Say what you will about the new Cider Gallery in East Lawrence (and we'll get to some of your comments shortly) you have to admit it's a startling aesthetic experience to enter through the tall glass doors and find yourselves in an open, airy, sophisticated space of brick walls and giant wood (insert dick joke here) and ungodly expensive paintings that feels worlds away from the eccentric, casual nature of most of the LFK art scene. Is there any way such a space can co-exist amidst the (let's say) more rough-hewn charm of the rest of the East Lawrence Warehouse District? Or is it an early sign of the inevitable tide of gentrification that will eventually sweep our friends and their urban chickens out of the way to make room for a Starbucks on the corner where Charlie's East Side bar now resides? Only time will tell.
The most common reaction during Friday's grand opening was "What. The. FUCK?," well-represented by our friend Karen in this photo:
BARRR initially dismissed the place as full of "stupid fucking Lincolns and bunnies" (though he later 'fessed up to liking the bunnies).
Some of the Lincolns and bunnies are "reasonably priced" at around $8000. Many of the paintings hover around the $20,000 to $40,000 range. We're not sure about the buyer's market for this art, but we do know one thing: it ain't us!
And we'll leave you with another local artist's Twitter assessment of the CG which we suspect is representative of many of the hardscrabble local artists who are working in the area:
"...it's pretty awful but there was free booze and maybe it'll get more people down to the [Invisible] Hand [Gallery]."
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Over at Love Garden we finally caught one of Fourth of July's series of CD-release shows for Empty Moon. The new songs sounded crisp, fellows! And we think the boys may have penned their best statement yet about the LFK scene:
"In this town, in this town, things get passed around,
Eventually, they're passed to me."
Does this refer to records? Women? Joints? We assume it's all of the above, and that's what makes it so damn beautiful!
We like this shot of our "Eskimo brothers" rocking out.
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Wonder Fair's opening was a little less quirky than we expect from those crazy kids (maybe everyone's still recovering from the whole Black Diamond thing), but we still enjoyed Kristen Martincic's "Surface Tension," a series of works about swimming pools. But why didn't the WF gang think to include a dunking booth? Or maybe just throw buckets of water on the guests at various intervals during the show? Or a bunch of little kiddie pools for scenesters to lounge around in?
The artwork made us want to rehash our old "Suburban Lit" lecture on the swimming pool as a central trope of suburban malaise, focusing especially on Cheever's classic story "The Swimmer" and the image of the empty pool in Ang Lee's masterful adaptation of Moody's The Ice Storm. But everyone was too drunk on "cheapo" swimming-pool themed drinks made from Blue Curacao that they weren't paying much attention to our thoughts.
Watch the empty swimming pool scene from The Ice Storm here (about 1:15 into the clip):
And head over to Karen's Larryville Artists blog here to see more pictures from the evening, including Fourth of July in a funny hat and an awesome Kim Kearns painting of Nixon posing with some sexy bad-ass ninja ladies. It's at Hobbs. We want it.
2 comments:
The "passed around" lyric is in reference to white ideas. But I guess a Lawrence eccentric would come up with something as crazy as women and joints.
It's a shame you didn't make it to The Invisible Hand.
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