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Jack the Pelican is thrilled to offer New York its first glimpse of New Zealand sensation Dan Arps.
Read CV
At first, it was going to be merely a selection of his works on paper (easy to ship)—and don't get me wrong, these scrawly-feely paintings and photo-collages are really fresh... (they're well described by the Michael Lett gallery as "sad hallucinations")—but the artist insists on giving you a "real Dan Arps show!"
Arps is really on a roll now, with powerhouse shows running concurrently at Neon Parc in Melbourne and Michael Lett in Auckland, New Zealand; and there's just been published an important catalog of his recent "Gestapo Pussy Ranch" project at The Physics Room in Christchurch.
AFFIRMATION DUNGEON
Dan Arps |
| Thursday, July 10–Sunday, August 10, 2008 |
| Opening: |
Thursday, July 10 , 7–9pm |
| Location: |
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10 |
| Directions |
| Hours: |
Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm |
| Contact: |
eva@JackthePelicanPresents.com 718-782-0183 |
Look forward here to nothing less than ambitious pop-perfect trashtastica. "Junk is just too banal for words" headlines his recent review in The New Zealand Herald. The Ozzie press seems a bit more thoughtful:
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Apathetic, cynical and often humorous, Arps' intuitive manipulation of his found materials speaks of the excesses of our commodity-saturated existence from a point as far removed as he can get from the slick over-production that characterises it. It is a kind of contemporary mash-up of surrealist, pop art and performative elements using whatever is at hand to convey his defiant message; he is consciously careless, iconoclastic and coarse. If Salvador Dali and Oscar the Grouch were teenage flatmates today, these are the kind of posters that might adorn their bedroom walls.
--Brooke Babington, excerpt of review, CitySearch, Melbourne, June 5, 2008 |
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Too, be sure to check out (and print out, according to the helpful instructions) Arps's magazine Natural Selection (he's co-editor)—it's all about cheeky practical dissemination of ideas about a truly vital art scene that for most of us seems so impossibly far away. Arps's been active in it for a few years now, getting dirty in artist-run spaces like Black Cube in Christchurch and Gambia Castle (founding member) in Auckland. Really, these are things you might enjoy knowing about.
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