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Zap! Bam! Zowee!

If visual art made a noise, that’s what Colin Christian’s hyper-realistic, fetishistic, ComicCon and cinema saturated statues would sound like.  These figurative sculptures, on view in “Colin Christian: Cosplay” through September 8 at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton, effectively conjure the psychedelic sci-fi aesthetic of the 1960s and ’70s—shiny, loud, cartoonish and anime. 

The title of the show, “Cosplay,” is a conflation and abbreviation of “costume play.” Brought to 3D life in Christian’s life-size and larger than life fiberglass and silicone and LED light-infused works, these fembots—to borrow the appropriate “Austin Powers” and “Bionic Woman” term—straddle a wicked line between art and mass production toys for big boys. 

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There are at least two surprising facts about this week’s cover image. One, it’s an overhead photograph of National, Sebonack and Shinnecock golf courses. Secondly, its photographer, Lili Almog, who incorporated her own drawing into the image, is not particularly known for taking pictures of golf courses. Rather, she is known for subjects as varied as Carmelite nuns, Chinese Muslim women and destruction of Kibbutz structures in Israel. While Almog’s images have been diverse, certain recurring themes have also evolved: the importance of landscape and the environment, women in their own private spaces, and the idea of intimacy.

Intimacy is an especially evocative concept. We surmise that Almog’s Chinese women form a close connection to material needs and the environment in order to survive. Conversely, her Carmelite nuns are absorbed in monastic seclusion; their intimacy comes from bonding with internal elements. (Almog’s photographs often show the nuns with their heads down or turned away from the camera.) Even her barren buildings, destroyed by the Carmel Fire in Israel, exist by themselves, devoid of a close union with both the land and the era that created them.

In Elektra KB’s Theocratic Republic of Gaia, a brainwashed army of genderless humanoids struggles to quash a guerrilla uprising led by a troupe of seditious dancing warriors. Bare breasted and tutu clad, their lips and eyes hidden by veils or obscured by black bars, these Cathara Insurgent Women recur as prominent characters in the artist’s photographs, videos, artist books, and collage works on fabric, usually operating as allegories for resistance. “The veil has been used in every culture in the world, and it always suggests a hiding,” KB says. “So I started using that motif, as well as silhouettes or shadows, as a signifier of repression that functions basically like redacted text.”

In 1959, the great theologian Paul Tillich wrote in his catalogue essay for the “New Images of Man” show at MoMA: “Whenever a new period is conceived in the womb of the preceding period, a new image of man pushes towards the surface and finally breaks through to find its artists.”

Each of the artists in the current show “#NSFW: Bodies,” on view at Vered Gallery in East Hampton through April 7, is grappling with what it means to be human in his or her particular moment in time.

Co-curated by Janet Lehr and Damien A. Roman, “#NSFW: Bodies” (for the uncool like me, NSFW is an acronym for Not Safe For Work) is an aesthetically complex panorama of nudes and portraiture spanning the early 20th century to the present day. Painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture are represented by forms that have been distorted, abstracted, eroticized, mutilated, savaged and cartoonized.

Today, Work on Monday looks at piece by well-known and loved Hamptons painter and Dan’s Papers cover artist Grant Haffner. His mixed media painting “Virgil Is Still the Frogboy” marks a slight deviation from the work for which he’s best known, yet it perfectly reflects the artist’s local cred.

Volume 30 of Hi-Fructose: The New Contemporary Art Magazine was recently announced, and it will feature beautiful artwork created by talented contemporary artists from around the world. You canpreview and pre-order a copy of the quarterly art publication online, which is set to arrive on January 1st, 2014.

There were a lot of foreign accents during Miami art week, with the usual mix of art andfashion and celebrities and this year the addition of an international coterie of starchitects who’ve been vying to make their mark on the youthful skyline.

But the most symbolic accent has to be an é: the one in the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the first major U.S. museum to have one in its name, which opened triumphantly in its Herzog & de Meuron buildingwith a pan-American perspective and exhibitions devoted to artists born in Morocco, Cuba, Poland,China, Israel, the U.S., and Scotland, though most of them left their native countries to live elsewhere.

That spectrum, like the scene in the fairs, museums, and private collections, reflects Miami’s status as an increasingly Latin American art center in an increasingly globalized art world. It’s hard to say exactly what this means, because the terms are so slippery. The idea of defining “Latin American art” is only getting harder, and less relevant to artists who have joined a global conversation.

Anyone who lives in the Hamptons has a lot to be thankful for. But Hamptons’ residents and visitors alike have an extra reason to feel grateful this month. The third annual ArtWalk Hamptons will take place on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, and offers a quieter, more personal way for Hamptonites and their guests to appreciate the local arts scene.
Read more at http://hamptons-magazine.com/features/articles/galleries-gear-up-for-annual-thanksgiving-artwalk#ieHFPfXsQ3H82zMu.99

Adam Miller has taken on a very ambitious task for himself: the creation of mythological and allegorical scenes that pose human figures in invented settings. The first phase of his career after art school — painting large scale murals often inspired by Tiepolo — came to an end after he realized that most of his clients simply wanted decorative backdrops. In his current easel paintings Miller has demonstrated an ambitious desire to re-visit and re-examinine mythological archetypes as they cope with challenging and contemporary situations. Miller has just turned 34 and his precocious transcendence of the norms of classical realism makes him an exciting and dynamic figure worth watching.