Ran down to CT in the heat yesterday.
Visited Trinity on Main in New Britain. Gonna be putting up a show this coming spring hopefully. Might be sooner. Going to help with a show at the Mayor's gallery in New Britain this summer too.
Went to NBMAA after that. Great space. They are doing it right. Elana Herzog's works made of paper and fabric stapled to the wall were nice, but many of their paintings were what really got me excited. Tom Yost's Painter Hill Road is an excellent little landscape. Christopher Gallego's Interior with Three Rooms is another excellent realistic painting. It's exactly what it sounds like, a painting of a house's interior. Walton Ford's Fallen Mias (see above) is another stunner.
Headed up to the Wads-Ath to at least see the Matrix 159 show of Justin Lowe.
Can't say enough about this installation. He really used his chance in a museum to its full potential. The image above is from my cell phone, so it's hard to see, but this is the acid room, the 60's acid room if you ask me. The floor is a carpet of pulp horror novels, the walls are reflective, the windows are colored green and pinkish, the tv shows overlain with other acid movies, the paintings are composed from the novels in the floor. It's intense.
Next to that is a hallway that has a slide projector. This room did nothing for me, but that's ok, as it leads to the post acid, punk rock cocaine and beer CBGB's bathroom. It's a dark place and dangerous. Maybe the hallway was the aftermath of the free love era where one moves to northern Cali to grow your own food or Aspen to be free. Either way, the bathroom is what everyone seems to be talking about. It was too clean and smelled too good to be the real CBGB, but that's fine by me.
Next door to that is the 90's rave chill out room. The music Brooklyn hipsterish-- a mellow non-genre slog of noisy chillout. With the symmetrical video projector showing another set of videos mashed together, this felt overpoweringly content. Too content. Melting into the carpet content.
Hiding behind all this drug reference is a great site specificity. He reflected the museum by being era conscious and making period rooms, he brought a Jackson Pollock into CBGB's bathroom for example. He made lots of puns about what he included in each room that reflect on the Atheneum's holdings. Very smart show.
Glad I went. Any museum that has a strong contemporary tradition and a Rembrandt, Zurbaran, and a pair of Glotzious's (or is it Glotziouseses?) paintings is alright by me.
