Image: ‘Born in Jail’ by Julie Adnan

“Living the Dream,” group show, Mar 27 – Apr 17, Fuse Gallery, NYC

This Saturday at the Brooklynite Gallery: Brooklyn’s Specter and German duo Various & Gould will “Make It Fit” with a labor-centric treatise of silkscreens, portraits and discarded materials. Specter’s cart-pushers and delivery boys take the spotlight in “hand-crafted” and “retro-fitted” medley of found objects arranged. Various & Gould’s vibrant work presents a distopia of body-part trading, “waltzing” workers. Opening reception is March 20, 7-10pm with musical guests Dj Cerock and Rifle Recoil.

Go, because they’re working really hard to promote it, even clobbering together this whimsical video fakery by an imaginary disgruntled intern featuring imprisoned artists’ plea for help from their basement.

“Make It Fit,” Specter and Various & Gould, Mar 20 – Apr 17, The Brooklynite Gallery, New York

While it’s a little un-feminist for the press release to beat about how feminist she is with her “marked interest in masculine spaces,” Rosson’s spray paint and acrylic works are curiously and colorfully bombastic, inviting with its allusions to artists/Dietch Project’s historical priors like Kieth Haring and Dash Snow. Ah, memories…

As Jeffrey Deitch abandons us for that cozy MOCA gig, palm trees, plastic Cali bimbos and sunshine, it’s sad that NYC is losing yet another interesting landmark. From shows with skateboarders, vintage video games, powdered nude women and Fisherspooner to Michel Gongry’s recreation of video shop and sweded sets from Be Kind Rewind and the Art Parade, Deitch Projects was fun while it lasted. I guess as the teeming scenester crowds ebbed, Deitch decided it’s time to go too. What now?

“The Bowery Boys,” Rosson Crow, Mar 4 – Mar 27, Deitch Projects, New York

Adam Stennett, who’s previously brought us meticulous marvels Underwater Mouse and Girl In Bathtub (NSFW), has a new painting in the “In Standard Time” group show at the Ana Cristea Gallery, opening tonight. Featuring ten young artist with internationally shifting residences, the exhibition seeks to find ground in the fluid, scattering state of our time. Painters address the ever-epic (historical antecedents, East vs. West), while Michael Brown contributes commentary via vinyl discs melted into utilitarian objects and Joe Diebes’ video art interprets critical music change. Come to closer leer at the details in Adam Stennett’s Soothing Syrup with two Poppies. It looks so pleasant, so very pleasant… (I WANT!)

“In Standard Time,” Feb 25 – Apr 3, Reception Feb 25 6-8pm, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York

South African photographer Pieter Hugo‘s photography exhibit Nollywood opens tomorrow at the Yossi Milo Gallery. Third largest film industry after Hollywood and Bollywood, Nollywood produces 1000 low-budget straight-to-video films a year. Tragic, raging, and rooted in traditional story telling, the Nigerian film industry’s focus lays on the supernatural, the symbolic, the melodramatic and the macabre.

Traveling through West Africa, Pieter Hugo has previously tried to capture the self-representing and locally based Nollywood phenomena, but switched his documentarian efforts to more Herzogian approach, hiring local actors to recreate typical Nollywood scenes on the sets in Enugu and Asaba. The photos have been floating around the internet for awhile now, as were Hugo’s photographs of men walking hyenas like pit bulls, but preview the remarkable work with us here anyway.

“Nollywood,” Pieter Hugo, Feb 25 – Apr 10, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

A somewhat mysterious group exhibition “The Museum of Unnatural History” opens tomorrow at Clamp Art. It appears to feature photography, digital works, dioramas, taxidermy, birds, bears and Twinkie idolization. The museum exhibit spin-off views animals “through a pseudo-scientific lens,” says Brian Camp. Participators include Nicole Hatanaka, Amy Stein, Jill Greenberg, Blake Fitch, Marisol Villaneuva and Animal Logic author Richard Barnes.

“The Museum of Unnatural History,” Feb 25 – Apr 10, Clamp Art, New York

Mike Weiss Gallery presents Sofi Zezmer‘s Remote Control and her manmade microorganisms. There’s something unsettling about these deliberately wadded plastic odds and ends, but if you want to see colorful cable ties, funnels, drinking straws and bicycle helmets form “irrational Duchampian hybrids of mechanical and biological systems” that comment on “consumption, mass production and overflow,” float on over to Mike Weiss and see this Frankenstein-MacGyver hoopla. But don’t blame us if you get neon nightmares of this thing buzzing around your room trying to eat you.

“Remote Control,” Sofie Zezmer, February 27 – April 3, Mike Weiss Gallery, Manhattan

Montiglio is also nephew to Anthony ‘Nino’ Gaggi, who reportedly murdered and dismembered 200 people at Brooklyn’s Gemini Lounge (a.k.a. “Horror Hotel”) with Roy DeMeo. After admitting to a bevy of lurid murders himself and snitching on the Family in court, Montiglio was discovered by his sister’s gallery owner friend and soon unfurled from the cocoon of witness protection as a struggling artist in his 60s.

In the ABC report, Montiglio recollects how “Uncle Nino” would rather he blow up cars than pursue a singing interest and killing in Vietnam vs. killing with the mob. Montiglio draws on the “dark anguish” inflicted by mob life, his art informed by such colorful memories as the fam chopping up money while eating spaghetti with the ajar bathroom door revealing “bodies hanging naked and bleeding out” and his nightmares of being invited to hell by former mob buddies. Sounds like quite an ample inspirational cache there, snitchy. 

 

 
“No Such Thing?” Dominick Montiglio