DaWire

Casa Rota is literally a house, but also an exhibition space in Levittown, Puerto Rico where exhibition maker Bryan Arocho presented last week a collection of small format collages titled Violation. At a time when alternative art venues seem to be anonymously sprouting amongst galleries and art institutions, it seems necessary to reveal alternate ways to exhibit works in a rapidly changing dire economy. This is one of the places where art is happening, but few seem to know about. Read the rest of this post »

Rae McGrath’s SUGAR JUNKIE; a Winnebago turned gallery turned school bus

One of the most enticing legacies of the tradition of writers and their multiple identities as graffiti artists, aerosol artists, street artists, or simply artists, is the spontaneous intensity of a particular type of art making. A certain “Live Art”, in dialogue with the moment. It is precisely this paradigm that Rae McGrath’s Brooklynite Gallery has engaged with for the last 3 years on Malcolm X Boulevard, not far from Fulton Street, in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Now at a crossroads, McGrath is looking to take this living art practice into new territory. Read the rest of this post »

Respublica acier, aluminium, cablage, ampoules 370 x 1240 x 150 cm, 2009.

For his first solo exhibition at Galerie West in the Netherlands titled Blue, White, Red, Black, French artist Nicolas Milhé (1976) presents a politically charged oeuvre that examines notions of nationalism, language and politicized individualism. The title of the exhibition plays off the colors of the French flag (the infamous symbol of ‘liberty’ bleu, blanc et rouge) and adds to it the color black, manifesting a dark and somber reality behind the quintessential French symbol of national pride. Read the rest of this post »

Installation view at AREA’s project room

Supported in its entirety by business man and collector José Hernández Castrodad, AREA has been now for five consecutive years one of the only artist residency programs and project rooms in Puerto Rico, providing a space for young artists to show their work and develop projects. For its 5th anniversary celebration, artist Norma Vila Rivero organized a collective project titled “Construcciones, instalaciones y ensamblajes” that comprised works by Migdalia Luz Barens Vera, José “Quique” Rivera, Christto Sanz, Manolo Rodríguez, René Sandín, Melissa Raymond, Omar Obdulio Peña Forty and the tinsmith DUA, which comprised Michelle Gratacós-Arill’s conceptual proposal; while artist Abdiel Segarra presented a documentation project of AREA’s history. Read the rest of this post »

An image from our most popular post in 2010: Luis Adelantado’s Inaugural Exhibition in Mexico City

This year has been quite a ride for DaWire. We have grown in numbers and expanded our network of contributing writers and websites. But most importantly, we have successfully carved our little niche in the online world. DaWire is no ordinary blog, it’s an art project; a resource for artists, curators and anyone searching to know a little bit more about contemporary art. It invites constant reflection and investigation. Read the rest of this post »

View from my end of the table at AO&’s curated dinner

Coming down from Chelsea Piers on a taxi on my way down to NYC’s Lower East Side, I wasn’t sure where exactly I was supposed to meet my friend for dinner. She told me earlier that evening to be there at 8pm, but I had just finished working a fair and wasn’t sure if I could be there on time. Arriving at Broome and Forsyth, there was no restaurant in sight. Looking around, I saw a couple that seemed just as lost as I was. “Are you here for the dinner?”  ”Yeah,” I replied. As we called our respective friend, a door opened on Broome right next to Simon Preston’s gallery inviting us in. Walking up the stairs, (this was no restaurant I realized), we arrived at an abandoned storefront set-up with a makeshift kitchen and a long nicely lit dining table. This was no ordinary dinner. It was the performance/experiential work of the Austrian collective AO&; a part of their Fall residency at Simon Preston Gallery. Read the rest of this post »

For his third solo exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery in NYC, José Lerma takes on three ideas that have preoccupied him in the past couple of years: the Bankers, the Reflective Curtain and the Keyboards. Under the title I am sorry I am Perry, the show gathers mixed media painting and installation. The title, although possibly strange for many, is the punch line of a popular joke in Puerto Rico, where an English-speaking fox (zorro) and a Spanish-speaking dog (perro) bump into each other and in apologizing, reflect the complexities of bilingualism, translation and a jagged political situation. Read the rest of this post »

Carlos “Mare139” Rodriguez, WU/StyleWriter, an illegal public sculpture in Wuppertal Germany.

One of the hardest working women in New York City is Martha Diaz. Dedicated to community empowerment through institution building for over a decade, her most recent project, The Hip-Hop Education Center for Research, Evaluation, and Training [H2ED Center], finds her in partnership with New York University. Launched in June 2010 at New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Urban Education [Metro Center] in the Steinhardt School for Culture, Education, and Human Behavior, The H2ED Center is the premiere institute formed to explore and advocate the potential of Hip-Hop education. Read the rest of this post »

Cuban School (Community 5th of October), 2010

There is something eerily mysterious about John Gerrard’s images. They look like desolate, ordinary landscapes; an oil rig or an abandoned building, but they are actually virtual sculptures, carefully built with skilled technicians and a complex software program. Currently on view at Simon Preston Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, Irish born artist John Gerrard presents his most recent major work, Cuban School (Community 5th of October), shown as a large scale double-projection. Read the rest of this post »

Chicks on Speed, Bawag Contemporary performance, Vienna, 7 May 2009.

Lying somewhere between performance art, DIY fashion and electroclash music, Chicks on Speed is a multimedia art collective formed in 1997 by Melissa Logan, Kiki Moorse and Alex Murray-Leslie while studying together at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Making records, music videos, live performances and fashion statements, Chicks on Speed’s practice is a mash-up of different creative disciplines that resists any type of definition. Read the rest of this post »