I met Charlotte Kidd, an excellent photographer and gallerist.
Maggie Lee was recently featured in Paper Magazine as one of the young artists shaking things up here in NYC.
Peter Sutherland, seen here with what appears to be his understudy.
VIP Gallery is a new spot on the 4th floor of a nondescript and somewhat bummy-looking commercial building at 181 Broadway. The space itself is very raw but has great energy and they couldn’t have chosen a better fit for their first-ever exhibition.
Ground Score, by Maia Ruth Lee and Peter Sutherland, is a collection of found object sculptures collected and constructed by the pair as they made their way across the deserts of the American southwest in early 2011. The pieces include a variety of materials: loosely assembled collections of small totems and stones, a faded and tattered chunk of an American flag, a digital-camo print prayer book, Styrofoam, cassette tapes, and even a Jeep roll-bar.
The nature of the exhibition lends an archeological quality to each object, making them feel less like sculptures than artifacts plucked from some parallel post-apocalyptic universe. The exhibit dove-tails with a booklet of photographs that documents the trip that yielded all of these forms as well as some of the people they met and sculptures they constructed along the way. All told a great collection and a really fun show to explore.
When I first moved to New York I wished there were more spaces like VIP Gallery, so I wish them well and I am excited to see whatever they do next. If you want to check out the exhibit, email them at vipgallerynyc@gmail.com to make an appointment.