Personal recommendations: SCOPE New York
Jeremy Lawson, "As Far As I Can Tell" (2008), $15,000
While most people with an invitation or a press card headed for Armory Show’s west side piers today, I did my slightly eccentric thing by checking out the SCOPE tent at the back of Lincoln Center. I wasn’t disappointed, as you can read in my ARTINFO round-up. SCOPE isn’t the biggest fair, but it’s still too sprawling to sum up in one 700-word review, and there were a couple of things that I particularly wanted to draw attention to here.
First, Jeremy Lawson’s large-scale pencil drawings that filled the walls of 33 Bond Gallery’s booth. I was particularly taken with his As Far As I Can Tell, his beautifully crafted night sky triptych. At $15,000 it’s totally out of my price range, but as is often the case, that is hardly the point. This is a splendid, seductive, evocative piece, and I got great pleasure from it, even in the crazy atmosphere of an art fair’s opening afternoon. Plus, as each panel is 4 feet by 3, it works out at less than $3 per heavily penciled square inch. That isn’t a lot for an artist to ask, it seems to me. And let me stress, I didn’t choose it just because of how appropriate that starry sky looks on the front page of this site.
Jesse Greenberg, "Invitation Station 1" (2008), $9,000
Then, some work that I did mention briefly in my ARTINFO piece: Jesse Greenberg’s sculptures at Okay Mountain, a young artist-run gallery from Austin, TX. This is not only the gallery’s first SCOPE, it’s their first art fair, period. If a crew of late twentieth century gaming machines, car interiors, ATMs, and vending machines were blasted into space and were then subjected to some mutating radiation poisoning in a mid-flight catastrophe, then their bastard children would probably resemble Mr Greenberg’s sculptures and wall reliefs. Indeed some of them come complete with families of so-called “touchables,” bizarre little plastic toys that suggest water pistols, TV remotes, or those toddlers’ make-believe cell phones that come filled with candies. Although almost every aspect of these sculptures evokes something domestic and familiar, the sum of their parts is utterly novel and disconcerting. I thought they were quite wonderful.
