Richard Coleman will be displaying new paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations at New Image Gallery for his exhibition “Keep Out The Light,” opening this Saturday, May 22nd. Fusing a vibrant palette, super-flat pop sensibility and geometric ephemera, his work are like mandalic inscriptions for millenial worship.

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Devin Crane recently released a new series entitled “Heaven Can Wait,” combining the unusual concepts of high fashion, sexuality and theology. Inspired by every day life, Devin states that he “wanted to bathe each painting in heavenly light and contrast with dark pieces of turmoil. This represents the choices we make in life that can either bring us absolute pleasure or confinement in our self-made prisons.”

Devin Crane is a well known computer animator working with the likes of Disney and Dreamworks. Some of his projects included Shrek 2 and Aliens 4. His use of rich color, highly stylized figures, and satire brings a heightened sense of awareness. Devin will be exhibiting “Heaven Can Wait,” at Galerie Arludik in Paris on May 25th, 2010.

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Small Victories, the latest project by Booooooom, opens Thursday May 20th at Hong Kong’s Above Second gallery. This collaborative experiment came together by requesting 4×6 photographic prints from numerous participants, and aims to be  “a photographic celebration of the quietly beautiful, unintentionally funny, people and things all around us. It is these little moments that make life worth living.” If you can’t make it to Hong Kong, Booooooom.com will be posting the submissions.

May 20th at Above Second gallery, 31 Eastern Street Hong Kong.

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Elemental and Royal/T are hosting a benefit art auction for Build Change, a non-profit organization that helps build earthquake resistant homes. The night will feature 92 artists and over 100 works of art, as well as live music and free food. For more info on the show and the artists involved, please visit www.aftershockla.com. See some of my favorite images by artists in the show after the jump.

 

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Sculpture artist Johnston Foster’s new exhibit,  Catch & Release, opens next Saturday, May 15th, at New York’s RARE gallery. Foster, whom we featured in Beautiful/Decay Issue Y, has always created incredible somethings from the populace’s discarded nothings, but in his new show Foster also focuses on creation as his subject matter. There’s a little something for everyone in Johnston Foster’s new show: sharks, tigers, hornets, unicorns and of course a pizza pie -  masterfully sculpted from a myriad of materials: pvc, bicycle spokes, marbles and a kiddie pool, to name a few.

The show opens on Saturday May 15th with a reception from 6-8pm and runs through June 19th.

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Rachel Niffenegger

John Parot, who was featured in our B/D Book 3, and Rachel Niffenegger currently have exhibitions up at Chicago gallery Western Exhibitions./(which, coincidentally enough, also stocks B/D Book 3!) John Parot, with his exhibition “Hobbies,” continues his poetic musings on gay urban living, and focuses in on internet dating to reflect how identity, meaning and love are constructed under the auspices of Web 2.0’s arrow. A multi-hued pie chart displays Facebook-esque likes and dislikes: “hot fudge sundae,” “enough with the man-scarves,” and “no beige!”

Rachel Niffenegger, in Gallery 2, creates sculptures and ephemeral-washed paintings dealing with the grotesque nature of the human body, executed with a hauntingly beautiful hand. Drawing its title from an ancient epitaph, “As you pass by and cast an eye as you are now so once was I,” the exhibition seems to conjure the ghostly spirits from beyond the gravestone she references.

Rachel Niffenegger

Rachel Niffenegger

Rachel Niffenegger

John Parot, "Self-Portrait, Infrared (Detail)." 2010

John Parot, "Angel, Down We Go Together." 2007

John Parot, "Spectrum's End." 2010

John Parot, "The Pyre, Page 6." 2006.

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Photographer Jeremy Blincoe works & lives in Melbourne. His series entitled Wander & Wonder is currently featured at the Lindberg Galleries. These fantastic images bring to mind, perhaps, the more innocent side of adult tales such as Alice in Wonderland or Huckleberry Finn – just before that darker something sets in, where pure curiosity still survives with wide eyes.

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"Candy Colored Clown (Lemon Eye Zig Zag Teeth)"

I never was too good at crafts. The little “easy loom” knit-a-kitten sets always came out looking surprisingly like Liz Craft’s sculpture, above…a mess of plaster-cast, jumbo yarn, pea-pod plastic dishes forming some sort of  goofy-grin. Or at least, I wished they came out like her work. In her recent fifth solo exhibition, “Death of a Clown” that just finished up at Patrick Painter, Liz Craft examines, in part, the culture of Regretsy…(Etsy + Regret). Macrame-mishaps and craft-catastrophes are elevated to objects d’art. At once humorous and fresh, Craft’s odd string-beards, tears, and thrift store nick-nacks don’t disappoint.

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Alexander Brodsky, "Settlement"

Kant, in “The End of All Things,” suggested that the imagination is more active in the dark than in the light. The current exhibition at Matthew Bown gallery explores this concept for its current group exhibition. Taking its title from Baudelaire’s description of his Creole lover, “noire et pourtant lumineuse,” (black and yet luminous), Matthew Bown literally “turns the lights off” in the gallery, shrouding it in total darkness, to present a group of artists who explore concepts of lightness/darkness within their work. Alexander Brodsky, above, creates an organ griding machine that plays the Beatles, and encases a lit-up city in the murky depths of an tank aquarium tank. Gunda Forster’s work consists of  a wedge of intensely bright light, shining through a crack between the door and the floor- referencing the great divine mystery of that which lies beyond. The exhibition runs until May 25 in Berlin.

Alexander Brodsky, "Settlement" (detail)

Gunda Forster, "Light Slit"

Katie Paterson, "Lightbulb to simulate moonlight"

Anina Brisolla, "Mall"

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This weekend will be the last to view painter Matt Mignanelli’s work, currently on display at the Recoat Gallery in Glasgow.

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