New Partisan is proud to present as excerpt from Jason Little’s graphic novel, Motel Art Improvement Service, a crackling good story that’s somewhere about the border of Hergé and Clowes.

This week’s video feature, by New Partisan regular A.R. Brook Lynn, is a short film about a cash-strapped Greenwich Village mother, Becky (NP contributor Hala Lettieri), and her six-and-a-half-year old daughter, Charlotte (Samantha Becker), on a trip to see her estranged husband, James (Salvatore Interlandi, writer and director of the widely acclaimed  Charlie), and try to collect child support. James also features Angela Pietropinto (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and a cameo by New Partisan editor-in-chief Harry Siegel as the mental patient some say he was born to play.

 

Flip through Weegee’s photos to see the city’s violent underbelly, or Berenice Abbott’s for razor-sharp views of the city’s canyons. Look to Michael Wesely for ghostlike, long-term exposures. When I look at Bill Travis’s work, I see something different and the closest parallels I can find are with photographs over a hundred years old.

Amber Scoon's Cortelyou Project, a series of paintings of what the 2000 census found to be America's most integrated neighborhod.

New Partisan, along with affiliate and contributor, Miranda Fine Art present Nick Savard’s solo gallery show, PEGGED, opening tomorrow in London. Savard is a New York based artist who incorporates photography, drawing and sculpture into his work. His most recent installation is an intricate setup featuring wooden viewing cones, a system of pulleys and drawings. If you’re in London, be sure to check it out. Details of the show, some examples and a brief essay on Savard’s work follow.

April 7 - 13 May 2006
The Glasshouse Gallery
2-3 Bull's Head Passage, Leadenhall
Market, London, EC1

The artist’s childhood, with its tiny apartments and the lurking shadow of political oppression, demanded a closeness with others that was at once comforting and stifling. The memory of these situations and emotions is reflected in the density of Baras’ painted surfaces. Layers of pattern in the paintings, evoking old lace and textiles, often placed on a glowingly textured background, create airless and closed miniature worlds.

Much of the fervor of the past week recalls France's tumultuous and bloody history of riot and revolt. The difference is that the disaffected rioters were not burning down government headquarters, they were burning their neighbor's car and their local grocery.



Sara White Wilson is a curator of the sidewalk. Her photographs capture the palimpsests naturally created in the urban environment through the constant changes of a neighborhood. Wilson captures the accidental as well as the intentional layering of meaning — graffiti on a storefront, a partially torn billboard poster. The build-up of visual representation happens quickly in a city, and Wilson practices a subtle art in choosing the decisive moment at which intervention has brought a climax of meaning, but before decay has set in, and a new cycle begun.

"The phrase 'the city that never sleeps' doesn’t refer to nightclubs and bars, but to work and labor. At all hours is the city building, selling, changing, working; that is what it means to live in the city that never sleeps."