Category Archives: gallery

Tara Donovan’s Pin Drawings at Pace

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Drawing (Pins)
Drawing (Pins), 2010


While out for some openings in Chelsea last night, I noticed Pace had kept its doors open, so I got to take a close look at Tara Donovan’s latest work. As always when I see her work in person, I love it. Her use of materials manages to be subtle and simple but transformative. I originally thought when I saw the press release that these were graphite drawings, but as you can see below, they are made by sticking pins into gatorboard.

Not only do the pins create line and shading, but there’s a nice depth to the varying degrees of how deeply stuck the pins are. The pins themselves have a sheen to them, which picks up nicely in the light as you walk around them, and at 96″ x 96″ these large works leave some room to walk.

These pieces really don’t reproduce well in photographs, so if you have the chance to get over to Pace before March 19, I recommend it. The circles drawings, like the first image, are my favorite, but most of the works are  clean and perfect gradients like these:

Parade of the Bearded Man, or my walk to dinner Friday night took an unexpected turn

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First they popped across my view on the Bowery. I heard the Mariachi’s cheerful music before I saw the parade leader, neon blue coyote shining from his large paper-mache head.

Then I saw his followers, sporting real and fake beards, carrying  white banners behind him, all bearing the sign of the bearded man. I walked with them up Bowery, east on Houston, and then a bit down Eldridge Street where they began to crowd into a gallery.

Thanks to the wonder that is the internet, I have since learned that the gallery was DCKT Contemporary, the artist was Irvin Morazan, and that is was actually a coyote procession. I stand corrected.

The exhibition itself is called “Temple of the Bearded Man.” I can’t speak for the rest of it, but the parade was good fun, even though I don’t know what happened with the whip cream at the end. A birthday dinner called.

Kevin Bourgeois at Causey Contemporary

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The installation of this show is just such a fantastic, seamless background that really shows off the work of Kevin Bourgeois to great effect. I loved it the second I walked in. Here, however, is the rub: the works viewed on their own were something else.

I found it hard to distance my reaction to the (rather horrible) subject matter from the way it was depicted, too distracted by repulsion to judge it as a work of art. Does that mean it failed as a work of art, or conversely that it was successful?

How is one meant to appreciate work that tackles difficult, uncomfortable subjects or, in this case, rather wallows in dark tropes? It’s up at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through November 14 in case you want to judge for yourself.