Spring / Break Art Show 2017

Skulls Reign On the Street and In Art Shows, Threatening and Humble Reminders

April 25, 2017 Artists

Skulls. We see them on the streets and recently many at art fairs.

The Memento Mori of the streets, these skulls reminding us that one day we all will be dead. Every single one. These are occasional, unplanned in pattern, surprising in appearance on the public stage perhaps.

Andrew Schoultz at Volta New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

But in a culture that glorifies violence and guns in movies, television, video games, rock and roll t-shirts, backpacks… the sight of the skull is old school. Here on the streets there are one or two skulls, not like the thousands in an ossuary underground in the Paris Catacombes.

Stephen Wilson at Scope New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Possibly these skulls appear in artworks on the street as an omen; meant to shock, or frighten, induce dread. Certainly uniforms have carried logos and insignia with skulls- from Nazis to US Marines to Pirates of Penzance to Cypress Hill the images of skulls are more of a threat, a promissory note, an invocation of warrior status.

Mexicans, on the other hand, eat them as sugar cookies for celebrations set aside every autumn called Day of the Dead, where people make peace with the loss of love ones.

Guy Richards Smit at Spring Break Art Show, New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the end, perhaps it is not the warlike associations. It may be the great leveling force of death, bringing every person to one level, that fascinates us. Regardless of where your body is buried, the rains will wash your bones into the oceans of time, and that is all you will be.

Maybe too it is healthy to keep these facts in mind despite all the drama, the tribulations, the wealth, the status, the suffering, the ignominy. Jim Morrison said no one here gets out alive, which is obvious, and funny as hell.

Here are some reminders of that fact on the street and elsewhere.

An unidentified artist in Hong Kong. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Scott Campbell at Scope New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Damien Hirst at Art Central Art Fair 2017 – Hong Kong. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Epic Uno on the streets of Brooklyn, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

An MSK Crew member on the streets of Brooklyn, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

An unidentified artist at Scope New York 2017 . (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Henry Hussey at Volta New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Niloufar Banisdr at Scope New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Spring / Break 2017 : This Years’ Times Square Show in Corporate Office Space

March 1, 2017 Artists

Braving the crowds at the 2017 Spring/Break show means meandering the floor plan of former corporate offices and encountering the daydreams of artists who usually work as temps here. After traversing the un-grand lobby and showing your ID, this high-flying glass and steel Times Square fantasy flips the lights on the funhouse as soon as the doors open to Greg Haberny’s elevator bank installation of hundreds of rough wooden sculptures dangling overhead while a hardcore soundtrack rams you through the glass doors to the reception area.

Greg Haberny. Detail. Curated by Ambre Kelly . Andrew Gori . Catinca Tabacaru. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This curator-focused show never allows you to be bored, ensuring an alternate-world full of possibility, often delivering on its promise, sometimes fooling you. Like a beehive of compartmentalized activities and scenarios playing out in a fractured psyche, you find comedy, fluid sexuality, bejeweled fantasies, a satiric art-factory performance, D.I.Y. cardboard set design, light illusions in closets, wide photographic vistas, costumed performers, photo shopped hyperfantasy, Basquiat photos by his ex-roommate, and fully immersive environments like a live barbershop delivering dramatic haircuts with multi-screened secret surveillance in the backroom – tracking movements and conversations here and on the street below.

Alexis Adler’s photos of her room mate Jean-Michel Basquiat. Curated by Jane Kim. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo by Jaime Rojo)

While the aesthetic/mythic/pop culture influences are Diluvian and flattening our traditional hierarchies in this information age, shows like this also highlight our level of distraction – and test your ability to edit. It’s not as libertine or scummy as you would expect from a Times Square show in a what looks like a former den of lawyers, but then Times Square is not the flawed and blinkered glam and muck and whirl that it once was. Although who knows what lurks behind those brightly Disneyesque and moldy fur costumes…

Here is a pile of laundry from one perspective. From another it is an anamorphic portrait of activist Hellen Keller. Noah Scalin. Curated by Dawne Langford. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Noah Scalin. Curated by Dawne Langford. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ask Jane Dixon, whose “Male Nourished” paintings of men and their dicks fill an office and overlook the action on the street below. She says she is rather celebrating men’s continuous love affair with their genitalia and portrays them as nearly obsessive relationships.

Dixon knows these scenes better than most since she and husband Charlie Ahearn made their own Times Square home movies out the window and overlooking the street action in this famous nexus when gangs beset passersby, drugs were not delivered to your door via text message, arcades were dark rooms full of pinball machines, and hookers and Johns were just “locals”. Dixon is also an alum of the famous “Times Square Show” mounted with 100 artists in 1980 in a massage parlor on 41st and 7th Avenue. The show later became regarded as a turning point in New York low/hi art and uptown/downtown culture with a list of young artists who became well known in certain circles; Tom Otterness, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, Nan Goldin.

For a moment you can forget the high rents that have driven most of these artists out of Manhattan and into the crowded lofts of Brooklyn, Queens, even Jersey. Quirky, searching, forcefully unique and hoping for a break. The excitement among these 150 curators and 400 artists is palpable on opening night and you want these visionaries to succeed, and indeed they do through this dark lookingglass. Many themes continue out to the street, and for a few boisterous moments this chaotic labyrinthine in fluorescent glow mimics the streets below.

Lee Quinones takes a US propaganda ad which he salvaged from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and adds modern military bombing of Babylon as a backdrop. Curated by Sara Driver. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A barbershop in the front, a surveillance room full of screens in the back. Curated by Eve Sussman . Simon Lee. Barbershop. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Cate Giordano creates an apartment of papier mache. Curated by Suzanne Kim. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist, writer, publisher and jazz saxophonist Noah Becker does a self portrait against a backdrop of Basquiat. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Curated by Carole Vobe playfully displays that great leveling force of death. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tamara Santibañez and a monochrome hand-drawn teen bedroom from the 1980s. Curated by Justin De Demko. Spring / Break Art Show 2017. NYC, 02-2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Check out Spring/Break 2017 March 1-6.

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