Closed for Business! (and Summer show at Winston Wachter Gallery)

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Yep it’s that time of year again. Chelsea is closed for business. Well most of Chelsea is closed for business. For the next two weeks if your headed to the west side for a cultural smorgasbord of the best and worst NYC has to offer and you expect to delight yourself with free cocktails and beer while you push past the suits and hipster collectives then you will find yourself sorely wanting. These are the percolation days of summer and they’ll be free booze and art schmooze for all of us soon enough. So while the busy bodies and installation teams make their mad push to secretly erect the opening acts of our beloved Fall gallery season, feverishly working away on ladders behind brown papered windows, I set out solo to see if I could find an exception or two to the rule. 

Ok so even though the show at Winston Wachter Fine art (with an umlauts over the a) has been up since June, I’ve wanted to post about it for a while. It was also the only  descent gallery open this week so I though it would be worth my valuable time to say thanks for being there Wachter (with an umlauts over the a) Gallery. I’m going to give this show enormous props for courageously installing wax works by Jil Weinstock that have been surviving the dread heat of summer completely unaffected. I figured that they would have melted clean off the wall by now but there they are, still hanging in there. Get up close and the wax smells sweet and there is a fragile nostalgia to her work that will strike a chord in anyone who enjoys reveling in the little details of the past. Beau Chamberlain and Scott Platt are also represented here and if you like space and you like funny then Scott Platt is the man for you. I was just writing about how I wished artists would make more work about space in an entry from a few weeks ago and here Mr. Platt doesn’t disappoint. In his series “wormholes” we are confronted with a troubled relationship between space and time. Their struggles are played out in brief messages on each canvas such as, “Dear Space, It’s not you. It’s you. Time.” and “Dear Time, Wish you were here. Space.” The paintings and mounted prints are witty for sure and playfully engaging. They  twist simplified scientific theory in order to explore very relatable human problems that must be surmounted in any relationship between people or cosmic forces.  When you realize that space and time are cosmically bound to each other like two sides of a universal coin, his dark jokes suddenly become optimistically inspiring and laughably absurd in a Taoist kinda way. Im also a sucker for pictures of stars and galaxies so maybe that alone would have been enough to win an A+ from this critic.

Well worth the trip downtown for a quick visit or if you just happen to be wandering down 25 street and want to see one of the best designed galleries in town. Winston Wachter is located at 530 West 25 Street between 10 and 11 Aves and the show is up for another two weeks.  You can see more images of the work in the summer show and find out more information about Winston Wachter by clicking here.   

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