The Shrine, 2000 by Robert Buck — © Brian Rose

I visited four or five of the LES galleries participating in Lush Life, a multi-gallery exhibition based on the chapters of Richard Prices crime novel. Although the book is first and foremost a story built on dialogue and character, over the length of the novel, it evokes a vivid sense of place, a sense of this particular moment in the history of the Lower East Side. In Lush Life, the exhibition, each gallery takes on a chapter of the novel, and the curators selected pieces relating to the content of each particular chapter. Go here for a comprehensive review in the New York Times.

Navigating Lower East Side galleries can be pretty daunting because so much of the art seems the expression of an insular art community with its own disconnected language. Lush Life, however, is expansive and generous in its messages, possibly because the work is tethered to tangible themes and narrative. I liked a lot of what I saw, but was especially taken by the pieces shown in Invisible-Exports on Orchard Street based on Chapter Three: First Bird (A Few Butterflies). It’s nice to see real painting in Karen Heagle’s image of vultures picking through garbage. And I found Dana Levy’s video of  live white doves fluttering about a museum gallery of stuffed birds quite mesmerizing.

A few of the galleries were closed on Saturday–the day after the New York Times review appeared–and I saw a number of disappointed people peering into the darkened windows. Lehman-Maupin was closed, but one of its pieces was on display on the sidewalk out front, a shrine of flowers, stuffed animals, candles, and the like, which was a fairly literal reference to the street memorial in Lush Life, the book. I preferred Christoph Draeger’s ghost bikes at Invisible-Exports, back-lit photographs of the white bikes seen around the neighborhood marking fatal bicycle accidents.