Carrie Moyer at CANADA and more

There's much to like in Carrie Moyer's current show of new paintings at CANADA gallery at 55 Chrystie on the Lower East Side (just North of Canal Street). Before I read the press release, I scribbled down a few of my favorite things:
- pigment: thick and thin, sometimes a glaze or inhabited with glitter, sometimes almost like a stain painting by Helen Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, other times so thickly applied that it has cracked
- color
- sometimes just raw canvas among the colors
- red string lines, mostly free form among the more precise edges of color areas, is this the influence of her partner Sheila Pepe?
- shapes that evoke: breasts but "First instance" reads to me like a thrusting male member
- a bit of Miró, a Target, puppets and calligraphy

And then I read the press release which talked about "Arcana" (the show's title) referring to the Tarot deck. I don't know much about Tarot so I'll have to take their word for it. There's also a list of what we might see and what it means. No mention of male parts so it must be me. The picture above is appropriated from the CANADA website; not "First instance" (and not identified by title on the website) but fairly representative.

My next stop was going to be Leslie/Lohman to see the Marco Silombria show so I started meandering North and West. I stopped at Jane Kim/Thrust Projects and found the Momoyo Torimitsu show. The gallery is full of small resin sculptures imitating melted chocolate Easter bunnies, supposedly critiquing consumerism. I don't really get it, or it doesn't move me.

Next. I vaguely remembered that Storefront's current show was on an interesting topic so I aimed there, forgetting that it was too far North for Leslie/Lohman.

The show now at Storefront for Art and Architecture is "49 cities" put together by WORK Architecture Company (WORKac): plans and statistics about 49 plans for better cities, whether that be denser or sparser, higher or over water, green or aerial. Included were the Royal Salt Works at Arc-et-Senans, a Roman town, a colonial Latin American town, some of the megastructures of the 1960s and 1970s, Levittown, garden cities, Broadacre City, Radiant City. The catalog is wonderful and reproduces most of the stuff in the exhibition. I find it an amusing coincidence that Storefront's show of photos from early last year was called "49 state capitols." The gallery guy said the 49s were just coincidental.

As I left the gallery, someone called my name and there was Jim Bergesen leading a group of young women galleryhoppers from Connecticut. We talked a bit about the joys and sorrows of galleryhopping amid the shoppers and lunch takers. And then I realized I was too far North for Leslie/Lohman so went to the grocery store and home. There's a lecture by Nina Katchadourian at Hunter College tonight: more evidence of the value of Facebook where I saw a notice for the artist talk.