Top Shows of 2009! part 3

JUSTIN LIEBERMAN : THE CORRECTOR IN THE HIGH CASTLE @ Zach Feuer Gallery

The Corrector in The High Castle is a sculptural tableau vivant inspired by Nobusuke Tagomi, the protagonist of Philip K. Dick's prophetic novel, The Man in The High Castle. The book posits a fictional future fifty years after Germany and Japan defeat the Allied forces in World War II. The gallery installation depicts the domestic interior of an apartment inhabited by Tagomi, a Japanese collector of American (and occasionally European) pop cultural artifacts, who is afflicted with a severe case of neotoma. His illicit collections of comic books, newspapers, VHS cassettes, records, Beanie Babies, lunchboxes, baseball cards, toys and other ephemera are piled everywhere, and like the Corrector himself, seem frozen in amber. Nearly everything in the installation is covered in a thick coating of clear acrylic resin, which drips off the collections in thick clear stalactites. The only exception to this are the objects Lieberman designates as placeholders, a term used by completists to refer to the homemade replicas they themselves make to fill in missing gaps in their collections. In the case ofThe Corrector in the High Castle, most of the items in the collections themselves will be junk; the placeholders, on the contrary, will be hand-made replicas of extremely rare artifacts. Included in these sets are a Gutenberg Bible in a Plexiglas case, the inverted Jenny 1¢ stamp, The Beatles'Yesterday and Today album with first state Butcher Block cover and the Princess Diana Beanie Baby. Each of these placeholders is flawed in one of two ways. In some cases the placeholder is not a replica of the original artifact itself but of a later reproduction of this artifact; in other cases Lieberman employs caricature and other illustrational motifs to differentiate the placeholder from the original.

Justin Lieberman was born in 1977 in Gainesville, Florida. He lives and works in upstate New York. This is his third solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery. In celebration of the concurrent shows at Zach Feuer Gallery and Marc Jancou Contemporary, JRP Ringier will publish a monograph on Justin Lieberman's work.

Nevan Lahart : Ugly Love @ Kevin Kavanagh

Blah Blah Blah

Circumventing the narrative

Gobble-d-gook, Gobble-d-gook,

non linguistic forms of

Yady, Yady, Ya.

active forces that

Blah Blah’s

subjective subliminal perception

yiddy, yiddy, ya

Contextualises the context of underlying structures

That navigate empathetic analoguious analogues

Ummmm………………………………………………………………………Interesting

Put simply, Nevan won’t stray too far from flowers.