Sometimes you never know what you’ll find in Bushwick. During Bushwick Open Studios, I stumbled upon the work of Summer Wheat — her real name she assured me — and was taken aback by the quality and intensity of her work.

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Bushwick Biennial logo, NURTUREart banner. — Photos by Hrag Vartanian

Curator Benjamin Evans understands the irony that half a world away in Venice, the art world cognoscenti gathered for the world’s foremost biennial mating ritual known as the Venice Biennale, while here in Bushwick the neighborhood has launched it’s own homegrown version with more Tecate than truffles. But Evans doesn’t dwell on it and has curated a serious show from NURTUREart’s own flatfiles which pulls together over a dozen artists that are as different as they are similar.

While four spaces are participating in the first Bushwick Biennial, it is rather obvious that the show at NURTUREart is the only one to consciously resemble anything like a biennial. The other venues, English Kills, Pocket Utopia and Grace Exhibition Space, created shows that are typical of their programming and don’t seem to have gone out of their way to partake. Evans explained that part of the reason for the inclusion of so many spaces was to demonstrate the diversity of gallery models in Bushwick, which was a great point to make but was probably lost on most Biennial goers.

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Sometimes, the contents of a freezer can be dreadful — other times, they can be enlightening. The outcome depends on your religious views… at least, that’s the case when it comes to Edouard Nardon’s confrontational pieces. His sculpture work commonly focuses on the cognitive dissonance generated by conflicts between our moral conscience and raw, animalistic desires.

When I walked into his apartment on Thames Street, I found a living room full of religious symbols, humanity’s imperfections and a freezer containing the Koran, Bible and Torah. Each holy book had its middle section carved out and replaced with either a weapon, money or used condoms. Above all this, a small mirror was placed in the freezer door I heard Nardon say, “This display is supposed to make you examine the difference between what you show others and who you really are on the inside.”

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).

My very last stop of the weekend at Stephen Truax’s home/studio at Irving and Greene — which for BOS he shared with colleague Brooke Moyse — was a personal highlight. I first met Stephen when he was exhibiting at Norte Maar during BETA Spaces last fall, and I made a special point to stop in and see more of his work this weekend. In the hallway connecting his railroad "wings" were gorgeous collage prints of "photo errors" taken in his travels to Italy and India — the technical process of which I was quickly told is a secret. Stephen explained that his digital work informs his paintings (on view in his studio), multicolored geometric gouache-on-stretched-paper pieces based on 8-bit videogames and classic quilt patterns. Finally, in the main gallery space (which normally doubles as the living room), his latest work was exhibited — ultra-bright digital prints, the offspring of his collages and his paintings.

Visit Stephen’s website for more of his work and mark your calendars: he has a solo exhibition scheduled at Norte Maar in February 2010.

Part of the reason I visited Mary Judge up on St. Nicholas Avenue was because so many people told me I had to just so that I could see her studio. Purchased in November, Judge’s house has been carefully and selectively renovated — a ground-floor apartment became her high-ceilinged, light-bathed studio, for example, but the hallway leading to it remains papered in what one imagines is the floral remnants of the taste of some long-gone old Italian lady. Art-school tenants live upstairs while an old-school barbershop remains in business on the street.

Judge’s work evokes Renaissance engineering drawings and the patterns created by the spirograph toy my elementary school had, and sometimes, as in the work shown in this weekend’s “Draw” show at Norte Maar, many-times magnified chromosomes. The artist employs a technique called “spolvero” — “dusting,” in Italian — which through paper-folding, pinholes, and the application of powdered pigments imparts a symmetrical pattern, though with uneven tone, onto a paper or fabric surface.

Current art trends make it pretty easy to be a painter. Whether a canvas is covered with one bold color or dripping with acrylic snot, almost any three-minute creation has a shot at getting into sophisticated museums. This is exactly why it was so rewarding to find Jake Messing’s work – the guy is really talented!

A Parsons School of Design graduate, Messing likes to paint dark, decaying urban and industrial landscapes, but enjoys dipping into different styles when he gets bored.

“Sometimes, I get frustrated with my work and I’ll go into figurative pieces,” he said. “Lately, I’ve also been experimenting with more surrealist images and painting from my imagination.”

Left, Brent Owens’ Meatball Sweater; right, Don Pablo Pedro’s disturbing work.

Taking its title from the second of Edgar S. Burrough’s classic 12-book science fiction series, Basroom, "The Gods of Mars" at English Kills is a solid group show curated by artist Phoenix Lights with video, installation art, and some really massive paintings.

In the third chapter of Burrough’s book, one of the main characters, Tars Tarkas, (the Jeddak of Thark, duh) has a typically Martian laugh to himself, thinking of the pithy human species. Burroughs describes it as "not an hysterical laugh, but rather the genuine expression of the pleasure they [Martians] derive from the things that move Earth men to loathing or to tears."

The artists included in "The Gods of Mars" seem to be in on the same joke. The series of alien artifacts and documents on display, each stranger than the next, keep a distant remove from the mundacities of day-to-day existence on earth. Each work seems to lightly mock or surpass the hum-ho sentiments of ordinary Earthling men. Flaunting the rules of gravity and good taste, Brent Owen’s Meatball Sweater hangs ominously on the wall, its symmetry recalling some carefully arranged sacrifice.  A small painting by Lenny Reibstein called Afterbirth is the creation story of a scrap-heaped planet starting over again. An excellent swamp of a landscape in acrylic and oils, it includes an abandoned baby and a crotch shot, both perhaps emanating from toxic waste.

Peter Dobill’s Drumaction was a hypnotizing video of a tribal leader from a parallel humanoid universe, and the ever-prescient Don Pablo Pedro documents what Kama-Sutra will be like for a future race of human-looking cannibals. His depraved scroll paintings, mostly of pasty beasts defiling each other, are my favorites, although he is also a sculptor and mixed-media artist. He had another work in the Fortress to Solitude show curated by Guillermo Creus, and will be doing a solo show at English Kills on August 1st.  Distopia, painful metamorphosis, and alien cruelty — overall a great show to see on a sunny day in Bushwick.

English Kills Art Gallery
113 Forrest

Something sultry was in the air on Sunday night.  Perhaps the Bushwick Action News team was right — a sweeping low pressure zone did make its way into Eastern District on Sunday.  It was a night of low-pressure, easy, come-hither rock n’ roll.  Pass Kontrol played one of it’s sexiest shows yet, channeling the depths of their red-hot, lurid, and passion fueled influences (Otis Redding perhaps?  Iggy Pop?), making the ladies and gentlemen of the audience scream and squirm on a whole new level.  By the time they broke out with Hot Potato, a favorite from the basements of Warsaw, the sweaty room was filled with dancing that threatened the surrounding artwork (thankfully no one was hurt), and closed the weekend with a succession of bangs.  There were many collaborations that night — including a skilled impromptu freestyle performance from an inspired audience member.

I spoke with Michael Cabrera, one of the owners of Eastern District, about the night as part of the Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do event which took place over the BOS weekend.  The concept was the different notes on a scale — different musical performances for each night that reflected the diversity of sound and stage presence of Bushwick musicians.  Earlier performers included “My Sister in 1994” and “NatureBoy.”  The current exhibition, “Home Away from Home,” a series of large scale photograph portraits by multi-media artist Justine Reyes, is an absorbing exploration of family, loss, grief, dislocation and aging.  Its worth a quick trip to 43 Bogart to see the works before the exhibition closes on June 14th.

Aside from the art, one of the best parts of Bushwick Open Studios is the ability to see how local artists live and the eccentric ways they set up their work spaces — something that makes Jennifer Slavin Harris a bit nervous. She was busy washing her dishes and rearranging furniture, all with a smile, as guests walked into her loft on McKibbin Street to view her mixed-media collages. Don’t get me wrong, her place was amazing with its wall-sized windows and golden Buddha pay phone shrine, but it’s amusing to see the human side, the self-conscious side, of the creator.

Throughout the weekend, Jennifer showcased her various arrangements of found objects (recycled art, street trash, urban artifacts), painted and glued to decomposing pieces of wood. The collages can include anything from old laptop keyboards to weathered children’s toys and are meant to “reflect the progress and careless freedom challenging today’s consumer culture.” She mainly uses the objects as they are, taking advantage of their unique textures and occasionally removing excess dirt, but the end result is always converting something that was littering our urban environment into a piece of art.