Two weeks ago I went to super great show at the Chelsea Hotel ( Suite 524).
The Chelsea Hotel itself is fantastic as a venue for art show. It has so much
history. It doesn't take too much to make me happy. Give me a historical
landmark where a couple of poets died and I am pretty ecstatic. Plus
did you know that right after the Civil War, the Chelsea Hotel was the
tallest building in New York? I bet you didn't. But isn't that exciting?
There are definitely other people who are more jaded and not thrilled by all the
history. The guy that was in the elevator with me seemed as if another
mention of Sid Vicious would make him projectile vomit. I sympathize ( and had
a similar reaction to mentions of graffiti and street art at the recent Whitney Biennial)
but my take is generally that all the cultural life in New York is itself such a priviledge
that you are almost compelled to be psyched. So, a packed opening at the Chelsea Hotel
which was completely out of wine by the time I got there still makes me excited.
The show itself was showcase of 500 polariods by Mikael Kennedy:
http://www.mikaelkennedy.com/odysseus.html.
Other than the great historical location the show had many other things going for it.
First is the fact that polariods can be such a fantastic and intimate medium. My personal
connection is that all of the polariods in my family were taken by my grandmother, who was
too artheritic to push down the button of a regular camera. Polaroids will forever bring back memories
of my grandmother's back porch, the toad that lived under it and the treehouse my dad built in my
grandma's yard. For many people I think polaroids harken back the late seventies and early 80's
when things were simpler, people wore more corduroy and more time was spent sitting outdoors
thinking about world peace or at least about the next very awesome episode of Thundercats.
Polariods have such an intimate scale they never get blown up into huge wall size prints. Like extremely
limited edition prints ( with a run of one, heh) or maybe paintings, each polariod is unique. The intimate
scale makes you get really close to each polariod and really look at it. The small scale, also, paradoxically
makes you take in the whole before you take in the details.
And then there is the fact the Mr. Kennedy is a creator of pleasant images in many scales and mediums.
His series advertising work for L.L. Bean makes it seem like the label of choice for apple cheeked creative
young people that spend their time off camera composing edgy ballads and raising basil. That isn't to
imply that these images are saccharine. Someone in the guest book said that the images made them think
of dreams from another time, forgotten dreams from their childhood, to this I might add forgotten dreams
of the mid-nineties like that episode of " My So Called Life" where Angela Chase is just riding her bicycle ( actually
Brian Krakow's) at the end and is just happy to be herself. If Angela had just kept riding that bicycle into her own
reality the world she rode into might look something like the world Mr. Kennedy takes pictures of.
The subject matter of the photos are ephemera of the cities and country, the forgotten moments of life, the moment
before a beautiful young person pauses in the woods and takes in the cool autumn air, or the hung over aspiring
musician sees a bit of garbage on the street which by the light of the too early morning is the most beautiful thing
they have every seen.
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