The Knockturnal had the privilege of attending Create Studios Venice opening night. Jim Budman’s vision was to create a space that “delivers a unique experience for its guests and clients to create and live amongst art simultaneously.” (Budman).
On February 9th, Atlanta’s acclaimed Trap Music Museum hosted the grand opening of their Black History Month exhibit dedicated to honoring black-owned businesses and artists making waves throughout Atlanta.
Artist Robyn Bellospirito wanted to challenge the still life’s concept. Her diorama ‘The Still and the Lifeless’ sat on a gallery table. It features two wooden chairs, an endless tile floor, and a melting silhouette. In a hiking chair, Bellospirito answered questions about her iconic work.
In 1982, a collaboration between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol was born, this is the story of that collaboration.
Jennifer Elster has always been a deeply reactionary artist. Whether it is rebutting (or accepting) seismic shifts in the culture or simply responding to a question posed or a happening taking place, her multi-modal replies are always candid and fizzling with raw, determined energy.
Elster has always consumed with world as anyone else does- receiving and interpreting on an on-going basis. But rather than letting things happen to her passively, she posits and responds urgently and instinctually. Stepping into the Take Heed show, now on view at The Development Gallery in Tribeca, one feels as if they’re stepping outside for the first time after an apocalyptic event.
Crystalizing the flurry of cultural norms that have been introduced in the past two years, Take Heed is the first honest retrospective of work that was created or heavily reconsidered under the shadow of an on-going global pandemic and an affronting war.
Taking shape amid the soaring columns and roiled tin roof and wood of the Tribeca space, the show feels like a shell of what once was and a space being repopulated once more. The dust has settled but hasn’t yet been swept away. A mount of KN95 masks, a signature element of the deepest valley of the COVID-19 pandemic, are positioned on a pedestal, taking on the performance of a future relic. In fact, preservation seems particularly important to Elster in this show, with many works being encased in plexiglas or wood.
A series of large-scale self-portraits, originally executed in 2016, featured Elster in military fatigues and gas masks. The works, faraway and innocuous at the time of their execution, are revisited within the collective gasp and gaze of an egregious war taking place in Ukraine. Have no doubt, conflict rages globally. But distance can breed unfounded comfort.
Elster’s instinctual quips, done in chiseled marker, are not flailing in conspiracy, but are bright-red warning lights. “Warhead” (2022) is one of the most delicate and thought-provoking pieces the artist has completed in recent memory, adding to an ongoing series of “head” works that address, in the most abstract way, the awe-inspiring dynamism of the human condition.
When Is It Enough?, 2015, 2020, Acrylic on paper with hands and no body, 44.5h x 44w x 44d inches
Unlike previous shows, Elster is no longer angry. She’s done defending herself. Now she is a communicator. Her prophesies have come true and she’s been prepared for a long while. Now she invites the broader world to involve themselves. Of course, there is humor. There is realism. Elster remains as buoyant as ever, motivated by- believe it or not- absolute optimism.
Bowie as the character of Ramona in a photograph taken by John Scarisbrick for Bowie’s 1995 1. Outside album. Styled by Jennifer Elster
Viewers will relish in the opportunity to revisit one of Elster’s most remarkable achievements: the styling of the late David Bowie. In a new installation, the image, which is celebrated for its deeply collaborative and improvised instant, enters into a new territory of multi-dimensional bliss by way of cut web around the enlarged image. “Bowie and I went very deep. I wanted to pay tribute and incorporate but not overwhelm the show.”Elster’s work are available to purchase for the first time at ChannelELSTER.com/art-gallery and on Artsy. Most of the show has sold, but there are collectible Limited Editions Gaeclee canvases and Digital C-Prints that will be available upon proposal.
Take Heed will be on exhibition through January 5, 2023 at The Development Gallery in Tribeca, NYC.
Shop the J. Elster collection here.
On Wednesday, Nov. 30 The Knockturnal was on the scene of Phillip K. Smith III’s Garden of Reflections with food and drinks by Michael Solomonov (Chef and Owner of Zahav, Abe Fisher, Merkaz, Dizengoff, Goldie, Laser Wolf, Federal Donuts and K’Far in Philadelphia, PA and Laser Wolf in Brooklyn, NY).
Solomonov’s delicious Mediterranean inspired spread included Instagram-worthy Ceviche in Bissli Bag, Hummus Cones with Brussel Sprouts & Green Garbanzo, and Mushroom Baklava. Guests also were invited to indulge in an open bar and enjoy handcrafted cocktails, wine, and champagne. American Express cardholders also received a cookbook: Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. The cookbook features many Israeli recipes, personal stories, and a dictionary of related terms.
My personal favorite item of the day was the Ceviche in a Bissli Bag. The flavors were outstanding and unique and eating it out of something that resembled a chip bag was so innovative, convenient, and mess-free to eat at this event.
“Food, culture and art are so intricately linked and I am thrilled to be partnering with American Express and Resy to bring this exciting experience to guests in Miami,” said Chef Michael Solomonov, Chef and Owner of Zahav and five-time James Beard Foundation award-winner.
Resy and American Express to Host Multiple Dining Events During Art Week in Miami Including Dinner Series with Massimo Bottura, Missy Robbins and Mashama Bailey with Original Art by Phillip K. Smith III; Gallery Day to Feature Food by Michael Solomonov
The art featured was “Phillip K. Smith III’s Garden of Reflections.”
Garden of Reflections is an installation composed of 17 columnar sculptures that collage the light, atmosphere, and movement of the space across their highly reflective and folded mirror polished steel surfaces. Organically collected in three different groups, the artwork reacts to the immediate surroundings, colors, and realities of the day. As the light of the space changes, so the artwork changes. As people move within the space, the artwork reacts accordingly. This reflective experience reconfigures and compresses directionality and space, amplifying one’s perception of their surroundings. The result is an installation that is equally powerful and quiet, completely immersive, and changing at all times, no matter day or night.
More about the artist: Working in the Southern California desert’s Coachella Valley, Phillip K. Smith III creates light-based work that draws upon ideas of space, form, color, light + shadow, environment, and change. Featured in many online and print publications, Smith is known for creating large scaled temporary installations such as Lucid Stead in Joshua Tree, Reflection Field and Portals at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, ¼ Mile Arc in Laguna Beach, and The Circle of Land and Sky at inaugural 2017 Desert X exhibition. His public artworks are sited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kansas City, Nashville, Oklahoma City and beyond; and the artist was recently commissioned to create permanent, light-based works for the cities of West Hollywood, CA, La Jolla, CA, and Bellevue, WA. The artist currently has solo exhibitions on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art through August 6, 2023, and at the Palm Springs Art Museum through May 7, 2023.
ABOUT GLOBAL DINING ACCESS BY RESY:
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Global Dining Access members are also invited to purchase tickets to Global Dining Access events featuring top chefs and restaurants. Past events have included World’s Best Restaurant noma’s 5-day residency in New York City (May 2022) and Platinum Coast (September 2021), a floating restaurant on a barge in Manhattan’s East River featuring Nancy Silverton, Kwame Onwuachhi, Stephanie Izard and more Global Dining Access Chefs.
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Richie Akiva came into Art Basel full force and claimed Miami with the hottest parties and events, undisputed. The hospitality giant and NY nightlife King, held Basel pop ups starting with Stone Island on November 29th and included celebrity stacked nights at GALA Miami nightclub, Socialista at Cipriani Miami on December 1 and December 3, and even a mega Yacht party on November 30th. There were definitely more, but we lost count.
Akiva marked his rank on Basel 2022, seen out nightly and all around town with an A-List crew.
GALA Miami, the hottest new and exclusive South Beach nightclub by JoJo Lahoud and Marco Garcia, partnered with Akiva for an unmatched weekend of talent endlessly flowing nightly and posted up across all the VIP tables. DJ sets included Jus Ske on Friday night and Stevie J on Saturday, with Ruckus guest popping into the booth . The flow of talent at GALA included Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian, Foodgod, Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott, Hailey Bieber, Serena and Venus Williams, Hassan Whiteside, Griizy, Shay Mitchell, Bella Thorne, Frida Aasen and Tommy Chiabra, Miguel, Cash XO, Floyd Mayweather, Eiza Gonzalez, Hailee Steinfeld, Beau Casper Smart, SAINt JHN, Zack Bia, Gastaad Guy, Yung Taco, Victor Cruz, Eric The Jeweler, Larsa Pippen, Marcus Jordan, Dixie D’Amelio, Patrick Carroll, JR Smith, Alesso, Tobey Maguire, and the list goes on….
If you missed the GALA late night parties, was there even a point to be in Miami last weekend? Perhaps, because Akiva also had just as many VIPs out at Cipriani’s Miami Socialista lounge for his earlier evening sets. On the 1st, Zoe Kravitz celebrated her birthday at the waterfront lounge, partying along side names such as Eiza Gonzalez, Hailee Steinfeld, Jamie Chung, and Hailey Bieber all hanging in their intimate VIP area, as well as Venus and Serena Williams, Adrian Grenier, Phillies’ owner John Powers Middleton, Vincent Laresca, Tobey Maguire, Frida Aasen, Tommy Chiabra, and more. The Socialista party reconvened on Saturday night for a second installment, December 2nd, in which Akiva did a double header.
Stone Island was the kick off of Akiva’s week at the RC Cola Plant on the 29th for the 40th anniversary with a performance by Jamie XX, and the likes of Jared Leto, Miguel, Odell Beckham Jr, Vivi Nevo, Danny A. Abeckaser, James Goldstein, Riccardo Tisci, and Venus Williams, among several other bold faced names, with DJ sets by Tomas Station and Jonny Rock, and many more. The event was co-hosted by Ronnie Madra, Steven Kentucky, Lucciano Grey and Skylar Hauswirth.
His lineup then followed on the 30th with a super VIP party on the VAVA Mega Yacht, for a party we hear went all night following Sean Penn’s Core Response Gala. The guest list of the yacht deserves an award in itself, ranging from A-Listers like Jared Leto to supermodels, athletes, influencers and a slew of notables, and we hear no phones were permitted. Akiva knows how to throw a bash, as we hear guests were greeted with white glove service.
The Knockturnal continues to bring you the hottest nightlife and event insider info. in all top cities. Follow us for more on instagram.
Photo gallery above from Gala Miami, exclusive images by World Red Eye / Seth Browarnik. Head to World Red Eye for more images from Gala, Stone Island and Socialista.
Over four hundred members of New York’s glitterati gathered at the iconic Chelsea Hotel to view the artwork of an arguably even more iconic It Girl: Edie Sedgwick.
As industrialized societies and wealthy entities continue wreaking havoc on the earth’s climate and displacing millions of people in a mass migrant crisis, some artists are looking back and paying homage to how humans used to– and still do– live.
Javier Senosiain, El Nido de Quetzalcóatl (1998–2007). Model fabricated by Enrique Cabrera. © Javier Senosiain / Arquitectura Orgánica
On view now at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens through February 26, 2023, “In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico” is the culmination of decades of work by four Mexican artists-architects who explored the natural landscape of caves and created them in the modern context. Taking over the entire first floor of the museum, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking look at how humans live and move today, and how we might experience the future years to come.
The exhibition, with works by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain, questions how humans might reconnect with nature through shelter, bringing forth environments that came forth in Mexico during the 1900s. The Knockturnal was invited to the exhibition’s opening night ceremony on October 18, where art lovers packed into the museum’s first floor and were joined by the last living artist Javier Senosiain, who described his inspiration for such works and how he interacted with his fellow artists and Isamu Noguchi himself.
“To be an originalist, we have to go back to the origin of things,” Senosiain said through a translator, before asking the audience to close their eyes and imagine themselves in the womb at the time of their birth. “We are like astronauts floating in space, in a round shape with no windows, and feel this urge to be pushed through, with the lights shocking us.”
Senosiain explains that psychologists describe the action of being born as a traumatic experience, and explains this is due to the shape of where we find ourselves in.
“If we are born early, we are put in a glass box,” he says. “When we leave the square room, we take the rectangular train to our boxy apartments in New York, where we get pushed into these cradles with boarded sticks.”
“As we continue to grow, we crawl around the apartment, through the rectangular doors, and see the kitchen with boxes and squares on the wall.”
The artist continues down this path of reasoning until the very end. “And when we die, we get put into a box and lowered into a square in the ground.” Because of this, Senosiain puts forth, “we lose three very important aspects of our career: creativity, spontaneity, and freedom.”
Instead, he offers that we should reconsider how humans live on earth and how we interact with our natural landscape— in a not-so-square-ish way. By paying attention to the earth’s natural shelters and more specifically, its shapes, we can ensure humans, in general, will never lose the most important aspects of our lives, all the while helping mitigate the very crises that [some] humans helped create.
“We can return to the earth again,” Senosiain ended. “We can become human again.”
At the very beginning of October, we were invited to the Park Hyatt New York hotel for the latest art collection featuring Jeffrey Okyere-Agyeii, a contemporary abstract artist and bellman at the hotel. “TeRa-NiSeR ToTeMs” is inspired by Okyere-Agyei’s upbringing in Ghana, where totems are a large part of the physical symbology passed down through generations. Ghana is one of many cultures across the world that have totems embedded in their history through artifacts and storytelling. These totems possess spirits of animals, plants, and various other entities associated with their ancestors.
Marking Okyere-Agyei’s third exhibit at the iconic Park Hyatt New York, the collection titled “TeRa-NiSeR ToTeMs,” is inspired by the artist’s upbringing in Ghana, where totems were a large part of the physical symbology he experienced, as passed down through the generations. Ghana’s culture, artifacts, and storytelling, like many across the world, honor totems as important fixtures embedded in their history, and typically possess spirits of animals, plants, and various other entities associated with their ancestors.
“I have always been intrigued by ancient mythical artifacts and have found their relevance to the human story fascinating,” said Okyere-Agyei. “TeRa-NiSeR ToTeMs has become my creative interpretation of one aspect of our human history, modern art, and its spiritual symbology as a way to connect the past to the present. With the use of resin and vibrant color pigments, each piece has a unique mystical reverence about it.”
Last fall, the hotel presented Okyere-Agyei’s “EDIFICE,” an abstract interpretation of New York City’s incredible cityscapes and famous skyline. Prior to that in September 2019, Okyere-Agyei displayed his first Park Hyatt New York exhibit, “Future Art for the Present,” which reflected his love of movement in nature, space, and geometry.
The artist’s current installation began on September 14 and will be commemorated with a launch event in the hotel’s restaurant, The Living Room, on October 6. “TeRa-NiSeR ToTeMs” will be on display at Park Hyatt New York’s ground-level Avenue Gallery and in The Living Room through the end of December 2022.