Alan Ruiz’s architectural installations; New Red Order’s Indigenous provocations; and “Wish,” a group show exploring productive pleasures.
Alan Ruiz
Through July 31. The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Manhattan; 212-255-5793, thekitchen.org.
Even if you’ve been attending performances and exhibitions at the Kitchen for decades, it’s harder now than ever to locate this nondescript former industrial building on 19th Street: It’s been swallowed up in a maze of residential towers and luxury boutiques in Chelsea. Alan Ruiz’s blunt, spare but impressive exhibition “Container and Contained,” addresses some these problems.
Ruiz is a New York-based artist and writer whose work explores the politics of architecture and the built environment. His most prominent work here is an installation in the ground-level black box theater titled “WS-C-62A; WS-C-62B”(2021). Made primarily of steel and glass, it cuts up the space like a fragmentary wall or viewing platform. Every day, about eight minutes before the gallery closes, flood lights come on and Philip Glass’s “Dance IX”(1986) is blasted throughout the space, a reminder of the institution’s earlier avant-garde days. Less obvious are the documents that make up “Transfer II (WS-B690-L40)” (2021), displayed on the gallery’s north wall, which detail how Ruiz has leased the Kitchen’s remaining air rights from the city for a year, for $1 per month.
Combining various recognizable strains of recent art — minimalism, conceptualism, pedagogy, institutional critique — Ruiz addresses the ways in which smaller institutions like the Kitchen have been engulfed by the titanic wake of real estate development and gentrification. It’s a depressing narrative, but Ruiz’s cleareyed approach mostly shuns nostalgia. Instead, he identifies and occupies the spaces that artists can still claim — or rent for a pittance — within a vastly altered New York.
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
New Red Order
Through Aug. 21. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; (212) 226-3970, artistsspace.org.
An installation view of New Red Order’s major exhibition at Artists Space, titled “Feel at Home Here.” Artists Space; Filip Wolak
The first time I saw a New Red Order (N.R.O.) video, I laughed — and then wondered if it was OK to laugh. The actor Jim Fletcher, calling himself a “reformed Native American impersonator,” was recruiting viewers to become informants for the N.R.O., an art collective that’s also a kind of secret society. The video was a pitch-perfect parody of a promo for something like a weight-loss program, only the goals were decolonization and the cultivation of Indigenous futures. It felt like a brilliant joke whose punchline was a genuine appeal to someone like me, a white person living on land taken from the Lenape.
The N.R.O. — whose core contributors are the artists Adam and Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys — now has a major exhibition at Artists Space, titled “Feel at Home Here.” The zany upstairs installation includes two semisatirical videos, graphics on the walls, branded beach products, and an imitation real-estate office for land repatriation. It also delves into two points of history: New York City’s seal, which features an amiable “Native American of Manhattan,” and the Improved Order of Red Men, a nationalistic secret society founded in 1834 by and for white men, who structured it based on their fantasies of Native society. Downstairs, lightboxes and videos take serious aim at well-known, stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans by the sculptor James Earle Fraser.
Although this is the N.R.O.’s largest show yet, the nature of the group remains elusive — which is precisely the point. Its gift is shrewd mutability. Using a mash-up of strategies and styles, the N.R.O. illuminates pervasive violence against Native Americans, but then, instead of letting perpetrators off the hook, urges us to do something with our guilt.
JILLIAN STEINHAUER
Wish
Through July 30. Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, Manhattan; (212) 206-7100, metropictures.com.
Torbjorn Rodland’s “Floor Flowers,” from 2015, in the exhibition “Wish” at Metro Pictures.Torbjørn Rødland and David Kordansky Gallery
Unrequited passions are central to the seven artists in “Wish,” a group exhibition about the productive pleasure of uncovering and anticipating the fulfillment of our hidden desires. That fulfillment can be subversively erotic, as indicated by several works in the show and most unsettlingly by Torbjorn Rodland’s series of photographs that tinge ordinary instances of human interaction with eeriness, like the outstretched pair of hands touching a funereal floral arrangement (“Floor Flowers,” 2015), or a mouth pried open in a medical office (“Intraoral no. 2,” 2015). In Heji Shin’s suggestive photographs, these discomfiting scenes extend to the animal kingdom, with the artist pairing common creatures with human nudity, as with “Dick and Snake” (2018), or allowing barnyard creatures to function as innuendos in themselves, such as in “Big Cock 7” (2020), a close-up shot of a rooster.
Though their punch lines may seem obvious or juvenile, Shin’s photographs home in on the exhibition’s emphasis on the tenuous connections, often humorous and disarming, between our desires and their real-world analogues. Nora Turato’s 2021 wall piece “This little piggy went to market” announces, with a perfect deadpan tenor, the omnipresence of the gig economy (“left his staff job to write a newsletter”) via the psychedelic patterns and sans-serif typeface of corporate advertising. In a similarly acerbic fashion, Elliot Reed presents a mound of salt — 163.2 pounds worth, equal to the artist’s body weight — within the gallery, atop of which is placed the clothes the artist wore while on a video call with his loved ones. The 2020 work, “End-to-End Encrypted (Lot’s Wife),” succeeds in signaling the bodily absence that video technology seeks to mitigate, but also evocatively alludes, like the exhibition as a whole, to the acutely felt sensations of longing for those dear and far away.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
