As opposed to their Armory Week “curator-driven fair” Spring/Break, Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori have tempered debauchery with themes of nostalgia and financial gloom in their latest presentation at Soho’s Old School, Wish Meme. “We opened it up to people who aren’t independent curators,” Kelly said, “and a lot of the artists from Spring/Break wanted to curate. So it’s a lot of the same people, but it’s different.”
On the top floor of the former Catholic school, Gori has curated a selection of Kelly’s drawings of art world denizens’ business cards and prints of invitations summoning power players to a dance in her honor. “It’s about monetizing those relationships,” Kelly said. The works are all priced at $150 (or four for $500).
Also on the top floor, Spring/Break alum Myla DalBesio curated the classroom-sized show “Magic Kingdom.” “I’d been thinking a lot about how childhood gets commodified,” DalBesio said, “and how our memories end up being tied to these objects.” In addition to drawings by six-year-old Yung Lenox, the exhibition includes a Mike Tyson quilt by Weston Ulfig priced at $8,500 and a Matt Jones sculpture inspired by the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering ($5,500). Not all the presentations are so playful, though.
“This is the third show I’ve done with Ambre and Andrew,” said David Andrew Flinn, “and it definitely feels like the most mature.” The classroom he curated contributed to the somewhat sober atmosphere, with its walls painted a shade of gray actually called “Ominous,” and stand-out works like a haunting photo triptych by Adam Ianniello ($4,000) and Gerald Collings’s fleshy and formally fantastic painting Ruby, 2011, $8,900).
Fall On Your Sword, the Brooklyn-based new media trio, engaged Wish Meme’s mix of gloom, nostalgia, and sensory delirium with aplomb. Their interactive installation, Blaze of Thunder, put visitors at the helm of a projection in which a toy car tears around a cluttered apartment, each push of a glowing red button triggering a clip of a car crash from a film by the recently-deceased blockbuster filmmaker Tony Scott.
Meanwhile a set of three large abstract canvases by Samuel T. Adams, each priced at $7,000, was the standout in the classroom curated by Adam Mignanelli. Created through a process closer to printmaking, the compositions at first evoked hyperrealist renderings of crinkled aluminum foil, their abstract shininess echoing the show’s themes of nostalgia and financial duress.
The architect duo of Brandt Graves and Carrie McKnelly, who go by thefuturefuture, prototyped an appropriately futuristic currency, Media of Exchange. Consisting of ten pairs of automated drawings and 3-D printed sculptures — available as a full set for $1,999, or piecemeal for $300 each — their project imagines an abstract, open-source kind of cash executed with a palette of children’s markers that makes for a playful but conceptually rigorous synthesis of Wish Meme’s nostalgia-tinged utopianism.