Unbreak My Heart: Kate Gilmore.

How perfect. When Unbreak My Heart opens on November 1, it'll be one day shy of 2 years since I posted my first big rave about Kate Gilmore's work. What a kick.

Unbreak My Heart Press release . . .
Kate Gilmore: Kate was an easy choice. If I do a studio visit with you and your work makes me cry, well then, if I I curate a show a couple years later I'm probably going to ask you to be in it. The video Heartbreaker is from 2004, but I couldn't pass up the irony of having it in the show. I mean, the artist takes an axe to a heart made out of lumber. In the destruction of her heart, she makes mine a little less broken. It's a weirdly triumphant act for both the artist and the viewer. Kate is the one artist for whom I put aside my self-imposed no-artists-with-representation rule. Big ups to Amy Smith-Stewart.

Unbreak My Heart. Two weekends left.

Beth Gilfilen

BREAKING: Anaba pays a visit to the show. Thanks, Martin! Also, Unbreak Break My Hearter Kate Gilmore gets a great review from Roberta Smith in the NYTimes for her amazing solo show at Smith-Stewart. Hell, yeah!

There're just 2 weekends left to see Unbreak My Heart. It still RULES so if you haven't seen it, the time is now. PLUS, this weekend is the last weekend of the Gilbert & George show at the Brooklyn Museum which is just four blocks away. Can you say double feature?


Rosanna Bruno

The other week Rosanna Bruno got an email out of the blue from some guy who saw her paintings from the street and had to come in to the gallery to get a closer look. Yes. This show stops traffic. I've spent some afternoons in the gallery and there's always this wonderful block of light that appears on Beth Gilfilen's painting between 3 and 4 o'clock. Although my favorite story from the show happened when I was gallery-sitting one weekend and two little girls from the neighborhood stopped in the gallery, probably about 8 and 10 years old. They started watching Kate Gilmore's Heart Breaker video. After about 30 seconds of watching Kate take her axe to the big wooden heart the older girl turned to me and said, "Somebody sure musta broke her heart." Let's face it, y'all. Art is awesome.


EJ Hauser

The artists:
Rosanna Bruno

Beth Gilfilen

Kate Gilmore

EJ Hauser

Robert Schatz

Luke Whitlatch

Some installation shots:
Click here.

Unbreak My Color.

Recently I heard from one of the Unbreak My Heart stars, Luke Whitlatch, and he sent pictures. Oh, hells yeah. Inversion rising. The pieces he had in my show left a lot of open canvas. The piece that he had in a group show at Rivington Arms last summer (above) was the most minimal thing I had seen him do. And now, this . . .



Whoa. Colors are bustin'! The first background, like copper shifting. And check that line escaping from the exploded corner. Whitlatch always finds an ecstatic and surprising balance I love.



The second second background has things moving into rust. And another bursting corner with more instability and decay between the background foreground. Love those two bars of burgundy holding things down in the bottom middle left. Luke Whitlatch, man. Still unbreaking my heart. Great stuff.

Unbreak My Heart: Rosanna Bruno.

Rosanna Bruno knocked me the hell out when I visited her studio a couple years ago. Her larger paintings were the first thing I thought of when I was asked to curate this show. In a tidy little circle, Rosanna had some of her smaller but also-mighty paintings in the inaugural show at PLUTO, the Nicole Eisenman-curated Norf*ckneasters.

Unbreak My Heart Press release . . .
Rosanna Bruno: Very physical work. Sometimes it rips my head off right away and sometimes it takes awhile, consuming me slowly. I'll be standing in front of a painting and then suddenly I'm all, like, "Da-amn. Where is my head?" Her swaths aren't grand, sweeping gestures of the brush though. They're finely tuned vortices of color, line, and space. Enter here.

Unbreak My Heart: Luke Whitlatch.

This guy isn't afraid of beauty, or what we might find inside it.

Unbreak My Heart Press release . . .
Luke Whitlatch: This is my across-a-crowded-room choice for the show. I went to see a jammed and lively group show of drawings at Daniel Weinberg Gallery a few summers ago in LA, and amidst the Ed Ruscha's, Lee Bontecou's, and Dan Zeller's it was a small drawing by Whitlatch that pulled me in and held me close. When I saw a couple of his paintings at the LA Art Fair here in NYC the next year I officially became a fan. This summer Luke had a piece in a group show at Rivington Arms and that cemented the deal.

Unbreak My Heart.

OK. So, in the next week or so I'm going to feature the artists in the show I've curated, Unbreak My Heart (Opening on SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1st. OMG. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1st!). And away we go . . .

Press release:
Bad shit happens, like, constantly. Quite frankly, I'm surprised we all aren't in cardiac arrest by the time we're 8. I'm not tipping you to anything new by pointing out that most of us make it past childhood, grow up, and drag our "long black bag" of heartbreak along for the ride. There are plenty of ways to lighten the burden though, and one of them is to look at art. (Therapy also helps. LOTS of therapy.) Every once in awhile I'll come across art that reverses the damage done, at least a little bit. I knew when I was offered this show that I wanted to include artists who have provided me with those moments of "unbreaking". You know how it works. The world slows down and you can almost feel the shards coming back together (Blondie style), the sinewy shreds of tissue reconnecting (David Lynch style). We just have to keep our eyes open and our hearts on the block. It's gonna be alright. At least for this moment.

Unbreak My Heart. Some shots.

I spent the day with Unbreak My Heart today. I must say, it does rock. Here are some shots of the installation.


Beth Gilfilen, Luke Whitlatch


Rosanna Bruno


Luke Whitlatch


Beth Gilfilen


EJ Hauser


Kate Gilmore, Rosanna Bruno


Robert Schatz

Unbreak My Heart: Robert Schatz.

From the Unbreak My Heart Press release . . .
Robert Schatz: I've known Bob for years now, but I didn't see the swoopy and swirly goodness of his paintings until last year's show at The Phatory in Alphabet City. His intuitive and (literally) hands-on approach to the materials is a move towards nature, but it's his mad grasp of technique and composition that brings it home to the rest of us.

Unbreak My Heart: Beth Gilfilen.

I had asked two artists for recommendations and BOTH of them told me I needed to check out Beth Gilfilen's work. Yep. They were right. Knockout stuff.

Unbreak My Heart Press release . . .

Beth Gilfilen: The two paintings we chose for the show are awesome gestures of texture and space-building on their own, but side-by-side they sing harmony like Gary Louris and Lucinda Williams on Williams' song, Essence. The dominance shifts back and forth between the voices and sometimes they share the middle. In one painting the color and action fills the canvas, and in the other Gilfilen let's the white space fly. Back and forth they go, making me wonder who's in charge.

Unbreak My Heart: EJ Hauser.

Crew Man

EJ Hauser, man. The moment we figured out her wall, Bongwater came onto her iPod shuffle. A blessing from Ann Magnuson. That's all you need.

Unbreak My Heart Press release . . .
EJ Hauser: Whew! I was unfamiliar with EJ Hauser's work before artist Sarah Peters introduced me to it. (Thank you, Sarah.) Abstracts, not-quite-abstracts, and text paintings make up her three-pronged attack. The lines she develops in the text paintings are so strong you can forget the text, but I'd recommend against that. There's too much fun to be had therein. Killer stuff all around, actually. Beauty can be hard. Beauty can be delicious. In EJ's work it's both.

Repulsion.

I can't even believe that this is happening, and that I'm going to be there. Seriously.

It would be enough if Pig Destroyer was playing. It would be enough if one of my first Grindcore loves, Brutal Truth, was playing. But no, it's so much more than that. Way, way more. And it's because of the fact that Repulsion will be playing their seminal (and only) album, Horrified in its entirety. Horrified was one of those perfect records that showed up at just the right time and place, building a wicked bridge between Thrash, Death Metal, and Grindcore. Horrified is arguably one of the top 5 most important Metal records ever released. To see it played live in all its raw and rancorous glory is gonna be huge and ugly. Yum. Please pass the maggots. You know. The ones in your coffin.

In honor of this event (And it IS an event.) I've changed the Unbreak My Heart sidebar to Unbreak My Repulsion, and linked to 5 YouTube videos of the band at work.

My Big News.

Bang. I'm a curator. Seriously, kids. Many excellent things have come my way because of this blog but this one takes the cake and eats it too. When Molly Bradford and Bill Pace, the owners of the much-loved Pluto, asked me to curate a show for them this fall my extremely immediate response was, "Hell, yeah!" And then I was off on one of the best adventures of my life.

I can't thank Molly and Bill enough for the opportunity and for the trust they've placed in me. The title for the show is Unbreak My Heart, and it will include work that's done just that for me. I've been doing studio visits for the last month or so, and seeing some amazing work. I'm just now beginning to figure out the final line-up, and I'll be sharing the studio visits I've done over the next couple weeks. It was great to visit (and revisit) the work of artists familiar to me, and it was equally thrilling to see work by painters to whom I'd recently been introduced. One of them even brought tears to my eyes. (You know who you are . . . EJ Hauser.)

OMG. This show is sooooooo going to rule. I can't wait to show it to you. But I will. It opens on November 1st.

Holy shit. I'm curating a show. Did you ever have a dream and not know it, but then it came true? Well, this is kinda like that.

EverynowandthenIknowit'sgottenhardtotell.

Photo of Gilbert & George's entry in Creative Time's 44 1/2 series by Trish Mayo via the Brooklyn Museum's flickr pool

But it's still alive and well. My Creative Time blog, that is. Between my being busy with Unbreak My Heart and some ongoing tech problems with Blogger it's been inactive for a couple months. No more, kids. Back in full effect.

Maria Bartiromo Holiday.

The holidays and a cold have slowed me down a bit in regards to the posting this month. Love me anyway. It's Chistmastime! Not to worry. Things'll be ramping back up after New Years. If my cold cooperates I'll be bringing back some goodies from my annual pilgrimage to The Land of Andy, The Iron City, The Home of Primanti Bros. In the meantime enjoy the special Christmas edition of Unbreak My Heart. Happy Holidays!!!

For Those About To Rock.

Rosanna Bruno

We salute you so much we believe we're turning into Angus Young. Two of my absolute faves are opening at John Davis Gallery in Hudson on Saturday. Rosanna Bruno and EJ Hauser! I liked them so much I put them in Unbreak My Heart. That was last year. Time has passed. They've gotten even better. Trust me on this. Two Coats of Paint mentions that Louise Fishman thinks that Rosanna Bruno is one of the best abstract painters out there right now. There's a reason for that. She is. So, here's what I think of Rosanna. And here's what I think of EJ Hauser (Let's put it this way. Her paintings made me cry the first time I saw them. Win!) And YO YO YO. Speaking of TCoP, Sharon Butler, whose supremely delicious work I got to devour when they were in this show group show at Denise Bibro, is ALSO in this show. Kick much ass, John Davis Gallery? Methinks you must. Also rocking out: Mary Ellen Scherl and Molly Herman.


EJ Hauser


Sharon Butler

Reflective Nature.

The moment I saw this black painting by EJ Hauser I knew it had to be in Unbreak My Heart. The more time I spent with it the more I realized how much it liked to remix everything in it's reflective path, so I knew that it was going to do spectacular things to Rosanna Bruno's paintings when they were on the opposite wall. I expecially dig how, because of the shiny and dulled surfaces it clips off the image it's reflecting. Too much fun.

No Turning Back Now. (The cards are printed.)

Unbreak My Heart on ArtCal. PICK! Most awesome.

Unbreak My Heart: Beth Gilfilen.

Hey. Sorry the posting's been so light this week. Much going on. But one of the things that's been going on is that I've been working on the show. In fact, tomorrow after work I'm going over to Jersey City to do a second studio visit with one of the artists I'm including, Beth Gilfilen. We'll be figuring out which paintings are going to work best in the show. Here are some pics from our first visit. Oh, yeah!

First Notice.

Photo of Robert Schatz work by Olympia Lambert.

Unbreak My Heart has gotten it's first notice . . . from Olympia Lambert over at Oly's Musings. Most excellent.

(Un)breaking Down.

Kate Gilmore, video still from Heartbreaker

This is it, kids. The last weekend to see utterly awesome Unbreak My Heart at PLUTO Gallery in Brooklyn. Big ups to Plutonians Bill and Molly, all the asskicking artists who laid down such wicked good work, and finally to all of you who stopped by to rock. Stoopid big hugs to all.

I'll be there on Sunday. Stop by. There will be beer. There will be tears. Then there will be more beer.