Wen and I had a chance to explore a couple of galleries around NYC and see some fascinating new shows.  The photo above is from the new Tony Matelli exhibition at the Leo Koenig Gallery.

The statue above, which is actually only about three feet wide, was the highlight of the day.  Here’s how the gallery describes it:

The chimpanzee has for some years been a figure in Matelli’s work as a stand in for the human id or the human subconscious.  For this exhibition he uses them to depict a violent upended social order: the poor eating the rich, the weak overtaking the powerful.

Here’s another view:

After that we headed over to Philips de Pury & Company to see Voom Portraits by Robert Wilson.  He’s shot a variety of video portraits of peoples (almost all celebrities - like Princess Caroline of Monaco, Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp, etc.) and animals; what makes them interesting is that they’ve been shot in HD.

Since it’s HD-and most of the portraits are reproduced on a larger than life scale-the detail is amazing.  As you stand in front of them, the faces swallow you up.  My personal favourite is a view of the writer Gao Xingjian.  His face is covered in white makeup and words slowly appear across his face (“La solitude est une condition nécessaire de la liberté”).  It’s a beautifully peaceful contrast to fighting monkeys.

FYI, you can see a copy of the Brad Pitt portrait here.

The last place we checked out was arguable the “toughest” gallery in NYC.  It’s called Invisible NYC and is a gallery and tattoo parlour.  As we were looking at photos by Ramon Antonio Vega (as part of his Bomb Scare exhibit) we could hear people getting needled in the back; you actually need to get buzzed into the gallery.

Vega loves repeating the same photographic motif to change how you see the situation.  Here’s an example: