Showing posts with label Black Floor Gallery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Floor Gallery. Show all posts

Friday, April 18, 2008

No you didn't!: Fleisher/Ollman makes a bad call.


Before Love Explosion at Fleisher/Ollman there was "Help Yourself to Roses" at Space1026.

But yes they did!!!!!!!!! I found this passage on Fleisher/Ollman's press release about Alex Da Corte's exhibition, Love Explosion, opening there tonight (6-8):

"Love Explosion is Alex Da Corte's first full-scale show in Philadelphia following recent solo exhibitions at Parisian Laundry in Montreal and the Stonefox Artspace in New York. He graduated from the University of the Arts in 2005. Jack Sloss first showed at Fleisher/Ollman in 2005's Meatball invitational and From Time To Time in 2006, following his relocation to Philadelphia from Chicago in 2005, where he had shown at the Chicago Cultural Center and Donald Young Gallery among many others."

Excuse me? What was his show at Space 1026 if not full-scale?

And before that he had a "full-scale" show at Black Floor!


For Alex's December 2005 exhibition at Black Floor Gallery he covered the entire wall with prints to make a wall-paper, had an army of ceramic figures (made with help from Nick Lenker), several paintings, and this horse. Black Floor was larger then the space Alex will fill at Fleisher/Ollman. . .

Plus! Both of those were solo exhibitions! Love Explosion is a two person show with Jack Sloss. I understand that this show at F/O will undoubtedly get Alex more attention then either of his earlier full-scale solo exhibitions. . .but you don't have to lie about it.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Dave Dunn at Copy

REFLECTION TIME
At Copy Gallery through March 29th. Opened by appointment (e-mail: info@copygallery.org) or Thursday-Saturdays 12-6 for the rest of the month.

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In order to prepare to write a review of Dave Dunn's video installation, Reflection Time, at Copy thru March 29th, I re-read a review I wrote on Dave's work when I was working as a blogger for Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Copy was called Black Floor and Black Floor was hosting all sorts of events at the ICA. You can read that review here, but I don't suggest it because I think I was full of poop. Not that the review is mean or anything, it just fails to see how great the work of Dave Dunn really is.

Reflection Time, as an installation, is five videos on five TVs. Grouped together; are two TVs with videos of vacuum cleaners being turned and left on. On a separate table two TVs; one with a video of endless buses passing you by and one with a video of a disembodied hand (read as "Dave's hand" or "the camera person's hand") opening an endless stream of doors. There is one single television on a table by itself with a video of Mr. Dunn running through the streets of Philadelphia with a paper bag in his hand which he breathes in and out of, his other hand (not pictured on screen) holds the video camera.

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I am not sure if the videos are meant to stand alone or meant to be viewed as one piece. I don't think it matters, though your experience would be different if you fell upon one of the videos in isolation from the others. As they are, I believe a visitor to the gallery summed up the experience best when she said "This is stressful to watch."

Buses, opening doors, hyperventilating on the streets, vacuum cleaners running for no reason and producing a machine-like buzz, simultaneously. Infinity, because everything repeats on an endless loop and everywhere the evidence of the videos, tvs, and dvd-players being plugged into an electrical supply. The lighting is also a tad dramatic. All of this seems in opposition to the exhibition's name, Reflection Time, which is the only text Dave has provided us with to explain his meaning but I think I catch his drift. . .

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The camera has done the recording, been the eye, as Dave has gone about his busy days. It has produced data. Now, in a small gallery on the 3rd floor of a warehouse-space, we have the chance to sit back and study it.

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