Richard Mosse, Love Is The Drug, 2012 (image via apexart)
Light In Wartime
Opening Wednesday, June 6 at apexart, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through July 28.
War has been a near-constant in most people’s lives, whether they intimately know it or not. This exhibition, curated by Rola Khayyat, explores “the gap between understanding wars as historical happenings, and their fictionalized representations in the entertainment world, political realm, and collective consciousness.” Seeking to combine traditional documentary photographs with artistic metaphor and experimental development processes, the work in Light In Wartime predominantly depicts imagery that shows the aftermath of war, from sniper holes to newspaper articles. In viewing these new creations, we may start to form new thoughts about the information related to war we’ve been given for most of our lives.
Video still from Pink Slime Caesar Shift by Jen Liu (image via bitforms gallery / Facebook)
Outside The Palace Of Heavenly Purity
Opening Thursday, June 7 at bitforms gallery, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through July 22.
America is a popular scapegoat for most of the entire earth’s ills. Usually it’s logical to place blame on our country, as it’s done a lot of not-so-good, but sometimes focusing on just one part of the world isn’t painting an entirely accurate picture. This new group exhibition at bitforms gallery on the Lower East Side seeks to “complicate the prevailing idea of globalization as a force emanating directly from privileged Western centers.” Uniquely, the show is curated by the research collective EST, which focuses on presenting work that frames Asia as a multifaceted place rather than one that the West generalizes as a monolith. For this show, they’ve assembled artists that focus on China, whether this be how plants (yes, like ferns and flowers) might have influenced the Young Chinese Communist Party or how Chinese factory workers attempt to transmit “secret messages of labor insurrection” within mass-produced hamburgers.
(image via TRANSFER / Facebook)
Carp Theory
Opening Saturday, June 9 at Transfer Gallery, 6 pm to 10 pm. On view through June 30.
In 1994, a physicist drew a correlation between human beings living in the world and carp swimming in a pond, in that they both can perceive objects and goings-on that they aren’t tangibly interacting with. Extrapolating from this, the exhibition Carp Theory from curatorial team Alt Esc argues that entirely separate realities can also exist, presenting a variety of creations from artists Kyle Hittmeier, Viktor Timofeev, and Mohsen Hazrati investigating how these realities might manifest. Not only are the concepts in the art pieces varied, but the ways in which you can experience them are too. There’s interactive virtual reality (which seems almost obligatory in speculative art nowadays) featuring anything from crawling cockroaches to self-portraiture, a video depicting a forensic scene and “architectural spectacle,” and more.