Today I went to the Volta Fair in Soho. After a morning packed with meetings, I was very happy to have a free afternoon to meander around and look at art. The Volta Fair shows emerging artists and galleries from around the world. What makes this fair different is that they show work in strictly solo booths. So each booth is like a mini-retrospective of an emerging artist’s career. The fair has an energy that is bright and fresh with a bit of underground grunge and you get a full introduction to a number of new and exciting artists. [1,2]
My favorite work at the fair was by the Japanese artist Atsushi Tawa. Tawa combines natural and manmade materials to create striking works that are gorgeous and ugly at the same time. [3,4] Working with singularly ‘useful’ materials such as quartz and plastic mannequins, Tawa creates something useless for anything but the aesthetic pleasure of an art piece. The work explores the dialog between the functional and the functionless and I fell in love with it.
There was a trend of young artists using traditional techniques with a modern spin to create work that paid homage to their heritage and questioned their present. These artists challenged the separation of generations within cultures by combining contemporary materials with time-honored methods, and boundary pushing concepts with exceptional skill.
I was enchanted by the work of Jeffrey Gibson, a Native American artist who uses beading and stretched animal hides combined with Everlast punching bags and muslin doll figures. Gibson’s work is internationally modern yet strongly influenced by his Cherokee-Choctaw Indian heritage. [5,6] I would kill for one of those punching bags. They are so gorgeous and I can . Masatake Kouzaki also combined traditional techniques with contemporary subjects in his Nihonga series. Working with a 2,000 year-old method, Kouzaki uses a syringe filled with gesso to create three-dimensional texture on paper. He then coats the molds with crushed amino pigments and gold and silver leaf. From a distance, the works look quite traditional, but in taking a closer look I saw very contemporary characters inhabiting the antique landscape. [7,8]
Half way through the fair, I popped into the Mercer Hotel for a meeting over tea and sake (and a moment to rest my feet.) I love the lobby of the Mercer Hotel. The ceilings are high, the space is airy, and it feels a bit like you are in London. They have one of the best burgers in the city, so my fiancé and I go there a lot. Most people eat at the restaurant downstairs, but I prefer the lobby for dining as well as for meetings.
Only a three block walk back to the fair: The exquisite lines of Tony Romero’s deceivingly simple Nude Study resulted in the sexiest piece of wood I’ve ever seen. [9] It’s endlessly intriguing how the purest things, such as a few clean pieces of wood can be loaded with so much sensuality. Daniele Buetti’s light boxes poked fun at consumerism and pretense in a hypersexual society. [10, 11] He also made some text message prints that made me giggle. [12] Other highlights were Willie Cole’s bronze cast shoe sculptures [13] Casey Ruble’s miniature paper collages [14, 15], and Robert Lawson’s cigarette pack collages. [16,17]. Robert Lawson, I was interested to learn, is not actually a smoker. He spends about 70% of his time outside of his studio, scouring urban landscapes for discarded packs of cigarettes.
After I left the fair, I headed to ABC Kitchen for dinner. ABC Kitchen is one of my favorite restaurants in the whole city, possibly my most favorite. The décor is perfect (it’s connected to ABC Carpet and Home, one of the most epic home stores in the city) and the food is exceptional every time: local, fresh, beautiful dishes. After dinner I headed over to the Norwood for the artMrkt Productions party. artMrkt Productions is the company who puts on Miami Project during Basel and artMrkt Hamptons in the summer. The scene at the Norwood was very cool and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I recognized tons of dealers I had seen at the fairs in the past two days. [18, 19]
