6 New York Art & Design Exhibitions Not To Miss This July
By Something CuratedLooking at the month ahead, Something Curated highlights six of the most exciting art and design exhibitions taking place in New York this July.
Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces, at New Museum || Mika Rottenberg & Margot Norton (Until 15 Sep 2019)
Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Mika Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls to the millions of brightly coloured plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores. The exhibition presents several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures, and premieres a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019).
I came as soon as I heard, at JTT || Margaret Wharton & Issy Wood (Until 2 Aug 2019)
JTT hosts a two-person exhibition with sculptor Margaret Wharton and painter Issy Wood. Both Wharton and Wood share an acute sensitivity to the psychological pull of domestic objects as well as the impulse to anthropomorphise them. Wharton is primarily known for deconstructing kitchen chairs with a bandsaw, meticulously separating them into thin layers of wood, and reconstructing the fragments into entirely new identities, while Wood’s practice consists of figurative and still life painting on linen, velvet, and clothing.
Living in a Lightbulb, at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery || Mia Locks & Jenny Jaskey (Until 26 Jul 2019)
Artists in this exhibition, curated by Mia Locks and Jenny Jaskey, make use of light and heat to emphasise the slow, dynamic process of our encounter with these phenomena. Works in the show include a site-specific installation by Bill Jenkins that redirects daylight from the gallery’s front window to a back room. This sculpture of light illuminates a picture of the Cosmos by Scott Lyall, an image animated by light reflecting off sub-visible information embedded in NanoFoil. Lisa Oppenheim’s heliograms capture the sea and sky at different times of day, while Olafur Eliasson’s suspended rotating orb emits a hazy orange glow, the light of a single frequency.
Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion, at Brooklyn Museum || Matthew Yokobosky (20 Jul 2019 – 5 Jan 2020)
Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion is the first New York retrospective in forty years to focus on the legendary couturier. Drawn primarily from Pierre Cardin’s archive, the exhibition traverses the designer’s decades-long career at the forefront of fashion invention. Known today for his bold, futuristic looks of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Cardin extended his design concepts from fashion to furniture, industrial design, and beyond. The exhibition presents over 170 objects drawn from his atelier and archive, including historical and contemporary haute couture, prêt-à-porter, trademark accessories, “couture” furniture, lighting, fashion sketches, personal photographs, and excerpts from television, documentaries, and feature films.
Blue Hills, Yellow Tree, at Pioneer Works || Sally Saul (Until 7 Jul 2019)
Blue Hills, Yellow Tree, which concludes early this month, brings together over three decades of works by Sally Saul, whose practice has become known for endearing and often humorous representations of humans, flora and fauna. The exhibition comprises sculptures created in Austin, Texas during the late 80s and 90s, and in New York City and Germantown, New York during the past twenty years. As the first retrospective of the artist’s works, the exhibition interprets Saul’s surrounding world by paying homage to her rural upbringing and various homes around the United States.
Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography, at The Met || Mia Fineman (3 Jul – 22 Sep 2019)
On July 20, 1969, half a billion viewers around the world watched as the first images of American astronauts on the moon were beamed back to the earth. The result of decades of technical innovation, this thrilling moment in the history of images radically expanded the limits of human vision. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography will survey visual representations of the moon from the dawn of photography through the present. In addition to photographs, the show will feature a selection of related drawings, prints, paintings, films, astronomical instruments, and cameras used by Apollo astronauts.
Feature image via Pierre Cardin