Essential Event: An Art-Filled Saturday Night In Bushwick With Beat Nite & Brooklyn Armory Night

After you've gotten your daytime art fix out of the way this Saturday (whether at the Guggenheim, Whitney, MoMA or Armory Show), it'll be time to head back to Brooklyn for the seventh installment of Beat Nite, Bushwick's "half art stroll, half bar crawl. For the bi-annual event, which L Magazine named "Best Neighborhood-Wide Gallery Night," 19 local art spaces will be open from Saturday night from 6-10pm. On top of that, additional local spaces will also be staying open late as part of Brooklyn Armory Night. This will definitely make for a great, art-packed Saturday night.

Below we've highlighted a few exhibitions that we recommend checking out. You can also take a look at the entire Brooklyn Armory Night list and download a handy map to help you plot your journey to all of the Beat Nite spaces.

• Dreaming Without Sleeping at The Active Space - Dreaming Without Sleeping allows viewers to glimpse the artist’s view of our waking world: a bent, slightly pessimistic and occasionally hostile place populated by animals and people who are often reluctant to be interrupted by the viewer." Curated by 3rd Ward teacher Robin Grearson! Check out our preview of the exhibition.

• Skewville's 80th Birthday: A Retro Retrospective at Factory Fresh - "The Skewville twins have been making things since birth, from building club houses in the 70's, graffiti in the 80's, then on to commercial ventures in the 90's. In the past 13 years, they have been making innovations on the street and in art galleries with their stylized work and installations."

• Jesse Hulcher: The Remaster Cycle at Interstate Projects - "Through a wide range of digital and analog mediums, Hulcher explores the ways that corporate media influences how we view such disparate cultural experiences as the Vietnam war, Groundhog Day, and the Grateful Dead, among others."

• Tim Spelios: Scissors, Paper, Glue and Books I Can't Cut Up at Studio 10 - "Spelios's original source materials become the means to mine obscure connections and create irrational associations through juxtapositions of images and objects." There will also be a musical performance by Mr. Klopp,  a group that plays "an unpredictable amalgam of Cajun, Blues, Country, Psychedelic and Free Jazz."

• Tamara Gonzales: Untitled an exhibition of new paintings at Norte Maar - "The exhibition will feature the artist’s new series of works that combine her use of spray painting through lace.  Her new paintings spring to the optical extreme through her unique process of spray painting through found lace tablecloths, doilies, and curtains."

• Marking The Ridgewood Line at Cojo Art Space - "The focus of this show is brought to light by the nearly 30 artists who work with line, or with a lens capturing the hidden underdrawings in our everyday world."

-- John Ruscher

BEAT NITE // TONIGHT: 3rd Ward Teacher Robin Grearson Presents 'Is Between' During Bushwick Art Crawl

Artworks by Sarah McDougald Kohn (left) and Liz Ainslie (right).

Tonight the Bushwick art scene will stay up late for the fifth installment of Beat Nite, a bi-annual "half art stroll, half bar crawl," with local galleries and art spaces open from 6-10pm. There's lots of cool stuff going on, but we're particularly excited about Is Between, an exhibition curated by 3rd Ward teacher Robin Grearson at The Active Space.

The follow-up to Grearson's curatorial debut during Bushwick Open Studios back in June, Is Between will feature work by Brooklyn artists Liz Ainslie and Sarah McDougald Kohn. We caught up with Grearson before she headed off to start installing the exhibition and asked her what's in store for tonight. Hit the jump to find out.

The choice of pairing Ainslie and McDougald Kohn was a natural one, not merely because they went to grad school together, but because they share similar creative approaches. "Liz and Sarah work intuitively and make decisions in the moment, but what's exciting to me is having the opportunity to show the results of their decisions, side by side," Grearson says. "The relationships the artists discovered between their work was found, not created, and I think it will be interesting for a viewer to discover these relationships too."

Both artists deal with objects in unconventional and unexpected ways. "Sarah’s sculptures are really fun; to me, many of them challenge our either/or thinking about objects as being either artistic or functional," Grearson says. "And Liz’s paintings invest shapes and lines with a sense of volume, despite the fact that the shapes are actually abstract and incompletely rendered, "she adds. "This forces me to consider the source of my impressions."

That unique, intuitive and artistic approach is also reflected in the title of the exhibition. "Is Between describes the liminal nature of the objects depicted and created by the artists," Grearson says. "It is a sentence fragment that exists in the present tense but is unresolved. This language felt right to all of us as a way to communicate something specific about the paintings and sculptures."

Look at a couple more images of work by Ainslie and McDougald Kohn below and check out the exhibition tonight from 6-10pm at The Active Space (566 Johnson Ave). Also, Grearson will be at 3rd Ward next month to teach the class Learn to Love Your Artist Statement (or at least make friends).

Liz Ainslie

Sarah McDougald Kohn

-- John Ruscher