Invasion of the Bart Snatchers and Other Fun Happenings

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New York has had an embarrassment of great, free art shows to see in the past few days. To recap:

Last weekend, on the same day as the Art Parade, Jeff Soto and Jim Hauser opened at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. I’m upset I missed this show on its opening night, but I was fairly exhausted from walking the city that morning. I hope to get to Chelsea for it sometime in the coming week.

Mike Nelson has an awesome maze of an installation at the abandoned section of the Essex Street Market. It was a very relaxed environment and fun to wander aimlessly through for 15 minutes. Sometime after I’ve gotten to see Jeff Soto I intend on returning here with my camera. The whole exhibit is screaming for me to spend a few hours wandering through and taking pictures.

But most endearing of all was the army of wildly disfigured Bart Simpson clones that invaded Toy Tokyo’s The Showroom starting this past Saturday. In the usual style of the designer toy scene, basic molds were passed around to bigger and smaller artists, with everyone turning in their finished project for the show.

According to a quick conversation I had with the curator(?), the show is much bigger than I realized. After spending some time here in New York, it will make its way to London, and then on to Beijing, hopefully in time for the 2008 Olympics. With the end of the tour all of the works will be auctioned off on eBay. I think some, like the one by Matt Groening, will go for almost absurd prices. Proceeds will go to charity.

And now, some pictures of Bart. Full gallery can be seen here.

(Apologies for the general weakness of the photos. The light was messing with me for some reason and I was in a hurry to get to a meeting for a top secret project I’m working on right now.)

One wall was also a mural, with a school of Blinkies by a personal favorite artist of mine, Andrew Bell.

(Attribution for particular models will be given, if I ever figure out who actually made each. Thanks to all of the artists who put in the time making such great Barts.)