An interesting new trend is evident in two galleries that recently opened in the neighborhood, that seem to be bringing a Chelsea-like polish to Bushwick. Both Interstate Projects and the new Momenta Art occupy the first floor of the large industrial-cum-studio building at 56 Bogart Street, and were open this weekend during Bushwick Open Studios (BOS).
The fact that Momenta has moved to the neighborhood is yet another sign that Bushwick has supplanted Williamsburg as the creative heart of the New York art world, as the latter becomes even more economically unviable for artists and artist-run exhibition programs.
The Momenta show consisted of photographs by Peter Scott and J. Pasila. Scott makes images of condominium construction sites superimposed with images of the upper class, seemingly from ads from the 1980’s, such as two children in private school uniforms in an otherwise empty modern kitchen. They gave you the feeling of looking through a window of a restaurant you can’t afford to eat in, while simultaneously seeing your reflection. The photos had a polished, spare quality with their imagery of modern architecture and desaturated color that reminded me of art that would hang in a corporate boardroom. But the class-conscious content they offered seemed self-aware and questioning, without being didactic.
J. Pasila’s black and white prints on matte paper were photographs of a film snapshot of seemingly blank studio walls. There were also a couple of smaller framed photographs of the same studio wall pictures leaning against more studio walls. This work was emblematic of many cold, polished, visually uninteresting shows I’ve seen in Chelsea. This work contrasts sharply with the kind of colorful, sometimes messy, risk-taking painting and sculpture happening in Bushwick.
On the opposite side of the building on the same floor, Interstate Projects seemed to share this polished Chelsea vibe in the show Composite Factor (Justin Berry, Arielle Falk, Jesse Hulcher, Alyssa Taylor Wendt). Arielle Falk’s installation included multiple pictures of a woman wearing large, mask-like sunglasses as well as the sunglasses themselves on shelves. Falk also showed an amusing video of a faux infomercial advertising these “Sunglasses for the Face.”
My first impression was of a fashion accessory out of the movie Tron, or the dancing drone girls from the music video of “Simply Irresistible” by Robert Palmer. Other work in the show was also video and photography, such as Justin Berry’s scanned images of book covers which had been Photoshopped to remove any characters from the illustrations as well as all text.
These carefully curated spaces are a nice counterpoint to the many artists’ studios that can start to blur together after a few hours of touring BOS. The focus on often monochromatic photography, sculpture, and video, and the very-clean look of both spaces, left a somewhat cool and remote impression, especially in contrast to the uncontained energy and visual variety of much of the art being made and exhibited elsewhere in Bushwick.
