Wednesday January 16, 2008

January artwalk

Aramis Gutierrez’s sensational painting show at Castillo. Across the street at Gallery Diet, Richard Höglund’s installation had folks scratching their heads. Like a parody of contemporary art, it took a simple geometric shape and threw it at everything — small drawings, big drawings, installation, video, paper stacks — and nothing stuck.

Christina Pettersson’s eye-popping drawings of bricks stolen from writer’s homes. This one is Jack Kerouac. It’s unfortunate that these are only ever seen as details — the bricks are drawn life-sized, centered on massive pieces of otherwise-blank paper.

One of Steven Gagnon’s car projections in front of Locust, which includes the audio and video of a man describing his illegal entry into the US.

Bethany Pelle shows off one of her immaculate little kitchen sculptures. This one comes apart to function as a tea strainer.

Between two buildings on North Miami Avenue sit five of these huge aluminum 80s-looking palm tree sculptures. I mean, people are wasting their time making stuff like this? With world hunger, war, and disease, and you’re going to make huge palm tree sculptures and finish them off by drawing lines on them with a drill? Wow.

Kevin Medal’s at Twenty Twenty. A tour de force of a video created with thousands and thousands of drawings, stop-motion play-doh, and computers. Stunning, and .