Gallery Days

Saturday was our first "gallery day." Because Chelsea is PACKED with galleries, we can never hit all of them in one day. We'll head over to Chelsea and just hit gallery after gallery. We never stay for too long unless the show is extraordinarily good or someone keeps us there for a random reason.

Having been on this trip before, I can say that yesterday was a great day for galleries. It is random because we rarely research shows before going. If you haven't noticed yet, this trip is extremely organic. If something comes up, plans will change, days off will disappear, writing down the agenda can sometimes become meaningless, but it definitely makes it more exciting and every time plans do change, it is for a good reason.

Back to the galleries. We went to about 20 different galleries and over 10 of them had solid shows that we were all impressed with. The Mixed Greens gallery stood out to me, especially. It was a solid show from Joseph Smolinski which was essentially a record of when wildlife becomes fed up with the encroaching technology (cell phone towers, etc) and begins to take the wilderness back. "The Beginning of the End" contained drawings, sculptures and videos all documenting this revolution and the work was incredible. My favorite piece was a drawing of a whale who had beached on top of a street and had managed to rip down powerlines before dying, only the skeleton remained. Phenomenal show.

We also visited Hasted, Hunt, Kraeutleur and Bill Hunt the owner came out to greet us. He ended up providing incredible conversation ranging from the lack of sense of humor in art and how DooWop saved his life. He touched on several subjects and also asked some intriguing questions.

There was obviously much more to this trip to Chelsea, like the gallery talk at the Michael Mazzeo gallery. If you want to see some of the other stuff we saw, look up Andre Butzer, Elisa Johns, Jennifer Poon, and Erick Swenson. They all had great stuff to show us.