Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, Left Brain

On Friday we stopped by ATM Gallery on Avenue B for the opening of Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir. There was a bit more buzz than one usually sees at an East Village opening these days -- Björk was there, supporting her fellow Icelander. She hung out in the gallery and on Avenue B for the entire time I was there, so she was probably there for most of the opening. I love NY! She can hang out like that without being accosted, which would be more likely to happen further uptown, or further west in Manhattan.

Then we hopped on the L to go to Williamsburg to check out the Third Friday happenings. One thing about the Plus Ultra show -- the cartoons by Will Self were surprisingly good.

The highlights of the evening were to be found at Brooklyn Fire Proof and Open Ground. The former is morphing into a gallery space in addition to being artists studios. They showed some great work, and had a good band with videos and people dancing in costumes. They're a little "at the edge" geographically, but that's changing -- witness the location of The Morning News party. I can't find anything about her via Google, but there were some nice works on paper by Stine Hedegaard Andersen, and I got a chance to meet Steven Baines, whose work I had seen recently at White Columns.

The other highlight was the (In)Security show at Open Ground. Approriately for a collaborative gallery space, they have a Wiki for a web site!

One of the things from the show is available for download from the artist, Rebecca Ross's web site. It's called "The Okay News" and is described thusly:

The Okay News memory resident Mac OSX application

A re-formed newspaper that runs in the background of everyday computer use. Every twenty minutes OkayNews delivers a headline from that day's New York Times to an operating system warning box with the single button "Okay", which must be pressed to continue using the computer.

I think the "Third Friday" event was a big success. There were a lot of people at every gallery I visited, including neighborhood people that asked questions as if they didn't normally go to galleries. As we walked around, we encountered quite a few people who were asking for directions, or asked where to get a copy of the gallery map.