CITYist

Screw, Spread, Slip, Stuck, Stab, Fall, Cross and Writhe. No, this is not a horror film description. These eight foreboding adjectives are the title for Andisheh Avini’s art exhibit now on view, through November 8, at HALF Gallery.

The quiet opening of Yeholee’s new shop on a calm corner of 38th Street marks a major shift in the New York fashion dynamic. Yeholee is the first designer to open a retail shop in the garment district, and by doing so, she has become a visionary forerunner, pushing the idea of local fashion forward to a reality.

Slicked hair and supersized blazers in shades of grey tossed over tissue tees were sent forth at the start of Duckie Brown’s Spring/Summer 2011 show. A mist grey coat that floated above the runway displayed the penchant for volume characteristic of the label’s designs. Cuffed trousers abounded, in step with the season. As the models took their standing space on the risers facing the audience the vision of a garment gradation began to take form. The preppy, square, suited man slid down—by way of animal prints and crayola select leggings—into a make-do-with-salvage aesthetic, and then to boyhood innocence, with sciencey pajama-like prints of insects. By the end of the show, the model began to look if he had been dressed in the dark in Kurt Cobain’s childhood closet.

A humming bird is stuck to the wall, midflight. A turtle, spun around on its shell, futilely paddles scaly legs. A garden snake hangs limply from a nail, coiled as a dried discarded rope. An overturned octopus, tentacles casting snake-like shadows, balances with a majestic eerieness surrounded by these smaller simpler beings. This is Mark Calderon’s sculptural menagerie of little lead animals now on view at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery.

Nocturne, 2008. Bronze.

The grey and gloomy weather on Thursday didn’t cast a single shadow on the country sun collection that Suzanne Rae presented for Spring. Inspired by road trips, Western films and a pure Americana, clothes for a playful prairie girl came through: lace layered, fuchsia frilled and petticoats peeking. Through a windowed wall at The Standard, a panorama of industrial river traffic and decaying dock posts poking out of the Hudson set the backdrop for models with windswept updos and quarter-wide braids, who stood on wooden risers surrounded by buckets of tall grass.

In a fall collection based on the Nancy Drew mystery stories, young Brooklyn-based designer Rachel Antonoff presents a full house of feminine day wear and graceful gowns straight off the pages of a detective novel. Printed tops and sassy shorts come in the distinctive shade of mustard macaroni that color the bindings of the Carolyn Keene books, yet Antonoff’s true talent is revealed in the cuts of her dresses.

If Andy Warhol was a woman, and that woman was a garden, how might it grow? Photographers Paul Solberg and Christopher Makos, longtime friends who collaborate in a prank-infused partnership dubbed “The Hilton Brothers,” set out to answer this strange question in their exhibit “Andy Dandy.” The show is a collection of diptyches—paired pictures—with Warhol in drag and vibrant blooms.

At times colorless color can hold the most complexity. Miles Mendenhall’s solo show of grey, white and black screenprints opening at HALF GALLERY on Tuesday, August 24 proves this with an uncommon vibrancy. The intimate space is well-suited to host the reflective work of this young, talented finalist from Bravo’s Work of Art. (On a side note, check out judge Bill Power’s article on the show.) The Midwesterner, whose innocent fresh face could be more easily seen as a Disney channel heartthrob than a rising art world star, is exploring the subjectivity of digital distortion in this show.

Have you ever leafed through a stack of snapshots and considered the image far too flat for what you remember of the place? The work of San Francisco based artist Patricia McClung seeks to change all that with its explorations of the layers behind landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and MoMA. McClung uses between 30 and 75 pictures taken over time of a single spot and pulls apart spaces, focuses in on faces and creates several hundred mini-pictures, creating a collage of a monument in a moment.

Tim Byrne looks in the mud for inspiration. Out of the mud behind shuttered factories, he’ll pull his material: discarded machinery. Cast iron gear cranks and supports will be married to wood or glass to create tables and benches. In the ultimate act of post-industrial repurposing, Byrne creates contemporary furniture from yesterday’s debris.

The new Neon Indian video for low-fi single “Sleep Paralysist” feels like wandering through the inside of a series of Polaroids—colors and images distort around you as the environment is shaken for developing. The Austin-bred artist, who just signed to Fader, broke from working with Brooklyn video and visual artist Alicia Scardetta to partner with Focus Creeps, the filmmaking duo behind many of the Girls videos. The result, three minutes of psychedelic nostalgia and paranoia, is pure shock art.

The past few days have been so hot and humid there’s been nothing to do but think about but escape. This has been on the mind of Devendra Banhart too, as he creates and curates A WAYS A WAY premiering tonight at HALF GALLERY, the forward-thinking space helmed by CITY edit board member (and judge of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, art’s answer to Project Runway premiering tomorrow night on Bravo) Bill Powers.

Sample sales at Parlor showroom, home of some of our favorite indie fashion brands such as Samantha Pleet (see yesterday’s post), trend setters Timo Weiland and southern belle style from Lorrick, are more of a party than any sample sale we’ve ever seen. This evening, the designers from Timo Weiland will be DJing the sale (dance party anyone?) and passing round margaritas (which, frankly, is all we’re thinking about on this hot Friday afternoon). As for Ms. Pleet: not only does she design delightful daywear, she also bakes.

Read on for details…

Tucker Nichols opens a solo show at ZieherSmith tonight where he explores our relationship to the city through Zen arranged rocks, skyscrapers of rocks, thoughtful maps and balls of blanket fuzz. We checked in with him this morning as the mid-career modernist walked to the gallery, talking art theory along the way.

Read on for our Q&A.

Barbed wire, tired billboards, taped together tents, inky black brick vortexes, and shadowy moons. These are a few of the elements that will explore the tension between utopic ideals and a dystopic reality at the Utopia / Dystopia show that opens Friday at STOREFRONT gallery in Brooklyn.

New York based artist Bjorn Meyer-Ebrecht submits large scale ink drawings of architecture in post-war Germany. The empty buildings are meant to portray an absence of history, and the thoughtfully taped together disjointed sections further evoke a disorientating, empty feel.

Design collective JNBY, a dozen Chinese women with a well-established business in Asia and Russia, takes on the stateside market today with the opening of its first American retail outpost. A butter-cream yellow storefront on Greene Street, the shop has standard Soho retail elements: brick walls, empty space and garments individually bungee-corded and hung by hooks (though watch for the helicopter-inspired dressing room slated to land in the store next month).