Soho and Williamurg: The Face of NYC's Contemporary Art Elite

It costs me $11 every day to make the trek from New Jersey to New York City to earn $0 at my internship.  To ameliorate this travesty, every evening I attend an event of some kind.  There's always a book signing, comedy show, gallery walk or lecture I could attend and often for free.  Everyone's selling SOMETHING here.

 

This particular afternoon leads me to McNally Jackson, a bookstore in Soho.

They hold a monthly series called Real Characters wherein comedians read from their newly published books or tell hilarious stories off the cuff.  Some of the comedians presenting this evening had worked on shows like SNL or Flight of the Concords.  It was PACKED.  I sat on the stairs.

True to the sense of humor here in NYC, the stories I heard involved one man's brush with herpes, a gay man's thoughts on the mystery of the vagina, and one woman's secret terror that her vibrator might be discovered by a film crew as they documented her for an Oprah home makeover.

This amazing mural was right outside the bookstore.

 

Later that week I attended a gallery opening at the ISCP studios, a three story, white-walled industrial-era building that houses young, foreign artists. 

Here, my friend Maryam, a Professor of Astronomy at NYU, stands in front of a huge repetition installation made of black twist-ties.

This artist filled a room with dirt and placed a wheel in the center that would send the soil churning high into the air as he shoveled.  I'm sure it symbolized capitalist oppression or something.

The highlight of the evening was a performance piece entitled A Woman's Mind Might Resemble a Room.

Jennifer Tee is a Netherlander that fabricates geometric rugs and displays them with a dancer.

A mechanical droning of atonal ambient music(?) beat on in the background as the dancer moved slowly from one strong gesture to the next.

The dancer Miri Lee executed the choreography with such strength, grace and sensuality.  The performance may have lasted five minutes or thirty, but I wouldn't have known.  I was lost in the atonal buzzing and the deliberate formations of the dance.

Rose Eken was one of my absolute favorite artists of the evening.  I can't get excited enough about her work!  Those texture splatters you see hanging on the wall are inspired by the impact stain left on used drum heads, and this crazy woman free-form hand embroiders the pattern with exacting detail.  This Danish savant is super nice to boot.

And then there was Takahiro Iwasaki.  This young Japanese miniaturist was more than willing to get down on the ground and excitedly explain his work and his process.  He extracts synthetic fibers from things like towels and toothbrushes and constructs tiny towers and Ferris wheels.

Next time: Etsy!