Escaping the pre-Christmas chaos

This weekend I decided to stay far far far away from the Christmas shopping madness after last week's Abercrombie and Fitch nightmare and joined a Saturday afternoon tour of the 'Best Exhibits' showing at the Chelsea galleries.

I love these tours. I try to do them every few months or so, but I don't manage to do them nearly as often as I would like. There are a few groups that do them, but mostly I like to do the ones run by NY Gallery Tours led by Rafael Risemberg. Rafael runs a Best Exhibits tour every month and for $20 - or $15 with an online coupon - he culls down the overwhelming number of exhibits showing at the 200+ galleries in Chelsea to his eight favourite picks. Usually I love 3 or 4 of his picks, hate 2 of them and feel ambivalent about another 2, but it's always 2hours well spent and since he's been running these tours for a few years he has good relationships with the galleries, so you get to find out the fun stuff like how much a piece costs. One time we even met one of the artists, C.K. Wilde, who creates amazing collages using currency, and got to ask him a few questions about his work. I like that a lot because the interpretation of the work is so subjective that you can only really know by speaking to the artist, but sometimes the galleries will tell you. You can see pieces here from the exhibition C.K. Wilde had at the Pavel Zoubok gallery, back in 2006, with another artist, Mark Wagner, who also creates collages using currency, although his preferred media is dollar bills. Unfortunately the photos don't give a true sense of how detailed and clever the work is, so if you have a chance to see his work, don't pass it up.

Anyway, this month my favourite exhibit by a long shot was Do Ho Suh's show Cause & Effect which is showing at the Lehmann Maupin gallery, 540 West 26th St.

In the back room of the gallery is the piece shown in the photo below, which I nabbed from the gallery's website. It's a tornado made of 100s, well more like 1000s, of interlocking plastic figures. The effect of the piece is amazing!! If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it.

Rafael reckoned it would sell for upwards of $400,000.

Fancy it for your living room? :-)

Here are other photos I nabbed from Flickr, taken by Sokref1 of the same exhibit with a bit more close up on the detail. The exhibit closes on the 22nd December, so dash on over soon if you are interested in seeing it up close.