Camminando | La Promenade Samuel De Champlain, Quebec City

La Promenade Simon De Champlain was was only completed in 2006 for Quebec City's 400th anniversary.
In the beautiful waterfront park on the Saint Lawrence river public art intersects landscape architecture. Elegant urban furniture elements such as benches and shelter provide comfort to bikers and pedestrians, who can enjoy also the framed views of the St. Lawrence from the follies and watchtower.

Camminando | Bridges of Quebec City

Pierre Laporte Bridge

Quebec Bridge

Camminando | A Summer Evening in Quebec City

A magical evening in Quebec City: the traditional charm of the most European of the North American cities is infused with contemporary multimedia shows, light projection and public art.

Camminando | Quebec City, Cirque du Soleil "Les Chemins invisibles: Le Sillon des rêves"

Cirque du Soleil presents the second chapter of Les Chemins Invisibles, Le Sillon des Rêves in the Saint Roch district of Quebec City.
For several evenings in summer a series of spectacular circus acts from aerial acrobatics to stilts walking and fire juggling are offered for free(!!!!!) under the Dufferin-Montmorency highway overpass (440) at Boulevard Charest.
The performers mix with the audience in the very dramatic urban set, augmented by light projections and murals on the highway pylons: set design and urban space, audience and performer become blurred in this amazing spectacle.

camminando | sun setting at Ashokan Reservoir

camminando | Thunderstorm at Sun Farm: day for night

From rainbows and menacing clouds to one of the most powerful electrical storm ever witnessed...on Saturday 2am on this area in the planet it was truly day for night!

Vernissages | Hudson, July 17: Carrie Haddad Photography, Damiani and BCB Art

A lively evening, strolling in the Warren Street art galleries of Hudson ---blessed as usual by the sunset light which contributed to the fame of the Hudson School of Paintings.

Sun setting in Warren Street

Art Strolling: Enid Futterman and John Isaacs, editors and publishers of the quaterly magazine Our Town

A remarkable exhibition of photography ---mixed with other media and processes-- at Carried Haddad Photography. The exhibition of works by David Seiler and Cuban photographer Adrian Fernandez is on view from July 15 to August 15, 2010.

"David Seiler works in sepia tones and dusty grays, instilling a nostalgia in his photographs, most of which are portraits of one kind or another. The vintage quality that this color palette evokes suggests these photographs were excavated from someone's personal archives, transported from private to public view for the first time... Movement and fixity, life and death are in tension, imparting a spectral air to these works."

Six vibrant still lifes by Adrian Fernandez, part of a series entitled To Be or To Pretend, provide a complement to Seiler’s sepia tones. Just as Seiler’s photographs exhibit pseudo-wear and tear to belie their modernity, Fernandez’ works feign false identities: after sustained attention, one becomes aware that the blossoms are fake, lifeless. The artificiality in each of these photographs adds dimension to these works, lending them an element of irony and play.

Carrie Haddad and her artists

Nancy Goldring combines vision and revision in drawing, photography and projected images to create pictures and installations.

Margaret Saliske, a sculptural artist who uses digital photography as a primary element in her work, presented a new series titled, “Photo Deconstructions.”

Another remarkable photography exhibition at Damiani Gallery: former dancer and dance photographer Roy Volkmann explores the beauty in the human body and movement in the almost sculptural plasticity captured by his photographic portraits..

Enid Futterman conversing with Roy Volkmann

At BCB Art "using historical references and subtle, humorous, graphic symbols Scott Reynolds examines America’s current political, economic and cultural wars in his latest drawings. He employs an economical and iconographic language along with ideas of social commentary (similar to those found in his sculpture) to explore the fragmented conditions that substitute for a current American ethos."

Vernissages NYC | Chelsea, Thursday July 15

My usual Thursday evening walkabout at Chelsea art openings brought me to:

Group Show at Mixed Greens

"Grass Grows by Itself" at Marlborough Gallery

Exhibitions NYC | New Museum

Yesterday evening, another hot summer evening in the Lower East Side.

The New Museum, is definitely a space quite in competition with the art shown, especially for installation based art. Nevertheless, I found the two main exhibitions quite engaging and well integrated in the "forceful" architectural space.

A Day Like Any Other, by the conceptual Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, merges different themes ---temporality, language and quotidian poetics--- as well as media. The viewer is involved in participation at different levels, from writing their wishes to describe their first loves face to a police portrait artist.

Viewing the exhibition "Dream Machine" of works by Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was for me quite "educational". I learned more about Brion Gysin ---a poet, performer, painter and innovator who was a major figure in the Beat Culture. Gysin developed the Cut-Up Method, based on cutting the paper of written words and phrases into pieces and then rearranging them. Gysin's Cut-Up experiments, were also in collaboration with his lifelong friend William S. Burroughs, The exhibition also includes "an original Dreamachine—a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes the flicker effect to induce visions when experienced with closed eyes." Gysin was quite involved with the building at 222 Bowery, almost across the street from the New Museum, main landmark in the life of the Beat Generation now inhabited by another eclectic Beat creative, the poet and artist John Giorno, also former lover of Gysin.

RivaneNeuenschwander, A Day Like Any Other

Brion Gysin, Dream Machine

Vernissages | NYC, Lush Life at Lower East Side

Lush Life is a multi-part exhibition, taking place at nine different LES galleries, opened yesterday.Lush Life is curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud and is inspired by the homonymous novel by Richard Price. The novel narrates a fictional murder investigation taking place in the contemporary LES. The neighbourhood is also the main subject of the book, with its many interwoven social, historical and cultural layers, including the contemporary gallery art gallery scene.

Each of the nine participating galleries shows work dealing with a chapter of the book.

Let it Die at Lehman Maupin

Whistle at Sue Scott

Wolf Ticket atSalonFreeman

Liar at On Stellar Rays