The New York Art Frontier

Drawn from the far corners of the Big Apple, four artists share bounty from their compulsions to create.

Jay Gard

Jay Gard’s journey leading to a solo gallery show of cryptically crafted hardware began with an art school prank in his native Germany. “It was a very conservative, old East German art school,” the 23-year-old sculptor explains, “where there are many ugly bronze statues on the campus. I removed a statue of a sunbathing woman, and replaced it with a new one made out of copper.” The faculty, unimpressed by Gard’s rebel act, and angered that he damaged the original statue (“there was a little dent on an arm… I couldn’t pay for the repair… ”) booted him from campus. Gard took the opportunity to travel to America and quickly landed a job as multimedia artist Tom Sachs’s assistant. “He teaches me to work faster, to be less precise than we’re taught to be in Germany,” Gard says of Sachs, who has become a mentor, introducing Gard to owners of the Half Gallery (writer Bill Powers, designer Andy Spade, writer James Frey). Inspired by “watching and studying New Yorkers,” Gard taps into themes of ambition, power and control in his disarming, yet volatile renderings of real and imaginative industrial components. The above installation, “plywood,” is a New Yorker’s spoof on the cheap construction of so many edifices in L.A. (thus the appropriation of the legendary Hollywood sign). Explaining the meaning of “guitar parts,” one of his favorite pieces in the show, Gard decodes the goal of communication, 21st century-style: “It has a button for tone, a button for volume. When you hit the right volume and tone, you can get what you want.”

Agathe Snow

Last spring, when Agathe Snow learned that her building in Chinatown, New York was about to be sold, she loaded herself, a parrot and all her material possessions into the back of a moving van, filming as she journeyed cross country to Chinatown, Los Angeles. The Corsica-born, New York-raised multimedia artist even went a step further than most creatives in her quest to transform a bummer twist of fate into art: “I decided to make a sculpture out of everything I brought with me,” says Snow, 32. The resulting assemblage, the centerpiece of a show called “Moving,” mounted at Peres Projects in L.A. last April, left Snow with another great credit (in a resume packed with them, including “Stamina: Gloria et Patria,” a dance-a-thon staged at this year’s Whitney Biennial). The show also left her possession-less. “I lead a super-gypsy life,” Snow says, now back in Manhattan on a sunny Monday where she is set to meet with a broker about an apartment. The fuschia-haired free spirit has her hands in a variety of projects ranging from fashion design to a catering company called The Chop Shop NY that she formed (with her sister, Anne Apparu, and Marianne Vitale) to give artfully rendered dinners and party experiences with ingenious twists to seen-it-all Gothamists. Here, posing at Peres Projects, New York with an installation she refers to as “the smallest egg museum in the world,” Snow explains its meaning: “It’s over-the-top insanity.” And no, she adds, the eggs weren’t supplied by her catering company. (peresprojects.com)

Eric Amouyal

Merging the surrealism of Salvador Dali with the stylish color palate of Paul Smith and a dash of Björk and Matthew Barney’s disturbing magic, artist Eric Amouyal creates works of extreme beauty. And yet, for all his elegant brilliance, counting among his collectors the playwright and director Craig Lucas, he’s known by some disgruntled tenants bordering his downtown Manhattan studio as a leaf thief. “I have tons of leaves. I have libraries of leaves,” says the cheerful creative, his eyes twinkling mischievously. For the last three years, Israeli-born Amouyal has explored the geometry of leaves, tracing some with charcoal, molding others out of acrylic paint, cutting up larger specimens to resemble veiny human heads. “Unlike flowers, leaves have a line, a clear beginning and an end,” he says. “I collect them in parks, and there is a tree right outside a coffee place I like which now has a sign that says ‘Don’t pick the leaves.’” With the recent news that his work is museum-bound (a patron’s collection was willed to the National Gallery of Art, which is now placing the art in museums around the country), Amouyal, 45, says he feels a surprising proprietary tug when he sees his work in a new home. “I’m jealous,” he says. “I think, ‘That’s a good painting. I wish I could have it.’”

Felisa Dell

“When I’m painting pieces I love, my enthusiasm is so huge, I stay up working. And that’s easy for me, because I own a bar,” says Felisa Dell, whose Manhattan Meatpacking District BBQ staple, The Hog Pit, closes soon, a casualty of soaring rents in the increasingly boutique-heavy butcher zone. The good news is Dell, 44, has a percolating second career as a painter. Her photo-realistic depiction of two-shot Derringer pistols and flowers ranging from roses to birds of paradise are selling briskly at Nest, a home interiors boutique in Chelsea. Dell says she knew when she painted her first gun in 1996 that the subject matter of weaponry would be controversial, but adds that her attraction to guns is based purely on aesthetics. “They’re bright and shiny, with lots of reflective surfaces,” she says.