Before “Spring/Break” opened today, some of the James A. Farley Post Office’s rooms hadn’t been used in 20 years. Sofia Majstorovic, who was working an information booth at the fourth edition of the Armory Arts Week satellite fair, told us that getting the “disaster area” ready for the public was “quite an undertaking”: “When we opened it up there were dead pigeons that we had to sweep out.” Well, it cleaned up nice. We cruised the show, consisting of two floors of mostly Brooklyn and Lower East Side artists, and snapped photos of the highlights.
Above, Guy Nelson stands in front of his piece, “Shipping and Receiving” — it’s made of wood from a torn down building in Tribeca. Guy reclaims and repurposes wood, often combining it with synthetics to explore concepts of natural/artificial.
Below, a photo of a set designed by Justin Bettman. He creates these out of unwanted furniture he finds in the streets, takes a picture then leaves the set as it is. People then take the furniture or they add to it. This photo was taken in Bushwick.
Jac Lahav is curating an exhibit made up of art that conceptualizes alchemy and transformation. Here he’s standing in front of his drawing of Brooklyn in the 1800s. He’s lived in Greenpoint for 15 years.
In the “cafeteria,” women sit in front of a mural by Mark Samsonovich, who has also done billboard art in SoHo and Bushwick.
Leah Dixon and Chris Harity, owners of Beverly’s Bar on the Lower East Side, are curating their very first staff show. They show art in their bar but Chris says they never show staff work because “it’s incestuous.” Shown here are works by Dan Sutti and Dani Zorzy.
Writer Marie-Salome Peyronnel shows me the work of an artist known only as Dirby who has somehow made trespassing into an art. In this work, he has taken objects from every place he trespassed and assembled them together in a room.
Let’s take a closer to look at this… 
And what the hell is in that jar???
Oliver Jeffers, well known for his work illustrating children’s books, also has a work on show. This is a muse on mourning. He painted an elaborate picture of a man who had recently gone through loss, unveiled it in the exhibit last night, and before anybody could take a picture, dipped it in blue paint, forever obscuring the image.
This was my favorite. Grace Villamil makes tents out of mylar blankets. She turns the lights off and strange animal noises begin to play. Then you crawl into the mylar blanket tent, lay down on your back, stare up at the mylar ceiling and contemplate.
And that’s exactly what I did.
