Gallery Watch: GAO HANG! at The Hole

Text by Clare Gemima

Photo by Arturo Sanchez, courtesy of the Artist and The Hole (2021)

GAO HANG!

The Hole, 86 Walker St.

A winding and disorientating green-screen grid tapes the ground of The Hole on Walker Street, trapping you in a lo-res, digi nightmare that is GAO HANG! a self-titled exhibition of 12 terrifying life-size paintings. 

In Gao Hang’s first solo show at the gallery, the artist paints his sovereign by relying on a paradoxical 1990s time frame — one that was alive and well not so long ago yet feels already fossilized. Through sharp graphic lines and softer, more airbrushed finishes, Gao Hang has seemingly filled a substitute position for God…his creations just as bizarre as the next millennial’s. 

As I scanned the show, my brain subconsciously shifted gears to screenland. A sphere that I was once very underqualified in but had complete autonomy over in my prepubescent heyday nonetheless. I was addicted to Crash Bandicoot (1996), Spyro (1998) and The Sims (2000) growing up and rejoiced in Hang’s insinuated homage to the suffocating graphics each game had produced. 

While in their infancy, gaming and digital ecosystems introduced an extremely avant-garde idea to society — a totally abstract and otherworldly identity could be constructed and exist online. Although 8- and 16-bit compositions tried (very hard) initially, the idea lacked anything close to a civilized visual vocabulary. Fast forward to today’s technical triumphs and you’ll find little justification for existing offline at all. Why would you if you could look more stylish and even sexier within the confines of your screen? 

Gao Hang’s minimized features, diminished perspectives and fluorescent back-lit net hues deliberately trap the viewer inside several massive stylistic and historical gaps. His deconstructed and naively painted characters not only fill in the cracks of console gaming’s graphic timeline but also in paintings such as Inarguably Beautiful and I Am So Pathetic Copying Donald Judd Like That, they also unveil evolutionary leaps found within a fine arts context. 

Hang’s subtle commitment to research re-situates two famous, real-life sculptures — Venus de Milo, created in 130-100 BCE (Hellenistic period), which now sits in the Louvre in Paris, and the minimalist Untitled from 1967, a work currently collecting dust at MoMA’s storage unit in Queens. 

In the artist’s other, less figurine paintings such as A Perfectly Beautiful Hand, Go Hug A Tree and Your Mountains Are So Fucking Full of Meaning, my thoughts instantly traveled to Xavier: Renegade Angel (2007), a perverse and problematic animated series that I fell in love with once upon a time. In this cartoon, protagonist Xavier has ocular heterochromia, a beak for a nose, a snake for an arm and backward bending knees. He’s covered in fur but is convinced that he is 100% human. 

As if this wasn’t enough, many of his supporting characters are reduced to decorated polygons, looking completely flat from most, if not all angles and are grossly lego-like in design. This flagrant mind-fuck of a TV series is an awkward one to commit to watching, but it is hard to turn away from because of its chaotic artistry. A similar aesthetic to the one employed by production companies such as Adult Swim carries across all three rooms in GAO HANG! The artist’s warped landscapes and nature paintings unapologetically question ideals of beauty, while his characters stare at you almost as quizzically as you do them. 

Amalgamating abject approaches to character manipulation, with a sense of humor around how limited his styling options once were, Hang also touches on a much darker side of the net. Beautiful and charismatic avatars masterfully disguise the identity of IRL losers, revealed in Cyber Bully and Losing the Freedom of Shaming People. 

Visitors to the gallery are reminded of the creeps that dominate the internet and game space, a community that has become much harder to expose due to technology’s advanced creations of simulated identities. 

As I stood in front of my favorite paintings in the show, Angel of The Day and My Photoshop My Choice, I realized that anyone around my age could have created these characters, or perhaps they already had 15 years ago. 

In place of yesteryear’s gaming capabilities, Gao Hang has ditched screen-based graphics and chosen the medium of paint to customize the color of his characters’ lips, the cup sizes of their breasts, and the elongation in their purposefully tortured faces instead. 

GAO HANG! is at The Hole’s Walker Street gallery until Jan. 29. Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist and arts writer from New Zealand, now based in the East Village of New York. You can find her work here: claregemima.com

Gallery Watch: Bockhaus’s Anti Christmas Special by Ryan Bock at Ki Smith Gallery

Text by Clare Gemima 

Images by Roman Dean

Bockhaus’s Anti-Christmas Special, by Ryan Bock

Ki Smith Gallery, 197 E. Fourth St.

Ryan Bock’s signature black, grey and white paintings usher viewers into a circus-y soiree hosted by an East Village favorite and locally celebrated space, Ki Smith Gallery. 

Bockhaus’s Anti-Christmas Special presents a reactionary narrative storyboarded through gouache and acrylic compositions on paper. 15 works created during the early stages of the pandemic showcase themes of anti-establishment, anti-celebration and anti-consumerism…. (although nearly all of the work has already sold).

Bock’s post-traumatic and politically activated pieces reflect the sinister and Scrooge-like disdain of all matters celebratory occurring in 2020, most especially from the perspective of an American audience. These imprecise paintings express the torturous moments that we were lucky to have survived during our last year. 

By combining cubist methods, historical/religious pictorial references and a personal opposition to conforming to the idea of “Christmas,” Ryan has depicted his own take on the undeniable (and sobering) socio-political heist of COVID-19’s zeitgeist. 

Many of the self-described “divisive” artist’s paintings in this show would usually operate as drawing studies or preparatory sketches for larger scaled work. Having walked past Ki Smith Gallery on a night before the opening, I watched Bock paint the outside of the building with huge black, grey and white Christmas tree-like iconography. His sensibility in using huge brushes to tidy, tight, graphic corners was so technical and blatant, even in the dark. For the most part, the pandemic circumstantially forced Bock to work to a tighter and smaller size. 

For a creative that welcomes a street-art and muralistic vocabulary, Bock has masterfully worked against his restrictions to present a body of work that is limitless, both in practicality and scale. On the contrary, these paintings are even more special because they are original one-offs with zero editions. No reproduction, runs or re-monetization. An artist who (finally) does not know how to depend on (or use) photoshop and is voluntarily and conceptually opposed to the commercial nature of bureaucratic bullsh*t. 

Some of the work is visually derivative of historical moments, such as the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack (Navigating the Halls of History, 2020) ... or pop cultural moments that are now memes (McMahon Gets a Haircut From There then-Future President and Friends Circa 2007, 2020) ... and from older but just as bizarre cinematic moments (Christ Handgun, 2020). 

For me, the takeaways from Bockhaus’s Anti Christmas Special are found in the magical moments in the works themselves. Convoluted forms reference horrific lived moments while exposing the artist’s comprehensive knowledge in rendering refracted, cubistic gestures. Forms collapse, undulate and oscillate so many times over and over again.. it is difficult to digest that the work, which also transforms a zillion times depending on the viewer’s proximity, has been made merely with two shades and one color. 

Perhaps there is something festively holy about it after all…

Bockhaus’s Anti-Christmas Special is up through Dec.23 at the gallery, 197 E. Fourth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B. Hours: Wednesday-Sunday from 12:30 to 6:30 p.m. Alternative times are available by appointment.info@kismithgallery.com.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist and arts writer from New Zealand, now based in the East Village of New York. You can find her work here: claregemima.com

Gallery Watch: 'Night Moves' by Jacqueline Cedar at Shelter Gallery

 Text by Clare Gemima (photos courtesy of Shelter Gallery)

"Night Moves" by Jacqueline Cedar

Shelter Gallery, 179 East Broadway

"Night Moves" showcases a collection of recently created works by artist and arts educator Jacqueline Cedar for Shelter Gallery's final show of 2021.

After learning that Cedar constructs each of her paintings with somewhat of a theatrical sensibility, the 15 works in the gallery's space turn into a perfectly syncopated yet non-sequential storyboard. 

Through protagonists, situationships, and, at times, ominous interiors, "Night Moves" projects "acts" that have appeared for the artist during their time dreaming. 

Unrealistically recognizable characters can be seen drowning or wading ("The Plain and the Forest"), relaxing and decompressing ("We Will Touch Our Feet") or stuck in some sort of domestic consternation ("A Huge Crowd of Spectators"). 

Distorted journeys occur for all of Cedar's actors, frozen in their missions of transporting, gardening or just convincing themselves they are more than somebody's dreams. 

Cedar's mostly acrylic works have been realized through a psychologically intuitive process, leading the viewer through a survey of the artist's formalized dreams. By filtering and gathering source inspiration, the artist's discovery is a before and after success and mess. 

Is this a 15-part dream or one long, drawn-out nightmare? The satisfaction here is that neither her audience nor the artist herself will ever know the honest answer, simply because these paintings were pre-conceived while unconscious. 

Connections in colors, compositions and in some instances a recurring lampshade motif ("Led Me Out and Not Saying So") become more apparent by accident after spending more time with each work. Because all of the paintings in "Night Moves" have been made in the last two months, the audience is spoiled by the vulnerability of Cedar's expression and by the show's fortuitous and "last-minute" cohesion. 

By depicting gangly, bendy, and long-limbed figures that stretch, lay or grab under the constraints of her luminous and tiny wood panels, Cedar invites us to indulgently and awkwardly invade her private bubble. 

"Night Moves" runs until Dec 22 at Shelter Gallery, 179 East Broadway. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday from noon to 6 p.m.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist and arts writer from New Zealand, now based in the East Village of New York. You can find her work here: claregemima.com

Gallery Watch: 'If Death Ever Learn' at Someday Gallery

Text by Clare Gemima (photos courtesy of Someday Gallery)

'If Death Ever Learn' by Brittni Ann Harvey

Someday Gallery, 120 Walker St.

"If Death Ever Learn," produced by Brittni Ann Harvey, is the first exhibition to show in Someday, an engaging new space joining the Walker Street gallery gang. Excitement can be felt merely in the space's infancy, let alone how much Harvey's work sets such a bold precedent for every show to come. 

Harvey's show immediately suggests the artist is well-versed and extremely literate in her research. Creating objects that curve, hang and twine, Harvey sets up a debate between man-made and digital intervention on a very symbolic scale. 

Harvey leads us through an array of problem-solving artifacts that relate to the contractual marriage between artificial intelligence and industry. Her dogs are adorned with architectural soft sculpture, preluding an identifiable canine cuteness that contrasts with the terrifying idea that manufactured four-legged robots could be weaponized. 

Through military-driven initiatives that Harvey extrapolates in "If Death Ever Learn," the audience is exposed to the slippage between the industrial revolution's residual downpour and technology's constant responsibility to be used for the greater good. 

Through her paintings, tapestries, braided bronze, and dog-like sculptures, Harvey toys with mass engineering and the advancement in bio-tech through an effeminate showcasing of corporal colors, sculptures and decor. 

I asked Someday Gallery Director Rosie Motley for her thoughts: 

The show brings together new oil on burlap paintings, embroidered collages, and three free-standing bronze sculptures that are loosely based on robotic dogs, the most familiar of which are produced by the Massachussettes based company Boston Dynamics.

In all of the works, Brittni combines both analog and digital processes — first sketching by hand and then scanning her drawings and manipulating them in a computer program to produce digital embroideries and jacquard-woven fabrics. 

While Brittni Ann Harvey's show ends Saturday at Someday Gallery, keep an eye on this new space for more exhibits in the future. For more information, visit the gallery's website here. Someday is open Thursday-Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: 'The Marble Mouth Oracle' at Below Grand

Text by Clare Gemima (photos courtesy of Below Grand)

The Marble Mouth Oracle

Below Grand (Formerly Super Dutchess), 53 Orchard St. 

Since visiting the former Super Dutchess, a new back space now accompanies the gallery's impressive front window, which faces out on Orchard Street between Grand and Hester.

Piles of boxes, kitchen equipment and random tools line the thoroughfare into the back room, making for quite an experience on opening night. Quintessential hole in the wall/New York vibe, yet, in relief, a hidden gem of a show, one drenched in research and exemplary curatorial refinement. Thanks to curator Andrew Woolbright.  

"The Marble Mouth Oracle" presents a collection of eight artists' work, installed throughout both spaces of Below Grand. The artists featured here are Joe Bochynki, Caleb Jamel Brown, You Ni Chae, Gabriel Cohen, Jesse Genepi, Sarah Miska, Erik Probst and Randy Wray. 

Woolbright has worked with Wray in previous shows and Accelerator (2011) oozes and torments the viewer. 

Wray's pieces are so desirable yet, abject, especially when made out of his signature papier-mâché, acrylic and oil paints. Strewn together with found objects from the East River's debris: Denim, test tubes, crystals, wire, coins and buttons are all fused together with an aqua-based epoxy resin, forming an extraordinarily anamorphic and animistic sculpture. 

There are multiple themes to this show, but one central thread that I personally read into was the depiction of religion — more specifically, the restrictive luxuries of paganism, the torment of worship, the life-long push and pull that devotion invites and the richness and collapse of martyrdom. 

From Erik Probst's pointillistic and gruelingly detailed illustration to Gabriel Cohen's flawlessly man-made triptych, the work in The Marble Mouth Oracle grapples with values that we place on oracular objects/subjects in this case, religious superiority, its invasiveness and its seamless skill at re-narrating the truth. 

This show regurgitates elements of historical ornateness, such as mosaic tiling or alter-y shaped pieces, yet each work embraces the unspoken truth that organized religion is so skilled at disguising ... pain. 

There is also a sense of being chained to one's craft that potently comes through all 8 artists' work. Sarah Miska's painting in the back room zooms in on one of the body's most intimate and soulful (or sinful) parts. The pupil, the eyeball, the stare. The owner of these attributes, in this case, is a dressage horse. The intentional cropping of this painting sensationalizes the horse's restrictive realities. 

In Miska's two smaller works, one renders a perfectly plaited horsetail, while the work above it depicts the rider's perfectly taught hair bun. The installation is presumably deliberate, emulating the complete backside of a horse rider sitting on their horse. To participate in an equestrian-related sport is, in fact, a religious practice in and of itself. 

Another piece that brought me face to face with multiple gods (let's get specific here) was the most vital work in the show, Temperaments (2020), by Joe Bochynki. Bobbleheads of NSYNC's boy-band members lined the top of a large-scale bricolage that I spent at least two hours looking at online in an attempt to find the right words to describe it.

Definitely, definitely a mosaic piece in its execution and process, but also such a shrine, maybe even an ode to an alter piece? A tiled pastiche of the Old Testament? Regardless of my never-ending word search, this piece was so difficult to stop looking at, purely because you'd continue to find new moments every inch that your eyes traveled. 

Tile, figurines, acorns, bobbleheads, censors, ball clubs, crosiers, trophies and toys are all used on panels to create this painstakingly labored piece of art. The act of making this work proves to me that Bochynki is not far from being a martyr himself, especially once you see the organically shaped pieces of tile. 

If this was all done by hand (which I have to assume because some of the tiles were beveled), it would've had to have hurt him at multiple stages throughout the process….but the finished work has no indication of the blood, sweat and tears that would've gone into its production, rather so, anonymous figures are seen carrying reliquaries and sporting books. 

Prized possessions are highlighted as holy. Unique and found objects in Temperaments become pure, polished and clean. The artist's agency is lost within the biblical grandeur of the work. I thought this piece was so conceptually sound and supporting to the shows' fellow artists. 

I have focussed merely on the work that I felt solidified the thematics of the show. Still, there are so many more works that are intentionally powerful, controversial, even sacrilegiously sacred. 

"The Marble Mouth Oracle" is running through Nov. 7. This is a must-see show and a must-watch gallery. To learn more about the space and past/current exhibitions, please visit this link. Below Grand is open Monday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Sundays.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: Sei Smith: Portraits of You at Ki Smith Gallery

Text by Clare Gemima 

Photos by Grace Shine Jeon

Portraits of You by Sei Smith

Ki Smith Gallery, 197 E. Fourth St.

I feel lucky to live so close to Ki Smith Gallery — not because of the geographic convenience or their fun and social openings. I visit Ki Smith Gallery for the art and its engaged, intellectual, and fascinating artists.

I would like to applaud this gallery for presenting and committing to an ethos that positions itself within an art historical context. A special thanks to Gallery Director Claire Foussard for offering such support to the artists at Ki Smith and to artist Sei Smith for his enthusiasm and willingness to talk to me about his new show, Portraits of You. 

Smith has created a series of figureless portraits, forcing an audience member to immediately question ideas around contemporary art jargon or any preconceived notion of what a portrait-painter could be today. This wit and finesse at articulating such are consistent throughout the eight works that line the gallery's space. Smith uses an iridescent adhesive film throughout this body of work which acts to obscure identity informing under-paintings. 

Eight works represent Smith's various relationships to eight different friends who range in backgrounds (and statures). Smith has reinforced this concept of diversity in highly creative ways, including height-specific installation techniques, his choice in titling the work and through the materials he chooses to play with. 

The work comes full circle to me conceptually because, by nature, these works are reflective. Seeing yourself within the work teases and tests your impulses to look for things you didn't think were ever there. It wasn't until I read more about the work that I realized the under-coats of acrylic were really the ID of the painting, and deciphering all of them was challenging but in a slow reveal sort of way. 

It was also a beautiful experience because of the tonality of the film coating (think reds, pinks, oranges, ruby, purple, etc.). Having this knowledge was not imperative to the viewing experience. Still, it definitely made me want to go back after reading the artist's viewing instructions to learn more about who his muses were, or at least through their instructions for Sei, who they wanted to be portrayed as. 

There is more than meets the eye in Portraits of You. Because of the iridescent top coating of the paintings, the work changes color depending on your angle. As you move from one piece to another, the light in the gallery hits differently, creating new narratives for each of the works. A live personification happens before your eyes. It is intimate and almost self-indulging. 

The show is fun but also wrapped in intellect that will excite you about the direction of Smith's career. I'm looking forward to seeing more. After the last show I covered at this space, the artist's inquiries and concept handling have already been embraced, updated, upgraded and re-navigated. 

Please read more about Sei's practice here. And follow the most up-to-date events and openings from Ki Smith Gallery here.

Portraits of You is up through Oct. 17 at the gallery, 197 E. Fourth St. between Avenue A and Avenue B. Hours: Wednesday-Sunday from 12:30 to 6:30 p.m. Alternative times available by appointment.info@kismithgallery.com

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: 'My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake' at Freight + Volume

Text and photos by Clare Gemima  

Rebecca Goyette's My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake

Freight + Volume Gallery, 97 Allen St.

My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake is definitely a sight for sore eyes from the instant you stand in front of Freight + Volume on Allen Street. 

Visible before entering the gallery, a video of humans in dog suits giving birth, humping and licking all sorts of different things invites onlookers shamelessly into the space. 

Regardless of this show’s potent R18 feel, colors explode playfully throughout the gallery as you experience the artist’s multifaceted skill set displayed through illustration, soft sculpture, video work, and in her most exciting execution, ceramics. 

Reading about this show, I discovered so much extrapolated narrative attached to it that I would like to encourage readers to visit and interpret the art for themselves. I say this because often the charm of a great show is rubbed away by some forceful and didactic description that 1) an average gallery-goer may never read in the first place and 2) is a load of just utter, out-of-touch bullshit. 

I think the conflict I face regarding this show is that the work is outstandingly attractive to me, yet it presents a dense amount of self-involvement and inaccessible self-consciousness that it becomes less about the beauty of the objects and more about the artist’s lived experience. I can’t tell if this is a good thing or not, but there is so much going on — a successful mind-fuck above all else. 

There is strong authorship in the show that guides viewers through a personal story of Goyette involving the sale of her father's house after he had passed away. The new home-owner turned out to be a right-wing and starchy bum-hole Trump supporter who is crafted (life-size) for a full-on confrontation as you enter the space. He’s grotesque to look at, drowning in snakes and dressed in politically indicative attire. 

This recurring "Snake Man" debuts as No. 1 enemy to our hero and protagonist, Rebecca Goyette, aka Lobsta Queen. The dogs have human dicks, the humans each have two dicks, a group of sausages throws a party, and the art of sex is celebrated positively, strikingly, abjectly. 

Evidence for an aforementioned mind-fuck of a show is particularly blatant in Goyette's collection of ceramics, which are by far the most enticing part of My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake. Her drawings are particularly tantalizing as well (think animal kingdom stampeding through a Grayson Perry tapestry). 

Go inside the mind of a tortured artist who chooses to torment her audience for fun with child-like and extremely perverse make-believe scenarios. 

My Snake is Bigger Than Your Snake will be showing at Freight +Volume, 97 Allen St., until May 16.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

The Gallery Watch Q&A: Superchief Gallery NFT

 Text and photos by Clare Gemima 

Superchief Gallery NFT, 56 E. 11th Street between Broadway and University Place, is said to be the first physical gallery in the world to devote its entire space to the display of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

I sat down with Ed Zipco, an extremely passionate member of the space, to discuss the ins and outs of this crazy new art world, the future of digital spaces and how every type of artist can benefit from this technology. (A special thanks to Ed for letting me pick his brain about this over and over again!)

What does the NFT space do for your everyday artist? 

I think it opens up a brand new arena for them where it’s new collectors, new opportunities to be created and a new world of royalties. More than anything and across the board, every artist should be caring about the fact that there is now a way to get royalties for their artwork.

So that’s the main ethos of  Superchief Gallery NFT (SCGNFT)?

Definitely. Getting royalties as an artist hasn’t existed in the history of the art world. It’s a huge deal. 

How does SCGNFT operate amongst other galleries in the neighborhood? How do you see yourself within the neighborhood’s more conventional art-viewing experience/ gallery culture? 

Well, we have two galleries. We have this one and the one in SoHo, which deals with the more traditional side of things. We are a bit bolder and we are really running into this field as fast as we can to champion it without hesitation. 

I think other galleries were not yet working with digital artists for the most part, but we have since 2016. We’ve been looking and waiting for this moment to happen and I think a lot of the other institutions, curators and people in the art world have been resigned to the idea that selling digital artwork is impossible. Now they seem to be getting into it. 

For us, we’ve been waiting. I think there are so many incredible digital and technological artworks out there and there hasn’t been a way to include them or support them in the best way possible. I think that’s the major difference. We want to include digital artists in a larger discourse and community. 

Did you think waiting for a platform to appear that would champion digital artists would correlate with cryptocurrency?

Yeah, of course. Because it all feels so — future. Everything feels like bits and pieces of alien technology that have suddenly become accessible, so I think that’s just what the future feels like, and it’s part of the whole NFT eco-system. I don’t think that we could’ve predicted how it all came about, but it made a lot of sense that it would be crypto-related for sure. 

Where does your confidence come from in erecting a physical gallery dedicated to showcasing exclusively digital/virtual work?

Our confidence comes from the fact that we are used to being “new” and early on projects. We’ve been betting on the future for 20 years. It’s kind of a necessary situation for the public to have an opportunity to see what it looks like to actually own this artwork and have it not just be something that lives on your phone.

If there is going to be artwork, people want to live with that artwork, and [you think] how do you inhabit a space, or,  how does your home host all of this stuff around you? I think people need to see the work before they start having it in their home.

So SCGNFT really wants to present the digital colliding with the physical. There’s a convergence there.

Well, that’s truly what cyber-punk is. The relics and artifacts of technology and the physical intermeshing.

And obviously, there are a lot of artists working across different disciplines: painting, sculpture, textile, ceramics, video, collage, etc., but all I can see are screens around me. Almost as if the screens are acting as canvases... is this the only iteration or display of NFT work that your gallery will showcase?

No. We are really excited to be as experimental as the NFT experience can allow. Our goals over time will be 3D-printed sculptures, projection mapping, having more interactivity where you can kind of experience NFTs as NFTs become more advanced. Right now, this is still year one of the pop-cultural interaction with NFTs.

Right, so they’re really in their infancy right now?

Certainly. 

Well, that’s exciting because I know there are plenty of people working outside of screen-based practices that can participate in NFTs. So what happens when you buy an NFT? I have a screen at home and I would like to experience my own NFT at home in real-time. What does that look like?

Most platforms/marketplaces will sell you an NFT that is roughly 50 megabytes. It will look good on your phone, OK to good on your computer screen but if you put it on your TV it will start to look soft. 

If you buy the NFT from us, you get unlock-able content, so you get a link or a way to contact us and once you contact us we send you away to download the high-res file. So you get to experience the high-resolution version in your home.

            

And that file exists in whatever format it has been uploaded as?

Mhmm. 

So it could be anything from a PSD to an AI to a JPEG to a TIFF to anything?

Yeah. I think there are a few types of files that aren’t accepted but for the most part, you’re correct. 

What is the best advice for launching or transitioning into this space?

I think the most important thing people can do right now is to engage with the audience that they have and start to build and communicate with them as to what their plans are. It isn’t the old way of doing art sales anymore. It isn’t the old art world where you’re trying to sell a piece and once you sell that piece you kind of lose contact with your buyers. It's difficult to have a relationship with your collector base ...

NFTs really allow you to create communities and be able to directly have relationships with your community. 

So I think the most important thing I would say to artists is to put work out there, communicate with people before you do so in order to promote it and then don’t set the prices too high or expect it to be a cash-grab.

It is really important for people to recognize that this is the first time that the collectors, flippers and artists are all on the same team. That hasn’t existed up until this point, so now when you sell something at a price and they flip it for more, the artist is getting 10 percent of that every time. 

So it’s really about the longevity of your work and setting an ability for it to grow over time and then be something that is a recurring income stream. It really helps everybody. 

So how does an artist approach Superchief Gallery NFT to facilitate a physical showcasing of their work?

For us we curate everything. For our gallery, we are looking all day/every day for new work. The way that we take submissions is through Instagram. If we are feeling it, we reach back out and let them know that we are excited and sometimes we get flooded so artists won’t hear back for a couple of weeks but we read everything.

Can you talk more about the nature of the artwork that’s already been submitted? Are they ambitious projects or more screen-based display-type proposals?

Both sides and everything in between. People have reached out with crazy opportunities but there is also a wave of people that are just starting to get excited because they can see people being able to pay their rent and make a lot of money with it. 

Because of that, there are now artists that have never made artwork before that are going crazy and trying to do everything they can which is great. It’s not necessarily always the work we want to show, but I am happy that people are encouraged to make artwork because you get that diamond in the rough. 

You get that 1 in 100 that’s amazing. 

Is the NFT space for everyone or is there a specific type of artist/collector that it is set up for?

I think eventually it will be for everyone. I think right now it's early adopters who I think in every way we’ve all seen tend to do well. The early adopters of Instagram are the ones with the giant Instagram accounts, early adopters of TikTok are the ones with huge TikTok accounts. 

The early investors of crypto are now millionaires and billionaires. There’s certainly a mix right now of people that hit it big in crypto and people that are excited about technology and the blockchain in general who have been involved for maybe two years at this point. Financial institutions have gotten into it heavy in the last six months. 

But this wave through art has made it appeal to mass culture. Sports is the other side of that and between sports and the arts, everyone is diving in. Celebrities are involved now. I think what is really going to blow the roof off of this whole thing is when sneakerhead culture enters the chat.

Explain sneakerhead culture.

Sneakerhead culture is the people from the last 10 years that found sectors in a culture that they could invest in, recognize scarcity, recognize the system, invest in it and profit off of it. I think those people and those hype beasts are going to completely create a boom now that they are able to invest in artwork. 

The secondary market has always been obscured in the art world and the gatekeepers were really difficult to work with and I think there being a transparency that is available now via the blockchain is gigantic. I think that wave is going to bring all of these boats up higher. 

There’s already a pre-existing culture in this space, early adopters, specific types of artist’s work that appreciates more significantly than others, etc. Do you think an artist could actually maintain an analog practice and dabble in the NFT space as a secondary income stream or do you really have to embrace this monster of a culture that maybe you wouldn’t usually or naturally?

Like anything, you’re going to get out what you put in, but I don’t think this is about people chasing a fad or changing their aesthetic or art practice to jump into this. To some degree, you will see people do that but I think maintaining their voice regardless of their chosen medium is the most important thing. 

As long as they are staying true to themselves, it’s a really good idea to be an early adopter of this. For 100 different reasons crypto, the blockchain and the fact that there are royalties make it a very worthwhile thing to chase after. 

When you curated this particular show, what was it that you were trying to present and give out to your audience? 

I really want to show a well-balanced portrait of the art community that we work with. I really want to show a balance of traditional artwork, graffiti artists, muralists, street artists, photographers, sculptors and really find the right way to bring each of those practices to the NFT sphere. About 70 percent of the show is from traditional artists and 30 percent from digital artists. 

For you, what is the most rewarding part of this experience?

It has been wild handing this much money to artists this fast. We were in our first week of being open and we sold $150,000 worth of NFTs and 85 percent of that goes to artists. It’s not the traditional 50/50. 

It just blew my mind.

Superchief Gallery NFT is open daily from noon to 6 p.m.

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com 

Gallery Watch: 'Nature Morte' at the Hole

Text and photos by Clare Gemima  

Nature Morte, 

The Hole, 312 Bowery 

The line to get into Nature Morte on the night of the opening honestly stretched so far beyond the Bowery that it had no visible end at all!

The Hole’s yearly group show packed in 60 visual artists working across painting, sculpture, neon, photography, works on paper and ceramics. 

The entire gallery is now a transformed concrete wilderness, sporting grey shades and foliage from ground to ceiling, framing each work in its own unique environment. 

Depicting disease, darkness and death, Nature Morte showcases the artist’s response to the chaos of the climate change crises using taxidermy, abjectness and deceptive seduction. 

The 21st century’s take on the death of the natural world circulates around a constantly growing collection of symbols such as cigarette butts, grease stains, balloons, animal repurposing/consumption and plastic. Compare this to a broad 17th-century critique and the gradual devastation, or our inhabitants' negligence, is a little bit too hard to bear (luckily matcha gin cocktails were being served).

You can find a list of all the artists in the show at the Hole's website.

Nature Morte will be running until May 9 at the Hole, 312 Bowery near First Street. Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12-7 p.m., and by appointment.

 

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Clare Gemima is a visual artist from New Zealand. New-ish to the East Village, she spends her time as an artist assistant and gallery go-er, hungry to explore what's happening in her local art world. You can find her work here: claregemima.com