Somoza.

Hunter Honors student Cialina Ngo has completed her honor’s thesis – “AccioBook” a book discovery website built on WordPress to discover and learn about young adult literature. What is significant about this literature site is that Cialina along with other editors has created a taxonomy for the site based on the reading of the books and careful consideration of how a book may be indexed and easily found by the site’s users.

As Cialina describes the project:

Unlike other book discovery websites that are based on algorithms, my website will be based on metadata created by a human who has actually read the book. AccioBook will be similar in format to Pandora. Users will be given a list of recommendations based on the title of a book that they recently enjoyed. The list of recommendations will be based on a database of metadata. I will develop a database of book metadata based on plot, characterization, setting, and romance using approximately 100 young adult novels.

5,000 Feet is the Best by Omer Fast.

This is a poignant and beautiful short film.

Donate money to help bring one of Sam Van Aken trees to Brooklyn! Artist Sam Van Aken has donated one of his trees from the project “The Tree of 40 Fruit” to the South Williamsburg community garden La Casita Verde. Now they just need $2500 to cover the transport cost from Syracuse to Williamsburg. Donate on line.

Artist Traci Talasco has maintained an active artist practice in New York City over the last 10 years and she is currently working on an installation that will be featured at the Brooklyn Arts Council.

The installation “Rub Me the Wrong Way” will transform the gallery into a home environment created entirely out of sandpaper, which will wear down as you walk through the space. The title humorously refers to the unrealistic, societal expectations placed on women to “do it all”, and how we become worn down by our absurd attempts to juggle everything.

Traci is reaching out to the public to support the realization of this installation and she’s getting very close. If you like the concept and would like to see it realized go to indiegogo to contribute financially.

Arts Across the Curriculum and the Integrated Media Arts MFA Program at Hunter College will host a performance by Martin Howse on Friday April 4th at 7pm in the Black Box – Hunter North 543.

Martin Howse is a unique new media artist who builds his own electronics and writes his own programs for performance. Berlin-based researcher, artist, inventor and performer Martin Howse traverses the electromagnetic spectrum as a space for exploration that may be manipulated to generate sound and visual. Martin Howse leads “micro_research,” a mobile research platform exploring psychogeophysics and asking the questions of where precisely the plague known as software executes.

Recently the Czech cultural center Školská 28 described Martin Howse performance as

“heavily improvised, playing with the collapse of massed, barely functional salvaged equipment and software systems made manifest in sound/noise and image, Howse presents a complex, process-driven constructivist performance; the symphonic rise of the attempt to piece together fugal systematics is played out against the noise of collapse and machine crash at the deserted border of control.”

As I continue to play with WebGL and the three.js library, I will generate compositions from photographs taken in Helsinki (until I run out of photos that I like). Check out the latest page and click through all the sketches.

The title isn’t entirely true, I did step into Carlos Rolon’s show at Paul Kasmin Gallery expecting to walk out quickly, but found myself drawn in by the diversity of wall pieces. Upon first look, the work all appeared slick and uniform – nice, colorful rectangles hanging beautifully on white walls. I can’t say that I really cared for any of the wall pieces, they are gaudy and not very interesting, but I’m glad that I walked through the space to find an installation with a television playing an interview with Manos de Piedra, Roberto Duran… a figure from my childhood. The hidden installation is much more interesting than any of the wall pieces as it does a nice job of capturing a specific time and culture that many Latinos from my age group can identify with. Rolon born in 1970 recreated his childhood wood-panel basement in the installation and featured excerpts from televised moments with the boxer Roberto Duran. Unfortunately, I didn’t document the installation.

At Andrea Rosen, you can find David Altmejd’s crazy, obsessive, sculptures that point to animation. I’ve seen several of these over the years and once you’ve seen one, there’s not much of a need to see another. They are intricate and obsessively done, but not very interesting. I was much more intrigued by the face sculpture below than the complex, multilayered room scale plexi and mixed media sculptures.

Jiha Moon’s work at Ryan Lee isn’t very interesting or worth a visit either, but I loved the graphic comic accents in the paintings and the combination of seemingly traditional ceramics with pop culture. On the surface, the work is whimsical and fun, but doesn’t do much more, beyond appearance.

Keith Sonnier’s work at Pace are engaging, but again they leave a bit of an empty feeling… more decorative than anything.

I don’t have anything to say about Andy Denzler paintings other than they made me long for Richter Gerhard… Though uninteresting, stylistically, I felt the need to take one photograph.

Ralf Schmerberg nice colorful prints of random things he encounters are kind of interesting. I like the title of the show “Greetings from our planet.”

Perhaps the high light of the stroll through Chelsea was the John Ahearn sculptures at Alexander and Bonin. But once again, I came away feeling a bit empty as I’ve experienced Ahearn’s work on the street where it belongs and it’s much more powerful than in a gallery.

Nearly every time, I do a Chelsea Gallery walk, I find something redeeming, worth seeing, but this February, I unfortunately did not come across anything interesting. And to top it off, the fashion people due to Fashion Week made the walk really annoying. And sadly, on the way to the subway, I came across this horrific scene where an MTA driver lost his life.