The Chelsea Perspective - ARTisSpectrum

CHELSEA CONTRASTS
BIG SPACE, SMALL SPACE:
A M U S E U M , A B O X
Chelsea hosts galleries with a diversity of
proportions.
The Cheslea Art Museum is a contemporary
space about 30,000 square feet
located in a renovated historic building in the
heart of Chelsea on West 22nd Street, opposite
the Chelsea Piers.
The Chelsea Art Museum is committed
to an exploration of “art within a context.”
This approach favors a program of exhibitions
that reflects contemporary human experience
across a spectrum of cultural, social, environmental,
and geographical contexts. The exhibitions
are supported by a series of related
cultural events and educational programs.
Co-founder and president, Dorothea Keeser,
describes the curatorial vision as, “a commitment
to art as a living entity that reacts and
interacts with us and changes the way one
continues to live one’s daily life.”
In collaboration with a network of
museums, galleries, and other visual arts institutions,
the Chelsea Art Museum seeks to
present important, but relatively unexplored
dimensions of 20th and 21st century art. Its
focus is upon artists that have been less exposed
in the United States than in their home
countries. The Chelsea Art Museum also
places prominent importance on exhibiting
young American artists. A new series entitled
“Insight” features artists who have not yet
enjoyed their own solo shows in a New York
Museum. The museum presents film, performances,
artist talks, and round-table discussions
that look to foster cross culural and
interdisciplinary debate.
“My work here allows me to really
pursue fresh insights and push the thresholds
of exhibition practice,” said Manon Slome,
Chief Curator for the Chelsea Art Museum,
“Here I work with important societal themes,
combine new and more well known artists in
often unexpected ways.”
Slome has been Chief Curator of the
Chelsea Art Museum since its inauguration in
November 2001. For several years prior, she
worked as curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum of New York. She is recipient
of the Whitney Museum’s Helena Rubenstein
Foundation Curatorial Fellowship. As an independent
curator, she has organized exhibitions
in New York, London, Hong Kong, and
has served as art advisor for private and public
collections throughout the United States.
The museum is also home of the
Jean Miotte Foundation, an organization dedi-
cated to archiving, preserving, presenting,
and making available for exhibition the works
of Jean Miotte. Rotating selections of Miotte’s
work are shown on a regular basis.
On the other hand, Chelsea continues
to attract small, grass-roots galleries. A few
blocks away from the Chelsea Art Museum,
lies a much smaller gallery space about the
size of a box called, White Box. The gallery
offers an “alternative space” within Chelsea
on West 26th Street. The non-profit organization
shows contemporary art in the context
of socially relevant issues and its vision is to
act as a counter to the surrounding environment
seeking to advance a creative difference.
Exhibitions range from mid-career, emerging,
and under represented artists with international
programs from guest scholars and curators
from around the world.
“The space at White Box in Chelsea
is a creative alternative,” said Juan Puntes,
co-owner and founder of White Box.
A recent summer exhibition,
APOCOCROPOLIS, curated by Jason Goodman
at White Box, could be seen from the
sidewalk through the window of White Box.
The crowd waited in anticipation of viewing
the show first hand inside the box. In the
meantime, crowds stood and sat on the Chelsea
street watching a performance art piece by
dancers and listening to the entertaining voice
of an opera singer before a band arrived to
play inside the box with the exhibition later in
the evening.
The exhibition was a multimedia
sculpture installation and post-emotional habitat
conjured by artists Jeremy Lovitt and Isac
Sprachman. In their first collaboration, the
artists exploit video and construction materials
Clockwise from top left: White Box; The Chelsea Art Museum; Staircase in the Chelsea Art Museum;
onlookers at the White Box
to erect a monolith which salutes the notion
that “enough is never enough” or “what have
I done to deserve this?”
The materials of the monumental
art-altar, metal studs and sheet rock, are the
same materials used to create the temporary
interior partitions so common of the buildings
of the Chelsea art gallery district. Quick and
cheap to erect, quick and cheap to tear down,
and put in the dumpster with the ever shifting
sands of the real estate market manipulations.
The materials comment on the forcefully unavoidable
cyclical migration of artistic centers
at once regaling the viewer with a new sensation
of archeological discovery.
19 ARTisSpectrum