Meryl Meisler is a Brooklyn based photographer who captured a very tumultuous, dangerous, and simultaneously glamorous era in NYC history – the 1970s and 80s. During that time, Manhattan was erupting with surreal characters and scenesters, gallivanting in iconic night clubs, while across the bridge in Bushwick, Brooklyn, there was destruction, arson, looting, the crack epidemic, and tensions between the disenfranchised communities that resided there. She taught in a Bushwick public school and with camera at the ready she bore firsthand witness to the opposing worlds, which existed just few subway stops apart.

Meryl carried a medium format camera nearly everywhere she went, and caught a glimpse into two very different social environments. One of those settings was the disco-era music and dance scene. She snapped photos of William Shatner, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and frequented  Studio 54. She went to places like the Paradise Garage, one of the most powerful House music venues of all time.

Meryl Meisler referred to the initial lines of A Tale of Two Cities when describing the then NYC dichotomy between extravagant Manhattan nightlife and the struggling nightmare of Bushwick, Brooklyn.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” – Charles Dickens

I went on a walk with Meryl, and then she took me out to lunch. Her eyes glowed with compassion and warmth. She currently lives in Chelsea, and she supervises/teaches future art teachers at NYU. Her new exhibition highlights photos published in her new book by Bizarre Publishing, called A Tale of Two Cities & her work is displayed in Bushwick’s Black Box Gallery (12 Jefferson Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206). She sent me photos, some of which have never been released. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did:

The original Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, and later to become the Priceline spokesperson, William Shatner is seen above. Meryl didn’t seek these people out, they just showed up in her life without her going out of the way. They seemed to be bizarre characters that had found their place in the media.

I love this one, it’s almost as if there was a crossover with disco night life into the grime and neglect of Bushwick.  My guess is that this depicts the relics of the night a woman got drunk, and experienced that shaky, exciting time. The shoes are evidence of god-only-knows what kind of misfortune and tales of love and loss that accompanied this shoe’s original owner.

 Meryl described Grace Jones (follow the link to view Jones’ YouTube video, ‘Cannibal Corpse’) as a diva, and when she walked in, she looked fabulous and divine.

This photograph cracks me up, the overt abundance of pubic hair, and the benevolent yet devious grin of the man contorting his body. Not to mention the guy with the flamboyant hat, in a mesmerized daze.

I said, “why not ask her for a photo of herself?” This photograph exemplifies the sexy and exuberant energy that I witnessed Meisler to possess ( she is standing to the left).

Meryl talked about where these three amigos wound up – one in jail, one died, and one still lives in Brooklyn. This photo was the first one that caught my attention due to the presence of innocence that had the immanency of destruction and pain.

To see more of Meisler’s photos, check out the show in Bushwick.

Meryl Meisler’s
A TALE OF TWO CITIES:
DISCO ERA BUSHWICK
exhibition and book launch
Exhibit open through September 10, 2014
Gallery Hours: Daily, 11am – 4am
BIZARRE PUBLISHING
8.5 x 11 inches
180 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9910141-1-8
$40.00 USA/CAN

Written by Andrew Kaminski

The post Is This Bushwick’s First Hipster? Meryl Meisler Photographed The Neighborhood Before It Was Cool appeared first on Artiholics.

New York City – Monday, April 21, 2014

Under the Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, immediately caught my attention with its entrancing, artistic trailer. I was drawn to Johansson’s gaze, and the comparison of director, Jonathan Glazer to Stanley Kubrick.

Artiholics gives the perspective of culture as told from an artist’s perspective, therefore I aim to do exactly that with this film that employed an artist’s eye to so many frames of the film [SPOILERS TO COME].

If you’re looking to see a film that doesn’t have a conventional Hollywood plot with predictable punchlines, but rather disturbing and at times uncomfortable dialogue between bizarre characters, ‘Under the Skin’ delivers that and leaves you feeling like you transported to some strange place that only an off kilter story and captivating cinematography can bring you.

The film offers a full spectrum of rich landscapes. A vast beach, rocks on the shore, violent waves, with a crying infant in its vastness and threatening tides. An urban environment, architecture surrounding busy crowds of civilians, with faces and interactions overlaid on top of one another in an orange luminescent glow suggesting the seemingly infinite layers of personalities and entanglement of connections immersed in a metropolis.

A forest dense with green towering pine trees bending and swaying in powerful gusts of wind that Johansson loses herself in as she is swallowed in bright scorching flames to contrast with the vegetation. The film concludes with the billowing clouds of grey smoke exuding into the abysmal sky Johansson’s extraterrestrial host descended from.

The chilling serenity of the natural settings is mirrored by the haunting scenes of the house Johansson lures her male victims in to harvest their skin and essence. The house is entered through a cellar door, and the unsuspecting and sexually hungry men are immersed in darkness with a stark light on them and Johansson, as she takes off her clothes. “Come to me,” she tells them seductively. They walk with a masculine strut, and as they inch closer, they start to submerge into a reflective black liquid.

One after another, men are lured into her deadly residence, and only after multiple men, does the camera reveal what occurs under the black surface the men have walked into.

In astonishment, the male character moves his limbs with a tinted blue glow on his skin. He spots another being submerged near him. The other has wrinkled flesh, as if he had instantly lost half his weight in a few hours. The two males, facing their surreal predicament, grasp hands, revealing the difference between the wrist of one and the deflated elastic appearance of the other. In a sudden and shocking moment, the wrinkled character is sharply sucked down into the depths of the abysmal darkness. The scene cuts to the bottom of a rectangular tunnel, flowing with sparkling blood pulled towards a vanishing point.

Although it is utterly horrifying, the liquid the characters are submerged within has a solitude and a silence that we can only barely reach in a deep meditation.

Under the Skin takes us through layers of human experience, and as we follow Johansson through cityscape, humans cape, forests, stillness, sexuality, fire, and snow, I considered how we travel from youth until death, searching for something or someone to fill our days, but the only quality that will take us away from our pain, lies beneath us, within us, under the skin.

Written by Andrew Kaminski

The post Layer by Layer ‘Under the Skin’ Artistically Takes Us… [SPOILERS] appeared first on Artiholics.

New York  – Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Forty four never before seen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat are now on sale through Christie’s from March 3-17, 2014. The works are being held on the twentieth floor of Rockefeller Plaza, at Christie’s showroom in midtown Manhattan. The press was able to get a sneak preview of the Basquiat exhibit on Friday, February 28th, where we met the collector, Alexis Adler.

Adler was Basquiat’s intimate partner from 1979 to 1980, where they shared a Lower East Side apartment. Adler gained many scribbles, notes, poems, a notebook, sketches, a painted radiator, objects, xerox prints, a painted door, to name just some. Basquiat was only 19 when he made the works presented in this show, but his work had already started maturing to the point where it would later sell for millions.

My professor from City College, Colin Chase, said he crossed paths with Basquiat at one point, and it he was like seeing “a shooting star.” So how was Jean-Michel like a shooting star? What made him so spectacular? Apparently at his time, many people that knew him, knew he would be great.

“He always knew that he had something, and that was his drive… he just had this spark. It was in his eyes,” says Alexis Adler,( as quoted in P. Hoban, Basquiat A Quick Killing in Art, 1998, p. 48.)

Basquiat’s art had a profound impact on the art world partially because he was relevant to the times he was working in. In the late 1970s, when he first made an appearance in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, his graffiti tags, which were in so many places according to news media at the time, coalesced hip hop, post-punk, and street art movements.

By the 1980s, he was exhibiting his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings in galleries and museums all over the world. In 1992, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his work. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a means of shining light upon deeper truths about the individual. His work was outspoken on attacking power structures, systems of racism, while his poetry and his language were sharply political and made a direct criticism of colonialism, and he made a support for class struggle.

Basquiat’s art focused on dichotomies, such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He merged text with image, appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, abstraction and figuration, and historical and contemporary critique. He had a lot to say, and it made things even more compelling that this extremely intellectual, yet rebellious individual was black, and played a major seat of power in the Art world.

This is a work from 1983 called “Notary.” As viewers, we can see that Basquiat could tap into some kind of channel, that allowed him to make work of urgency, impulsivity, layering, symbolism, exquisite color palette, and once you stare at the painting for a while, you start to read into its social commentary. This painting was not in the collection at auction at Christie’s, but it shows Basquiat’s work at its height.

So what is special about this collection that Basquiat made when he was seeing Alexis Adler? This work reveals the beckoning of Basquiat’s extremely valuable and prolific career. He had mastered his mark making, his technique by the early 1980s. The collection of Alexis Adler is a collection of the beginning of his repertoire, the beginning of him forming his rich vocabulary. He was starting to find his voice, and he was painting and drawing on everything and anything he could put paint and make marks on.

When Christie’s curator, Jonathan Laib, asked Alexis “What motivated your decision to publicize your collection and provide interviews in the spring of 2013?” Alexis responded:

“Every year or so I’ve had an inquiry. Every year an art dealer or somebody would just call me up out of the blue, and say I’m doing this story about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I understand you knew him, and so I’d talk to them. It would happen about once a year. And then we went to the Gagosian show, and somebody from ArtInfo spoke to a friend of mine who was also there. And they found out that I knew him, or had a collection, or whatever, and call me up. I’ve always wanted to share the artwork. Shows would appear, and I was like, “I wish I could get some of his artwork seen, or shown.”

I had been to a panel discussion at the New School with my son when he was there. He’s since graduated. And it was a panel with Al Diaz, Michael Holman, and Annina Nosei, and Alan, Michael, and I are close friends. The room was packed out with young people mostly who really wanted to learn more about Jean. And so I was like, wow, this is really interesting and cool that so many young people are interested in his art.

The idea of sharing my story, as well as sharing my art became more appealing. But really, it’s about his art. I’m really excited to be able to have the show at Christie’s, as well as share the artwork with other people so they can enjoy it. I’ve been enjoying it for a long time.”

The sweatshirt in this photo is going to be sold, starting price of $10,000. Basquiat hand painted it himself.

This sweatshirt is priced between $7,000 and $9,000.

Untitled (Olive Oyl), 48 X30 inches is priced at $400,000 – $600,000.  Representative of his former life of graffiti in NYC streets, he you can see the spontaneity of the paint strokes in the lower left hand corner of the painting. Basquiat combined references to American cartoon character Olive Oyl from Popeye, with the white picket fence. This piece foreshadows Basquiat’s strong style that was later to come.

The show offers a never before seen glimpse into the mind of a very profound mind, and extremely talented artist.

The show is up March 1-28,2014, at 1230 Avenue of Americas, 20th floor, New York, NY, 10020

Written by Andrew Kaminski

The post Never Before Seen Basquiat Works On Sale After Hiding for 35 Years. appeared first on Artiholics.

Castle Fitzjohns Gallery, Lower East Side, New York, NY – Gabriel Gimenez, an artist born and raised in Miami, has invented his own icon: Fado. Fado is the character he connects with the most personally among all the characters he has generated over his career as an artist. He uses Fado to convey his different themes, and he uses this character as a way of telling a story.

In one of his paintings Gabriel had references to Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, Banksys, Basquiat, and Andy Warhol. He creates connections with these major artists by referencing their recognizable appearances. Keith Haring for instance, was standing above the “radiant baby,” his iconic symbol representing his work. Keith Haring created a plethora of line drawings that symbolized a multitude of characters with different implications of nuclear holocaust, sexuality, AIDS, and commercialism. Gabriel seemed to be influenced by Haring’s large overtones with simple line drawings. Gabriel’s work created an extension of line work’s powerful ability to convey big meaning that Haring had generated, except Gimenez supplemented Fado.“Fado,” as Gimenez states, implies a character of “curiosity and confusion,” with one eye bulging large, and one eye small. Gabriel drew upon Haring’s and Warhol’s implications of commercialism by referencing the dollar symbol within many of his works, suggesting  the commercialistic society we currently abide by.

Gimenez, in his pull to engage the audience with pressing contemporary issues references Steve Jobs and  Mac computers, and how they echo Warhol’s concept of the Campbell’s soup can. Mac computers are mass produced, often to break down within an agitating short amount of time. A Mac computer, which consumers wish to love and cherish, becomes another perishable consumer product, just like a Campbell’s soup can. An image that we see repeatedly, that we in turn worship as an object that will bring function and happiness to our lives, is yet another material possession produced by a corporation that essentially wants to take our money, and does not truly care about our satisfaction. 

He is a self taught artist, he didn’t go to school for art, which explains the sense of raw urgency behind his work. His style has not been filtered and watered down by academia. Gabriel produces an extraordinary amount of paintings, all clearly generated by him. Gabriel samples different artists’ work, as he says, as a “hip hop artist.” He aims to create “new ways of how society sees things.”.

The most pivotal point in his work is a “personal expression.” He aims to express spontaneous things. He filled the entire downstairs of Castle Fitzjohns Gallery with paintings all of a consistent visual icon. Fado took over the paintings, and marked Gabriel’s signature character within different themes of cultural iconography, whether it be Fado as Darth Fader, or Fado as the Beatles, or Fado as any of the many artists icons that Gimenez is influenced by. Fado is Gimenez’s way of creating a footing within society, generating a new symbol that society is faced with. Fado is a defiant expression of an artist who competes with domineering figures and symbols that we cannot escape, by supplementing its own face amongst the chaos of a money driven society.

I asked him if his work will evolve over time, and he responded that for the past 2 years, his work has become more conceptual, in that it targets concepts more than aesthetics. It has changed from graphics into work that has become more idea-based. He feels that he is expressing things at their essence.

I asked him if he believed in a higher power, or in a soul. He responded that as far as a spirituality, he is still trying to chase that idea, and he is trying to comprehend spirituality, and his work suggests that search. He is primarily sharing ideas for other people. He feels that any artist sharing his/her work is a spiritual practice.

Gabriel feels that he is always pushing himself.  Marcel Duchamp is the artist that is pushing him the most, and although none of Duchamp’s concepts directly influences Gimenez’s work, understanding how theoretical Duchamp’s work goes, pushes Gabriel to extend his boundaries, and dig deeper with his visions.

written and photographed by Andrew Kaminski

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, galleries have been sprouting up in the Lower East Side left and right. With hundreds of galleries in the LES , it’s hard to keep up with all the openings. Artiholics has your back when it comes to know which galleries to check out, and what upcoming and established artists are making their presence known.

Last Thursday, the Broadway Gallery displayed the work of ninteen artists in the opening for their newest show Artists at Home and Abroad: December Edition. The theme was simply International and local emerging artists showing together in New York. This is a special gallery that seeks new talent with very little gallery experience, and helps upcoming artists network with internationally renown artists. This article is a recap of that show. I encourage you to check it out.

An artist that particularly caught my attention was Loreal Prystaj. Her work on display was a dramatic black and white photograph with a gorgeous composition. This piece showed the back of a woman, gazing out into the horizon of a vast body of water.

This piece intrigued me, and I later discovered more of Loreal’s work, which turned out to be stunning. Way to go Loreal. Hopefully she’ll have a solo show soon. She certainly deserves it, and will surely captivate a large overcrowded gallery at that opening.

Another artist, Paola Frisoli, had two large vibrant paintings on display. Frisoli takes you into her colorful world, and you quickly realize that she wants to bring simply happiness to the viewer in a playful and childlike manner. She has come all the way from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Her artwork, she describes, favors the colors, with their volumes and symbols, where there is harmony between the point and understanding.” She doesn’t speak English fluently, but she radiated a peaceful and benevolent vibration

Next was artist Duane e. Hilburn, who was excited to tell me his story. This man survived cancer, was shot in the neck, and worked his way from nothing, to eventually being in this gallery. He had a gripping story of survival, and he feels he has just a little bit more time to live. His artwork was made from construction materials such as sheetrock, cement, and other materials used to construct buildings. In his life, he was an architect, and his history of constructing has led him to build his immense, and heavy sculptures/paintings/reliefs.

His work reflects his near death experiences, and reveals the mind of an extremely hard worker, with the faith that he is here for a greater purpose. Good luck Duane!

There was also David M. Bowers, whose work was reminiscent of the early Renaissance painters, with qualities of realism, and a skill of conveying the illusion of real flesh and subject matters. His work was humorous, seductive, and incredibly skillful. He had two paintings on display, and they will awe you in their ability to convey realistic imagery, with a touch of fantasy.

So much wall space was covered that the artwork barely had any room to breathe, but this gallery’s motive behind their shows is to showcase upcoming talent, and compliment them with their selection of International talent.

Since the show was a group show, none of the artist’s work was extensively explored, but rather each piece displayed was a tease, inviting you to take a further step, and check out the artist’s oeuvre within their website.

December Artists Include:

Make sure to check out the gallery’s supportive NY Arts magazine for more information.

Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway, Floor 7 |  New York, NY

Gallery Hours:  Monday – Friday,  10 AM – 6 PM

Written and photographed by Andrew Kaminski

Slideshow photographed by Cojo

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