Chelsea and fast cars...

Bruce Silverstein Gallery- 535 West 24th Street
Todd Hido is showing large scale color photographs. The exhibition is titled "A Road Divided". The photographs vary from extreme close up to medium shot. The photographs were of car accidents, more like car wrecks. The close up shots abstracted the subject, the crunched car hood, and it took me to minute to realize what I was looking at. I really like the twelve photographs that documented the deployment of an air bag. Overall, I thought the exhibit was interesting subject matter and had a slight morbid quality. However, I had a slight knot in my stomach because it reminded me of my recent car accident.

Pace Wildenstein Gallery-545 West 22nd Street
Maya Lin is exhibiting "Three Ways of Looking at the Earth". The exhibit consists of three large scale installations. The first installation is in view as you first enter the gallery. Its quite overwhelming in scale and construction. Its titled "2x4 Landscape". The landscape is built out of 2x4 small blocks of wood, stacked and layer to achieve height. This was insanely cool and gives new ideas how to build something large scale. The second installation is titled "Waterline". This installation was constructed out of wire and referenced the ocean floor. The third installation is titled "Blue Lake". The installation was separated into squares of layered particle boards with jagged tops and set up in a grid pattern. It represented the elevation map of a mountain range. Overall this show was really well put to together and completely amazing. At first the scale is overwhelming and slows your realization of what you are looking at. Then, slowly, the simplicity of the materials leads you to the understanding of what you are actually looking at.

Andrea Rosen Gallery-525 West 24th Street
Josiah McElheny exhibited "Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism". This exhibit consists of photographs and sculptures. The main concept of is future architecture using primary color glass windows. The photographs are colored in to show where the primary colors would go on the windows. This exhibit was hard for me to understand because I lack the understanding of architecture but the "proposals" were visually pleasing. I really did not understand how the monochromatic shelves with glassware fit into the exhibit.

Winston Wachter Fine Art-530 West 25th Street
Ed Cohen was exhibiting "The Nothing That Is Not Here". This gallery I just stumbled into while walking down the street. The paintings consisted of solid black or white backgrounds and there were either wavy lines or circles. The lines and circles were created out of drips of paint that resemble marble. The Pollock influence is completely apparent. I just generally like these paintings. They seem to project a happy feeling. They seem to focus more on an intangible than a tangible subject matter.

Pace Wildenstein Gallery- 534 West 25th Street
James Turrell's exhibit was titled "Large Holograms". Well... basically it was holograms. I thought I was pretty interesting because it seem to deal with optical mixing and perception. I was interested in walking around and figuring out how the holograms were made with the projection of the lights.

Lehmann Maupin Gallery-540 West 26th Street
Juergen Teller showed his exhibit titled "Paradis". The exhibited consisted of large scale color photographs. The photgraphs were taken in some sort of museum. Some contained two female nude models and others were just of the interior of the museum. I did not really enjoy this show. The photographs seem a little pixelated and made it seem amateur. I wondered if that was on purpose?

Andrea Meislin Gallery-526 West 26th Street
Jed Fielding exhibited "Look at Me: Photographs from Mexico City". The show exhibited all the same size black and white photographs. The photographs were matted, framed and hung about eye level. The subjects of these photographs were blind children. The photographs gave a sense of uneasiness because it is social norm not to stare at a person's disability. However, this show forces you to look at them directly and enables you to stare at them without being yelled at.

Robert MIller Gallery-547 West 27th Street
I am pretty sure I saw the wrong show at this gallery. The show that I saw was titled "Sundaram Tagore Presents The Space Around Us, New York" by Joan Vennum. The show consisted of multiple panel paintings that resemebled sunraises and sun sets. However at the same time, they had a abstract quality to them.