Working on the theory that you can make something so bad it’s good, Misaki Kawai presents faux naïve painting and sculpture at The Hole that entices with its wild color and cartoonish figures. (On the Lower East Side through Oct 30th).
Caroline Larsen’s paintings are a deliberate tour-de-force of low-brow associations, resembling latch-hook or embroidery, created by squeezing oil paint through pastry bags and mounted on cheap wall coverings. Seemingly designed to test whether there’s any fertile ground left in the fine art vs kitsch debate, they deliberately elude the kind of transcendence that this majestic mountainscape might suggest. (At The Hole NYC through July 24th).
At first glance, Adam Parker Smith’s shiny mylar balloon sculptures don’t look long for this world; inside of each, however, are resin & fiberglass interiors and metal armatures that give the sculptures heft. Arranged around a faux rock garden, the balloons resemble classic Greek sculptures reinterpreted with humor – Venus stands in the foreground with a champagne bottle body barely covered by a flying scarf while Augustus towers to the rear of the gallery. (At The Hole on the Lower East Side through July 24th).
In person, the subjects of LA painter Vanessa Prager’s heavily painted portraits only faintly emerge from their textured backgrounds; in photos, they materialize more readily. The implications of being more visible on a screen aren’t lost on Prager, who has installed peep-holes through out the gallery to carry on a conversation about the absence and presence of images today. (At The Hole NYC on the Lower East Side through Feb 29th).
Rachel de Joode, ‘Here I am and things that exist. Ow! XIV (foreground), archival inkjet print on PVC with pedestal, 60 x 34 x 14 inches, 2015.
