BushwickBK Culture Editor Anna D’Agrosa behind a piece by Jonah Boaker at Norte Maar. Artists Kevin Regan and Brece Honeycutt in the background.

Last year, Culture Editor Anna D’Agrosa and I made our first ever visit to Norte Maar as our first stop on the BOS tour 2008.  This year, we decided to again kick off the weekend there, and were met with mimosas and and “damn good art” (overheard in the entryway of the gallery), starting the weekend off on an extremely high note.  “Draw: Vasari Revisited or a Sparring of Contemporary Thought” was the exhibition on view (now extended through June) in the beautifully renovated storefront gallery space on Wyckoff Avenue.  If you have not yet been to Norte Maar, I recommend you go and see this thoughtfully curated show.  There is something for everyone — as it stretches across disciplines to include drawings and more by architects, designers, established and emerging artists, choreographers, and composers of past and present — a lineup that correlates to the Norte Maar Mission of creating, promoting and presenting collaborations across artistic disciplines.

I was fortunate enough to tour the exhibition with artist/philosopher Kevin Regan,  prominently featured in the show, who led me through what he referred to as the “little passages” created by the carefully considered installation of works that expressed parallel relationships.  We spent most of our time chatting below a fanciful sculptural work by Tyrome Tripoli (who also did the iron work at Tandem) fashioned from bottle cap, nail brush and other seemingly discarded objects that brought to mind those instances when random arrangements of trash on the street create delicate and beautiful compositions.

The work (above pictured) by Jonah Bokaer of Chez Bushwick, which is installed perpendicular to the wall, is an old map of Coral Gables, Florida, “Points of Interest” in which all of the many points of supposed interest are systematically and uniformly crossed out. As drawings, Tripoli’s and Bokaer’s works certainly revisit the time of Vasari and beg a new definition of disegno in terms of formal qualities.  They are, however, clearly drawings in Vasari’s more conceptual definition: “… a tangible presentation and explanation of a particular thought which originates in the senses and which is imagined in the mind and emerges in the form of the idea.”  Other artists/works I particularly enjoyed were:  Jeremy Sapienza, Kevin Regan, Andy Spence, Paul Siskind (composer), Stephen Truax, and Peter Townsend (architect).