Ragnar Kjartansson’s S.S. Hangover with a Brass Sextet on Board Loops Around the Harlem Meer In Central Park

Icelandic conceptual artist Ragnar Kjartansson's incredible performance sculpture is currently making scheduled loops around the Harlem Meer in Central Park. The S.S. Hangover, a haphazard hybrid of Greek, Icelandic and Venetian ship design, was originally a 1934 wooden fishing boat from Reykjavík that the artist transformed into a remake of a theatrical boat that appeared on dry land in a swanky party scene in the film Remember Last Night? (1935). Sailing under the flag of a winged fat Pegasus–one that Kjartansson regards as a symbol for the artist struggling to reach sublime heights. Instrumentals are provided by the Grammy-nominated Metropolis Ensemble and led by conductor Andrew Cyr. You can catch the S.S. Hangover on Fridays and Saturdays through June 20, 2015 on the East side of the park near Lennox Avenue in New York.

Brian Kokoska's Collaborative Show With Chloe Seibert Is A Pepto-Bismol Shade of Pink and Full of Strange Artifacts

Johannes Vogt Gallery presents Night Cage, a two-person exhibition by Brian Kokoska and Chloe Seibert. Kokoska has altered the gallery space entirely in a Peto-Bismol shade of baby pink. Brian Kokoska's paintings explore sensibilities of a post-human "face" in which each composition is built from a series of gestures and recognizable iconography and symbols. His new monochromatic sculptures are built up from various acquired objects including snakes, Droopy the dog (an anthropomorphic cartoon dog introduced in 1943), rare collectible teddy bears, blankets, caskets and furniture. Each sculpture is intentionally altered and rearranged to induce a sort of hyper sentimentality or overwhelming sadness. Additionally, Kokoska is exhibiting a new work that is a selection from his collection of acquired prison drawings. Their intimate scale, cute subject matter and loving text is both personal to the artists childhood and to his current practice. Chloe Seibert uses scale and expression to evoke psychological and physical responses. In this selection of her work, gestural and aggressive mark making creates vague facial representations out of pedestrian materials and a bland palette. The works are decisively haphazard and familiarly disgruntled. She will be presenting two wall sculptures and a large head statue. Night Cage will be on view until June 20, 2015 at Johannes Vogt Gallery, 526 W 26th St., New York

Cole Sternberg's ARTed House Is On View Now in the Hamptons

Memorial weekend is always a memorable experience in the Hamptons. A must see this weekend, in this rarefied atmosphere, is artist Cole's Sternberg's ARTed House, which is presented by Los Angeles based MAMA gallery. Entitled "A Moment Near the Sea," Cole Sternberg has transformed a classic property into a giant canvas with installation based works, collages on wood, sculpture and more that spill out from the house and into the backyard. Cole Sternberg's ARTed House opens today and runs until June 7th, Davids Lane East Hampton, NY

Crackle & Drag T.R. Ericsson's First Solo Museum Exhibition Opens This Weekend At The Cleveland Museum Of Art

T.R. Ericsson employs photo-based work, sculptural objects, and cinema to create installations that provide a ruthlessly honest, yet tender portrait of his mother, who committed suicide at age 57, and of the triangulated relationships between three generations within one Northeastern Ohio family. Ericsson is involved in an ongoing investigation and reinterpretation of a deteriorating archive of family artifacts, documents, writings, and photographs. Crackle & Drag makes a personal struggle public, coming to terms with the archive’s power to determine the past and the future, even as it vanishes in time. The exhibition’s title is taken from the final line of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Edge”: “Staring from her hood of bone./She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.” T.R. Ericsson's Crackle & Drag will be on view from May 23 to August 23, 2015 at the Cleveland Museum Of Art. After that, you can catch his show All My Love, Always, No Matter What, which will be on view from September 10 to October 8, 2015 at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels. 

Selfie-Stick Aerobics, Crystal Healing, Laughter Therapy and Hacked Kindles: Self Publish Be Happy Takes Over The Tate Modern In London

The madcap geniuses at Self Publish, Be Happy will be taking over the Tate Modern this weekend. A project in the Turbine Hall celebrates the fifth birthday of Self Publish, Be Happy (SBPH) this year for the first Offprint London fair, which coincides with Photo London. By using books to vitalize public interaction, the SPBH Project Space will host numerous events involving exciting contemporary photographers. Visitors can create their own temporary tattoo in photographer Thomas Mailaender’s ‘Fun Tattoo Parlor’. After selecting a photo from the artist’s weird collection of internet images, they can wear it - becoming part of a mobile exhibition. Artist Antony Cairns will be hacking old Kindles bought on eBay and making them into photobooks. Arvida Byström and Maja Malou Lyse will lead a selfie-stick aerobics class, while Japanese artists Daisuke Yokota and Hiroshi Takizawah will print a book using an experimental process that uses wax, cement and iron powder. There will also be some cathartic booksmoking by Melinda Gib- son, crystal healing sessions by Johan Rosenmunthe and laughter therapy by Dominic Hawgood. Finally, SPBH features workshops on risographs and zine-making with Maya Rochat and Col~Late. Offprint London opens tonight at the Tate Modern in London and runs until May 25, 2015. You can also view the events live on the SPBH Youtube Channel.   

Devendra Banhart and Adam Tullie Team Up for a Collaborative Book of Drawings entitled "Unburdened by Meaning"

"Unburdened By Meaning" is a split effort between Adam Tullie and Devendra Banhart which documents selections of work created over one week, while the artists worked in parallel in Devendra's New York drawing studio. Tullie and Banhart, who are now based in Los Angeles, have known each other for over 13 years, so it only makes sense that they would collaborate together in this capacity. As the title suggests, the collection of drawings found in this book aren't held to any one concept or idea - it is simply a freewheeling, minimalistic exploration of the two artist's unique, but synergistic styles. The book also includes two essays - one by New York based artist and writer Ross Simonini, and the other by San Francisco based writer and artist Chris Fallon. The book is available now from Canadian based publishing house Anteism in a limited edition of 200 - it is also signed and numbered by the artists. 

Urs Fischer Large Scale Sculpture "Big Clay #4" Outside of the Seagram Building

Gagosian Gallery presents Urs Fischer's monumental sculpture Big Clay #4 on view at Seagram Plaza until September 1, 2015. .Fischer's work is the result of an intimate gesture enlarged to epic proportions. The curving, towering stack derives from a scrap of clay that has been squeezed; scanned and enlarged digitally; then cast in aluminum as a 42 1/2-foot-tall sculpture. The silver surface reveals all of the incidental nuances of the original form, including Fischer's fingerprints, which are preserved as striated curves.

William Pope.L: Trinket at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles

William Pope.L is perhaps best known for his extreme performative works, like the "The Great White Way," which involved him crawling 22 miles through the streets of New York in a superman costume with a skateboard strapped to his back - it took a span of five years to complete. In his new exhibition at the MoCA in Los Angeles, entitled "Trinket," Pope.L presents a number of installation works - including a giant American flag, which is being blown by four giant fans. Over the course of the exhibition, the flag will eventually unravel and disintegrate, thus continuing the artist's philosophy of the American identity in a contemporary context, especially as a black man. William Pope.L: Trinket will be on view until June 28, 2015, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles

Yayoi Kusama 'Give Me Love' On View Now At David Zwirner Gallery In New York

David Zwirner presents "Give Me Love," the gallery’s second exhibition with Yayoi Kusama in New York. On view in two spaces will be new paintings from the celebrated "My Eternal Soul" series and new polka-dotted pumpkin sculptures. The exhibition also marks the United States debut of "The Obliteration Room," an all-white, domestic interior that over the course of the show is covered by dots of varying sizes and colors. In a departure from earlier iterations of the work, which have involved one or several rooms, the present installation is built like a typical, prefabricated American suburban house. As visitors are handed a set of stickers and step inside, they enter a completely white residential setting where otherwise familiar objects such as a kitchen counter, couch, and bookshelves are all painted the same shade. Gradually transforming the space as a result of the interaction, the accumulation of the bright dots ultimately changes the interior until it is eradicated into a blur of colors. A sense of depth and volume disappears as individual pieces of furniture, floors, and walls blend together. Yayoi Kusama 'Give Me Love' will be on view until June 13, 2015 at David Zwirner, 519 & 525 West 19th Street, New York

'America Is Hard To See' Inaugural Exhibition @ The New Whitney Museum Location In New York

Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon. America Is Hard to See will be on view until September 2015 at the Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York. 

Highlights from the 2015 NADA Art Fair At Basketball City In New York

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

6 Booths You Have to Visit On The Last Day of the 2015 NADA Art Fair

1. See Elizabeth Jaeger's awkwardly beautiful sculpture - entitled "Maybe We Die so the Love Doesn't Have To," 2015 at Jack Hanley Gallery (Booth 2.30) 2. See artist Janson Stegner's erotic and sinuously lengthened portraits of cheerleaders and female cops at the Sorry We're Closed booth 3. Like Fragonard on too many tabs of acid, see Irish painter Genieve Figgis's works on view at the Half Gallery booth (404) 4. See artist Betty Tompkins' pussies, pearls and penises on view at the Louis B. James gallery booth (booth 2.26) 5. Perhaps the most exciting and thrilling booth belongs to the Oslo, Norway based gallery Rod Bianco with a solo presentation of work by artist Vaginal Davis, entitled “Flirtation Walk (The Ho Stroll)," which explores homosexuality and male prostitution through a long prose poem that is juxtaposed against hunks of Hollywood's golden era 6. Wall sculptures by artist Sara Rahbar combines religion's sanctifying iconography and man's tools of trade - shovels, rifle butts and crucifixes – in primitive, neo-Dadaist assemblages on view at the Carbon 12 booth. The 2015 NADA Art Fair will be on view until May 17, 2015 at at Basketball City, located at 299 South Street on the East River.

Angela Bulloch 'New Wave Digits' @ Simon Lee Gallery In London

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by acclaimed artist Angela Bulloch. Stacked columns of polyhedra, formed in steel, corian or MDF, populate the gallery space. Conceived and designed within a digital imaging program, this new body of sculptures, with their stylized geometry, electronic glow and manufactured surface sheen, might seem to channel New Wave Science Fiction - a genre typified by its imaginative, futuristic and often inaccurate notions of science and technology. Just as that genre’s writers accelerated the age’s visions of modernism, these geometric stacks suggest Brancusi’s Endless Column as if refracted through vector graphics, reinforcing a sense of ‘retro-futurity’. The temporality is confusing. Today, when much sculpture seems to be looking back toward the purity of minimalism, these works seem to refer to a later moment, when culture took imaginative leaps forward, postulating a world of stark angles and sawtooth synthesizers. Angela Bulloch 'New Wave Digits' will be on view until May 30th at Simon Lee Gallery in London. 

Part Two: Highlights from the Private Opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015

Autre made its way to Randall's Island Park to see the Private View opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015, situated on the chilly banks of the Harlem River and it was more than worth it. Some standouts from Part Two of our coverage include a few of the international booths, like Sultana Paris' solo exhibition of Swiss artist Walter Pfeiffer and São Paulo based gallery Casa Triangulo's solo presentation of works by Eduardo Berliner. Then there are the classics, like Cheim & Read, that had a brilliant large scale portrait on display of Little Richard by the artist Jack Pierson, who is known for his text based work using neon lettering from discarded signage. SEE PART ONE HERE. The Frieze Art Fair New York will run until May 17th, 2015. text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper 

Part One: Highlights from the Private Opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015

Autre made its way to Randall's Island Park to see the Private View opening of Frieze Art Fair New York 2015, situated on the chilly banks of the Harlem River and it was more than worth it. Some standouts from Part One of our coverage includes British Gallery Payne Shurvel's display of artist radical feminist artist Margaret Harrison and a slightly disturbing piece by artist Patrick Walsh, a.k.a JPW3, which involves a cluster of metal chains being dipped in wax over and over again - presented by Los Angeles based Night Gallery. SEE PART TWO HERE. The Frieze Art Fair New York will run until May 17th, 2015. text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper 

Artist Bjarne Melgaard on His Upcoming Show 'Daddies Like You Don't Grow On Palm Trees' @ Sammlung Friedrichshof

We here at Autre have a bit of fascination with New York based, Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard. His art is brutal, poignant, poetic and always adventurous. After his controversial show at the Munch Museum in Oslo - entitled 'Melgaard & Munch: The End Of It All Has Already Happened' - Melgaard is paying a strange homage to Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl. The show, entitled 'Daddies Like You Don't Grow On Palm Trees,' also explores his relationship with his lover, who is nearly 30 years his junior. Here is what Melgaard says about his upcoming exhibition, "This show is about the failure and synthesis of a sculpture I made some 15 years ago called Light Bulb Man.The genesis of the show was to take that sculpture and simply wash it out into new models of materialization, mixed together with several collaborations as random references to my fashion collection about disappointment and the pleasure attendant to that whole concept. All the fabrics in the exhibition have been designed by Babak Radboy of SHANZHAI BIENNIAL, specifically incorporating images of my boyfriend, David Oramas, me and of Light Bulb Man.The fabrics then were given to the designers to dress nine new sculptures that are remakes of the Light Bulb Man. The show also clearly references MDMT and LSD as a significant inspiration for the show and looks at the healing aspect of these substances and how they can open up consciousness and how psychedelics can be, if one is open to it, a tool to enter your inner core. The "Bad Daddy" aspect of the show takes into consideration and contextualizes the fact that I am 48 and my lover is 21 and with all the different mechanics inherent in that attraction. It’s also a show based on seduction and intrigue along matters of age and time, themes that were fundamental to the original Light Bulb Man. The balance of the show will feature an improvised pop-up shop, soundtracks, and new paintings that will infiltrate the permanent collection of the Sammlung Friedrichshof." Daddies Like You Don't Grow On Palm Trees will be on view from May 16 to November 30, 2015 at Sammlung Friedrichshof, Zurndorf. 

#RAWHIDE co-Curated by Dylan Brant & Vivian Brodie Opening At Venus Over Manhattan In New York

#RAWHIDE is an exhibition - co-Curated by Dylan Brant & Vivian Brodie - of paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs from the nineteenth century to present that together chronicle the cowboy’s rise to omnipresence in art. He has long been a vehicle through which artists are able to interpret and articulate their relationship to American identity. For that reason, the cowboy’s portrayal at any given time is both a critique and a reflection of our nation’s values and desires. This icon is a testament to the artist’s ability to recognize the universality, longevity and potential of this American symbol. #RAWHIDE will be on view until July 11, 2015 at Venus Over Manhattan, 980 Madison Ave, New York. photographs by Eric Morales 

Kelsey Lee Offield of Gusford Gallery Shares Her Highlights and Adventures from the 2015 Venice Biennale

Kelsey Lee Offield, art collector and owner/director of Los Angeles based Gusford Gallery, shares with Autre her highlights and adventures from the 2015 Venice Biennale, which include the multi-room international pavilions to smaller satellite exhibitions - some that literally float on the canals, like Maurizio Cattelan's gigantic cactus, which is flanked between two white eggs (see if you can catch it in the distance of one of the photographs above). photographs by Kelsey Lee Offield