Susan Graham's Sugar Sculptures

Susan Graham's Toile Landscape is a collection of works that were just at Schroeder, Romero & Shredder  Gallery that the artist moved back to her Smack Mellon studio in time for DUMBO Arts Festival. I loved the intricacy of her all-white creations (yes, despite the yellow tint to my photograph these are white.)

Detail of above

Graham presents trees, towers and other tableaux here with delicate lines. Graham made these pieces out of sugar--in fact out of sugar, egg whites, wood and wire. (In fact, sculptures made of sugar are by no means a new thing, and apparently can last quite a long time.) In addition to sugar, the artist also works with porcelain. Here we have small landscapes of sorts, but more confrontationally in terms of material vs. content, she makes delicate white guns and lawnmowers.

The Dumpster Project

Some people, like me, clean house when they move, getting rid of the extra stuff that has accumulated along the way. Others, like artist Mac Premo, move to a smaller studio and decide to put all the stuff to good artistic use. In The Dumpster Project, Premo doesn't chuck his decades-worth of collected objects into a dumpster as I would: he obsessively makes a home for it in the interior wood structure he built inside a dumpster.

Each of these objects have a personal meaning for the artist, recalling memories and stories. In addition to loving sorting them here, he posts an entry about one every day on the project's blog. So for example, you might learn that the Chairman Mao watches pictured above were gifts from friends, and similar stories exist for each object on display. 

Currently The Dumpster Project is (or at least was this weekend for the DUMBO Arts Festival) on view in the tunnel in DUMBO.

A "tilted" view of DUMBO: Isidro Blasco at Smack Mellon

Tilted by Isidro Blasco, at Smack Mellon during the DUMBO Arts Festival, was a large wooden framwork installation that sprawled out across the first gallery, dividing the space into little rooms covered in photographs. The photogrpahs themselves were of local neighborhood, but cut and pasted into and around each other in a way that created its own 3-dimensional, and tilted, space. They recreate the DUMBO streetscape and the Smack Mellon gallery itself. 

Blasco is Spanish artist with a background in architecture. That comes across clearly here: the bare sticks of wood at odd angles suggest deconstructed-construction.

It's rather like taking apart the pieces of something to figure out how it works, except in this case rather than a toy or an engine, it is a nieghborhood, and more specifically a gallery in a neighborhood. One of the more interesting and visually-stimulating pieces I saw during the DUMBO Arts Festival, Tilted really succeeded in taking over and interacted with both the space and the viewer.

For a view of some of the artist's earlier work, checkout James Kalm's video walk through of a early 2011 show at Black and White Gallery.