All I wanted to do Wednesday afternoon was run out to grab a coffee during a long day at the gallery. Unfortunately, Madison Ave was being heavily patrolled by police, and I felt like a salmon swimming upstream toward my delicious caffeine fix. Why? Obama was in town and headed to a dinner on the Upper East Side. The highly choreographed police presence reminded me of a sophisticated, composed video AD Projects displayed last year to a very limited audience.
Becca Albee, video stills
Before our show Piles last summer, we held a dinner to thank our supporters in my old loft space and staged a small-scale solo show of works, many still in progress, by the fantastic artist Becca Albee. Becca generously lent us a variety of her works, spanning from highly personal photographs, to a communal newspaper giveaway piece, to a research project about a fugitive, to the video mentioned previously.
In her studio space at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Becca had a prime view of the downtown helipad where the president arrives and departs New York. She filmed the rigamarole of the helicopter landing, various black vehicles zipping around one another, and figures sprinting to and fro on the helipad for hours. Becca’s resulting video shows a passage of time, motion, and circumstances while maintaining a removed and distant perspective. Shown still in progress and large-scale in my home, just about a mile north of where it was filmed, the video definitely impacted my personal experience with the arrival of our nation’s president and how precisely he must travel through his domain. I was reminded of this fact, and of Becca’s beautiful video, by the impending motorcade this past week stopping me from getting my coffee!
Becca will be in a show opening this weekend at Cleopatra’s in Brooklyn entitled F is for Fake: The construction of femaleness by the US media. I cannot wait to see what she’s been up to since our show last summer, as I think she has further pursued her interest in Joan Lowell, an author who fictionalized her memoirs (ahem, James Frey) and fled to South America decades ago. The opening will be held this Sunday, May 1st from 6-8 pm at 110 Meserole Avenue in Brooklyn with an additional performance by Becca on May 29th at 5 pm.
