Basel Follow Up

Ah, Miami.
You know that the only reason the plate says "toplz" is because there are so many OTHER clever men with convertibles who had the same idea, and he tried all of the other variations they had already claimed before he came to this compromise.

The piece that made Carol & I gasp was called "Blue Shift", and was made by Cornelia Parker. I finally saw one of Lee Bontecou's more recent pieces and it was unbelievable: I missed her big show a few years back, and have been trying to get a catalog from it ever since then. There was a great Julie Heffernan painting at Basel, and more at Bridge. The Dee Ferris paintings (flip through that link to see a beautiful assortment) that were at the fair looked like a detail of Julie Heffernan's work. Laura Anderson Barbata showed a piece called "Gloria", a life-sized holographic postcard of the Virgin Mary, but she had no head on her shoulders, only a halo in its place.

At the Margulies collection, "Cooked Books" by Denise A. Aubertin was memorable, a series of books by Proust, Burroughs, and Camus that were wrapped in dough and carefully cooked in her oven until they were "just right". I was mesmerized by Jackie Nickerson's "Faith Series", photographs of nuns in their environment where the found light surrounding them becomes one of the central characters. Days later, I am still haunted by Christina Pettersson's video, "373 Sounds for Anne Sexton, or God is in Your Typewriter". As it is a video, even if I could find a still, it would tell you nothing. It featured images with occasional text: "a sound like walking without legs", "a sound like waiting for the letter that will never come", "a sound like the broken chair on the street corner, feeling sorry for itself". Ronald Mora has an installation in the collection entitled "Home Sweet Home", a kitchen covered in batting, that felt quiet, and soon will be very dusty.


The show at the Rubell's, "Red Eye" was named after all the trips that the collectors make back and forth between Miami and Los Angeles. The show was a kind of self portrait, it seemed.


I even went to the show at ArtCenter, a kind of lowbrow/Juxtapoz kind of show, where I found painting by Kris Lewis.... I could not resist a photo.


At Pulse, I saw lots of great stuff, but the large painting "Blinded" by Erik Sandberg (click on #9 at link) at Connor Contemporary Art made me sit up and take notice.

There was a surreal moment when I was having a discussion with Carol walking through "Basel Proper". We were talking about how easy it would be to just make work that would sell, and what we would make, if we were so inclined. I looked up that moment and saw a piece in a booth (sorry, I did not get the name of the artist): it was sentence in neon that read, "I sell the shadow to sustain the substance".

Way too verbose today trying to create closure on the Basel thing. Angelina painting pics tomorrow.