At these upcoming shows, artists “pimp” out myth, magic, and movies.
“Poop,” courtesy of Richie Brown
Myth and Mutations
April 10 (opening 7-9pm) to May 2 at Reverse, 28 Frost St., Williamsburg
For this one, Richie Brown took traditional oracle cards and swapped in emojis. “I realized that a lot of the newly created cards had emoji counterparts (i.e. santa, alien, poop with eyes) as well as some of the traditional ones (i.e. envelope, dog, eyeballs),” he told us. The cards, he said, contain what you might call “Jungian archetypes” — “but I don’t know how Jung would feel about poop with eyes being included in that,” he admitted. Brown will perform readings using his “spiked” or “pimped” deck at the opening. Meanwhile, Jonathan Monaghan’s “The Checkpoint” is a reinterpretation of Dürer’s Triumphal arch, where griffons and heraldic crests are replaced by security camera, video game weaponry and Whole Foods logos. And Yara Travieso’s video installations reinterpret Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Eurypides’s Medea.
“Fears,” courtesy of Zefrey Throwell
“Plotting” by Zefrey Throwell
April 2 (opening 6-8pm) to May 2 at Garis and Hahn, 263 Bowery, Lower East Side
Zefrey Throwell got the idea for his “Plotting” series when he overheard people at a cinema passively talking about the movie they’d just seen. To transform film into something more active, he painted diagrams of different versions of a plot line; viewers can throw a dart at them in order to “generate” a plot. Throwell used the method to create “Let’s Stay In Tonight, Honey,” a video piece, complete with dominatrices and a submissive, based on a 1970s detective manual on sexual deviations. Another series of paintings, titled “Cinema Puzzles,” consists of riddle-like visual outlines of classic films: if you guess all of their titles, you get to French kiss the artist.
Object of Magic
April 2 (opening 7-9pm) to May 3 at Moiety, 166 North 12th St., Williamsburg
Among the mythological weapons and gear reinterpreted for this exhibit are Zeus’s goat-skin shield, the shield of Roman god Mars, the sword of the Japanese god Susano-o, and the golden fur that Heracles claimed after defeating the Nemean Lion. Artistically speaking, the show will consist of three paintings by Zach Bruder, glass and bronze installations by Tristano di Robilant, and two steel wall pieces made out of steel by Ben Bloomstein.
Photo: Courtesy of Tina Lugo
Cotton Candy Machine: Tina Lugo and David Cook
April 10 (opening 7-11pm) to May 3 at Cotton Candy Machine, 235 S. 1st St. Williamsburg
Erotic artist Tina Lugo is infatuated with the glossy, saturated aesthetics of Japanese anime and video games. Many of the pieces in her latest show, “Sleep Sex,” feature helpless men and women being bound and sexually teased by Oni demons and other terrors hidden under their bedsheets, amidst landscapes made of silkscreened papers and fabrics. The figures, she told us, “are suspended in these moments, in these frames with gold and shimmer behind them.” The works’ glossy finishes create a barrier, giving the viewer a voyeuristic glimpse of this world without making us participate fully. Along with Lugo, David “Bonethrower” Cook creates works that symbolize both mythology and a “memento mori” warning.