Art on the Weekend: Mary Ann Aitken and Helmut Smits

I usually reserve Sundays for little other than donuts. After my search for the East River dolphin, I visited two adjacent art shows. I started with a visit to the site of my former studio, now occupied by the art gallery Cleopatra's. The softly lit space is hung with small toothy oil paintings by the artist Mary Ann Aitken.  I'm continually drawn to abstraction right now and at this contemplative scale the paintings did not demand attention despite their heavily worked surfaces.

My second stop was a relatively new gallery, called Beginnings, sharing the same address as Cleopatra's. The small space is packed with mostly digital prints by the artist Helmut Smits. He uses motifs of strained capitalism while embedded in a computer-centric culture. To a humorous end in Dead Pixel in Google Earth, he depicts a square patch of lawn scraped down to the soil. In Real Life Photoshopping No. 1 and Real Life Photoshopping No. 2, he has manipulated trivial elements in the scene with the help of Photoshop such as adding green to dried leaves or removing low-hanging branches from unmanicured hedges. I think my favorite work from the group is a series of photo-copy documents created by rolling a six sided die on the glass bed of the machine.

http://cleopatrascleopatras.blogspot.com/
http://www.beginnings-nyc.com/

Both galleries are located in Greenpoint at 110 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222
*check the websites for hours of operation

East River Dolphin

On Sunday I read about a wayward dolphin swimming in New York's East River. With a naive hope that I would catch a view and possibly meet this misguided animal, I headed through the village of Greenpoint to the bank of the East River. My first stop was the recently opened WNYC Transistor Park. Unfortunately the pier was fenced off and with unwavering anticipation I continued on to the ferry dock at the end of India Street. I spent about half of the hour watching boats pass and looking for signs of movement in the water. From memory I could match buildings in the distance to images pictured in the news article and remained hopeful. Birds gathered off in the distance and I thought maybe dolphins fed on the same things the birds looked for. Several years ago I was on a boat in Hawaii and the guide explained that dolphins are curious by nature and often play in the wake of tour boats. As a ferry pulled up to unload passengers, I carefully watched the trailing water. I imagined a dolphin splashing and playing in the turbulence but the wake was a white cloud of emptiness. With nothing to show for my endeavor I decided to leave. As I retreated, I looked back several times to see if something would appear in the gray water.

New Bike Racks in Greenpoint, Brooklyn!