Near the entrance to VOLTA, just across from the elevators, Bruce High Quality Foundation has installed an unobtrusive old black monitor which runs a surveillance video recording a number of zombies wandering around the fair's spaces.
[the bear]
The concept which underlies Rune Olsen's "Too Drunk To Fuck: Father & Son", one element of a four-part project, suggests a more ambiguous, and even more disturbing, interpretation than these apparently straightforward images of inter-generational passion might suggest.
Olsen's "Bear Paintings" replace the heads of adult magazine models with portraits of a bear, their own eyes remain as exposed as their bodies, staring at the viewer. Just as with the sculptured images used in the "Too Drunk" series, the substituted heads were inspired by an image the artist had found on line, this time that of someone's idea of a trophy, a freshly-severed bear head lying face-up in a pool of its own blood. Olsen has re-imagined it in this same installation as the black sculpture mounted on the wall adjacent to the paintings/collages.
Samson Projects curated the installation.
[wall text]
For a limited amount of time, and by their own choice, Regina Jose Galindo and her family occupied a "family cell" (intended to house whole families, typically immigrants awaiting the disposition of their cases) in one of the forty private prisons located in Texas.
Prometeo Gallery curated the installation.
David Kramer's heart belongs to Brooklyn.
Aeroplastics Contemporary curated the installation
Photojournalist Rina Castelnuovo's images, taken within both Israel and the occupied territories, manage to convey the twisted horrors of life as it is experienced by ordinary people in communities boasting, or burdened by, virtually every kind of political status.
The first image above details a pair of photographs, that on the right showing young Israeli soldiers mourning the death of one of their number during the invasion of Gaza early this year; that on the left shows Israeli Druze women lamenting the death of a young Druze soldier who served in the very same unit. The image below these two photos is of Palestinian boys on the West Bank, playing on the dump created by Jewish West Bank settlers. The boys are part of a large colony of scavengers who live on what they can find in that trash.
Andrea Meislin Gallery curated the installation.
[larger view]
Maria Nepomuceno's organic twists, coils, and sews fabrics and beads into fantastical organic shapes with a genius, an imagination and an industry which suggests that, given enough time, she just might be able to arrange to have them replace the world's more conventional matter.
A Gentil Carioca curated the installation.
These are just a sample of some of the other installations at VOLTA which I thought were successful projects. Or perhaps they were only remarkable in some particular. They may also have simply moved me. They are also here because I found they responded to my camera, although it's both frustrating and embarrassing to have to take that into consideration at all.