DEITCH PROJECTS AROUND TOWN, OPENINGS 3/6/9 & 3/7/9.

Deitch Projects has 3 outrageous exhibits opening at its 3 galleries this week.

 

 

March 06, 1996 — April 12, 1996

4-40 44th Drive, Long Island City

 

“Deitch Projects presents VB64, Vanessa Beecroft’s first public performance in New York since 2000 and an accompanying exhibition of new sculpture at Deitch Studios on the East River in Long Island City. The performance/sculpture will take place on Friday evening, March 6th from 7 – 10 PM. The sculptures from the performance along with a video projection of the performance, will be on view through Sunday April 12th. An exhibition of new wax and gesso sculptures will also be on view in the adjoining gallery.

 

Vanessa Beecroft works in the space between painting, sculpture, performance, and real life. In VB64, she introduces a new element into the work, gesso sculptures cast from live models, resting on coffin-like bases. The twenty live models in the performance will be in white body make up and at the beginning of the performance will be indistinguishable from the sculptural casts. VB64 pushes Beecroft’s deliberate confusion between sculpture, performance and real life into a new realm, the tension between life and death.”

 

 

 

March 07, 2009 — April 04, 2009

76 Grand Street, New York

 

“Kessler's Circus places the viewer inside the American war machine. An army tent pitched inside the gallery houses mechanical sculptures and barracks stacked with video monitors. The work depicts the American military-industrial complex as macabre circus, traveling from country to country, importing nothing and exporting atrocities under the veil of democracy. Rather than simply presenting a mediated spectacle, Kessler indicts the audience in the violence.

 

Surrounded by handmade mechanisms and surveillance cameras, the viewer becomes part of the machine. There is an induced sense of vertigo and surge of paranoia, as the viewer's own faces appear in the video feed. Entering Kessler's Circus, one is immersed in an undefined state, conflating machine and spectacle with entertainment and horror.

 

Kessler's Circus updates and politicizes the experience of Calder's Circus. Following the tradition of performative mechanized sculpture, Kessler creates a playful format for his exploration of our modern war experience. The mischievous nature of Kessler's hand belies a dark violence that is at once captivating and frightening. The business of death as mediated spectacle exposes anxieties and complacencies concerning surveillance, propaganda, and our ravenous consumption of celebrity.”

 

 

March 07, 2009 — April 18, 2009

18 Wooster Street, New York

 

“Ryan McGinness Works., an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Ryan McGinness, opens on Saturday, March 7th, at Deitch Projects' 18 Wooster Street gallery. Like all of McGinness's exhibitions at Deitch Projects, this show is not just a display of new works, but an experiential installation. Gallery visitors will enter the world of Ryan McGinness.

 

McGinness merges several of the most important directions in contemporary painting. His work combines all-over composition, inspired by Jackson Pollock and the mechanical silkscreen process inspired by Andy Warhol. The work also fuses naturalistic and contemporary pop culture references. His imagery derives form a broad range of sources: from dreams and hallucinations to song lyrics and fragments of art history. There is a push and pull between content and form, and between literal meaning and intuitive feeling. McGinness's paintings represent his own mental landscape. His compositions reflect the infinite, ever-flowing continuum of the universe.