Top 5 Booths at Barely Fair

Thank you to Erin Toale and New City Art Magazine for including our presentation of Nando Alvarez-Perez: Bellona in your Top 5 List of Booths at Barely Fair 2023!

Rivalry Projects [3]

The most fully realized diorama in the show is Buffalo-based Rivalry Projects’ showing of  Nando Alvarez-Perez. This bleak and immersive installation proffers an iota-sized homage to Samuel R. Delaney’s 1975 science-fiction novel “Dhalgren.” The story is set in dystopian Bellona, a fictional Midwestern city isolated after an unknown catastrophe. The milieu is allegedly inspired by the Rust Belt post-industrial landscape of Buffalo.

This post-apocalyptic topography is punctuated by more pop-culture references than you can count, but not of the Deuxmoi variety (visualize a headshot of George Washington, a cutout of the recently scandalized Michelangelo’s David, and a poster for the 1998 film “Armageddon”). Surfaces and finishes oscillate between dusty and luxurious. Desperate gestures like meticulously rendered backs and bottoms, inaccessible to the viewer, elicit the pathos of Mike Kelley: the Midwest’s tragic protagonist. Koonsian 4 inch x 6 inch prints on aluminum elevate commercial objects to precious pieces worthy of studio-lit still lives, sexily secured together with chains and jump rings. This miniature montage of hopeless Americana elicits nostalgia for the era of booming industry, and grief for the detritus its fall left behind.