Jonathan Binstock

November 14, 2020November 14, 2020

Gallery Hopping In A Pandemic

Friday the 13th marked exactly eight months since we last had dinner guests in our house. We spent the day virtually gallery hopping. We started by joining the Eastman Museum’s 1PM Zoom presentation, A Photographic Truth, with process historian Mark Osterman. He walked us through the various photographic image making processes, demonstrating how starting in the nineteenth century, photography has always had a challenging relationship with the truth.

I have had the Cultured Mag webpage that Louise sent us open for a week now because it had a link to the Philip Guston virtual show at Hauser Wirth. That became our second destination and turned out to be a deep dive as you would expect with anything related to Guston. The show was curated by Guston’s daughter, Musa Meyer, and she narrates a beautiful walk-through. The gallery’s site includes a short video of a 1979 Roberta Smith interview with Guston that is a must see. I’m a Roberta groupie and just had just read her review of Jonathan Lyndon Chase‘s show in Friday morning’s paper.

At 6PM we joined the Zoom meeting at the Memorial Art Gallery with art critic and Warhol author, Blake Gopnik. He shared a wealth of Andy info and was thoroughly entertaining.

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June 11, 2017July 26, 2019

Brilliant Distillation

Park bench in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York

Who would go to a documentary about Sol Lewitt at two in the afternoon on the warmest day of the year? Well, we would. The screening is another installment in the series of events surrounding the “Minimal Mostly” show at R1 Studio.

The movie had a maximal amount of substance, much more than Wednesday’s lecture at the gallery. Although I really enjoyed MAG director, Jonathan Binstock’s, take on Ellsworth Kelly’s work, a brilliant distillation launched by the Kelly prints in Deborah Ronnen’s show. He said “sometimes I feel like I could round up all the art in my house and replace it with one Ellsworth Kelly because his work is the essence of art.” Peggi and I had just seen a show of Kelly’s last paintings in Chelsea and I knew exactly what he meant.

The Sol Lewitt movie was insanely beautiful.

New Subterranean Surrogates

Subterranean Surrogates in Inner Loop. downtown Rochester, New York

You know you’re in a happenin’ spot when both Bleu Cease and Jonathan Binstock, the directors of RoCo and MAG, are in the house. Well, not exactly in the house but outside of the packed 1975 Gallery where a show of work by the international mural artists, in town for this year’s “Wall Therapy” project, was in opening mode. The work had some serious prices attached to it and some of it was extremely meticulous. This gallery has zeroed in on the tattoo set. Illustration, surrealistic nods to the absurd, bugs, photo realism are all touchstones. I was drawn more to the “Subterranean Surrogates” in the old Inner loop, the underground infrastructure going into this new terrain in front of the gallery.

We wandered over to the Village Gate for the Festival of Lights. The Village Gate location was running a little later than the 10 o’clock start time and and I got a kick out of that. I used to like that hour or so where you waited for a band to come in a rock n’ roll club that was running perpetually late as the excitement built. The place was wall-to-wall bodies, the sound system mysteriously went silent but we stuck around long enough to see some LED lit dancers slithering around the cobblestone. Last night’s thunderstorm and its accompanying light show blew away the Festival of Lights by a long shot.

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