Last Sunday we went to DUMBO to see Outpost at Smack Mellon and Future Species at DUMBO Arts Center (DAC). The press release for "Outpost" is from a real estate site, since Smack Mellon hasn't updated their web site in a month. While you're on that site, feel free to buy me one of the penthouses at 30 Main Street as a present.
The DAC show was a bit disappointing. The best works in the show, and not just because we own one of them, are the Matthew Callinan sculptures. They're quite magical, hanging in a space with large windows in DUMBO, and everyone walking into the gallery talked about them and smiled. I also liked the twisted toy sculptures of David Krepfle.
The "Outpost" show at Smack Mellon, curated by Ada Chisholm, was excellent. I'm very sorry I missed Cory Arcangel's power-point-presentation-with-Van-Halen-guitar-solo at the opening. His work in the show consists of "videos" on DVD created by tricking QuickTime to interpret memory blocks in his computer as video data. They're quite beautiful. Greg Simsic, who is also the author of some design and computer books, had a great installation of 11 video monitors stacked on several folding tables. They showed various activities in his studio -- picking up objects, things getting soaked, hands dipping into paint, etc. Chad Silver had a funny video in which he looks around his apartment for animals and characters hidden in the patterns of the wall textures, clothing piles, and other places.
