A giant inflatable drill at Fortress to Solitude, in an unsold condo on Boerum Street. What might be strange uses of space for the art world is typical for Bushwick.
Photos by Paul Cox for BushwickBK | Click to view slideshow>>
Now in its fourth year, BETA Spaces remains a one day festival celebrating what Bushwick curators do best: filling unusual spaces. This time around the presenters, Arts in Bushwick, rallied nearly forty spaces from the fertile lands between Meserole, Myrtle and Hart. This Research Triangle of the gallery world showcased all the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood where creative minds take it upon themselves to display art.
"What makes this different from Chelsea is that you work with what you’ve got, and somehow that makes it better," says Kevin Regan of Famous Accountants, kicking the afternoon off on a panel discussion at English Kills called Bushwick’s DIY Galleries. Paul D’Agostino, who curates his living room as Centotto, agrees that shows are dictated by the spaces available. "But at the same time I try not to exclude pieces because they don’t fit. If I have to hang it higher than usual, or one on top of the other, so be it." Simply put, as does Norte Maar‘s Jason Andrew, "it’s all about opportunity. You see an opportunity, and as cheaply as possible, you make it happen."
D’Agostino briefly argues against the "DIY" label, which reminds him of Bob Vila and Martha Stewart and shades the legitimacy of the art itself. But as the discussion turns to the practicalities of nonprofits, LLCs, and liability insurance, he proves just how punk Bushwick galleries can be. "If somebody slips in my apartment… I don’t know what to do about it. Just get up! I hurt myself in there all the time."
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Duly warned, we set out across the uneven sidewalks of North Bushwick to see how many of these post-Chelsea spaces we can tackle. Right here on Flushing we find a delightful piece of repurposed space, ordinarily Leinad After School Center, but for the moment an exhibition called B is for Bear. The curators found this corner property with its brightly painted interior walls through a simple process, explains Jen Galatioto of Ugly Art Room. "I just walked in and asked the guy running the place if we could use it this weekend, and he said, ‘Sure!’" With childish things put away in the back corner, the space is hung with art exploring the imagery of the bear. A hearty tonic to the friendly deer and owls flooding the walls of galleries and craft fairs alike, these bears project a menace that shows through their stuffed-animal familiarity. This is, the curators remind us, "The Hug That Can Eat You."
Some spaces are available to art simply because they have failed at more profitable occupation. Fortress to Solitude inhabits a row of three would-be modern townhouses on Boerum Street, which have stood empty for years due to residential permit woes. Today curator Guillermo Creus has filled one of the houses with his show Download/Destroy, a collection of installations on the difficult relationship between human technology and the human spirit, while giving another house over to celebrated Bushwick newcomers Regina Rex. It’s hard to look past an inflated power tool filling the vast ground floor, quite possibly the largest space in all of these alternative galleries, and wondering who would need all of this as a living space. It’s a dream for site-specific installations, at any rate.
The garage is another under-utilized exhibition space, even when it’s the garage of 217 Troutman, which functions as the studio of sculptor Tyrome Tripoli. Tripoli decided to open up his personal space, tear it apart, and give it over to a series of performance and sound artists for the day, calling the results Object Palette. The noise lures gallery crawlers from far and wide to see the chromatically arranged detritus within and hear the banging, grinding and occasional melodic interludes coaxed from the scraps.
The majority of spaces on the agenda hardly register as "alternative" at all by Bushwick standards – spending as much time here as we do, it’s easy to forget that railroad apartments, lofts, and old factories are still considered odd in some sheltered quarters. Buildings like 49 Bogart Street and 1717 Troutman Street make up for their familiarity with strong material. The former houses a pair of big, very professional shows. The brand new 49B (the residence of performing artist Makram Hamdan) showcases a gathering of artists from the Middle East with HOME-LAND, including visual art, installation, performance, film, and intersections thereof. Down the hall, and spilling out into it, Mythologized explores the role of the artist in modern myth, exemplified by Coral Silverman’s update of the Cloisters’ Unicorn in Captivity and Kevin Curran’s on-site sculpting of a Campbellian action figure hero.
1717 Troutman, meanwhile, offers a display of T-shirts at Bushwick Print Lab and a group show called X vs. Y, with the resident artists of unit 318 gathering a strong body of work on the subject of strong male bodies. This was an unintentional counterpart to a show on the opposite end of the BETA triangle, XX at 245 Montrose, a living room exhibition of equally impressive work on the female subject. The two shows were organized by friends, but with no prior coordination, a bit of synchronicity floating up out of the Bushwick milieu.
With only a brief afternoon and nothing to go on but vague one-liners in the BETA Spaces program, we surely missed plenty of the best material; it’s unfortunate that the festival roster has grown beyond the scope of individual exploration. Not too unfortunate, though. It’s an inspiring thing that this small collection of residential and industrial blocks can offer so much at once, with no help from "real" galleries. And we take heart in knowing how many spaces like these are open to us on any given week; for Bushwick, there’s nothing alternative about it.
