It's one thing when an artist is milling around his own show, teetering a wine glass and trying to overhear what guests will say about his work. It's another for the audience to investigate his basement, to amble past his record collection and paint-spattered kitchenette, while he works with in a side room with airbrush and stencils.
This Bed-Stuy art party was Chelsea gallery Goff Rosenthal
's first installment of what it calls "artist-tailored events." Goff Rosenthal, by way of an invitation to hummus and introduction to a frenetic gray housecat, attempted to reconcile the elitism of the Chelsea art world with the populism of the art-interested youth. The host, Jeremy Earhart, wore jeans, a plain T-shirt and beat-up Chuck Taylors. His artistic milieu is a sort of holy psychedelia, glowing Plexiglas carvings that are edged with arabesque and often explicitly religious. In the room where he cuts the "plexi," he explained that he often works under only a black light and was worried about his eyes."I take a lot of breaks," he said.
Earhart told me his symmetrical cuttings are inspired by Rorschach blots, ambiguous shapes whose power of insight fascinates him. This influence isn't so striking in the gallery, where his sculptures are interposed and elaborated on, but it's obvious in the basement, where some of his preparatory wax-paper sketches are tacked to the walls.
I tried one of the drawings on Miranda Siegel, a magazine writer. “Fallopian tubes,” she said, then studied a bulge in the passages. "There's something ectopic going on there."
Siegel was keen on the house party idea, leaning her head in to look while Earhart designed T-shirts for the guests.
"I think an artist making his stuff accessible is so refreshing," she said, "as opposed to the people who try to keep this mysteriousness, like, 'You'll never know my process or my way of thinking. I'm from another level, another sort of being.'"
I related this to Earhart, whose orange curls were now damp on his forehead. He said that yeah, it's nice to let people into his world. Then he thought a minute and decided that some rooms would not be opened to the public.
"It's hard for non-artists to understand your work [process]," he concluded. "I can only let someone in to a certain point."
