Art This Week: Disasters, Morir Soñando, a Different Dia:Beacon

Edge of Eden
Opening Wednesday, June 20 at Fridman Gallery, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through July 20.

Maybe all your friends have been to Dia:Beacon, that trendy hub of Minimalist art just a hop, skip, and a jump upstate, but you haven’t made it yet. Fret not—there’s a way to experience it without figuring out how to convince your friend’s roommate to let you use their car. The art and the scenery will be rendered in paint as part of German painter Alina Grasmann’s solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery, Edge of Eden. The show has two components: large paintings of Dia:Beacon’s scenery and art with components of other notable paintings added in, and 40 small oil paintings of Agloe, a fictional New York town dreamt up to prevent map copyright that became real for a spell and then dissipated once more. Combined, the two painting series conjure a New York that’s outside the city and maybe even our reality.

Still Water, Circling Palms
Opening Thursday, June 21 at Marlborough Contemporary, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through August 3.

Disasters come in many forms. As they’re arriving (and after they’ve wreaked their havoc), a slew of documentation usually follows. Artist Margo Wolowiec has taken graphics related to weather forecasts and storm aftermaths and spun them into works of cloth-based art that look like a combination of patchwork quilts, glitch art, and a foreboding television screen that’s started to go fuzzy yet is still trying its best to broadcast the latest breaking news. In addition to tackling the topic of climate change and how social media has transformed the manner in which we receive and process news of all sorts, it also finds a correlation between the destructive nature of weather and “the real-time subjugation of women in a patriarchal system.”

Morir Soñando
Opening Friday, June 22 at Knockdown Center, 6 pm to 9 pm. On view through August 19.

Named for the frosty Dominican drink mixing orange juice and milk, Morir Soñando is a group exhibition all about softness, exploring how it can be political, precarious, and positively multifaceted. Some people are expected to behave and present in a way that exemplifies softness, and others risk violence by daring to be even a little bit soft or feminine. The work on view in Morir Soñado (which literally means “to die dreaming”) tackles these societal factors (colonialism, gender identity, race, environment) that affect who may feel safe doing what. It employs literally soft materials to do so, such as velvet, pastel-centric color palettes, and glitter in an effort to both “express the potential of vulnerability as a tool for liberation” and “convey alternative methodologies for compassion.”

motherfather
Opening Friday, June 22 at Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York, 6 pm to 9 pm. On view through July 29.

If you happen to live in a New York City apartment with a kitchen island, I’d venture to say you’re doing pretty well for yourself. I’d also venture to say it probably doesn’t look like the one on view as part of Hong Seon Jang’s solo exhibition motherfather. Jang’s kitchen island creation, appropriately serving as the centerpiece for his show, is made not of marble or granite but of soap and animal bones. In addition to being visually jarring and intriguing, the act of using these materials for this specific purpose is Hong’s attempt to raise awareness about the labor exploitation and unethical practices that often permeate the process of mass-producing both the food that is brought into the kitchen and the objects we place our newly-bought groceries on.