ART BAND: A Night of Music
and Art
Organized by Kenny Schachter/Rove
Opening Reception: Thursday July 24th, 2003 8pm-midnight
Art on view through August 14th @ CAPITALE
130 Bowery between Grand and Broome St.,
New York, NY
t. 212 807-6669 f. 645-074
www.RoveTV.net schachter@mindspring.com
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
To the sounds of seven hot bands—Empire,
Apollo Heights, Cheeseburger, Some Action, Dearraindrop,
Slo Jams, and Phoenix and the Shadow—Kenny
Schachter presents a collection of eight artists,
as different as they are dynamic.
Katherine Bernhardt’s
explosive canvases present a saturnalia whose participants
—including logos, icons of American consumerism,
and pouty fashion models—are as much celebrants
as they are sacrifices in Bernhardt’s bonfire
of exuberant color and texture. Brendan Cass’s
meaty, unapologetic brushstrokes and bright, unmixed
colors create a deceptively child-like surface; a
second glance reveals a lurking adult conscience,
in reworked passages, structural deliberacy, and ghost
images. Taylor McKimens and Brian
Belott similarly manipulate a semblance of
innocence. Belott’s language of neon blasts
and cartoon citations bespeaks a blindly poppy enthusiasm,
but his multimedia tableau constructions, with their
holograph patches, enamels, and scrawls, resonate
with iconic gravity. If one of Belott’s boom
boxes could play in the cluttered room of some compulsively
imaginative kid genius, then Taylor McKimens’
doodles would surely cover the kid’s notebooks.
McKimens’ Rabelaisian whirlwinds of torqued
and scrambled characters contrast with a warm humility
of scale, in the end ripe with humor. Misaki
Kawai’s work is equally humorous, but
with a sweeter slant. Her stitched fabric and cardboard
aircraft are like plush, somatic dumplings filled
with a minced cultural meat—the Beatles, R2D2,
and the artist herself all take flight together in
a wonderfully confused dreamworld. Passengers aboard
flight Kawai looking out their windows might see something
like Melissa Brown’s Technicolor
landscapes. Crisp but not cold, replete but unhurried,
Brown’s crystalline waters and bird-boned verdure
often seem saturated with some sort of ominous potential.
The works of Joe Bradley and Robert
Reynolds could be described likewise, as
placid waters teeming with ambiguous life and hazardous
depth. Bradley’s sober, resonant canvases involve
slight meddling with the canvas’ kilter. The
limits of the form, and its very simplicity, create
a playing field for Bradley’s infinite jest.
Reynolds is equally aware of the limits of the canvas,
but dives into its confines and comes up with bales
full of American idealism, deadpan humor, shards of
Stella and Van Buren, and the bones of hippie and
religious marginalia.
J. Langbein
