Photo By Gail
Say you were creating a miniature holiday diorama, and you were in need of something to represent a Pink Christmas Tree. Wouldn’t this flower, which is a variety of Cockscomb, be just the thing? These little pink blooms have been spotted in the public flower beds around First Avenue and 16th Street during the transition into early fall. Sadly, the bright pink color fades as they come to the end of their lifecycle.
I think they are pretty rad!
Photo By Gail
In Jonas Wood’s (b, 1977) paintings, he often uses intricate decorative patterning to render ordinary objects that hold personal resonance for him. Some of the pots depicted in Night Bloom Still Life (2015) were make by Wood’s wife, Shio Kusaka. Thus, the painting is just as much a self, or family, portrait as it is a still life. “You could call it a visual diary or even a personal history,” the artist has said. This everyday quality, accentuated by flat planes of color and uniform detail, makes the spatial ambiguities in Wood’s work — such as the impossible perspective of the table — all the more disorienting.
Photographed in the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
The New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show just closed for the season this past weekend, so if you missed it, there’s always next year! I had the chance to check it out with a friend on the Saturday when we had that amazing snow storm here in the city, and it was a pretty sweet time. The Train Show — which is about so much more than just model trains — takes place inside the enchanting setting of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, where you can travel back in time, it seems; wandering through miniature landscapes featuring more than 150 scaled iconic buildings, private mansions (many of which do not exist today) and other structures which stretch out amid the plants, under thousands of twinkling lights through various rooms of the conservatory. Also, there are model trains, but they are not necessarily the show stoppers!
Continue reading Midtown Skyscrapers Made From Plants at the NYBG Holiday Train Show
All Photos By Gail
While Meg Webster’s Solar Grow Room — which is just one section of her current, eponymous exhibit at the Paula Cooper Gallery — could easily stand in for a Pink Thing of the Day, I’m going to let it flourish on its own, because it is just so darn rad.
In this installation, Webster turns the Greenhouse Pink! First created for 2015’s Natura Naturans, a joint show with Roxy Paine held at Villa Panza in Milan, Solar Grow Room is an ecosystem sustained by making solar pannel on the gallery exterior. Bathed in pink light, raised planters are cultivated with moss, grass, flowers and other vegetation.
Meg Webster’s work finds inspiration in the intrinsic beauty of natural materials. Using metal, glass and organic elements like salt, soil, twigs and moss, the artist creates large-scale installations and precise structures rooted in the traditions of Land Art of the 1970s. Also highly influenced by Minimalist artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Robert Morris, Webster draws on their rigorous formal vocabulary to create simple, geometric forms that directly and perceptually engage the body and its senses.
The walls of the gallery room look like Fun House Mirrors.
A lifelong environmentalist, Meg Webster draws awareness to nature as an ever-evolving force, as well as mankind’s careless destruction of the earth’s resources and energies. We very much enjoyed this exhibit!
Meg Webster’s Solar Grow Room will be on Exhibit Through June 24th Exhibit Has Been Extended Through July 12th, 2016 at Paula Cooper Gallery, Located at 534 West 21st Street in the Chelsea Gallery District.
All Photos By Gail
It was a complete accident that Geoffrey and I ended up making a pit stop at the gorgeous Brooklyn Botanic Garden as part of a recent trip to visit the Brooklyn Museum. It wasn’t until we were on the train that I noticed (for the first time, ever) that the Eastern Parkway Stop off the 2 and 3 is also the stop for the BBG, so I suggested to Geoffrey that we “See how far away it is from the museum” once we got out of the subway. What we discovered, much to our ecstatic delight, is that the Garden is literally right next to the Museum. It could not possibly have been more conveniently located. Even better, Geoffrey’s work ID card got us in for free, and since we had no strict agenda to follow, we spent over an hour exploring nature as a prelude to some hardcore, art-viewing action. It was an amazing day!