Top Ten at Spring Break Art Show 2020

The Spring Break Art Show, is a curator-driven fair that began almost a decade ago in run-down St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral School in Nolita. It has since moved uptown to a slick corporate building on Madison Avenue. Using its Madison Avenue address as inspiration organizers, Andrew Gori and Amber Kelly decided on the theme In Excess. In the fair’s application, the pair explained the theme this way:

“In Excess seeks curatorial proposals that explore the pleasure of ‘more is more.’ The bigger, brighter, busier, the better’ was once the zeitgeist with the intent to create, not a nauseous geegaw of consumer pleasures, but an impression that rattled complacency—generating, instead, awe, surprise, wonder; a sense of the infinitude. Where is our awe with all this consumer excess, information detritus, technology worship? Where is the new Rocaille? Is it any good? Is it a spectre of Greed or Good? How much is not enough, and when is too little too soon?”

The duo encouraged curators to “Go For Baroque,” and they did. With that impetus, we have Spring Break 2020. The following is a list of our top ten (ten curators and fourteen booths, listed in no particular order). The curators went for “Baroque” and have offered up over the top immersive installations and artworks. See what the curators and artists have to say about them.

Booth 1037 – Tableau Vivant

Victoria Udondian, Max Colby, Kirstin Lamb, and Anna Cone

Tableau Vivant is the most Baroque of the installations. It is the combined effort of Victoria Udondian, Max Colby, Kirstin Lamb, and Anna Cone. They say it is “in response to the relationship between the allegory, excess, truth and transformation. The artists set a stage for (re)enactments in their fantastical, Baroque-inspired tableau, where Udondian’s elaborate costumes and headdresses, will activate the space and disrupt referenced histories. Within the scope of allusions from period rooms to science fiction theory, time-lapses and collapses giving way to future visions. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theories on Allegory in Trauerspiel, where he relates allegory, truth, and temporality, each artist explores the idea of (re)enactment to investigate ways to disrupt the allegory in order to re-evaluate and imagine new systems of power. In this way, the work becomes unfettered from the past and finds contemporary ways to rewrite the future.”

Booth 1065 – Burrowed

Artist: Kate Klingbeil

Curators: Rachel Frank, Kristen Racaniello, and Jacob Rhodes

Artist Kate Klingbeil created one of the most extensive and most intensely detailed installations at the fair. She says her paintings investigate all manner of burrows. The curators wrote about their installation, saying it includes “joyous burrows, threatening burrows, excessive burrows, loving burrows, sexy burrows; a network of emotional interactions characterizes Klingbeil’s newest investigation of the excess and diversity of the emotional landscape. Klingbeil generates a network of overlapping narratives that are deeply personal yet almost transhuman, through a theatre of thick, materially effusive figurative vignettes.”

10th Floor Lobby – Belly of the Beast

Artist: Jeila Gueramian

Curators: Emily McElwreath and Evan Pepper

Gueramian’s giant installation greats you as you step off the elevator on the 10th floor. It reminded us a little of Leonard Knights Salvation Mountain in Colorado. Knights mound was made of paint, Gueramian’s is made of crocheted and knitted yarn and found objects. She spent two years creating the structure. McElwreath says of the installation: Jeila Gueramian’s exhibit, Belly of the Beast, Is an immersive and fantastical installation, inviting the spectator to crawl inside of a large breathing, primordial textile monster. The vision of the installation is a vibrant, but darkly whimsical, throbbing monster tunnel, made primarily from textile antiquities, and recycled materials. Within the excess will be a nod to a Fibonacci sequence of sorts, interconnecting parallel systems at the heart of the interaction and collision between the natural and human-made world.

Booth 1106 “…Do They Make A Sound?”

Artist: Jessica Lichtenstein

Curator: Indira Cesarine

Jessica Lichtenstein’s installation for Untitled Space is an explosion of pink leaves in a pink forest. Hidden in the forest are small pink female figurines (the artist was dressed in pink too). Cesarine says of her artist, “Her work plays with the boundaries of power, commercialization, consumerism, fantasy, and propriety, provoking tensions that challenge the viewer. For “…Do They Make A Sound?” She has created an immersive installation that includes a forest scene made out of 1000’s of digital renderings of the female form. The faceless, repeating effeminate forms represent both the community of women in the world and the individual characteristics that make up a single woman.”

Booth 1029 – The Breathing Room

Artist: April Marten

Curator: Monica King Contemporary

Monica King Contemporary is one of the hottest new galleries in a wave of new galleries that have recently opened in Tribeca. Monica King opened the gallery with the exhibition Frances Wasn’t a Saint, a multi-media exhibition featuring the work of April Marten. They bring Marten to Spring Break with her interactive installation, The Breathing Room. The Breathing Room conjures images of overflowing, manufactured abundance for mass consumption providing quick and fleeting pleasures that slowly transmute to permanent decay.

Booths 1022 and 1026

Curated by Lauren Powell

Lauren Powell returns to Spring Break in 2020 with two booths. In 2019 Powell curated arguably the most popular booth at Spring Break her presentation of Shona McAndrew’s installation.

Booth 1022 Frenzy

Artist: Claudia Bitran

In booth 1022, Powell presents Frenzy with paintings by Claudia Bitran. Powell explains Bitan’s process this way. “Compelled by the vast amount of viral videos of inebriated teenagers circulating online, Bitran started collecting and cataloging clips in an effort to break down and examine the paradoxical way in which we consume them. In Frenzy, Bitran explores the tipping point between euphoria and near-death experiences. By painting each frame of these found videos, she is expanding time and analyzing each microsecond of the actions. The artist employs a wide range of painting strategies that both glorify and petrify the vulgarity of the actions, resulting in surfaces that are affected, thick and loaded with the poses of the young disoriented bodies.”

Booth 1026 – Somewhere That’s Green

Artist: Benjamin Cabral

Powell presents Benjamin Cabral. Cabral recently exhibited at the LA Spring Break fair. For the New York iteration, Cabral expands his exploration into the realm of the domestic with “Somewhere That’s Green,” a title borrowed from the 1982 cult Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors. Powell says, “In this installation, Cabral examines these signifiers here creating a suburban front yard complete with a picket fence, a garden, and fluffy clouds in the blue skies overhead. His paintings, suggestive of window glimpses, present the viewer with vaguely menacing scenes as well as those of domestic bliss – a peaceful garden and a serene figure in prayerful contemplation. The richly ornamented surfaces employ the vernacular of both belabored craft and seductive commodity, examining memory, autobiography, and nostalgia.”

Booth 1006 – Two for Me, None for You: A Narrative on Excess and Wishful Thinking

Artist: Steffi Homa

Curator: Che’ Morales

Gallery: Mindy Solomon

Artist Steffi Homa a.k.a. Super Future Kid collaborated with curator Che’ Morales to create “a micro-universe of glutenous abundance.” They spread 2,500 pounds of salt on the floor creating, a white beach. One reaches the beach by walking over a white polka dot Kusamaesque bridge to reach “The Land of Cockaign,” where one can relax on bean bag chairs with the same polka dot pattern. The artist believes “Cockaigne is the perfect metaphor, a dangling carrot of sorts; a projected vision of a more prosperous future-with untold culinary delights.” Steffi was influenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall “in 1989; an eight-year-old Steffi Homa caught her first glimpse of abundance and excess in the form of bright, stylized cartoons, video games, and oversized plush toys- all densely saturated in color. Overwhelmed by the bounty of a Western childhood long denied, Homa internalized these visual elements and began to articulate them as a practicing artist.

Booth 1165 – TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Artist: Brian Dettmer

Curator: Michelle Tillou

Brian Dettmer explores the theme of information overload in Tillou Fine Arts’ presentation Too Much Information. The raw material of Dettmer’s art is vintage reference books that are meticulously cut and “excavated” using an Exacto knife and tweezers. Tillou explains, “Information is the raw material of today. We have an overabundance of text and imagery constantly at our fingertips. In digital media, it is often as fleeting as it is abundant, but when information is written in print, we have a stronger sense of its relation to history and its stability for the future. In his work, Dettmer questions this stability and asks what erasure and loss could look like through the lens of printed matter.”

Booths 1127 and 1128

Curated by Kathy Imlay
1128 BOOK OF PINK : A dipsomaniacal rose-colored installation

Artists: Lori Field with video animation by Harry Field

Lori Fields installation consists of ballpoint pen drawings and animations of those drawings created by her son. Curator Kathy Imaly says of Fields and her drawings, “Post-apocalyptic romanticist artist Lori Field began a ‘stream-of-unconsciousness’ book of drawings, one or two a day, in order to rest her obsessive-compulsive-aesthetic mind, leading up to the impeachment hearings on Capital Hill. The artist says of the figures, “they reflect symbolic characters…. knights in shining armor, business men, Rococo Baroque bourgeoisie that make statements about our current society heading towards neo-feudalism, Mad Max post-carbon apocalypse, robber baron redux, or the Ancien Régime Pre-Revolution, future or past.”

1127 The Event of a Thread

Artists: Crystal Gregory and Gwen Charles, in collaboration with dance company the Moving Architects, Artistic Director Erin Carlisle Norton

An immersive, performative collaboration between sculptor Crystal Gregory, female-centric dance company The Moving Architects, led by Artistic Director Erin Carlisle Norton with dancers Bailey Caitlin and Ashley Peters, and video collage with interdisciplinary artist Gwen Charles.

Gregory’s The Event of a Thread, combines industrial architectural scaffolding, hand woven textile, and concrete pipes, inverting material stereotypes while considering the life of each thread—individually prone to stress and breakage, but as a collective the burden becomes bearable. The choreographed work “Demure as Dynamite,” is reinterpreted as a dance intervention wherein women activate the materials of the sculpture—female bodies’ gestures interlace mimicking the warp and weft of weaving. Women carry women, and delicate textile holds concrete pipes as well as women’s bodies. The layering of video by interdisciplinary artist Gwen Charles, creates a collaged storyboard questioning what and where the work begins and ends.

Booth 1135B

Artist: Rob Swainston
Curated by Guttenberg Arts

America Is Really Hard To See borrows the iconic figure of ‘Boss Tweed’—a notoriously corrupt NYC political boss and real estate titan – from an 1871 political cartoon titled ‘THE BRAINS’ by Tomas Nast. Nast was relentless in his exposure of political corruption and capitalist greed, and was instrumental in Tweed’s eventual demise. Swainston reinterprets this image as a large-scale multi-layered woodblock. Contemporary figures in power-suits flank Nast’s historic caricature of greed. Backlighting produces shifting moiré patterns as the viewer moves past the image. Swainston calls this the ‘unstable image’ and posits this effect as analogous to power’s disappearing act in contemporary society. In an accompanying room-sized stop-animation video, the artist attempts to ‘confront the boss’ but his rebellion is short-lived.