Benefit for Red Hook’s residents and businesses hit hard by Sandy

RED HOOK INITIATIVE            RESTORE RED HOOK

WHITE BOX  teamed up with SLIDELUCK to host a benefit for the community of RED HOOK, Brooklyn.

SLIDELUCK is working in collaboration with a number of fantastic organizations and companies to get this often-overlooked community back on its feet. There was a $10+ required donation to enter and raffle tickets were available for a wide variety of prizes. You can make a $10 donation (or more) HERE.

SLIDELUCK Red Hook artists:Slideshow of work by Red Hook artists | Slideshow of Hurricane Sandy coverage |  Drinks from Brooklyn Brewery, Tanteo Tequlia and Perrier Hurricane Sandy Relief T-Shirts from Grey Area | Cakeballs from Flour Shop | Milk Truck Grilled Cheese | Nearby Afterparty to Follow

Artists:

Alan Chin | Alessandra Olanow | Bettina Magi | Coke Wisdom O’Neal | Crystal Dyer | David Trimble | Facade/Fasad | Hannah Mandel | Heather Phelps-Lipton | Jinah Kim | Joey Frank John Gordon Gauld | Laura Arena | Mark Ovaska & Andrew Litchenstein | Peter Van Agtmael | Red Hook Criterium | Wilmott Kidd | and other surprise artists…

Hurricane Sandy photographers:

Alan Chin | Benjamin Lowy | Eugene Richards | John Moore | Kirsten Luce | Micah Garen & Marie-Helene Carleton | Michael Christopher Brown | Mario Tama | Peter Van Agtmael

The proceeds from this event will go to Restore Red Hook, which focuses on the small businesses affected by Hurricane Sandy and the Red Hook Initiative, empowering youth in the Red Hook Houses - Brooklyn’s largest public housing development. 

SLIDELUCK is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to building and strengthening community through food and art.

We hope you will work with us to get this small, but vital corner of New York City back in action. 

You can still donate HERE

Brooklyn painter Thomas Legaspi extracts the abstract

Kenny Scharf, latest mural, Halloween 2012, somewhere in Brooklyn…

Cheech Wizard and Daisy Mae walk into an art gallery…

Mark Bodé is a second-generation underground-comic artist, whose father,Vaughn Bodé, became famous for his outré cartoon character, Cheech Wizard. Mark, along with Dr. Revolt and Stan153, was inBrooklyn this past week to exhibit new work at the Urban Folk Art Gallery’s new show, “It’s Alive! 2”. He has also been a tattoo artist for about 15 years, and when not at the show, he was kept busy all weekend inking his fans with his custom designs. He is known, like his father, for his bodacious women. “Inspiration comes from a lot of different places,” said Bodé. “Sometimes I’m using drawings my father did. He was known for his erotic and voluptuous women, which he trained me to draw early on.” He grins at the memory. “In fact, he taught me to draw tits when I was seven years old,” he continued. “He said, ‘Son, if you draw them like this, you’ll always make money’. And I’ve been drawing them like that, and I always make money. So he was right!”

Mark also had an early career experience with some characters who are very well-known today. “In 1985-86 I met Kevin Eastman, one of the co-creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” said Bodé. “He said he was a big fan of my dad’s, and the ‘Turtles’ were just taking off (this was before they were on TV), so we decided to do a comic book together. For a period of about seven years I worked for the ‘Turtles’, and it was a great ride, a lot of fun. We were cartoonists, and we were living like rock stars!

Bodé’s also proud of the fact that younger artists see graphic work as a legitimate path for an artist. “It’s a new art form that birthed right here, in New York City,” he said. “The level of ability is just through the roof. People doing super photo-realistic stuff, people doing super stylized stuff, like myself. The hottest artists in the scene right now are spray-can artists. You had Keith Haring that was kind of the beginnings of it, the huge ‘pop-culture superstar’, and I’ve seen some of my friends go to incredible levels with it. My friends Os Gêmeos, from Brazil, for example, do murals all over the world, and some of their paintings go in the hundreds of thousands of dollars now. It just opens doors.”

Mark’s tattoo art also evolved over a period of time. “I never dreamt I’d be tattooing, actually,” said Bodé. “I had seen a lot of people doing Bodé characters as tattoos, and a friend told me that I should do ‘flash’ (tattoo designs), and then sell them to tattoo shops. So I brought the flash to a tattoo convention and sold out. So my friend told me ‘Why don’t you quit messing around and tattoo people yourself?’ Bodé wasn’t sure where to start. “So I asked him, do I practice on grapefruits? Chickens?” He laughs. “And he told me, ‘No. Drunk people!’ So we went to down to the local bar, where everybody knew me as an artist, and I asked, ‘Who wants a free tattoo by Bodé?’ And all these hands went up, and that’s how I started.” He then went on to do a proper apprenticeship with Al Valenta, and with Myke Maldonado, who co-ownsBrooklyn Tattoo, along with Adam Suerte. “We’re friends, so I like to do some guest spots here every now and then,” said Bodé. When he’s not on the road, he also works two days a week at Sacred Rose Tattoo, in Berkeley, near his home base of San Francisco.

Mark Bodé was one of the first artists through those doors. How does he feel about the new-found love by the art establishment for spray-can artists and comic-book heroes? “It makes you step up your game, that’s for sure,” he said. While he was in New York, he helped paint a huge mural in the Bronx. “It’s great to do stuff for the public, a lot of times I don’t get paid for it. It’s just fun to be in the streets, and be with people,” he said. And by the crowd that buzzed the gallery on opening night, the people love to be around Bodé and his creations, too.

‘It’s Alive 2’ is up until November 19th.

Copulating on canvas creates mating mementos 

Rolling around with your special someone means different things to different people.  But can sucking face on a canvas while covered in paint create a lasting work of art?  Artist Alexander Esguerra believes it can.  His method is quite simple: put two people in a room, supply them with paint, and let them do what comes naturally, all over a canvas.  He calls the show, curated by Gregory de la Haba at Windows on Orchard Gallery, ‘Universal Truth’.  ”Each of these paintings have their own mystique,” said Esguerra.  ”In this act of love, in this moment, couples create this painting that kind of equalizes us all, makes us one.  It’s a common thread that unites us all, this universal truth.”

Esguerra sets the scene for the couples, who come from all walks of life and have varying sexual orientations, but he does not actually do any of the ‘painting’.  “I’m removed from the situation,” he said.  “I’m more of a composer, in a sense.”  The body of his work (sorry) explodes (sorry again) in a torrent (oops) of color, along with black slashes and smudges, almost like the splooge-y residue from lovemaking itself, from back in the days before people recorded their rutting on canvas.  ”I explain to them the best positions, the way to apply the paint, and then I leave the room,” said Esguerra.  

When they’re finished with their candlelit romance, they text him, and he returns to the studio, where he turns on the lights and together they assess the evening’s squishy aftermath.  ”They’re covered in paint, it’s kind of beautiful,” said Esguerra.  He doesn’t alter the canvas in any way, except to stretch it so it can be framed.  And does he have an inkling of how the finished work will look, based on the couples’ predilections?  ”A lot of these works are female couples, so you’ll notice a lot more negative space,” he said.  ”I think it’s the way their bodies interact with the canvas as opposed to heterosexual couples.  And of course the positions that two females would naturally do, give me a different image.”  

Just in case you needed to be reminded of the sexual provenance of what’s hanging on the walls, there are two scantily-clad Russian dancers snaking and slithering in the storefront windows of the gallery on a packed opening night.  They ooze sex so overtly, it creates a remarkable counterpoint to the subtle, almost quiet works that hang on the walls behind them.  

‘Cutting-edge’ etchings

Brooklyn artist Nicholas Forker works in disparate mediums to produce distinctive works of art.  For example, he uses a ballpoint pen to draw on Mylar, combining the utilitarian and the ‘space-age’, to create what looks like a developed x-ray.  “The ballpoint pen drawings take months and months, two, three months, sometimes more, hundreds and hundreds of hours bent over a desk pushing a ballpoint around,” he said.  “It’s interesting to me because it’s an underdog.  It’s like a really common thing found everywhere, and maybe not thought of as a fine art tool.  The idea is to use something people cannot perceive as valuable to make something beautiful.”

Forker also creates etchings, and in a modern take on a technique that has been around since the Middle Ages, he uses a laser printer to fabricate them on sheets of glass.  “I started to play with this laser-etching technology that one of my friends mentioned,” he said.  As the friend listed the available substrates, or base materials onto which images can be printed, Forker was struck by the possibilities of glass.  “I started etching some images into glass,” he said, “and noticed quite quickly that the shadows that were apparent were really, really, interesting.”

He displays several glass panels in his Bushwick loft, most of which are abstract.  “I started doing the glass etchings because I was struggling to create a more dynamic image that wasn’t just a flat painting that hangs on a wall,” he said.  “Something that was a little more engaging.”  He leans the glass panels against a white scrim, allowing the shadows created by the etchings to move and sway with the changing light or viewing angle.  The etched glass panels may be seen as ‘sculptures’, in a sense, but they function almost purely to formulate and arrange the shadows and images that they cast.  They are the flip-side of the ballpoint pen drawings, where space is concealed, and light is absorbed.  “It was happenstance, and next thing you know you have some pretty interesting artwork,” he said.

Not all of his etchings are abstract, though.  Some picture floating astronauts, a symbol, to Forker, of something that seems to have disappeared from our present times.  “I just saw so many of my contemporaries apathetic and listless, pessimistic,” he said.  “So I was curious as to what happened to the vital male role, like what happened to the hero, the conqueror, the explorer, these ideas that kept us excited.  It was something to be a man, and to be a hero.  So I focused on the astronaut because I thought it was the perfect metaphor for the arc of the story of the United States-the narrative of the twentieth century, from the Fifties until now.  And with the end of funding for the space program, it made perfect sense.”

But it’s not just space-age allegories and materials that permeate Forker’s work.  He also radiates a sense of optimism about the future.  “I’ll always pick up pieces of paper off the street and draw something on them,” he said.  “I like to think that I give them another chance.”

Art in the blood

Painter Adrian Nivola knows what it is like to have a professional artist in the family. He reminisces, “My grandfather was the sculptor Constantino Nivola. He was not an abstract expressionist, but he was in that environment-very close friends with deKooning and all those people. So that’s a part of my family history.” When Adrian was still a teenager, he felt the tug of the artist’s life. “When I was eighteen, I went to apprentice myself to Caio Fonseca, an abstract painter,” he said. “I went and lived with him in Italy and he was sort of my mentor for a while. And that was when I decided to commit to painting.” The landscape of his travels had sparked his imagination. “That decision was partly inspired by seeing all the work, all the churches in Italy. I felt especially moved by it.” He went to college, “moved here, and started plugging away at it,” he said.

Nivola has been “plugging away” in his Bushwick studio for more than 5 years, and he has seen a lot of changes in the Brooklyn neighborhood. “It really hasn’t been until the last two years that it’s become the scene it is now,” he said. Of the loft building where he works, called ‘Brooklyn Fireproof East’, he said, “This building was empty when I started working here and now it is packed with artists. The whole neighborhood is packed with artists!” But in some ways he mourns the loss of the industry that used to inhabit this area north of Flushing Ave. “I feel badly for the factories that had to move out of here, because in a way, it was very nice to feel that kind of energy,” he said. “It is similar to artists working. The workman’s side of being an artist is important to me, and I like the feeling of being around workmen. That probably sounds silly.” But the camaraderie among his fellow artists is expanding. “You can definitely feel a sense of a strong community here,” he said. “People interested in seeing what everyone else is doing, and coming by. One isn’t in a vacuum here at all.”

Nivola often paints using live models, like his father, who sat for a drawing which Nivola used as a template for a painting. The canvas presents a somewhat dour and bemused gentleman, slouched in a chair, looking neither pleased nor dissatisfied. “There is something about my father’s presence,” he said, “a combination of imposing, and a bit vulnerable, or recoiling, at the same time. There was a duality that I was interested in trying to capture.” Another painting, of a pretty girl, densely layered yet straightforward, leaves all emotion out, to be inserted into the work, perhaps, by the viewer. “It’s a special privilege to have someone sit for a portrait,” he said, “especially to put in that kind of time. It’s grueling.” His girlfriend at the time put in over thirty sessions. “My process is one where I tend to tear down if not the entire painting then huge parts of it, and repaint from scratch,” he said. “I kept reworking the thing over and over again, killing it, and kind of resurrecting it. She was incredibly patient.” The girl’s composure radiates from the work, and the painting reflects the artist’s assurance and coolheadedness.

That adroit hand may be a gift from his ancestors. “I grew up with a professional artist in my family,” said Nivola. “For me it was nice to know that someone actually succeeded in making a living at it, for one thing, and who got up and did that every day; and who worked really hard and seriously at it. I feel lucky to have had an example like that who was close to me.” In the end, it is all about the work to Nivola. And while the sounds of bristles on canvas may not be as loud as the clanging factory machinery that used to be nearby, it is a signal that important work is still being done here.

When a duck is a world traveler

It’s certainly newsworthy when a baby’s plastic bathtub takes a trip across oceans. It might be even more stunning if the baby was in it, of course. But for Brazilian photographer Cibele Vieira, now working out of a Bushwick loft, the bathtub in question is meant more as a metaphor, and less as a vehicle for travel. “The original duck was a bathtub for my baby, which I painted in gold and put in the East River. So now the duck has been to Brazil, Philadelphia, and all over New York State,” said Vieira, with plans to have it travel to Europe and beyond. The installation is called, “Chasing the Golden Duck”, and it is emblematic of people’s hopes, as the humble origin of an inflated duck is transformed by its newly golden aura. When she floated the kiddie pool-like ‘duck’ into the water under the Williamsburg Bridge for the first time, passersby became instantly curious about this rather odd object. “People saw me taking photos, and suddenly, everyone wanted to have their picture taken with the duck!” said Vieira. The more people became enamored by her whimsical creation, the more inspired Vieira became about extending the project from performance art, to photography, and finally, to create an installation of hundreds, then thousands, of photos. “I have over 800 photos right now, and hopefully one day I’ll have 10,000 photos,” said Vieira. And indeed, hundreds of photos adorn her small working loft, rising up from one wall, across the ceiling, and then cascading down the opposite wall, where they spread out and cover nearly the entire available wall space.

But, as Chico Marx once famously asked his brother Groucho, “Why a duck?” “Everything’s precious in life,” said Vieira. “In art or in life, we always think the fancy thing is the expensive thing. But actually, it is just an inflatable duck, painted gold. There’s nothing inside!” She smiles at the thought. “In America right now, everybody’s chasing, chasing, chasing, the future,” she continues. “But in the end, who are we really? And what makes us happy in life?” Some might argue that we never really find out the answer to that question until it is almost too late, until our dreams have been nearly extinguished, our hopes perilously doused. But “Chasing the Golden Duck” drives home the idea that we must conquer our grasping ways, and not live unfulfilled lives. It radiates a certain child-like quality, an image of a naked little tyke, splashing happily in the water, unaware of the turmoil and complexities just outside of her little world. One can visualize the little girl, hanging on to the duck’s golden neck, pulled by random currents to explore continents, and, in the end, her own life, and the lives of those around her. Vieira’s subtle work demands that we explore, and that, ultimately, we cherish the exploration that is our daily lives, hopes, and dreams.

9/11 Photographs disturb some and comfort others

When photographer Rafael Fuchs set out one morning to take his daughter to kindergarten, it was an ordinary late summer day in New York City. After he kissed her goodbye, he glanced down the avenue and saw smoke billowing into the sky. He tried to get closer but was rebuffed, so he headed over to his studio, on Broadway and Bleecker St. That ordinary day, of course, would turn out to be anything but. “After I dropped my daughter off at Ninth Avenue and 14th St., I heard some people saying that an airplane had hit one of the towers of theWorld Trade Center,” said Fuchs. “So I immediately went to the subway, taking the ‘E’ train, trying to go to the area, but I was stopped around Houston St. So I went to my studio, which is at Broadway and Bleecker, and went up to the roof.” There he ran into a few people who were watching the event unfolding. “The super of the building, my studio manager, a guy who had just dropped off some contact sheets, a few other neighbors and workers, and we didn’t know what had happened,” said Fuchs. “We didn’t really have a sense of people burning up, or dying there, we didn’t know.”
So Fuchs began doing what he knows best, and started taking photographs from the rooftop, documenting the terrible scene taking place just a little more than a mile away downtown. “And then I decided to document the people as well,” he said. “To take a portrait of them with this bizarre, horrific, scenario in the background.” He photographed their reactions and expressions. “I wasn’t directing anyone at all, I was letting them naturally express how they felt,” he said. “So, one guy was standing very still and severe, another was holding his head in disbelief, and some were even slightly smiling.” In one of the photos, a man can be seen holding up two fingers in a ‘V’. “I asked him what that was, and he said it was for the two buildings that had gotten hit. It somehow didn’t make much sense, but we didn’t yet know at the time that it was a terrorist attack.”

View a slide show of the photos

Born in Tel Aviv, Fuchs has been living and working in New York City since 1985. He works out of a studio on Bogart St., in the artsy Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. Fuchs has been a commercial photographer for years, shooting celebrities and newsmakers for such publications asLife magazine and Newsweek. He has also worked on ad campaigns for Coke, Pepsi, and Visa. But this was something different. “Everyone was affected somehow from this event,” he said. “You can see it in their faces in lots of different ways. My photography, everything, my life, changed after that. I still was doing lots of commercial work, but my focus was starting to shift to a more personal type of work. This was something really, really, big. A catastrophe. I became more interested in shooting something that really hits me, that amazes me, whether it’s beautiful, or horrific, or something that I have questions about. My passion was with my personal photography.”

Fuchs’ images of 9/11 have brought controversy. Photo credit: Danny Brody

 

Some people have been very disturbed by Fuchs’ images, which show people at their most natural-maybe somewhat bewildered by the events unfolding in front of them, but not necessarily emotional. “I showed the photos to a few people and they got really irritated,” said Fuchs, “which means that actually it’s a strong picture. But then I was thinking, what about Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’? Cartoons about Nazis? My father is a Holocaust survivor. What am I supposed to think about it? This is not the right artistic expression to do it? Well this is my artistic language. I was lucky to be able to document it, and to document other people who were experiencing this event with me.”

Eleven years later, on the anniversary of the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil, there is still much controversy over how to portray September 11th, its aftermath, and the people who died and lost loved ones. No one agrees on what sort of restraint may be called for, and New Yorkers seem to have wildly divergent views on public discussions and portrayals of that tragic day. Rafael Fuchs is no different. “It still puzzles me,” he said. “I have had people, after seeing these photos, come up to me and hug me. And others have gotten aggressive, demanding that I defend the photos. Maybe these photos are a manifestation of my not being able to get down there; but people have to understand that there are different languages to describe the same scene.”

Can books be sexy again?

Marcel Proust famously had his madeleines-little cookies that he would nibble on to jar his memory. They would help him to conjure up images and thoughts for his monumental literary works. Painter Jen Mazza uses books as touchstones for her paintings in much the same way. But not necessarily by reading them and extracting ideas to use later-she creates vivid artworks of actual physical books that are both representational and mysterious. She sees the duality in the work. “These paintings came out of two different things,” said Mazza. “First, I’m a really big reader, and literature has inspired my work over the years-even though it didn’t directly appear until now.” And the second? She counts none other than Monsieur Proust himself for inspiration. “Reading Proust and making it through that,” she said. “He was writing about flowers and I was painting flowers at the time. He uses flowers a lot as a metaphor for sexuality.” She ultimately found that she didn’t want to paint the scene he was creating, or the flowers, but the actual book itself.

Of course physical books have not been seen as sexy for some time, and in fact are more often viewed as dowdy and dusty relics that the average hipster iPad or Kindle reader would gently scoff at, hardly worth the time to explain. But is the physical book as a ‘reading apparatus’ already dead? “That’s certainly a question that has come up a lot around this body of work,” said Mazza. “To me it is unlikely that the book is going to disappear as an object. But suddenly we are more aware of its value and how different it is to read a book as opposed to reading on a screen.” There is a precedent for artists returning to analog methods. In movies and in photography, both gone digital eons ago, shooting on film has become a sort of ‘back to the future’ low-fi method of obtaining the graininess and light of classic work. And painting itself has been declared dead more times than Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Mazza’s paintings, which are considerably more contemplative than the rumbling BQE, nonetheless invoke motion. The way readers sensually fondle book covers, and the meditative turning of the pages, are both referenced in her minimally elegant brush strokes, and in her moody colors. If one imagines books as objects made to encourage our physical caress, you will find these paintings both tactile and, yes, even a little bit lusty. Feel free to embrace your inner booklover.

Jen Mazza, ‘THE WORDS’ opens September 5, with a reception from 6-9 p.m. at the Stepehen Stoyanov gallery at 29 Orchard St (between Hester and Canal). The show runs through October 14.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, 12-6 p.m.
Phone: (212) 343-4240