Trent’s Top Gallery Picks

By Trent Morse

Blane De St. Croix’s sculpture “Mountain Strip.” Photo courtesy of the artist and Black & White Project Space.

BLANE DE ST. CROIX, “MOUNTAIN STRIP”
Black & White Project Space
483 Driggs Ave., through 1/10

Walk through the interior of Black and White Project Space to the back courtyard and you will run into a behemoth geological model— flipped upside down. Blane De St. Croix’s sculpture, called “Mountain Strip,” is a 40-by- 22-foot miniaturization of the Kayford Mountain Ridge in West Virginia, an area that has been strip-mined using the destructive method of mountaintop removal. The vast majority of what you see in front of you, however, is not the mountain but deep layers of subterranean rock and sediment. Lay on your back underneath the installation and you will get a wonderful bird’s-eye-view of the lush green topography—as well as views of land flattened by mining companies. This is environmental activist art at its finest.

Rusel Parish’s painting “MJ Bursting with Fireworks,” 2009. Photo courtesy of Figureworks Gallery

RUSEL PARISH, “THE CULT OF MICHAEL JACKSON”
Figureworks
168 N. 6th St., through 11/1

Rusel Parish has converted Figureworks into a chapel devoted to Michael Jackson, complete with a Byzantine-style icon of Jacko in military regalia and vigil lights around an altar. Candles, soaps, chocolates, and wax figurines molded in the shape of the singer create a conventionshow atmosphere. On the other hand, Parish’s layered, expressionistic portraits of Jackson (throughout his various incarnations) burst with vitality here. Though the celebrity-as-cultfigure theme is not the freshest terrain an artist can traverse, Jackson’s death earlier this year lends the show a spooky timeliness. To his credit, Parish has worked on the series for nearly 3 years and had originally planned to parallel the exhibition with Jackson’s comeback tour. The passing of the King of Pop, which only furthers his deification, was merely a coincidence.

Collection of Joshua Stern’s works “Straw Economy.” Photo courtesy Parker’s Box, New York.

JOSHUA STERN, “STRAW ECONOMY”
Parker’s Box,
193 Grand St., through 10/25
This survey of Joshua Stern’s work over the past decade reveals an artist who is not content to stick with any one style (or medium). Macrophotographs of spit-wad sculptures and reflections of images on tiny, shiny pinheads expose Stern as unabashedly obsessed with technical tinkering. His “Beaver” paintings may at first seem like simple riffs on borsht- belt humor, à la Richard Prince, but the series is a salute to the importance of the beaverpelt trade in the formation of American capitalism. The most compelling pieces in the show are also the quietest. In a set of minimalist text works that seamlessly protrude from the gallery walls, Stern mocks the socioeconomic structures of the art world via funny and bitter slogans like, “Always buy what you love. Just make sure you love the same artists loved by other collectors.”

Jack Early’s Mixed-media installation “Ear Candy Machine,” 2009. Photos: Maika Pollak

JACK EARLY
Southfirst Art
60 N. 6th St., through 11/1
The air outside carried a chilly wind on the night of Jack Early’s opening at Southfirst, but inside the gallery all was warm and dark and womblike. The artist’s new installation—his first in New York in 17 years—consists of very few elements, yet it encompasses the entire room. Every surface has been coated in matte black paint; black lights illuminate a Day-Glo rainbow that leads across the floor, onto a wall, and into a clear prism reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album cover; the prism shines a spotlight on a starkwhite phonograph spinning a white record. Emanating from the record player are tender ballads written by Early that make you want to dance with your lover—or smoke a bong. The whole scene evokes a recreation room from the late 1970s, but it also has a fineness and elegance that deserves appreciation from even the most uptight aesthete. Jack Early achieved infamy in 1992 with “Red, Black, Green, Red, White, and Blue,” an installation of pop African-Americana that many critics pegged as racist. Was the controversy a misinterpretation during an era of hyper political correctness? Probably. That work is currently being revisited in an exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. Hopefully, Early can find some redemption through these concurrent shows.