Nancy Shaver
ArtForum
Greater New York
MOMA PS1
Alex Kitnick
For all its commitment to community, the exhibition’s emphatic interest in things and materiality and its turn to the handmade and the idiosyncratic frequently dovetails, rather strikingly, with the logic of retail, and that ur-thing, the commodity. Nancy Shaver has laid out an installation that pairs her variegated bricolaged sculptures with a sundry assortment of found objects, including a framed and folded pajama top, hook rugs, spindles, and a yellow shovel. Her spread has all the faded wonder of a rummage sale, and it’s not surprising to learn that she operates a Wunderkammer-like store in Hudson, New York, where the items for sale have a similarly touched and curated feel. Putting a finer point on this theme, the curators have turned over a significant amount of gallery space to a project called KIOSK, whose proprietors scour the globe for simple, cute, and colorful products and resell them at museum gift shops and online. (Begun in 2005, the company maintained a second-floor space in SoHo until 2014.) I know from experience what great gifts these things can be (full disclosure: I own the white watch from Greece!), but KIOSK’s inclusion still baffles, seeming to foreclose the possibility that art might generate alternative economies, even as it highlights the commercial formats of other projects, such as Susan Cianciolo’s RUN fashion collections from the 1990s, represented here by a variety of handmade outfits, pieced-together books, and lo-fi fashion videos. While giving Shaver’s upstate sensibility a downtown feel, the logic is similar, transforming standard commodities into one-of-a-kind things. ...excerpt ArtForum, Dec., 31, 2015
Greater New York is on view through Mar. 7.
Alex Kitnick is Brant Family Fellow in contemporary arts at Bard College.
*****
Nancy Shaver shines in Greater NY at MoMA PS1 until March 7th
by Katharine Umsted
The brilliant Nancy shaver looks fantastic with a large installation in Greater NY at MoMA PS1. And the wall label even mentions her inspiring hudson store, Henry. See it if you can.
Imby.com/Hudson - 5 January 2016
*****
Greater New York
October 11, 2015 - March 7, 2016
Greater New York is the fourth iteration of the renowned series, begun in 2000 as a collaboration between MoMA PS1 (then P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center) and The Museum of Modern Art, that showcases emerging artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area. This Greater New York arrives, however, in a city and art community that has changed dramatically since the first version of the survey. Against this backdrop, Greater New York will depart from the show's primary focus on youth, instead examining key points of connection and intersection between emerging and more established artists across New York, while also exploring aspects of earlier histories of the city itself, and its changing political, social and architectural fabric.
The 2015 exhibition is co-organized by a team, led by Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs, MoMA PS1, that includes art historian Douglas Crimp, University of Rochester; Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Perfromance Art, MoMA; and Mia Locks, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
MoMA PS1
2225 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY
Thursday - Monday 12 noon - 6pm
*****
MoMA PS1's Citywide Survey Shows New York's Greats
(and Not-so-Greats)
by Benjamin Sutton
....Another popular formal trope is the collection: pieces that consist of large numbers of similar objects, assortments of disparate and seemingly unrelated things, or actual spring and fall fashion collections. Greater New York features installations showcasing clothes and accessories designed by the collectives Eckhaus Latta, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, and renaissance woman Susan Cianciolo. In one gallery, Nancy Shaver‘s colorful collections of found objects and baubles are installed alongside Sara Cwynar‘s photographic assemblages of matching found images — snapshots of the Acropolis, reproductions of Piet Mondrian paintings, etc. Liene Bosquê‘s tabletop sculptural installation, “Recollection” (2000–15), is an urban grid made up of hundreds of souvenir architectural miniatures, a kind of kitsch update of Rem Koolhaas’s “The City of the Captive Globe” (1972). The most literal manifestation of the collection trend, however, comes from KIOSK, a collective founded by husband-and-wife duo Marco Romeny and Alisa Grifo. Their installation, titled simply “KIOSK” (2005–15), features objects of all sorts that were gathered by the duo and several dozen contributors from all over the globe installed in translucent shelves that have turned an entire gallery into a delightful maze full of odd trinkets tucked into nooks and corners. Like the exhibition in miniature, it includes both delightful tchotchkes and uninteresting trinkets.
excerpt - Hypoallergic.com - Oct. 9, 2015