Fair Enough: Scope

The posts so far:
Fair Enough: And I'm Off
Fair Enough: Traveling Incognita?
Fair Enough: All Over But the Posting
Fair Enough: Art or Trash?
Fair Enough: Prologue to the Report
Fair Enough: ABMB, Part 1
Fair Enough: ABMB, Part 2
Fair Enough: Aqua Art
Fair Enough: Pulse
Fair Enough: Seven

A sportscar cozy? Was I tripping?

I'll be honest: By the time I got to Scope on Saturday afternoon, I was pretty fried. I'd already been back and forth across the causeways several times. I'd been to the Convention Center twice, in four-hour chunks each time; to Aqua Art for the preview party and then again to host the Art Bloggers @ get-together; to Pulse; to Seven and a #rank roundtable there; to the Rubell Collection and Jennifer Rubell's oatmeal breakfast/installation. To say that I was running on fumes by the time I got to Scope would be to attribute more octane to me than I actually had. But I was following an agenda, dammit, and I pressed on.

Scope is under a tent that shared space with Art Asia. I was practicing art-fair triage, so I skipped the Asia side of the tent, otherwise I wouldn't have made it out of Scope under my own power. Let me start off by showing you some general shots. It's a way to get a sense of the place.

Every fair has its own identity. Scope, to me, is not as much fun as Pulse, not as intimate as Aqua, not as big or diverse as Art Miami, not as blue chip as ABMB. (But those plywood floors are much kinder to the lower back that the concrete pavements of ABMB and Art Miami.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that in the past couple of years this venue has become Plan B for a lot of dealers--they get rejected, too--because there are more applicants for the two big fairs than can be accepted. 

Bonelli Arte Contemporanea, from Mantova, Italy, has a strong showing every year, wherever they show. Above: a painting by Elena Monzo



A small venue from Brooklyn that I'd not heard of before, Muriel Guepin Gallery, showed this fabulous piece  by Valerie Hammond

A small venue from Brooklyn that I have heard of: Like the Spice Gallery. I'm a fan of Rachael Beech's sculpture, which I saw for the first time at the the gallery's booth at the Bridge Fair in New York a few years ago, and this is one of her new pieces

The collective effort by Kayrock Screenprinting is lively from a distance but kind of a downer from up close . . .

. . . a mood that carried through in this small painting by Agni Zotis at Raul Zamudio, New York City . . .

. . . and this painting (artist unknown to me) at the Corey Helford Gallery, Culver City, California



Then I came upon the installation, below, at the Christopher Henry Gallery, New York, which explained the sportscar cozy out front. It takes a particular kind of obsessiveness to do a project like this--which I can appreciate, given that I'm writing this post after a week and a half of non-stop blogging about the fairs. The work is by an artist who goes by the name of Olek. It was a crowd pleaser.

Above and below:

Everything in this installation is completely covered by crochet, including the person seated in front of the TV. "How are you holding up?" I inquired. I got a thumbs up. Still, it's a little odd when the "installation" moves

I knew it was time to leave when I couldn't tell if this was art or an actual packing crate

On the way out I passed these brain shoes, by Antuan Rodriguez, at the Galeria Lyle O. Reitzel, Miami.

I could relate