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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Thursday, November 20

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Word of Mouth

This Week in Art Openings: Three Group Shows

By Mary Logan Barmeyer

“there is no there there”
there is no there there is hard to nail down. These six multi-media artists focus on intangibility, doing so by contrasting presence and invisibility, conceptual and physical space, mostly by using abstraction and ambiguity. Lauren Luloff deconstructed banners, quilts, crests and flags and reconstructed them in bright paintings that re-tell their folk narratives in a new perspective. The poster piece for the exhibition was created by Jeremy Everett, whose work expresses the dichotomies of human experience: sex and death, beauty and decay, and chance and determination. He does this by making crystallized sculptures of laundry detergent and porno mags, which we think is a pretty intangible idea.

Rivington Arms, 4 E. 2nd St., first floor, (646) 654-3213. Opening reception July 3, 7–9 p.m. Through August 1.

“Will Happiness Find Me?”
This is a colorful exhibition by four young artists, Daphne Arthur, Mary Reid Kelley, Jason Ledet and Juliana Romano. Paintings on canvas, some using multimedia materials, make up the bulk of the exhibition, but you’ll also see a comical video by Mary Reid Kelley. In this piece, the artist recites a poem about a young World War I aviator lamenting rejection by a ballerina named Camel Toe. Somehow, by the end of the video, happiness has found both the aviator and Camel Toe in the form of machines that replace each other.

Marvelli Gallery, 526 W. 26th St., second floor, (212) 627-3363. Opening reception July 3, 6–8 p.m. Through August 8.

"Corpus Kinetics"
This group video exhibition is all about the human bod. Laura Calhoun, Robert O'Connor and Bryan Zanisnik have each developed a narrative that expresses various physical functions and meanings. Calhoun, using the body as a place of religious practice, documents a Brazilian ceremony of choreography and tug-of-war with a rope. O'Connor puts his body in a Christmas decoration and performs various movements, indicating the body as the site where nature and culture conflict. And Zanisnik puts himself in submissive roles to show, among other things, the relationship of fetishization to banality.

Cuchifritos, 120 Essex St. (inside the Essex Street Food Market), (212) 420-9202. Opening reception, July 5, 4–6 p.m. Through July 26.

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