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Art

Factory Fresh and the Bushwick Gang of Four

Welcome to wheatpaste heaven! Brooklyn's upstart galleries create a new art district.

By Camille Dodero

Wednesday, July 23rd 2008

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Mostly, Harding's taste favors dementedly ambitious installations like last fall's Blind Spot, a meticulously rendered Brooklyn tenement engineered by Andrew Ohanesian and Tescia Seufferlein. From the front, the scene was an average row house, arranged down to every last detail, including cement stoop, working light fixtures, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Venture in further and you discovered a residential war zone after an attack, a disastrous confusion of upended cushions, crushed walls, and broken toilet bowl. It took the artists nine months to perfect, and no one made a dime. Harding, an ex-employee of Mary Boone Gallery, says: "Maybe English Kills is an answer to what I saw working at Mary Boone. This is the complete antithesis of that awful experience."

Ah, yes. If there's one unassailable generalization to be made here, it's that these upstarts were all founded on the rejection of art-world assholes. Ford is downright gleeful that Ad Hoc's owners understand that you shouldn't be jerks to strangers. "When I got here, it was amazing to realize: 'Oh, so there are a lot of people who hate the way most Chelsea galleries treat people!' So then it became: 'OK, let's build our own community.' "

Now the community just needs a name. Hypeville, anyone?

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