Two shows at The Pit delineate visionary worlds of wacky flourish and dazzling variegation. In The Pit II, Mindy Shapero‘s psychedelic installation vivifies the alienness of Nye’s painted world. As you step inside, it seems discourteous to tread upon the meticulously hand-embellished floorcloth of reflective foil within Shapero’s dystopic funhouse that queasily unravels your sense of orientation.
In L.A. artist Mindy Shapero’s installation “Second Sleep,” the boldly painted walls, sculptures and floor make you feel woozy while never letting you forget that art works in mysterious ways — just like a dream, except that you’re wide awake.
To get a sense of where contemporary art is heading, you could make art magazines your bedside reading. That would either bring you up to speed or finally cure your insomnia.
Art fairs are for art lovers. There’s really no way around it. You can say that they demean art, that they’re all about commerce. You can complain about the crowds, the bad food, the poor ventilation. I hear you. And yet if art is something you must have or think you want to have in your life, you stand to gain from perusing one or more of the several art fairs that have set down stakes across Manhattan this weekend.
Chris Burden was there, Charley Ray has arrived in ’81, but I did not take classes with him. I was taking new-genre classes; Mike Kelley was there for a semester or so; it may have been his first teaching job out of Cal Arts. I graduated in ’84. I took eight years out of school and went back in ’92 to UCLA graduate school. I had started working there in ’89 for Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden as their lab assistant, as an employee of the state, which was kind of a great job: I liked the space and the facilities.
When I first met Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero a few years ago, she compared her sculptures and drawings to run-on sentences – a point driven home by a 2004 sculpture entitled 'Almost the exact feeling one gets when staring at the blinded by the light for too long just before anything is about to happen', similar to the images that you see when closing your eyes and pressing into your eyeballs (blackness). Such a generously loquacious mouthful of a title is confirmation that the artist, who did a stint in Brooklyn before heading west to attend the graduate programme at USC...