Yesterday in Chelsea

A good part of the point of Chelsea is to come up with gee-whiz stuff, going for the reaction “did you see that.” The winners in what I saw yesterday were first of all Tara Donovan’s piece at Pace Wildenstein – one of the large cab garages, fill with millions of plastic cups stacked up at different heights to create an arctic environment. Total gee-whiz. Then on a smaller scale there was a piece from a collaboration between Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger at Frederieke Taylor. There’s a mirror on the wall, and coming up in front of it is a metal element that has two loops on it. There’s instructions to blow through it softly. This produces a cloud of little avatar creatures that appear on the surface of the mirror, covering up your own reflection and then fading back. It’s the last thing you expect to be asked to do and the last response you expect from the device.

Some good stuff:

• Didier Mahieu’s sprawling memory piece at the Chelsea Art Museum, which also has a good exhibit on Andrea Zittel (I guess the first floor is really the New Museum of Contemporary Art).
• Jil Weinstock’s clothes encased in rubber, although maybe she reduces it too much to minimalist gestures.
• Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao operatic photos of Queens and other NY streetscapes.
• Masato Okazaki b&w photos of interior spaces that open out into winter landscapes. I don’t have the gallery name handy. It was on 25^th.
• Holli Schorno’s collages constructed from illustrations of machines drawn out into delicate forms.
• Scott Peterman photos at Silverstein. Some are pretty Misrach-y desert landscapes, but they include Mexican housing projects that have a massive repeated patterns of structures and Sao Paolo cityscapes that surprised me because I’m not familiar with the city and it seems denser and more developed than I thought.
• Adam Fowler, a DC guy who draws looping structures in pencil, then cuts out the drawing and overlays it. A really nice texture.

Also, Kara Walker’s exhibit at the Met is great. Some of Barbara Yontz’ students at St. Thomas Aquinas said they liked her writing the best. They have a point. She makes a beautiful statement about Katrina and the way it connects to larger issues of water, disaster, and race in history. The exhibit itself is wonderfully indirect, in combining obscure pieces from the Met’s collection and Walker’s work.