It’s been a hot and well-attended Bushwick Open Studios so far, and in the Morgan area especially the throngs are out in force, accompanied by street vendors of all kinds and even live music. If you plan to stick to this area near the L stop, we recommend some must-see open studios and performances — several are not listed in the program. On a personal note, BOS10 so far has featured the best work I’ve ever seen in Bushwick to date.
117 Grattan St
Avi Adler #101
Charming and colorful Adler plays host to a playground-like artistic/sculptural intrusion on the Grattan St sidewalk in front of his street-level studio, including a day-glo orange fire hydrant, a neon-pink bathtub, household furniture, and untold treasures lurking in a massive curb-side puddle; inside, he shows several talented painters and an in-floor goldfish bowl, similarly decorated.
Ariel Brickman, Outside (Not registered)
Unregistered with BOS, Brickman, in an almost mermaid-like fashion, greets viewers with a parasol is clothed only with enormous armor-like stickons on her nipples, and is ensconced in Adler’s pink tub.
José Gabriel Fernandez, 1st floor (Not registered)
This Venezuelan artist now working in Bushwick shows two incredibly beautiful abstract shapes of perfectly cast white fiberglass and the architectural drawings and models that went into making them.
Joe Nanashe #218
An impressive series of hand-drawn "signs" exploring local media advertising (esp grocery and real-estate) each completely colored in by hand with colored pencil.
56 Bogart St.
Jonathan VanDyke Ground Floor, North side
Impressive sculptural works that reference stretched paintings are mounted to the walls of VanDyke’s studio and bleed dripping paint from various orifices into puddles on the floor (note the previous, and extremely beautiful, dried-up paint from previous installations). VanDyke also features more language and social content-driven work in a video titled Seven Men Asleep in A Bed 2010, and large-scale digital prints of books, scanned with related homoerotic photographic intrusions.
Kyu Seok Oh #1K (Not registered)
By far the most incredible studio I saw today. In a large, open studio on the 3rd floor, in front of massive wall-sized window, Oh has casually placed three hand-made paper sculptures made of paper he makes from scratch: a sheep, a bed, and a chair. They have no armature or discernible mounting structure, the effect of being carefully hand crafted and effortlessly installed was striking. Watch out for his upcoming installation in Times Square in August of 40 paper sheep!
Attention: 1 Grattan, 2 Harrison and 56-72 Bogart are all the same yellow-brick building directly across the street from the Morgan L Stop.
236 Troutman St.
(IN)TRANSIENT Daniel + Travis, outside Tandem, 9pm-12am
Video projection of a displayed inside a UHaul parked outside of Tandem Bar; you can’t miss it. Beautiful self-reflexive imagery slowly syncopates with various carefully selected soundtracks and moving-box noises in a semi-narrative exploring transient apartment living many of us are so familiar with living in Brooklyn.
1717 Troutman St.
ReginaRex 3rd Flr (Not registered)
Tightly curated show by ReginaRex art collective on the third floor of this enormous studio building. Current show explores "material minimalism," e.g., works about what they are, in an extremely poetic and highly intellectual context. Totally unexpected for this show to occur in this building during BOS — I was blown out of the water.
Sarah Faux + Tatiana Berg #326
Excellent paintings and paintings-cum-sculpture about painting by two RISD Painting grads.
