Flash Back Friday to Art-in-Buildings' 2015 exhibition at the West 10th Window, Amanda Millet-Sorsa, A Game of Tarot!

A Game of Tarot is composed of a full deck of delicate, hand-painted tarot cards. During the course of this exhibition, Millet-Sorsa will show a few cards at a time, switching them out every other day for a new reading, to display all 78 cards over six weeks. Drawing on tarot's use during the Italian Renaissance, Millet-Sorsa has invented her own pictorial language to portray the original suits of the tarot deck to reflect the society we live in today: blood as a weapon of war, network as power, water as wealth, while the heart remains the same. Examining these pillars of society on a macro, global level, A Game of Tarot then abstracts the imagery relating to each suit and figures of the deck. For instance, in her attempt to find the equivalent of the knight today, Millet-Sorsa concluded, in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo's tragic events, that the pencil, or the expression of the individual, is the knight. The pen emerges as a weapon instead of the historically depicted sword or spade. Here, A Game of Tarot is continuously in flux, inviting viewers to contemplate the structure and cardinal virtues of our modern day, global society.

Learn more on the AiB website!

Now on view at the West 10th Window | Esther Ruiz: Discovery!

Esther Ruiz draws on the languages of Minimalism and Pop, creating brightly colored neon-lit geometric forms. Her architectural objects operate as miniaturized fictional landscapes, referencing pop culture, space operas, and science fiction. Bringing together Euclidean shapes to build colorful, freestanding sculptures, Ruiz's work brings to mind the fluorescent glow of a Dan Flavin installation, the psychedelic palette of Pink Floyd, and the otherworldly colors of the desert. In Discovery at the West 10th Window, Ruiz imagines a futuristic environment on a desert planet, embedding totemic, glowing beacons into a sand-covered ground. These half buried sculptures suggest a contained, unknowable form of information within a fictional, alien landscape. The soft orange-painted walls recall the warm glow of a sunset, creating a moment of stasis in the window space when the neon lights of the city first turn on.

Learn more on the AiB website!

Now on view at the West 10th Window: Geoff Kim, Untitled Selfie!

Geoff Kim's practice is rooted in the analog and digital collaging of portraiture. In Untitled Selfie, Kim turns the camera away from his usual external subject matter and onto himself, embedding his face into an image that appears to be within a cell phone screen (see the Wi-Fi and battery symbols in the top left and right corners). Kim boldly presents multiple copies of his face to the public as a way to insert himself, and the Asian-American male figure, into the contemporary art scene, and as an exploration of the self in the age of digital image making. Kim's compilation of selfies confronts the viewer – his portraits are scaled up and removed from the confines of the selfie medium as usually viewed on a smart phone. Presenting 'selfies' as printed image in the West 10th Window, Kim explores how the images of ourselves captured on screens form our sense of self. Kim's selfies confront passerbyers and encourage self-reflection: How much of our time is connected to screens and the images that are born from them? How do we present, or create, the self via selfies? What is the role of the artist's hand in digital image making? Examining the selfie as an undeniable force in the zeitgeist of contemporary portrait photography, Untitled Selfie explores the changing nature of portraiture in the twenty first century.

Learn more on the AiB website!

Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the newest exhibition at the West 10th Window: David Baskin, Limited Edition.

Limited Edition is the latest iteration of David Baskin's Vanitas Project, a series that uses art historical models to address contemporary consumerism. Taking its name from the 17th century Dutch painting style, which traditionally presented still lifes laden with symbolic imagery alluding to death, Baskin's modernized vanitas transmutes the painted still life into three dimensional, chrome sculptures. In contrast to the austerity of the Dutch vanitas, Baskin composed his modernized construction of primarily kitsch or ersatz chrome products that are ubiquitous in the retail landscape. The found objects in Limited Edition, for example, include a chrome toy car, trumpet, fake grenade, dolphin corkscrew, and figurine of a pig with wings. Placed within the confines of the West 10th Window, Limited Edition transforms the space into a vitrine, interpretable as either a shop store window or a museum display case. Baskin's installation plays on the idea of artwork as a luxury item. The vitrine serves to advertise the work within as a "limited edition" item available only to a select few, heightening the intrinsic value of the object.

Now on View at the West 10th Window | Mollie Murphy: Passages!

Mollie Murphy's installation at the West 10th Window, Passages, presents life forms in motion in an exploration of the essence of movement. Creating a light box in the window, Murphy displays two large-scale photographs of figures walking in a university garden of her hometown of Princeton, NJ. Using a very low shutter-speed, Murphy's images show blurry, anonymous figures against a crystal clear, saturated, green garden background. In both images, one part of each figure is in focus, and appears as clearly and as still as the garden background it sits in front of. Passages is portraiture, just as much as it is a reflection on the idea of the garden as a metaphor for stillness and sound, movement, and the passage of life. Murphy brings this garden contemplation to the West 10th Window audience, with imagery of anonymous strangers mimicking their very actions and movements as they pass by the window.

Learn more on the Art-in-Buildings website!

Throw Back Thursday to Art-in-Buildings' 2015 exhibition 'Alan Ruiz: Precincts' at the West 10th Window! 

Precincts explores the boundaries of the West 10th Window by confronting the space of the display as a volume, as opposed to a container, through a series of customized vertical white aluminum sheets. Precincts simultaneously references the surrounding neighborhood: the 6th Precinct of the New York Police Department (which is immediately adjacent to the West 10th Window) and the shopping district on Bleecker Street. Rather than displaying an object for consumption, Ruiz inverts the traditional storefront window display by redirecting the viewer's gaze through and out of the window. The white aluminum sheets fill the volume of the space, but are cut in such a way to create a visual passageway that redirects the viewer's gaze towards the police precinct and neighboring private property. As such, Precincts warrants a kind of physicalized act of looking that subverts the notion of consumption while referencing surveillance via the viewer's redirected gaze. Precincts relates to Ruiz's wider artistic practice of exploring the tensions between standardized materials and customization, as well as the relationship between architecture and power, particularly as it relates to the delineation and control of public and private space.

This weekend is your last chance to see Robbin Deyo: The Gathering (Assembly #2) at the West 10th Window!

Don't miss it!

Throw Back Thursday to Art-in-Buildings' 2014 exhibition Patrice Renee Washington: Drab Contortionist at the West 10th Window!

Drab Contortionist is an exploration, and defiance of, gravity and form relative to material. Washington forces a slab of clay over a hurdle-like wooden rod, pulling and stretching the clay as if it were a piece of fabric. The slab then becomes something light, effortless, and carefree. The inspiration for Washington was to evoke an emotion of longing through a simple sculptural gesture. Here, the fired clay is hardened as it bends over backward on the rod, pushing the limits and notions of clay as a material: first soft and pliable and at the mercy of maker, and then hardened, finalized, stuck. In this sense, Washington sees the slab as longing to transform itself into something it is not, or something we do not think it is. The clay takes a sort of character, an acrobat or contortionist, while almost stubbornly remaining a basic, primitive form.

Read more on the Art-in-Buildings website!