AERNOUT MIK, MOMA, JULY 2009

Aernout Mik's gripping installations at the MOMA pull apart the fascia of social anxiety. Figures run frantically within violent scenarios as well as from installation to installation. Relationships between crowded bodies, contorted, spasmodic movements, and intensified activity are investigated. Mik is brilliant at pulling disparate real life events into a performative space of interaction through editing. The viewer is made complicit with the action unfolding:we are part of the violence, part of the detritus of a catastrophe, part of a war in which we are privileged viewers in a human scale projection. Mik uses performance and cinema, media and physicality to tear away at actions and events that are chaotic. His instinctive ability to capture what is raw in societal dysfunction threads through his large performance installations. The scale of Mik's work is gigantic- monumental. There is nothing timid about his investigation of random human actions impacting human life without accountability. Mik's world is brutal: here people are animal like, scavengering modern life without narrative continuity. To that extent, Mik's "events" do not have a continuous narrative flow, but rather, are staged as ruptures of perception. Fragments of a life caught digitally and edited into meaning. 

POP UP ART GALLERIES on 14th STREET

Could 14th Street be a new Meatpacking District, where art, commerce, trash and the transient merge? The current show of works by Alexandra Pacula and JMR at the Dapper Dan Imperial Gallery, 139 West 14th. Street, Manhattan, suggest a new energy of possibility on an otherwise nondescript stretch of 14th St. between 7th and 8th Avenues. Street artist and visionary curator Alex Emmart has brought two vibrant talents to this innocuous stretch: the bold graffiti artist JMR, and the heady, intense ferocity of Alexandra Pacula. Pacula's furious brush work is rivetting. A glass of Scotch holds one's gait. Streetscenes of Manhattan are caught in their relentless passion. The colors are unapologetic, sweeping the viewer into the maelstrom of drama. Pacula's graphite on paper are magnetic images of delirious traffic. The strokes draw the eye along the lines of speed. The passerby is left thinking: we need more of this. Emmart's tenacity has brought two gems to 14th Street, and we can do with more of such surprises along forgotten storefronts and forelorn drapery stores.