Titularly yet tentatively, this three-person exhibition is about psychedelic mushrooms, but only one piece depicts toadstools. That work is Chris Martin’s “Untitled” (2013), a freestanding vinyl screen, more than 15 feet wide and 10 feet tall, portraying a woman foraging in the woods. Tree-size mushrooms surround her as she bends down to pluck something from the forest floor, while a painted void eats into the scene from the top right corner. Martin is best known for making rhythmic, semi-abstract paintings, and we get the sense that working with collaged figuration is freeing for the artist—that it’s important for him to shake things up.

Martin’s other works on display likewise utilize a mix of materials to create eccentric imagery. There’s a James Brown record screwed to the wall, with spray-painted gold dots and lines radiating across the black vinyl; a “Daily News” front page announcing the death of Michael Jackson coated in chunky orange, yellow, and blue paint and gel medium; a cloudy glitter-and-oil painting that resembles sparkling galaxies viewed from deep space; and a black-and-white photo of a guy by the seashore cradling nine pumice stones, while broadly painted lines in yellow, red, and green burst all around him. This one hangs from the brick façade outside the gallery, where summer rains, wind gusts, pollution, and sunlight will continue to alter the picture.

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(From Société Perrier 5/10/13, by Jim Allen)

As the editor in chief of Brooklyn Street Art, Steven P. Harrington has a tricky task: trying to document for posterity an art form that’s transitory by nature. The undaunted Harrington, who runs the blog with editor of photography Jaime Rojo, says, “At this moment in history, everything feels transitory. What better art form to be paying attention to right now than the one that knows how to celebrate the moment?” Covering street art not only from New York but a broad range of other sources as well, the blog has earned quite a rep; it’s been included in a number of books, and Harrington and Rojo have been contributing extensively to The Huffington Post. How do they keep on top of it all? Harrington offers, “BSA publishes every day and we stay quick on our feet and keep an ear to the ground. It’s an ongoing conversation.”  (For full story, click here.)

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Myk Henry, an Irishman from Dublin, had just come back to Brooklyn from an arts festival in South Korea. He walked around his apartment and into his kitchen making coffee, and placed the mugs on the dining room table. One month had passed since we had last spoken. Before his trip to Korea he said that he had been getting burned out on performance art. Although now, he felt reinvigorated. “You look down a side street and you see the neon signs blinking and the people rushing by and it’s like, woosh!” he said. And he is amazed at his own prolificacy. Realizing he’s participated in eleven performances in 2012 alone, it doesn’t seem like Myk Henry is slowing down.

An artist who works with video, installation, and performance art, Henry is tall, broad shouldered, and speaks in a colorful, descriptive way that brings up images of the many specific and odd experiences he’s lived through. He gives the impression that life could be, or is, at least for him, an art form. (He also shares an uncanny resemblance to actor Adrien Brody.) He works as an interior renovator by trade and lives as an established artist by discipline.

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“What sort of art would you show if you had access to the Brooklyn Museum’s space, its power, its audience?”
Our critic, Sarah Schmerler, asked this question last fall; then she started her own curatorial initiative called “GO:Curate.” She selected the paintings of Lori Ellison and Elsie Kagan as a good place to start building a show of pertinent art made by women working in Brooklyn today. Here’s a taste of what an exhibition might look like, with two works by each.

About the artists:
Lori Ellison has been making labor-intensive works in ballpoint pen on paper and gouache on panel for two decades. They may be humble in scale (no larger than a piece of notebook paper), but their surfaces pulsate with energy.
 

By William Allen

This group show, called “Wackadoodle,” thumbs its nose at highbrow irony and aesthetics, with seven artists steeped in the traditions of North Brooklyn (conceptual art, action painting, and sculptural collage). By design there is no theme, only fresh, bright painting, drawing, sculptures, video art, and prints.

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