Laurel Gitlen

Recently reopened in a new, bigger location. When I last went, for a show of work by Allyson Vieira, the front entrance wasn’t finished yet so you had to go in through the office. This was actually great because I otherwise might have missed the series of earthy nudes on paper and set in mirror-​backed frames, which were hanging in the office instead of the gallery. They were great. And just a teaser for a show full of cool surprises. Allyson Vieira’s work is all about archaealogy and primordial architectural forms, and she evokes these themes with layers of contemporary construction materials such as plaster and drywall and concrete. It’s monumental but also strangely slight. A lot of her pillars, arches, and cornices were white and blended in with the wall, so I’d be looking at one sculpture in the middle of the gallery and then turn around be like, whoa! more art, right here against the wall behind me the whole time! It’s like a fragment of an imaginary building haunting a real building. There were some funhouse mirrors on the floor so the forms of the sculptures, reflected in them, seemed even more ethereal than they were already.
Laurel Gitlen has a back room so make sure you don’t miss it. I can’t say what will be there when you visit but at Allyson Vieira’s show there was a bronze cast of a squid attacking a winged penis. Epic.