Seven Things 27
Seven things for Monday, February 3.
1.
Photographs by Anastasia Samoylova
The other day I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to check out the Sienna: The Rise of Painting exhibition, which frankly was very crowded and a little disappointing. As I battled the Saturday afternoon crowds I had nearly given up hope of seeing anything worth writing about when I ducked into Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans. Nearly empty compared to Sienna down the hallway, this cool photographic exhibition pairs historical work by the photojournalist Walker Evans, who apparently lived in Florida for some time, with big, colorful pictures taken by Samoylova, a contemporary photographer based in Miami whose photographs capture Florida’s particular brand of colorful, gun-toting, and alligator-infested weirdness. In addition to capturing the state’s saturated colors, her photos take an apparent interest in sea-level rise and Florida’s ongoing experiment in ecological brinksmanship. The image above shows new condos rising out of the jungle in Bonita Springs, a rapidly growing part of the state, and looking at the image, I almost can’t tell if they’re new or abandoned and being slowly consumed by the jungle. Other works are more explicit, in Blue Courtyard, Hollywood, the floods have already come while Empty Lots, Mexico Beach tells a familiar story of development and destruction.
2.
The Public Domain Image Archive
This is a fun archive of quirky, out-of-copyright images that you can browse through. It’s been curated by the Public Domain Review, a publication that focuses on scholarship and essays about largely forgotten (but not lost) pieces of media that are, as the title suggests, in the public domain for one reason or another. It’s an interesting exercise in “information freedom.” They also sell prints.
3.
Cyanotypes of British Algae by Anna Atkins (1843)
A finding from the Public Domain Image Archive, these botanical prints were made using cyanotype, a sort of early photographic process where plants are placed on specially treated paper, clamped down with glass, and exposed to UV light (the sun?) and the paper turns this wonderful blue. Apparently Anna Atkins may have been one of the first people to publish a book of photographs, and the production of actual blue prints uses more or less the same process—the more you learn. Chemistry and history aside, I just love the way the limited colors of this medium transforms what was a scientific process of specimen taking into these beautiful abstractions.
4.
BNP Paribas building + Mural
The AXA Equitable Center on 7th Avenue between 51st and 52nd streets was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and built in 1986. While the exterior isn’t exactly beautiful—Paul Goldberger once called it “54 stories of ambivalence”—it’s rather striking from the street. The lobby’s, 68-foot-tall Lichtenstein mural (Mural With a Blue Brushstroke) that was painted on site can be seen peeking through glass and scaffolding, and belies a robust public art program that also includes some Sol Lewitts. Sadly, according to Crain’s, museum-quality art and chunky post-modernism are no longer enough to guarantee a building’s value.
5.
Fred Eversley Untitled Gold Layered Step Pyramid
Another find from the Met, in an exhibition of Black artists responding to Egyptian art. Eversley is an abstract sculptor with a background in engineering. Most of his works relate to parabolas, lenses, and light; this one also has some cool optical illusion effects as you move around it.
6.
282-290 Dekalb Avenue, Brooklyn
Architecturally it’s all one building, but each module got painted as its own building, maybe by separate owners? Sometimes you see that with row houses, but these aren’t really row houses, or maybe they are, but they’re merged into one by the shared gable and the corners? Funny. Reminds me of a Neapolitan ice cream.
7.
The Return of the Studded Belt
A couple weeks back at a Been Stellar show at Bowery Ballroom, I sensation of deja vu swept over me as a nursed a PBR and waited for the show to start (like the old man I am I had arrived nearly an hour before the opening band even started). But it wasn’t the beer or the venue, it was the hipster kids in their vaguely Spencer’s Gifts-coded belts and scene-y leather clothes. Though the pants they were holding up are much, much bigger than the skinny jeans of the studded belt’s last heyday in the mid-aughts, the hardware is back, baby.