My Day with Chelsea

Here's what I thought.

ROBERT MILLER GALLERY
This gallery was my favorite, it featured a multitude of mediums created by one man, Bathelemy Toguo, a Cameroon artist. Video, installation, photographs, and ink drawings filled up the large empty gallery. In the back an installation meant to portray an African hospital addressed the AIDS epidemic in his country. Each bed was made up with sheets reflecting Africa's elaborate patterns; on top of each of the sheets were a pile of loose clothes, perhaps representing all the lives lost, and a misquito net (resembling a condom, thanks to my buddy for helping me see that). Along with his photographs Toguo displayed brief stories about the subject in his photographs. I found a few of them comical, like the Malcolm X wooden workers hat, and the solid wood suitcases he tried to bring on the plane. Two thumbs up.

LEHMANN MAUPIN
I didn't like the images in this gallery at all. They were trite and kind of sleazy. At first, I thought the two women in the images were the photographers. I thought they were making a statement about some museum's prejudice against anything not of the highest standard, perfected, and refined, cultured, and or tamed.Although I didn't like the images, I liked the message I thought they were trying to convey so it was workable. After I found out it wasn't the two women who made the work, but was a man who shot them for a spread to be featured in a magazine it all seemed cheap. The photos were also printed entirely to big for the quality of the images to be preserved. Two thumbs down.

MITCHELL-INNES&NASH
The columns in the gallery were beautiful and seemed to be a piece of art themselves. Enoc Perez painted one image that was huge. It had to be over 10 feet long in both ways. His depictions of unusually shaped modern architectural forms and use of rich colors really did it for me. The gallery described his work as an "impossible utopia" which I agree with it. I wanted to actually live in the buildings he painted, but sadly that would never happen. His technique was also something I had never seen before and appreciated. Underneath the paintings, vertical lines that were reminiscent of lines created by printers were visible in most of the paintings. Two thumbs up for creativity.

-N.b