TED RIEDERER: HELLAS: Goff+Rosenthal

Back in America and thanks to my pal , artist Jayson Keeling I've found a great new American artist to process. Ted Riederer staged a show at the Goff+Rosenthal Gallery in Berlin earlier this year that sparked up a lot of buzz. Titled "Hellas" the show combined two installations. The first feautured a suit of body armor molded from vinyl punk rock records posed in opposition to a pile of skulls molded from records off the 1986 Billlboard Top 200 Chart. The second installation was projected video of Riederer's band "The Ressurectionists" smashing their instruments at a performance. That video was the background to a forground staging of a destroyed drum kit reconstructed in the confines of the gallery. I love the mix of pop colors, comic book antics, music culture and stability of execution on the part of the artist. Its easy to lump Riederer into that group of artists like Adam Helm, Kendell Geers and Banks Violette but I think the accessibility as well as the control of the ideas presented here makes him very unique and quite stand alone.

Installation view: Walker Art Center, Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/MxMillian: 2006

Not that credentials should drive your decision as to which artists to track, but as fate would have it Adam Helms has all the blue chips stacked in his favor. Product of Yale's MFA program, carried by Sister in LA and Mariane Boesky in NY and collected by museum power-brokers like John Friedman, Helms art has all the cachet a rising star might need. Past all those superficial values, his work plays with the subversive fringes of American culture wgile rendering them with a kind of finely etched romanticism. Even if it were a litho, I'd buy into it.