Midori Harima Installation in Unstaffed Honey Space on New York City's Westside Highway

This past Thursday I spent an afternoon visiting a dozen of Chelsea's 200+ galleries. As NYC art visitors will know, one way to go from gallery to gallery is to walk street by street in a zig zag the way one might wind one's way through a multi-aisle art fair. Every second street, one walks up 10th Avenue to get to the next east-west art street, and, every second street, one walks for a stretch (of sidewalk on) the Westside Highway. It is actually a highway, with cars whizzing by at considerable speed, so, when walking the stretch between 22nd and 21st Streets, I was not expecting to come across a gallery. Lo and behold, an open door beckoned me Honey Space.

I entered to see a quite fascinating installation by Midori Harima (more on which, later). There was a table with information (hard to read, mind you, in the near-dark) and no staff. I resolved to find out what this space was, when I returned to Toronto.

Above is a picture of the open door with the website's "About us" text. The text, too small to read here, tells us "[s]ituated in a former garage/warehouse that has intentionally been left raw, Honey Space presents exhibitions that are necessarily site-specific, and that are designed such that the space can operate without any staff. Metal security gates open in the morning, go down at night, and throughout the day the space is open to the public." Cool, to say the least. One Thomas Beale founded Honey Space in 2008, and, judging by the website Archive, the exhibition I saw, Negativescape by Midori Harima, may be the first one.

The website very much pushes you to go see the actual exhibition, as it currently has no information on the artist or the show other than the dates September 13 - October 11, 2008. So, let me describe it briefly.

You enter this darkened space, as one might enter a video room in a gallery, and you see a life-size or near-life-size carnival carousel about 12 feet ahead. It is a ghostly apparition, a chalky white with some grey lines and shadow. Horses without riders seem to shimmer in front of you. It feels almost like a a superscale graphite drawing (if memory serves me correctly). The whiteness is created by a projection from a projector hanging near the entrance, although it was not possible to tell whether the carousal object onto which the light was projected was itself white and grey. In any case, the light seemed to be projecting a mirror image of the carousel. I have to give this some more memory-thought (I did not take notes in the dark) but installation appeared (to me, anyway) to be partly about the sense of movement of the carousel created by the fact the cars pounding the pavement on the Westside Highway (only 2o or 30 feet from the door of the Honey Space) caused vibrations in the building structure to which the projector was attached. The image was thus vibrating in such a way that the carousel appeared to shake.

It was intriguing and also a bit haunting. I recommend a visit, although, if I were a woman, I would probably not stay long in a darkened space in an unfrequented section of industrial New York without someone else as company.