Last month the Lower East Side gallery Rivington Arms (4 East 2nd Street) announced it was closing. Was it abrupt? The whole thing was abrupt. The gallery’s owners Melissa Bent and Mirabelle Marden founded the gallery in 2001. At the time, Brent and Marden had only recently graduated from college. They, bold youths, appeared to hatch right out of the art dealing egg–no six-year stint as a gallery assistant, no waiting.
The artists shown at Rivington Arms were scarcely older. Jonah Koppel debuted at the gallery a year after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design; Hanna Liden had a show at Rivington at the tender age of 22.
What will people say about Rivington Arms in the years ahead? That it possessed, from the get, a startling surety. That, and mixed judgment. Some of the art was terrible. Rivington Arms launched the career of the duo Lansing-Dreiden, and used to show the work of Dash Snow, New York’s enfant infant terrible. You’re young and then you aren’t.
Tonight, the gallery’s final show opens. Titled "Geraniums," the show features the photographs of Uri Aran, of whom one knows little. (Aran got his MFA at Columbia in 2007; in artist’s years that’s like being old enough to vote.) The press release helpfully cites: "Starlet coconuts, phantom birthdays, Baryshnikov, trinities, circles and a Dolphin–the seemingly haphazard connections put forth in Uri Aran’s work, engage a language of the absurd to illustrate social structures and diagram systems of value." You’re young and then you aren’t.
The show opens at 7 p.m. and runs until January 25. Expect scads of fops in flannel to show.
