ARTnews
“Young Curators, New Ideas II”
P.P.O.W.
It was a nice idea to give over this gallery to seven fledgling curators, each of whom arranged a “micro-exhibition” of budding artist, and the show was perfectly pleasant. But nothing- neither the curatorial concepts nor the artists’ works- seemed really new or astonishing. And putting these disparate mini-exhibitions in the same space made the show seem like a Twitter feed of Curatorial Studies 101.
“Comet Fever,”curated by Nico Wheadon, dealt with hysteria and the occult, and it included several interesting works, such as Noelle Lorraine Williams’s weird bridal sculpture, Condoleezza Forsaken (2009), and Dawit L. Petros’s A Sampling of a Sequence of Thoughts, Meditations, Digressions, Associations and Recollections Derived from a Series of Walks through Harlem Double Cube Formation (2009). “Inaugural Reference Archive and Library,” curated by four-person group called Cleopatra’s, was composed of a bookshelf holding texts donated by established curators. “Deconstructing the Female Gaze,” by the duo Women in Photography, dealt with stereotypes about woman phographers, while “1973,” curated by Megha Ralapati, offered one shadowy video by Jaret Vadera about received ideas. Karen Archey curated “Low Museum,” more or less about her own work, lending another meaning to subjectivity. Cecilia Jurado (of Y Gallery in Queens) wisely limited her project, “In Heaven,” to two pieces—Norma Markley’s white neon nooses— to address anxiety.
The winner here was Jose Ruiz’s “The Individual & The Family,” which underscored the relationship between collaborative effort and identity-based art. Ruiz selected Bryan Zanisnik’s two hilarious, pathetic, and profound staged photographs of his parents; a wall of single lost gloves, each with a hand-painted mate, by Las Hermanas Iglesias; and an interactive cabinet of drawers and niches, with a blue Styrofoam cloud and a big wooden wheel, by J&J, titled Santa (You Complete Me), 2009. The “gifts”—sculptures, drawings, and home-made dolls—that filled the drawers were continually replenished as they vanished.
- Kim Levin
October 2009
P.P.O.W.
It was a nice idea to give over this gallery to seven fledgling curators, each of whom arranged a “micro-exhibition” of budding artist, and the show was perfectly pleasant. But nothing- neither the curatorial concepts nor the artists’ works- seemed really new or astonishing. And putting these disparate mini-exhibitions in the same space made the show seem like a Twitter feed of Curatorial Studies 101.
“Comet Fever,”curated by Nico Wheadon, dealt with hysteria and the occult, and it included several interesting works, such as Noelle Lorraine Williams’s weird bridal sculpture, Condoleezza Forsaken (2009), and Dawit L. Petros’s A Sampling of a Sequence of Thoughts, Meditations, Digressions, Associations and Recollections Derived from a Series of Walks through Harlem Double Cube Formation (2009). “Inaugural Reference Archive and Library,” curated by four-person group called Cleopatra’s, was composed of a bookshelf holding texts donated by established curators. “Deconstructing the Female Gaze,” by the duo Women in Photography, dealt with stereotypes about woman phographers, while “1973,” curated by Megha Ralapati, offered one shadowy video by Jaret Vadera about received ideas. Karen Archey curated “Low Museum,” more or less about her own work, lending another meaning to subjectivity. Cecilia Jurado (of Y Gallery in Queens) wisely limited her project, “In Heaven,” to two pieces—Norma Markley’s white neon nooses— to address anxiety.
The winner here was Jose Ruiz’s “The Individual & The Family,” which underscored the relationship between collaborative effort and identity-based art. Ruiz selected Bryan Zanisnik’s two hilarious, pathetic, and profound staged photographs of his parents; a wall of single lost gloves, each with a hand-painted mate, by Las Hermanas Iglesias; and an interactive cabinet of drawers and niches, with a blue Styrofoam cloud and a big wooden wheel, by J&J, titled Santa (You Complete Me), 2009. The “gifts”—sculptures, drawings, and home-made dolls—that filled the drawers were continually replenished as they vanished.
- Kim Levin
October 2009
Art Slant New York
If August were a litmus test for an art gallery it would distinguish between three types: the weak, who close shop; the dull, who dust off their golden oldies, and the tireless, who emerge to test ideas too experimental for any other time of the year. Like a late night scene at a nightclub, the far end of the tireless section is typically crowded with young people. And the beauty of being in a place like this is unconventional, like courting serendipity with buckets full of planned chances.
When you walk into P.P.O.W. Gallery it’s obvious immediately where they fall on the litmus test. Young Curator’s New Ideas II, organized by Amani Olu, is a group exhibition of curators who have each put together mini exhibitions. From a
quantitative perspective we’re talking seven shows in one; from the qualitative angle it is the jeweler’s medley, a necklace full of precious gems, each a beauty on its own and an engaging compliment to its neighbor.
The seven mini exhibitions run the gamut from Comet Fever, connecting communal hallucination with scientific modalities, to the Low Musuem, a consideration of how popular culture views the contemporary art curator. Cleopatras inaugurated a
reference archive on a bookshelf; Women in Photography deconstructed the female gaze, and The Individual & The Family have had their threads intertwined. 1973 explores the desire to absorb information, while In Heaven explores the paradox
inherent within the title In Heaven.
What is surprising in this exhibition isn’t the new ideas of the young curators, it’s the organization of the whole. Seven curators each doing separate shows with separate artists in the same space. It sounds like an impossible feat, like gluing a whale’s tail to a skyscraper, but Amani Olu and his roster of curators made it happen. There are Neon nooses, abandoned tortillas, the lost gloves of Los Hermanas Inglesias, a charred resin tree limb, and an interactive sculpture called Santa (You Complete Me), from which I was given a broken wooden lightning bolt. It might seem like madness when you enter, but like any nightclub worth a scene, if you stay a while the vibe gets in you and the next thing you know...you're dancing.
When you walk into P.P.O.W. Gallery it’s obvious immediately where they fall on the litmus test. Young Curator’s New Ideas II, organized by Amani Olu, is a group exhibition of curators who have each put together mini exhibitions. From a
quantitative perspective we’re talking seven shows in one; from the qualitative angle it is the jeweler’s medley, a necklace full of precious gems, each a beauty on its own and an engaging compliment to its neighbor.
The seven mini exhibitions run the gamut from Comet Fever, connecting communal hallucination with scientific modalities, to the Low Musuem, a consideration of how popular culture views the contemporary art curator. Cleopatras inaugurated a
reference archive on a bookshelf; Women in Photography deconstructed the female gaze, and The Individual & The Family have had their threads intertwined. 1973 explores the desire to absorb information, while In Heaven explores the paradox
inherent within the title In Heaven.
What is surprising in this exhibition isn’t the new ideas of the young curators, it’s the organization of the whole. Seven curators each doing separate shows with separate artists in the same space. It sounds like an impossible feat, like gluing a whale’s tail to a skyscraper, but Amani Olu and his roster of curators made it happen. There are Neon nooses, abandoned tortillas, the lost gloves of Los Hermanas Inglesias, a charred resin tree limb, and an interactive sculpture called Santa (You Complete Me), from which I was given a broken wooden lightning bolt. It might seem like madness when you enter, but like any nightclub worth a scene, if you stay a while the vibe gets in you and the next thing you know...you're dancing.
Time Out New York
Despite its title, this assembly of seven bite-sized exhibitions underwhelms in terms of innovative or even distinct curatorial voices, blending together into a single, conventional summer group show. Fortunately, there’s intriguing art throughout, and interestingly, the most compelling works share an unseasonably haunted quality.
Bryan Zanisnik’s photograph Mom and Dad in Outer Space, for instance, shows his parents in their living room as familiarly domestic aliens, rather abjectly peering from cutout eyeholes in the lamp shades they wear over their heads. The installation Lost Gloves, by an artist team called Las Hermanas Iglesias, pairs 62 gloves and mittens found last winter with mates made from painted paper, a memorial to forgotten objects and absent owners. Jaret Vadera’s video 1973 (When You Grow Up…) transforms a vintage children’s film about adult careers into apparitional blurs and a robotic voiceover that sounds like Stephen Hawking.
Best of all, Taylor Baldwin’s sculptural ensemble I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts includes a spectral chain-saw cast in translucent acrylic, sitting atop a schematic tree stump made of wood scraps papered with images of foliage; a hand-drawn copy of a 1908 San Francisco Chronicle with front-page stories about a devastating fire in a sequoia forest and an invasion of hoboes on a train; a trilobite fossil; and sawed-up police barricades, among other items. The quirky mash-up of environmental loss, vanished vagabonds, ancient relics and state power suggests a mind freely zinging between current events and the remembrance of things past. —Joseph R. Wolin
Time Out New York / Issue 725 : Aug 20–26, 2009
Bryan Zanisnik’s photograph Mom and Dad in Outer Space, for instance, shows his parents in their living room as familiarly domestic aliens, rather abjectly peering from cutout eyeholes in the lamp shades they wear over their heads. The installation Lost Gloves, by an artist team called Las Hermanas Iglesias, pairs 62 gloves and mittens found last winter with mates made from painted paper, a memorial to forgotten objects and absent owners. Jaret Vadera’s video 1973 (When You Grow Up…) transforms a vintage children’s film about adult careers into apparitional blurs and a robotic voiceover that sounds like Stephen Hawking.
Best of all, Taylor Baldwin’s sculptural ensemble I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts includes a spectral chain-saw cast in translucent acrylic, sitting atop a schematic tree stump made of wood scraps papered with images of foliage; a hand-drawn copy of a 1908 San Francisco Chronicle with front-page stories about a devastating fire in a sequoia forest and an invasion of hoboes on a train; a trilobite fossil; and sawed-up police barricades, among other items. The quirky mash-up of environmental loss, vanished vagabonds, ancient relics and state power suggests a mind freely zinging between current events and the remembrance of things past. —Joseph R. Wolin
Time Out New York / Issue 725 : Aug 20–26, 2009
NY Art Beat
"Young Curators on the Art of New Ideas"
In the spirit of celebrating new ideas, NYAB asked the folks behind “Young Curators, New Ideas II” at PPOW Gallery to share thoughts on what’s recently been on their minds… with funny, thoughtful, and unexpected results.
“Young Curators, New Ideas II” organized by Amani Olu, is made up of seven micro-exhibitions from a diverse coterie of emerging New York curators. The show promises to be a vibrant mix of perspectives that “experiments with curatorial practice and an exploration of ideas as physical form.” In the show’s open spirit of engagement, several of the featured curators took time to share some new ideas with NY Art Beat.
AMANI OLU - Curator, “Young Curators, New Ideas II”
NEW IDEA ON HIS MIND: Photography as we’ll know it after photography as we knew it
“Currently on view at Bose Pacia is a group show I curated titled “After Color,” which examines how artists employ conceptual black-and-white photography to strengthen their ideas and how such usage comments on the dominance of large-scale, color photography as seen in the contemporary art world over the last 25 years. One of nine of the artist included in this exhibition is Talia Chetrit. In her series Gradient Tool, Chetrit composes eight black-and-white prints from images created with Photoshop’s gradient tool. Once converted into 8 x 10 inch negatives, she returns to the darkroom to make traditional contact prints on silver gelatin paper. The result is a formal study of tone and the way that light renders space.
Chetrit sidesteps conventional methods of using Photoshop by reversing technological advancements in photographic production. Taking into account that these works originate as digital fabrications and then revert to traditional silver gelatin prints, Chetrit raises the following questions: Are these images actually photographs? Does referring to a traditional photographic process prove that this is photography? Furthermore, what does this work say about technology’s continued influence on photography and how images are interpreted? Chetrit’s manipulation of the trajectory of technological advancements within photography makes room for a critical discourse around the inherent contradictions within the medium.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HIS SHOW: “Young Curators, New Ideas II”
If you mine the minds of seven curatorial talents, what sorts of priceless nuggets about contemporary art presentation and perspective are to be found? Broadening the scope of the photography-centric original “Young Curators, New Ideas,” this year’s show includes sculpture, video, and multi-media installation.
KAREN ARCHEY - Curator, “Low Museum”
THE NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: Redefining greatness and re-evaluating success
“I’ve struggled with the concept of greatness and often become hung up on the term. Greatness doesn’t necessitate a qualitative ‘goodness’ to me. The concept marries well with ambition as well as failure, effacing any lingering sentiment of idealism or culturally determined success. Greatness may be quotidian and ugly, but never boring… kind of like Divine in John Waters’ movies.
This definition brings to mind the exhibition space I started with a friend in the Lower East Side around October 2008. Diving blindly into the project, I had moved to New York merely two weeks before its opening. The space held countless events and exhibitions featuring emerging artists for about six months, draining our pocketbooks as well as our morale. Although I became acquainted with some of the most ingenious artists and gallerists in the LES, the project ended almost as invisibly as it began. Though ambivalently, the quality and magnitude of this experience proved to be ‘great,’ compelling me to reevaluate the definition of art world success.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “Low Museum”
Through an installation of archived refuse from past curatorial projects and two video projects, Low Museum lays bare the curatorial process and asks, “What is the process through which one becomes a curator of contemporary art?” “How does popular culture view the role of a contemporary art curator?”
MEGHA RALAPATI - Curator, ”1973”
THE NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: The lauding of “PLOT/09″
“I love the idea of ‘PLOT/09,’ a public art initiative presented by Creative Time, particularly the first installment titled ‘This World & Nearer Ones.’ The project features 19 artworks by contemporary artists displayed at existing spaces all over Governors Island. It energizes people to explore or re-explore Governors Island, a beautiful and historically fascinating place that has served important military functions for the last few centuries—and it’s free to travel to! I think this project perfectly embodies what public art should do, which is to successfully operate on a number of levels by presenting relevant contemporary art at venues that are accessible and safe for the widest number of people to visit.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “1973″
Using the re-appropriation and reinterpretation process embodied in Jaret Vadera’s 1973 (When you grow up…) as a theoretical springboard, she explores the way in which the mind constructs “new” ideas and how often our thoughts are “merely reflections of information that have been filtered into our consciousness.”
NICO WHEADON - Curator, “Comet Fever”
THE NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: The wisdom and folly of the 4th grade on our potential future selves
“In the fourth grade, Mrs. _____ asked me to write a letter to my future self. I remember being hungry and totally annoyed by the prophetic intentions of the exercise. So, instead of outlining the future I envisioned for myself, I drafted a list [in order of edibility] of all the items in the classroom that I would eat if nobody was watching: paint chips, pink chalk, world map, etc. Last week, I was reminded of this letter and my apathy when reading an article in New Scientist that discussed how a combination of real-time web search and user input at FutureMe (a website where you can send yourself an email scheduled to arrive at any date within the next 30 years) could be analyzed to gauge individual hopes and fears whilst forecasting communal action and reaction. The formative authoring capacities of our online footsteps coupled with an ever-present necessity to reintroduce hope into global equations of cause-and-effect could work to open up a site of creative inquiry inside of which we can write a better future into being.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “Comet Fever”
A glimpse into the “communal hallucination” induced by the fever and allure of the unknown, occult, and uncontrollable that we all love and fear, and love to fear. Works by Taylor Baldwin, Boyd Holbrook, Dawit L. Petros, Segtram, and Noelle Lorraine Williams contrast the world of science and logic, and “render the world less fathomable and more magical.”
WOMEN IN PHOTOGRAPHY - (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips), Curators, “Deconstructing the Female Gaze”
THE NEW IDEA ON THEIR MIND: The thrill of techno-ization and democratization in art
“Curating has evolved considerably in the last several years from DIY exhibitions and self-publishing to virtual showcases and online magazines. People are stepping into the role of ‘curator’ by employing the technologies offered by the Internet. By doing this, they can reach a worldwide audience with efficacy, rapidity with very little monetary investment, making the web one of the most valuable tools in showcasing art today. These DIY practices are spilling over from the virtual art world into the physical art world. It is allowing the artists to be more involved, it is breaking down the traditional roles that in the past have separated artist from curator, it is questioning the value of art and it is allowing for more experimentation—all of which to us is quite exciting.”
THE NEW IDEA IN THEIR SHOW: “Deconstructing the Female Gaze”
Through the highly individualistic work and methods of women artists Michele Abeles, Tierney Gearon, Els Vanden Meersch, and Victoria Sambunaris, the stereotypical assumptions about how women interpret the world through photographic practice is closely considered—then tossed aside with art that transcends gender.
CECILIA JURADO - “In Heaven”
NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: Mortality
”For me, last year was filled with unexpected deaths and with a big echo of the crisis. Although its very ending was like a dawn, the whole experience of a debacle—unannounced—made 2009 a year where I stopped in almost every single step while walking. Every show I curated this year was a question of mortality, of its values, of its ironies, of its memories. From ‘Two to Dominate,’ (where Eunah Kim built a fantastic new happy world to subjugate her lung cancer), passing for ‘El Fin’ (where Christoph Draeger made jokes of ‘the end,’ and Miguel Aguirre reviewed recent tragedies), till ‘Bulletproof’ (perhaps the pick of the investigation, where Milagros de la Torre showed crime evidence, the protagonists, but also, the protection).”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “In Heaven”
The project presented for “Young Curators” is literally a bright ending. White neon pieces by Norma Markley and Tom Fruin bring to mind the poetic space like the myth of the tunnel we pass through as we move towards the light at the end of it. It’s a journey that is paradoxical, hopeful, frightening, humorous and mysterious.
In addition to Karen Archey, Megha Ralapati, Nico Wheadon, Women in Photography, and Cecilia Jurado, “Young Curators, New Ideas II” includes micro-exhibitions curated by Jose Ruiz and Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara & Erin Somerville).
IN FEATURES BY TERI DUERR 2009-08-06
http://www.nyartbeat.com/nyablog/2009/08/young-curators-on-the-art-of-new-ideas/
In the spirit of celebrating new ideas, NYAB asked the folks behind “Young Curators, New Ideas II” at PPOW Gallery to share thoughts on what’s recently been on their minds… with funny, thoughtful, and unexpected results.
“Young Curators, New Ideas II” organized by Amani Olu, is made up of seven micro-exhibitions from a diverse coterie of emerging New York curators. The show promises to be a vibrant mix of perspectives that “experiments with curatorial practice and an exploration of ideas as physical form.” In the show’s open spirit of engagement, several of the featured curators took time to share some new ideas with NY Art Beat.
AMANI OLU - Curator, “Young Curators, New Ideas II”
NEW IDEA ON HIS MIND: Photography as we’ll know it after photography as we knew it
“Currently on view at Bose Pacia is a group show I curated titled “After Color,” which examines how artists employ conceptual black-and-white photography to strengthen their ideas and how such usage comments on the dominance of large-scale, color photography as seen in the contemporary art world over the last 25 years. One of nine of the artist included in this exhibition is Talia Chetrit. In her series Gradient Tool, Chetrit composes eight black-and-white prints from images created with Photoshop’s gradient tool. Once converted into 8 x 10 inch negatives, she returns to the darkroom to make traditional contact prints on silver gelatin paper. The result is a formal study of tone and the way that light renders space.
Chetrit sidesteps conventional methods of using Photoshop by reversing technological advancements in photographic production. Taking into account that these works originate as digital fabrications and then revert to traditional silver gelatin prints, Chetrit raises the following questions: Are these images actually photographs? Does referring to a traditional photographic process prove that this is photography? Furthermore, what does this work say about technology’s continued influence on photography and how images are interpreted? Chetrit’s manipulation of the trajectory of technological advancements within photography makes room for a critical discourse around the inherent contradictions within the medium.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HIS SHOW: “Young Curators, New Ideas II”
If you mine the minds of seven curatorial talents, what sorts of priceless nuggets about contemporary art presentation and perspective are to be found? Broadening the scope of the photography-centric original “Young Curators, New Ideas,” this year’s show includes sculpture, video, and multi-media installation.
KAREN ARCHEY - Curator, “Low Museum”
THE NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: Redefining greatness and re-evaluating success
“I’ve struggled with the concept of greatness and often become hung up on the term. Greatness doesn’t necessitate a qualitative ‘goodness’ to me. The concept marries well with ambition as well as failure, effacing any lingering sentiment of idealism or culturally determined success. Greatness may be quotidian and ugly, but never boring… kind of like Divine in John Waters’ movies.
This definition brings to mind the exhibition space I started with a friend in the Lower East Side around October 2008. Diving blindly into the project, I had moved to New York merely two weeks before its opening. The space held countless events and exhibitions featuring emerging artists for about six months, draining our pocketbooks as well as our morale. Although I became acquainted with some of the most ingenious artists and gallerists in the LES, the project ended almost as invisibly as it began. Though ambivalently, the quality and magnitude of this experience proved to be ‘great,’ compelling me to reevaluate the definition of art world success.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “Low Museum”
Through an installation of archived refuse from past curatorial projects and two video projects, Low Museum lays bare the curatorial process and asks, “What is the process through which one becomes a curator of contemporary art?” “How does popular culture view the role of a contemporary art curator?”
MEGHA RALAPATI - Curator, ”1973”
THE NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: The lauding of “PLOT/09″
“I love the idea of ‘PLOT/09,’ a public art initiative presented by Creative Time, particularly the first installment titled ‘This World & Nearer Ones.’ The project features 19 artworks by contemporary artists displayed at existing spaces all over Governors Island. It energizes people to explore or re-explore Governors Island, a beautiful and historically fascinating place that has served important military functions for the last few centuries—and it’s free to travel to! I think this project perfectly embodies what public art should do, which is to successfully operate on a number of levels by presenting relevant contemporary art at venues that are accessible and safe for the widest number of people to visit.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “1973″
Using the re-appropriation and reinterpretation process embodied in Jaret Vadera’s 1973 (When you grow up…) as a theoretical springboard, she explores the way in which the mind constructs “new” ideas and how often our thoughts are “merely reflections of information that have been filtered into our consciousness.”
NICO WHEADON - Curator, “Comet Fever”
THE NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: The wisdom and folly of the 4th grade on our potential future selves
“In the fourth grade, Mrs. _____ asked me to write a letter to my future self. I remember being hungry and totally annoyed by the prophetic intentions of the exercise. So, instead of outlining the future I envisioned for myself, I drafted a list [in order of edibility] of all the items in the classroom that I would eat if nobody was watching: paint chips, pink chalk, world map, etc. Last week, I was reminded of this letter and my apathy when reading an article in New Scientist that discussed how a combination of real-time web search and user input at FutureMe (a website where you can send yourself an email scheduled to arrive at any date within the next 30 years) could be analyzed to gauge individual hopes and fears whilst forecasting communal action and reaction. The formative authoring capacities of our online footsteps coupled with an ever-present necessity to reintroduce hope into global equations of cause-and-effect could work to open up a site of creative inquiry inside of which we can write a better future into being.”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “Comet Fever”
A glimpse into the “communal hallucination” induced by the fever and allure of the unknown, occult, and uncontrollable that we all love and fear, and love to fear. Works by Taylor Baldwin, Boyd Holbrook, Dawit L. Petros, Segtram, and Noelle Lorraine Williams contrast the world of science and logic, and “render the world less fathomable and more magical.”
WOMEN IN PHOTOGRAPHY - (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips), Curators, “Deconstructing the Female Gaze”
THE NEW IDEA ON THEIR MIND: The thrill of techno-ization and democratization in art
“Curating has evolved considerably in the last several years from DIY exhibitions and self-publishing to virtual showcases and online magazines. People are stepping into the role of ‘curator’ by employing the technologies offered by the Internet. By doing this, they can reach a worldwide audience with efficacy, rapidity with very little monetary investment, making the web one of the most valuable tools in showcasing art today. These DIY practices are spilling over from the virtual art world into the physical art world. It is allowing the artists to be more involved, it is breaking down the traditional roles that in the past have separated artist from curator, it is questioning the value of art and it is allowing for more experimentation—all of which to us is quite exciting.”
THE NEW IDEA IN THEIR SHOW: “Deconstructing the Female Gaze”
Through the highly individualistic work and methods of women artists Michele Abeles, Tierney Gearon, Els Vanden Meersch, and Victoria Sambunaris, the stereotypical assumptions about how women interpret the world through photographic practice is closely considered—then tossed aside with art that transcends gender.
CECILIA JURADO - “In Heaven”
NEW IDEA ON HER MIND: Mortality
”For me, last year was filled with unexpected deaths and with a big echo of the crisis. Although its very ending was like a dawn, the whole experience of a debacle—unannounced—made 2009 a year where I stopped in almost every single step while walking. Every show I curated this year was a question of mortality, of its values, of its ironies, of its memories. From ‘Two to Dominate,’ (where Eunah Kim built a fantastic new happy world to subjugate her lung cancer), passing for ‘El Fin’ (where Christoph Draeger made jokes of ‘the end,’ and Miguel Aguirre reviewed recent tragedies), till ‘Bulletproof’ (perhaps the pick of the investigation, where Milagros de la Torre showed crime evidence, the protagonists, but also, the protection).”
THE NEW IDEA IN HER SHOW: “In Heaven”
The project presented for “Young Curators” is literally a bright ending. White neon pieces by Norma Markley and Tom Fruin bring to mind the poetic space like the myth of the tunnel we pass through as we move towards the light at the end of it. It’s a journey that is paradoxical, hopeful, frightening, humorous and mysterious.
In addition to Karen Archey, Megha Ralapati, Nico Wheadon, Women in Photography, and Cecilia Jurado, “Young Curators, New Ideas II” includes micro-exhibitions curated by Jose Ruiz and Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara & Erin Somerville).
IN FEATURES BY TERI DUERR 2009-08-06
http://www.nyartbeat.com/nyablog/2009/08/young-curators-on-the-art-of-new-ideas/
Art In America International Review
"Amani Olu Has New Ideas" by Andrew Cappetta 08/06/09
For his recent exhibition After Color at Bose Pacia in Chelsea, 29-year-old New York-based curator amani olu selected a diverse group of young photographers whose stylistic tendencies span from abstraction to portraiture and whose techniques range from gelatin silver prints to animated GIFs. What draws the practices of these nine artists together is their conscious embrace of the black-and-white photographic tradition "after color," a choice that olu argues is both an homage to the Conceptual approaches of the 60s and 70s and a response to the domination of color on the contemporary photo market. Tracing this shift in artistic practice, olu makes a claim for a new generation of photographers. olu applied a similarly generational lens in his most notable project, Young Curators, New Ideas, from 2008. The focus, however, shifts from the work of emerging artists to the practices of rising curators.
The exhibition was originally conceived for the Bond Street Gallery, where olu was hired as Director, to help transition the space from a commercial to a fine-art photography venture. He admits that the idea
was developed at a moment's notice to fill a spot in the calendar left vacant by a last-minute cancellation. For the exhibition, olu invited six young photo curators and curatorial teams to develop proposals for a share of the gallery space. olu's job was far more managerial, keeping the project participants on strict deadlines while ensuring that they had access to the appropriate resources to realize their exhibitions. The result was six individual exhibitions, each with its own curatorial vision, ranging from Michael Bühler-Rose's solo show of the work of Charles Benton to Laurel Ptak's Graphic Interchange Format, a collection of 67 animated GIFs, made by 26 artists and displayed on a flat screen.
Young Curators, New Ideas gained notoriety not only for introducing a new crop of arts professionals but also for putting the position of the emerging curator on equal footing with that of the emerging artist. When olu was invited to work with the P.P.O.W. Gallery this summer, he suggested a second installment of the project
(Young Curators, New Ideas II opens today, August 6). This time the show features the work of seven curators and teams, including the Bronx Museum's José Ruiz, co-curator of the most recent Queens International, and Art Fag City's Karen Archey. This re-visitation has allowed olu to expand the exhibition's concept and range, opening up to a variety of media and curators of varying experience. Two of the exhibition's most enterprising projects reflect upon aspects of curatorial practice itself. Archey's Low Museum is an archive of leftover
material from past projects, while the collective Cleopatra's (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara, Erin Somerville) will present the Inaugural Reference Archive and Library, a bookshelf of reference material chosen by curators admired by members of the collective. These two projects and the growing franchise of New Curators, New Ideas perhaps indicate another generational shift in the artworld, the curator as auteur. Although to some it is another concept exhumed from the Conceptual generation (Szeemann's Documenta V comes to mind), what has maybe become evident is the fact that the power of the curator is inescapable. As olu himself expressed, "A critic was the one who could make or break a career, but now it's the curator."
Young Curators New Ideas opens tonight, 6–8 PM. PPOW Gallery is located at 511 West 25th Street, Room 301, New York
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-08-06/amani-olu/
For his recent exhibition After Color at Bose Pacia in Chelsea, 29-year-old New York-based curator amani olu selected a diverse group of young photographers whose stylistic tendencies span from abstraction to portraiture and whose techniques range from gelatin silver prints to animated GIFs. What draws the practices of these nine artists together is their conscious embrace of the black-and-white photographic tradition "after color," a choice that olu argues is both an homage to the Conceptual approaches of the 60s and 70s and a response to the domination of color on the contemporary photo market. Tracing this shift in artistic practice, olu makes a claim for a new generation of photographers. olu applied a similarly generational lens in his most notable project, Young Curators, New Ideas, from 2008. The focus, however, shifts from the work of emerging artists to the practices of rising curators.
The exhibition was originally conceived for the Bond Street Gallery, where olu was hired as Director, to help transition the space from a commercial to a fine-art photography venture. He admits that the idea
was developed at a moment's notice to fill a spot in the calendar left vacant by a last-minute cancellation. For the exhibition, olu invited six young photo curators and curatorial teams to develop proposals for a share of the gallery space. olu's job was far more managerial, keeping the project participants on strict deadlines while ensuring that they had access to the appropriate resources to realize their exhibitions. The result was six individual exhibitions, each with its own curatorial vision, ranging from Michael Bühler-Rose's solo show of the work of Charles Benton to Laurel Ptak's Graphic Interchange Format, a collection of 67 animated GIFs, made by 26 artists and displayed on a flat screen.
Young Curators, New Ideas gained notoriety not only for introducing a new crop of arts professionals but also for putting the position of the emerging curator on equal footing with that of the emerging artist. When olu was invited to work with the P.P.O.W. Gallery this summer, he suggested a second installment of the project
(Young Curators, New Ideas II opens today, August 6). This time the show features the work of seven curators and teams, including the Bronx Museum's José Ruiz, co-curator of the most recent Queens International, and Art Fag City's Karen Archey. This re-visitation has allowed olu to expand the exhibition's concept and range, opening up to a variety of media and curators of varying experience. Two of the exhibition's most enterprising projects reflect upon aspects of curatorial practice itself. Archey's Low Museum is an archive of leftover
material from past projects, while the collective Cleopatra's (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara, Erin Somerville) will present the Inaugural Reference Archive and Library, a bookshelf of reference material chosen by curators admired by members of the collective. These two projects and the growing franchise of New Curators, New Ideas perhaps indicate another generational shift in the artworld, the curator as auteur. Although to some it is another concept exhumed from the Conceptual generation (Szeemann's Documenta V comes to mind), what has maybe become evident is the fact that the power of the curator is inescapable. As olu himself expressed, "A critic was the one who could make or break a career, but now it's the curator."
Young Curators New Ideas opens tonight, 6–8 PM. PPOW Gallery is located at 511 West 25th Street, Room 301, New York
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-08-06/amani-olu/
Comet Fever at P.P.O.W Gallery
YOUNG CURATORS, NEW IDEAS II
Organized by: amani olu
Curators: Karen Archey // Cecilia Jurado // Megha Ralapati // Jose Ruiz // Nico Wheadon // Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara & Erin Somerville) // Women in Photography (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips)
August 6 - August 28, 2009
Opening Reception: August 6, 6-8pm
amani olu projects, in conjunction with P.P.O.W Gallery is pleased to present Young Curators, New Ideas II, a curator focused exhibition that examines new voices in contemporary art through the perspective of seven New York based curators. These varied micro-exhibitions experiment with curatorial practice and an exploration of ideas as physical form.
Low Museum curated by Karen Archey: What is the process through which one becomes a curator of contemporary art? How does popular culture view the role of a contemporary art curator? Low Museum considers these questions and seeks to demystify the clichéd identity of the art professional through an installation of archived refuse from past curatorial projects and two video projects, one in collaboration with Daniel Chew.
In Heaven curated by Cecilia Jurado: In Heaven features works by Tom Fruin and Norma Markley and explores the paradox inherent within the exhibition title. Commonly interpreted as a paradisiacal space, the word “heaven” also conjures dramatic images of death and loss. Formally, both pieces use fluorescent and austere white light to provide a sensory experience, summoning the audience into their poetics.
1973 curated by Megha Ralapati: This project explores our desire to absorb information, questioning how frequently we are actually able to develop original thought. Often ideas that we think are our own are merely reflections of information that has been filtered into our consciousness. The images in Jaret Vadera’s 1973 are originally from an educational video that have been manipulated to become a physical representation of the way in which information is filtered and absorbed by the mind.
The Individual & The Family curated by Jose Ruiz: Works by Alejandro Diaz, Las Hermanas Iglesias, J&J, Jessica Ann Peavy, and Bryan Zanisnik entertain the rhythmic patterns between two seemingly divergent threads of art making and social inquiry — collaborative and identity-based work. Entering with a freewheeling interplay of handmade narratives, symbols and constructs that alter the stereotypes and clichés of their genres’ norms, these five artists turn displacement into engagement, while addressing issues of homogeneity and authorship with irreverent and humorous actions.
Comet Fever curated by Nico Wheadon: Comet Fever materializes a contemporary obsession with phenomena outside of human control and harnesses the tension of hysteria and choreography of ritual associated with the paranormal. Taylor Baldwin, Boyd Holbrook, Dawit L. Petros, Segtram, and Noelle Lorraine Williams neutralize this crisis of fear induced by the occult, rendering the world less fathomable and more magical. Imagination overthrows logic and testifies to the absurdist modes by which communal hallucination rivals the tools and science of modern intelligence.
Inaugural Reference Archive and Library curated by Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara, Erin Somerville): Cleopatra’s questions what curating means to those who define themselves as curators. As a way of inaugurating Cleopatra's reference archive and library, the four founders wrote letters to working curators they collectively admire or respect asking for a book of the curator’s choosing. This inaugural bookshelf will later be permanently installed in Cleopatra's storefront space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Deconstructing the Female Gaze curated by Women in Photography (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips): Deconstructing the Female Gaze examines the work of Michele Abeles, Tierney Gearon, Els Vanden Meersch and Victoria Sambunaris, four artists working in methods that both question and challenge the stereotypical ways that women interpret the world through photographic practice. Engaged with contemporary art making practice in highly individualist ways, their work is both informed by and immaterial to their gender.
For additional information or images, please contact 212-647-1044 or info@ppowgallery.com.
Organized by: amani olu
Curators: Karen Archey // Cecilia Jurado // Megha Ralapati // Jose Ruiz // Nico Wheadon // Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara & Erin Somerville) // Women in Photography (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips)
August 6 - August 28, 2009
Opening Reception: August 6, 6-8pm
amani olu projects, in conjunction with P.P.O.W Gallery is pleased to present Young Curators, New Ideas II, a curator focused exhibition that examines new voices in contemporary art through the perspective of seven New York based curators. These varied micro-exhibitions experiment with curatorial practice and an exploration of ideas as physical form.
Low Museum curated by Karen Archey: What is the process through which one becomes a curator of contemporary art? How does popular culture view the role of a contemporary art curator? Low Museum considers these questions and seeks to demystify the clichéd identity of the art professional through an installation of archived refuse from past curatorial projects and two video projects, one in collaboration with Daniel Chew.
In Heaven curated by Cecilia Jurado: In Heaven features works by Tom Fruin and Norma Markley and explores the paradox inherent within the exhibition title. Commonly interpreted as a paradisiacal space, the word “heaven” also conjures dramatic images of death and loss. Formally, both pieces use fluorescent and austere white light to provide a sensory experience, summoning the audience into their poetics.
1973 curated by Megha Ralapati: This project explores our desire to absorb information, questioning how frequently we are actually able to develop original thought. Often ideas that we think are our own are merely reflections of information that has been filtered into our consciousness. The images in Jaret Vadera’s 1973 are originally from an educational video that have been manipulated to become a physical representation of the way in which information is filtered and absorbed by the mind.
The Individual & The Family curated by Jose Ruiz: Works by Alejandro Diaz, Las Hermanas Iglesias, J&J, Jessica Ann Peavy, and Bryan Zanisnik entertain the rhythmic patterns between two seemingly divergent threads of art making and social inquiry — collaborative and identity-based work. Entering with a freewheeling interplay of handmade narratives, symbols and constructs that alter the stereotypes and clichés of their genres’ norms, these five artists turn displacement into engagement, while addressing issues of homogeneity and authorship with irreverent and humorous actions.
Comet Fever curated by Nico Wheadon: Comet Fever materializes a contemporary obsession with phenomena outside of human control and harnesses the tension of hysteria and choreography of ritual associated with the paranormal. Taylor Baldwin, Boyd Holbrook, Dawit L. Petros, Segtram, and Noelle Lorraine Williams neutralize this crisis of fear induced by the occult, rendering the world less fathomable and more magical. Imagination overthrows logic and testifies to the absurdist modes by which communal hallucination rivals the tools and science of modern intelligence.
Inaugural Reference Archive and Library curated by Cleopatra’s (Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Kate McNamara, Erin Somerville): Cleopatra’s questions what curating means to those who define themselves as curators. As a way of inaugurating Cleopatra's reference archive and library, the four founders wrote letters to working curators they collectively admire or respect asking for a book of the curator’s choosing. This inaugural bookshelf will later be permanently installed in Cleopatra's storefront space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Deconstructing the Female Gaze curated by Women in Photography (Amy Elkins & Cara Phillips): Deconstructing the Female Gaze examines the work of Michele Abeles, Tierney Gearon, Els Vanden Meersch and Victoria Sambunaris, four artists working in methods that both question and challenge the stereotypical ways that women interpret the world through photographic practice. Engaged with contemporary art making practice in highly individualist ways, their work is both informed by and immaterial to their gender.
For additional information or images, please contact 212-647-1044 or info@ppowgallery.com.
Scallywag and Vagabond
Say ‘Cheese’- Glitterati Pop-up Shop Explores Our Identities.
By Sabrina Chapman. • Apr 1st, 2009 • Category: Visual Arts
Tuesday night, artists, musicians, supporters, and friends gathered at Rush Arts Gallery on West 26th to take part in Glitterati Magazine Nicholas Fahey’s “Your Portrait Project.” Interestingly enough, the art goers also seemed to have an underlying anchor - Facebook.
Ankle booties, leggings in shades of purple, leopard-print, and gray, oversized Marc Jacob bags, boutique and vintage thrift store finds were among the trends of the evening. MGMT Electric Feel, endless white walls, and designer Carlos Sandoval de Leon’s integration of wood chipped board, set the tone for a raw space available for a natural evolution in the Arts.
What’s going on in here?
Nicole Dungao, Nicholas’s assistant, replied “Its an interactive installation.”
Huh?
“Nicholas shoots, I print, you write, we post, and in the end it goes online. You have all the basic components of bringing people together.”
What kind of Printer?
“ HP - all in one.”
“Are you here for your portrait?”
Sure.
A snap of a flashbulb, a few quick clicks later, I was seeing stars or maybe I just momentarily felt like one.
Nicholas briefed us. He explained that this was his first portrait performance in a gallery. Nico Wheadon, Associate Curator at Rush Arts, had discussed with Nicholas that it was such a shame the gallery was not being utilized in the time between curated shows. Your Portrait Project was a perfect one-night installation for the space. Earlier pop-up shoots, spanning from LA, San Fran, and NYC, have taken place in bars, private parties, and dance clubs. When shooting in these locations, he found that people are in environments that allow them to be comfortable and who they really are.
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2009/04/01/say-‘cheese’-glitterati-pop-up-shop-explores-our-identities /
By Sabrina Chapman. • Apr 1st, 2009 • Category: Visual Arts
Tuesday night, artists, musicians, supporters, and friends gathered at Rush Arts Gallery on West 26th to take part in Glitterati Magazine Nicholas Fahey’s “Your Portrait Project.” Interestingly enough, the art goers also seemed to have an underlying anchor - Facebook.
Ankle booties, leggings in shades of purple, leopard-print, and gray, oversized Marc Jacob bags, boutique and vintage thrift store finds were among the trends of the evening. MGMT Electric Feel, endless white walls, and designer Carlos Sandoval de Leon’s integration of wood chipped board, set the tone for a raw space available for a natural evolution in the Arts.
What’s going on in here?
Nicole Dungao, Nicholas’s assistant, replied “Its an interactive installation.”
Huh?
“Nicholas shoots, I print, you write, we post, and in the end it goes online. You have all the basic components of bringing people together.”
What kind of Printer?
“ HP - all in one.”
“Are you here for your portrait?”
Sure.
A snap of a flashbulb, a few quick clicks later, I was seeing stars or maybe I just momentarily felt like one.
Nicholas briefed us. He explained that this was his first portrait performance in a gallery. Nico Wheadon, Associate Curator at Rush Arts, had discussed with Nicholas that it was such a shame the gallery was not being utilized in the time between curated shows. Your Portrait Project was a perfect one-night installation for the space. Earlier pop-up shoots, spanning from LA, San Fran, and NYC, have taken place in bars, private parties, and dance clubs. When shooting in these locations, he found that people are in environments that allow them to be comfortable and who they really are.
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2009/04/01/say-‘cheese’-glitterati-pop-up-shop-explores-our-identities /
New York Times
"Toplessness and Taxidermy in a Bottoming Market" by Karen Rosenberg
As a newly sobered art world sizes up this weekend’s Armory Show, many are wondering about the fates of smaller fairs with catchier names. What prospects do they have in a crippled economy? A winnowing has already occurred: at least three of last year’s Armory-week fairs have opted out of the festivities.
Those that remain are trying out some new strategies. Volta, which shares a parent company with the Armory, strives to be seen as its younger, hipper sibling (something like the Art Statements section of solo-artist booths at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach). Pulse, in its most diverse incarnation yet, is banking on globalization. And Scope supplements its accessible, pop-kitschy wares with a packed special-events calendar of music, screenings and parties.
Everywhere artists were mindful of recession economics. At Volta, Alejandro Diaz’s black-marker epigrams on cardboard could be had for $99.99. At Scope, artists hawked T-shirts and other multiples priced from $5 to $250 in a separate pavilion marked “Cheap, Fast and Out of Control.”
In previous seasons wry deconstructions of the fair environment, taking a buzz saw to the walls of the booth, for example, or leaving it mostly empty, were common sights. This time dealers showed tidy installations of paintings and photographs, mostly of modest proportions. “Small is the new big,” a wall text at Scope proclaimed.
The solo projects at Volta, in particular, exhibited a slightly queasy self-consciousness of art as a commodity. “Age of Anxiety” is the pre-emptively clever theme of this year’s fair, which was organized by the returning team of Amanda Coulson and Christian Viveros-Faune.
One piece raising eyebrows was a sculpture by Fernando Mastrangelo, at the booth of the Los Angeles gallery Rhys Mendes. A white figure of a Colombian coca farmer resting on a mirror-tiled floor in an all-black setting, it was said to be made of cocaine.
At the Belgian gallery Hoet Bekaert, a topless woman enticed browsers to dig for buried treasure — hidden necklaces — in an installation of brightly colored thread clusters by the Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong. Nearby at Haas & Fischer, Joshua Callaghan’s Model-T Ford, wrought from brass lamps and bedposts, competed for attention.
Some booths didn’t need a gimmick to stand out. In this category were paintings of women with nimbuses of dark hair and the stylized features of figures in Persian miniature painting, by the Iranian artist Hayv Kahraman, at Thierry Goldberg.
Celebrities were another marketing ploy. Galerie Brigitte Schenk showed watercolors of creepy figures with gas masks and guns capably painted by the musician Marilyn Manson. At Scope a painting signed Yu Ling, at Eli Klein Fine Art, was revealed to be the work of the actress Lucy Liu. Intentionally or not, Ms Liu’s prank mocked the demand, in recent seasons, for undiscovered Chinese contemporary artists.
(Fledgling fairs dot the perimeter: Bridge, in the Tunnel nightclub space on 27th Street; Pool, in the Wyndham Hotel on 24th Street; and Fountain, on a boat docked at Pier 66. Although the art is strictly entry level, these fairs have the benefit of proximity to Chelsea galleries.)
Scattered throughout Pulse are galleries from Beijing and Shanghai, but other urban centers also vie for attention: Moscow, Manila, Montreal. Most are fluent in the language of international contemporary art: blurry Photo Realist painting, staged and digitally enhanced photography, crafty crocheted sculptures festooned with sequins and bric-a-brac.
There are also special Pulse-commissioned projects like the Miami artist Clifton Childree’s “Miamuh Swamp Adventure,” a rickety installation resembling a rotting silent-movie theater. Inside is a film about Miami real estate scams at the end of the 19th century.
Solo-artist booths, a trend that clearly extended beyond Volta, stood out at both Pulse and Scope. At Pulse, Mark Moore of Santa Monica, Calif., devoted a large booth to Alison Schulnik’s heavily impastoed paintings of hobos and clowns. At Scope, the Brooklyn gallery Jonathan LeVine had a winning installation by Camille Rose Garcia: wallpaper, paintings and pillows all adorned with a street-art version of the Disney character Cruella de Vil.
Scope seemed to be in the grip of the dubious urban-frontier trend in décor. Specially commissioned installations at the entrances to both tents, by Maya Hayuk and Kristin Schiele, evoked cabins and shanties. Inside the main tent two pieces of taxidermy art were prominent: Marc Séguin’s bald eagle and a deer head with exaggerated, resin-sculpted antlers by Carolyn Salas and Adam Parker Smith.
In the design world this stuff is old news — but in the art world, it’s evidence of a new survivalism.
Continuing through Sunday are the Pulse Art Fair New York, Pier 40, 353 West Street, at West Houston Street, West Village, pulse-art.com; Scope New York, Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, scope-art.com; and Volta NY, 7 West 34th Street, Manhattan, voltashow.com; and the Armory Show itself, at Piers 92 and 94, 12th Avenue at 55th Street, Clinton; thearmoryshow.com.
NYTimes.com, Art & Design Section, March 6, 2009
As a newly sobered art world sizes up this weekend’s Armory Show, many are wondering about the fates of smaller fairs with catchier names. What prospects do they have in a crippled economy? A winnowing has already occurred: at least three of last year’s Armory-week fairs have opted out of the festivities.
Those that remain are trying out some new strategies. Volta, which shares a parent company with the Armory, strives to be seen as its younger, hipper sibling (something like the Art Statements section of solo-artist booths at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach). Pulse, in its most diverse incarnation yet, is banking on globalization. And Scope supplements its accessible, pop-kitschy wares with a packed special-events calendar of music, screenings and parties.
Everywhere artists were mindful of recession economics. At Volta, Alejandro Diaz’s black-marker epigrams on cardboard could be had for $99.99. At Scope, artists hawked T-shirts and other multiples priced from $5 to $250 in a separate pavilion marked “Cheap, Fast and Out of Control.”
In previous seasons wry deconstructions of the fair environment, taking a buzz saw to the walls of the booth, for example, or leaving it mostly empty, were common sights. This time dealers showed tidy installations of paintings and photographs, mostly of modest proportions. “Small is the new big,” a wall text at Scope proclaimed.
The solo projects at Volta, in particular, exhibited a slightly queasy self-consciousness of art as a commodity. “Age of Anxiety” is the pre-emptively clever theme of this year’s fair, which was organized by the returning team of Amanda Coulson and Christian Viveros-Faune.
One piece raising eyebrows was a sculpture by Fernando Mastrangelo, at the booth of the Los Angeles gallery Rhys Mendes. A white figure of a Colombian coca farmer resting on a mirror-tiled floor in an all-black setting, it was said to be made of cocaine.
At the Belgian gallery Hoet Bekaert, a topless woman enticed browsers to dig for buried treasure — hidden necklaces — in an installation of brightly colored thread clusters by the Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong. Nearby at Haas & Fischer, Joshua Callaghan’s Model-T Ford, wrought from brass lamps and bedposts, competed for attention.
Some booths didn’t need a gimmick to stand out. In this category were paintings of women with nimbuses of dark hair and the stylized features of figures in Persian miniature painting, by the Iranian artist Hayv Kahraman, at Thierry Goldberg.
Celebrities were another marketing ploy. Galerie Brigitte Schenk showed watercolors of creepy figures with gas masks and guns capably painted by the musician Marilyn Manson. At Scope a painting signed Yu Ling, at Eli Klein Fine Art, was revealed to be the work of the actress Lucy Liu. Intentionally or not, Ms Liu’s prank mocked the demand, in recent seasons, for undiscovered Chinese contemporary artists.
(Fledgling fairs dot the perimeter: Bridge, in the Tunnel nightclub space on 27th Street; Pool, in the Wyndham Hotel on 24th Street; and Fountain, on a boat docked at Pier 66. Although the art is strictly entry level, these fairs have the benefit of proximity to Chelsea galleries.)
Scattered throughout Pulse are galleries from Beijing and Shanghai, but other urban centers also vie for attention: Moscow, Manila, Montreal. Most are fluent in the language of international contemporary art: blurry Photo Realist painting, staged and digitally enhanced photography, crafty crocheted sculptures festooned with sequins and bric-a-brac.
There are also special Pulse-commissioned projects like the Miami artist Clifton Childree’s “Miamuh Swamp Adventure,” a rickety installation resembling a rotting silent-movie theater. Inside is a film about Miami real estate scams at the end of the 19th century.
Solo-artist booths, a trend that clearly extended beyond Volta, stood out at both Pulse and Scope. At Pulse, Mark Moore of Santa Monica, Calif., devoted a large booth to Alison Schulnik’s heavily impastoed paintings of hobos and clowns. At Scope, the Brooklyn gallery Jonathan LeVine had a winning installation by Camille Rose Garcia: wallpaper, paintings and pillows all adorned with a street-art version of the Disney character Cruella de Vil.
Scope seemed to be in the grip of the dubious urban-frontier trend in décor. Specially commissioned installations at the entrances to both tents, by Maya Hayuk and Kristin Schiele, evoked cabins and shanties. Inside the main tent two pieces of taxidermy art were prominent: Marc Séguin’s bald eagle and a deer head with exaggerated, resin-sculpted antlers by Carolyn Salas and Adam Parker Smith.
In the design world this stuff is old news — but in the art world, it’s evidence of a new survivalism.
Continuing through Sunday are the Pulse Art Fair New York, Pier 40, 353 West Street, at West Houston Street, West Village, pulse-art.com; Scope New York, Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, scope-art.com; and Volta NY, 7 West 34th Street, Manhattan, voltashow.com; and the Armory Show itself, at Piers 92 and 94, 12th Avenue at 55th Street, Clinton; thearmoryshow.com.
NYTimes.com, Art & Design Section, March 6, 2009
V Magazine
DESIGN FOR LOVING /// Marina Cashdan reports on the next wave of industrial design from Design Miami /// December 22, 2008 Issue
Finally Design Miami feels like it has its place. Most likely the result of not being crammed into the Moore Building this year (as has been the case in the past three years), the fair felt way more expansive and comprehensive. Twenty-four of the best international furniture galleries were housed in New York–based architecture and design firm Aranda/Lasch’s movable modular tent. Our favorites included Moss Gallery, where East Indian Bavarian screens juxtaposed Fernando and Humberto Campana's (this year's Designer of the Year recipients) glass and rope sculptures dangling from the walls. At Dansk Mobelkunst Gallery easy chairs from Bruno Mathsson were amongst our favorite pieces; David Wiseman’s collage chandelier and wall sculpture were the highlight at R 20th Century’s booth; and at Ornamentum Gallery, the Ted Noten Lady K Bag—gun-engraved with flowers and gold-plated, then cast in an acrylic Prada handbag—and other bags and luggage were unbelievable. At the Beyond Organic: Design in the State of Nature show, nature explored the theme of the natural world, and celebrated nature as a vital touchstone for building practice. The botanical garden-like setting (the project was a collaboration with Miami’s Fairchild Tropical Garden) showcased works by Arik Levy, Julia Lohmann and Tommaso Barbi; while in a dimly-lit back room Tom Dixon exhibited heavyweight furniture created through the industrial process of flame cutting steel (originally created for a show he exhibited on the grounds of the 14th century Sudeley Castle). Items like a highchair and lounge chair were oddly comforting, even in the severe, steadfast material.
But the satellite fairs impressed us most, including the Al Sabah Art & Design Collection exhibition, stunning east-meets-west designs, like a 1960s swivel chair embroidered with vintage fabric from Tajikistan and hand-blown glass formations by Pieke Bergman applied to delicate mother-of-pearl inlay furniture from Damascus, the furniture scorched by the heat when married with Bergman's hot glass addition. The Mallet and Meta exhibition showcased selected works by Tord Boontje, Edward Barder & Jay Osgerby and Asymptote, among others; and at the Kaikai Kiki exhibition, Murakami presented his gigantic plush flowerballs.
But it wasn’t just the official Design Miami exhibitions that caught our eye in the Design District. The area has recently caught the overflow of the art world and now, both permanent and pop-up galleries are teeming with contemporary art and photography. The Moore Space was peacefully empty except for a lone table with a guest sign-in book and reading material about the 2nd-floor photography exhibition by model agent-turned photographer Paul Rowland. The minimal white space was the perfect setting for the collection of grainy oversize black and white photographs. Most of the images come from Rowland’s artsy biannual model catalogues, in the form of a well-printed book (inspired by Visionaire, according to curator Jordan Seiler) or they have come in other forms like boxes containing black and white prints. For his first exhibition, he took them and blew them up to fill the walls; and they were breathtaking in the space.
We also found the 4141 building (4141 NE 2nd Avenue) overflowing with pop-up galleries. And every day of Design Miami, bands played in the open atrium space, creating this gallery house party feel as you walked to various exhibitions with cocktail in hand. The "Freeze Frame" exhibition was among our favorites (curated by Nico Wheadon, associate curator at Rush Arts Gallery). The works made up a collection of video still prints by 30 international artists working in narrative, non-narrative, experimental, and documentary video.
On NE 40th Street, 101 Gallery (in collaboration with Galerie Brigitte Schenk) debuted work by Marilyn Manson who, it turns out, is a talented artist. His predictably disturbing subject matter (androgyny, murder, deformation) is made oddly beautiful by way of watercolor, acrylic and ink. He even used caffeine-free chamomile tea (specified) in one work. All in all, the Design District has evolved from what was centralized fair—it has finally begun to grow its wings. That just makes us anticipate what’s in store for next year.
-Marina Cashdan
Finally Design Miami feels like it has its place. Most likely the result of not being crammed into the Moore Building this year (as has been the case in the past three years), the fair felt way more expansive and comprehensive. Twenty-four of the best international furniture galleries were housed in New York–based architecture and design firm Aranda/Lasch’s movable modular tent. Our favorites included Moss Gallery, where East Indian Bavarian screens juxtaposed Fernando and Humberto Campana's (this year's Designer of the Year recipients) glass and rope sculptures dangling from the walls. At Dansk Mobelkunst Gallery easy chairs from Bruno Mathsson were amongst our favorite pieces; David Wiseman’s collage chandelier and wall sculpture were the highlight at R 20th Century’s booth; and at Ornamentum Gallery, the Ted Noten Lady K Bag—gun-engraved with flowers and gold-plated, then cast in an acrylic Prada handbag—and other bags and luggage were unbelievable. At the Beyond Organic: Design in the State of Nature show, nature explored the theme of the natural world, and celebrated nature as a vital touchstone for building practice. The botanical garden-like setting (the project was a collaboration with Miami’s Fairchild Tropical Garden) showcased works by Arik Levy, Julia Lohmann and Tommaso Barbi; while in a dimly-lit back room Tom Dixon exhibited heavyweight furniture created through the industrial process of flame cutting steel (originally created for a show he exhibited on the grounds of the 14th century Sudeley Castle). Items like a highchair and lounge chair were oddly comforting, even in the severe, steadfast material.
But the satellite fairs impressed us most, including the Al Sabah Art & Design Collection exhibition, stunning east-meets-west designs, like a 1960s swivel chair embroidered with vintage fabric from Tajikistan and hand-blown glass formations by Pieke Bergman applied to delicate mother-of-pearl inlay furniture from Damascus, the furniture scorched by the heat when married with Bergman's hot glass addition. The Mallet and Meta exhibition showcased selected works by Tord Boontje, Edward Barder & Jay Osgerby and Asymptote, among others; and at the Kaikai Kiki exhibition, Murakami presented his gigantic plush flowerballs.
But it wasn’t just the official Design Miami exhibitions that caught our eye in the Design District. The area has recently caught the overflow of the art world and now, both permanent and pop-up galleries are teeming with contemporary art and photography. The Moore Space was peacefully empty except for a lone table with a guest sign-in book and reading material about the 2nd-floor photography exhibition by model agent-turned photographer Paul Rowland. The minimal white space was the perfect setting for the collection of grainy oversize black and white photographs. Most of the images come from Rowland’s artsy biannual model catalogues, in the form of a well-printed book (inspired by Visionaire, according to curator Jordan Seiler) or they have come in other forms like boxes containing black and white prints. For his first exhibition, he took them and blew them up to fill the walls; and they were breathtaking in the space.
We also found the 4141 building (4141 NE 2nd Avenue) overflowing with pop-up galleries. And every day of Design Miami, bands played in the open atrium space, creating this gallery house party feel as you walked to various exhibitions with cocktail in hand. The "Freeze Frame" exhibition was among our favorites (curated by Nico Wheadon, associate curator at Rush Arts Gallery). The works made up a collection of video still prints by 30 international artists working in narrative, non-narrative, experimental, and documentary video.
On NE 40th Street, 101 Gallery (in collaboration with Galerie Brigitte Schenk) debuted work by Marilyn Manson who, it turns out, is a talented artist. His predictably disturbing subject matter (androgyny, murder, deformation) is made oddly beautiful by way of watercolor, acrylic and ink. He even used caffeine-free chamomile tea (specified) in one work. All in all, the Design District has evolved from what was centralized fair—it has finally begun to grow its wings. That just makes us anticipate what’s in store for next year.
-Marina Cashdan
Installation Explores Art Within Space
Whether they've dodged the mobile of black globes suspended in the lobby or gazed up at the knot of yellow tubing hovering over the north stairwell, recent visitors to the List Art Center have probably noticed large works of art taking root in unusual places.
"It's art that emphasizes the relation between space and the object," said Vesela Sretenovic, the curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery. "It's a very physical encounter."
Such is the essence of "in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE," an expansive collection of installation art that has slowly taken over List. "We really wanted to engage the whole building," Sretenovic said, referring to the show's use of the List's second floor and outdoor lawns.
Showcasing 10 separate works, "in TRANSIT" was a collaborative initiative involving Sretenovic, Leslie Bostrom, associate professor of art and chair of the Department of Visual Art and Associate Professor Emerita of Visual Art Marlene Malik. The exhibition was designed to combine the work of both nationally reputed and emerging artists.
Three of the featured artists - Nico Wheadon '06, Arlene Chung '06 and Hilary Leewong '06 - are former students of Malik, who completed her final offering of VA 142: "Sculpture II (Installation)" last semester. These artists' contributions were not, however, part of their work for Malik's course.
The works are similar in that each deals with social issues. According to Bostrom, Wheadon's piece depicts how society and individuals constantly apply numbers to daily life. Wheadon found inspiration for her piece in the Dewey Decimal System. The creation, titled "Soft Mathematics: Numbers Revisited," used touch-activated "sound objects" to create a sensory experience. An art-semiotics and literary arts concentrator, Wheadon also incorporated original writing into the work.
Curving along the north lawn is Leewong's "Pasa," a pink fence made of wire and soft drink labels. Juxtaposed against an actual construction site, Leewong said the barrier is meant to question the idea of the "authentic American."
"This notion of who deserves to be on what side of the fence is absurd," Leewong said, adding that "Pasa" also highlights the boundary between College Hill and the city of Providence.
"I'm kind of obsessed with the Van Wickle Gates," said Leewong, "And I kept thinking, what would the back gate of Brown look like?"
Chung, a neuroscience concentrator now attending New York University's School of Medicine, is responsible for one of "in TRANSIT's" more frightening installations. Covering the ceiling outside of List 110, "Untitled (The Legacy of Gaetan Dugas)," uses dangling syringes to address the ever-present threat of disease, specifically AIDS.
According to Bostrom, infection and the fear it invokes are recurring themes in Chung's work. Bostrom said she vividly recalls a performance art piece Chung created as an undergraduate in which she dressed in a nurse's uniform and distributed emergency medical kits to students around campus.
The exhibition also displays several prominent site-specific artists. Among the recognizable names is Magaly Ponce, whose "Subject, Horizon, and Reflection" was designed from scratch for its specific location in List. A three-part video installation, the exhibit employs cleverly hidden cameras to split projections of the viewer onto a wall between the elevators.
Another well-known artist is Fred Wilson, whose breakthrough came in 1992 with his piece, "Mining the Museum," which mixed antique furniture with objects related to slavery found in the basement of the Maryland Historical Society. His current display at the Bell Gallery, "My Eco, My Shadow, and Me," is a surreal assortment of blown glass and features an ornate black chandelier. Though Wilson's piece was crafted prior to "in TRANSIT," Sretenovic said its reconfiguration in this new space has radically changed the work's appearance and meaning.
This is also true for Sharon Louden's "Fairies," which is situated on the lawn opposite the building's main entrance. Originally an indoor work, Louden's structure of raw wire and reflective metal has rusted and morphed since it was placed outside List. Louden's piece is emblematic of the dynamic relationship between space and the object, the central theme of "in TRANSIT."
In addition to the installations in List, "in TRANSIT" will feature a presentation and discussion on Sept. 15 with subRosa, a feminist performance art group. The exhibition will also feature a symposium with five prominent art scholars discussing the role of installation art in society on Sept. 23.
The display's assembly began over the summer and was completed this past Saturday. The exhibition will remain in the space until Oct. 22.
-Allissa Wickham
Issue date: 9/11/06 Section: Arts & Culture, The Brown Daily Herald
"It's art that emphasizes the relation between space and the object," said Vesela Sretenovic, the curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery. "It's a very physical encounter."
Such is the essence of "in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE," an expansive collection of installation art that has slowly taken over List. "We really wanted to engage the whole building," Sretenovic said, referring to the show's use of the List's second floor and outdoor lawns.
Showcasing 10 separate works, "in TRANSIT" was a collaborative initiative involving Sretenovic, Leslie Bostrom, associate professor of art and chair of the Department of Visual Art and Associate Professor Emerita of Visual Art Marlene Malik. The exhibition was designed to combine the work of both nationally reputed and emerging artists.
Three of the featured artists - Nico Wheadon '06, Arlene Chung '06 and Hilary Leewong '06 - are former students of Malik, who completed her final offering of VA 142: "Sculpture II (Installation)" last semester. These artists' contributions were not, however, part of their work for Malik's course.
The works are similar in that each deals with social issues. According to Bostrom, Wheadon's piece depicts how society and individuals constantly apply numbers to daily life. Wheadon found inspiration for her piece in the Dewey Decimal System. The creation, titled "Soft Mathematics: Numbers Revisited," used touch-activated "sound objects" to create a sensory experience. An art-semiotics and literary arts concentrator, Wheadon also incorporated original writing into the work.
Curving along the north lawn is Leewong's "Pasa," a pink fence made of wire and soft drink labels. Juxtaposed against an actual construction site, Leewong said the barrier is meant to question the idea of the "authentic American."
"This notion of who deserves to be on what side of the fence is absurd," Leewong said, adding that "Pasa" also highlights the boundary between College Hill and the city of Providence.
"I'm kind of obsessed with the Van Wickle Gates," said Leewong, "And I kept thinking, what would the back gate of Brown look like?"
Chung, a neuroscience concentrator now attending New York University's School of Medicine, is responsible for one of "in TRANSIT's" more frightening installations. Covering the ceiling outside of List 110, "Untitled (The Legacy of Gaetan Dugas)," uses dangling syringes to address the ever-present threat of disease, specifically AIDS.
According to Bostrom, infection and the fear it invokes are recurring themes in Chung's work. Bostrom said she vividly recalls a performance art piece Chung created as an undergraduate in which she dressed in a nurse's uniform and distributed emergency medical kits to students around campus.
The exhibition also displays several prominent site-specific artists. Among the recognizable names is Magaly Ponce, whose "Subject, Horizon, and Reflection" was designed from scratch for its specific location in List. A three-part video installation, the exhibit employs cleverly hidden cameras to split projections of the viewer onto a wall between the elevators.
Another well-known artist is Fred Wilson, whose breakthrough came in 1992 with his piece, "Mining the Museum," which mixed antique furniture with objects related to slavery found in the basement of the Maryland Historical Society. His current display at the Bell Gallery, "My Eco, My Shadow, and Me," is a surreal assortment of blown glass and features an ornate black chandelier. Though Wilson's piece was crafted prior to "in TRANSIT," Sretenovic said its reconfiguration in this new space has radically changed the work's appearance and meaning.
This is also true for Sharon Louden's "Fairies," which is situated on the lawn opposite the building's main entrance. Originally an indoor work, Louden's structure of raw wire and reflective metal has rusted and morphed since it was placed outside List. Louden's piece is emblematic of the dynamic relationship between space and the object, the central theme of "in TRANSIT."
In addition to the installations in List, "in TRANSIT" will feature a presentation and discussion on Sept. 15 with subRosa, a feminist performance art group. The exhibition will also feature a symposium with five prominent art scholars discussing the role of installation art in society on Sept. 23.
The display's assembly began over the summer and was completed this past Saturday. The exhibition will remain in the space until Oct. 22.
-Allissa Wickham
Issue date: 9/11/06 Section: Arts & Culture, The Brown Daily Herald
In Transit: From Object to Site
This fall, the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art will present in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE, featuring ten installations by established and emerging artists and Brown students, which will be displayed throughout List Art Center. The Bell Gallery is preparing a four-part exhibition, presenting an installation by renowned American artist Fred Wilson in the main gallery; a piece by French artist Xavier Veilhan in the lobby; an outdoor sculptural work by New York artist Sharon Louden; and a video projection on the second floor by Chilean artist Magaly Ponce. The Department of Visual Art has invited three artists: Peggy Diggs, whose installation will be displayed in the second floor gallery; Laura Evans, who will present her installation in the north stairwell; and subRosa, a feminist performance group who will create an interactive work. Furthermore, three students in the Department of Visual Art. Arlene Chung, Hilary Leewong, and Nico Wheadon will present their work inside and outside of List Art Center.
Featured Installations/Artists:
Fred Wilson’s installation in the Bell Gallery space, My Eco, My Shadow,and Me, features nine works all made of blown glass. Although functioning as individual pieces, the works—Viscous Risk, Chandelier Mori, First Spurt, Dark Down, Black Memory, and Black Present—are interrelated, creating a unifying walk-through space, that evokes poetic or melancholic sentiment while also bringing an awareness of blackness or black consciousness.
Wilson is best known for his site-specific exhibitions—such as the groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society—in which he re-contextualized objects and artifacts from various museum’s collections thereby changing their traditional meanings and interpretations. Wilson’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX; the Venice Biennale, Italy; the Whitney Biennial in New York, NY; and the International Cairo Biennale, Egypt.
Xavier Veilhan’s installation Mobile occupies the List Art Center lobby. It is comprised of fifty spheres in varying sizes, and suspended from the ceiling. Fabricated in plastic (according to the artist’s computer generated renderings) and with a matte black finish, the full-volume spheres activate the lobby in a way that is neither obstructive nor purely decorative. With its strong physical presence and in constant motion, Mobile arouses a sense of weight and lightness, density and transparency, producing a space that envelops both the architectural surrounding and the viewer.
Veilhan is one of the most prominent contemporary artists in France who lives and works in Paris. His work employs a wide range of media from traditional practices of photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture to innovative digitally-based production, computer simulation, and filmmaking. Veilhan has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the US, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Le Magasin in Grenoble, France; Barbican in London, England; Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain; and in New York City at the Jewish Museum, National Academy Museum, and Sandra Gering Gallery.
Magaly Ponce’s video projection Subject, Horizon, Reflection spans the entire hallway on the second floor of the List Art Center. Six video projections of horizon, shadows, reflections and blurred figures/subjects are projected on different walls and in between the elevators creating an encompassing space in which the imagery of vast un/known landscapes, merges with those of water, sunlight, people and their reflections, thereby exploring the experience of (self)reflection, and the idea of mirroring or doubling of the self and the surrounding, altering an ordinary walk-way space into a poetic, dreamscape.
Ponce is a Chilean-born video and installation artist who currently lives in Providence and teaches new media at Bridgewater State College, MA. Her work has been exhibited widely in her home country, as well as in Denmark, Korea, Turkey, and in the US, including at the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, and the Saint Louis University Museum in St. Louis, MI; the America Fest and the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA; the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY; and most recently at inSite_05 in Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, CA.
Sharon Louden’s outdoor installation Faires is situated on the lawn facing the main entrance to the List Art Center. More than 200,000 feet of black tie-wire is arranged into an organic configuration that elegantly merges with its natural setting. Within theses piles of raw wire thousands of small, flickery “lights” (reflective sheeting imbedded in the piles of wire) absorbs and reflects the constantly changing light from its surrounding, creating a magical lighting field. As such, Louden’s Fairies, much like fairy-creatures themselves—delicate imaginary beings with supernatural power—triggers fancy and delight.
Louden is a New York-based artist who works in numerous media, from drawing and painting to sculpture, installation and mostly recently video animation. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT; the Drawing Center in New York, NY; Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, DE; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO; and most recently the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY.
Peggy Diggs’ installation Resolution Room—presented in the second floor gallery of the List Art Center—captures the physical and visual aspects of the resolution process, the key to human understanding and communication. It consists of a circular pathway with two straight paths intersecting at the circle's center. The circular pathway is covered with sand, while the intersecting paths are covered by large rocks, except for a few feet at the exact point of intersection. The remaining spaces of the room are occupied by glasses of water, items often present at negotiations, providing solace for the voice. Hence, Resolution Room may function on two levels: as a metaphor of conflict resolution or as an actual space for resolving conflict.
Diggs is best known for her activist and public art projects oriented toward social justice and marginalized groups. Her public art installations include the interactive project Here and Then currently on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; Make Do at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC; Recollection for Wave Hill in the Bronx; and Finding Home in Chicago. She has also done projects in Boston and other US cities, as well as in Canada and Venezuela.
Laura Evans’ installation Sinuendo is displayed in the north stairwell of the List Art Center. It consists of two main parts: a large mass of curling yellow forms clutched together and suspended from the ceiling, and multiple snaking forms made from painted pipes, coated wire, soft fabric forms, and flexible plastic tubing that emerge at different levels throughout the stairwell. It is in this sense that the installation bares the name Sinuendo referring to serpentine forms and sinuous movement.
Evans lives and works in Boston. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and groups exhibitions mostly on the East Coast, including at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York, NY; and in Boston, MA at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Barbara Krakow, Mills Gallery, and Harbor Gallery, University of Massachusetts Galleries.
subRosa’s Love is Strong as Death: A Convivial Feast is performance of hosting on the List Art Center terrace. Modeled on the tradition of Plato’s Symposium, as well as on bell hooks’ and other feminist’s notions of hospitality and collaboration, the performance functions as a site for critical conviviality, addressing the ideas about politics of friendship, especially those between women.
subRosa is a feminist art collective (Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis), committed to producing artworks, activist campaigns and projects, publications, media interventions, and public forums that explore the effects of new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work. While the name subRosa honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, science, and politics: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks and Rosie Franklin, the collective’s practices focus on “art of social relations developed around critical issues of feminist concern.”
Brown alumnae
Arlene Chung’s installation Untitled (The Legacy of Gaetan Dugas) in the interior lobby of List Art Center consists of hundreds of syringes with needles suspended from the ceiling alluding to human conditions of disease and medical protection, illness and recovery. Chung graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown Univesity in 2006 with a concentration in neuroscience.
Hilary Leewong’s installation Pasa is made of sugar, sugar substitutes, paper, PVC piping, fishing wire, and is displayed on the north lawn of List Art Center. By using organic, perishable substances and more sturdy industrial materials, she questions, in her own words, “what is artificial and what is real,” and “how we construct a nation,” on real or artificial grounds. Leewong graduated in 2006, concentrating in Art Semiotics and with Honors in English literature.
Nico Wheadon's interactive installation Soft Mathematics: Numbers Revisited—presented in the second floor video room,—is comprised of sound objects activated by touch and wall text taken from the artist’s own fictional writings inspired by the Dewey Decimal System. Dwelling on the sensual, soft aspects of numbers or mathematics, Soft Mathematics “revisits the numbers” via words, objects and sound creating multi-sensory environment in which the viewers are engaged in the experience of touching, reading and listening.
Support for InTransit has been provided by the Creative Arts Council, Brown University.
All events are free and open to the public. The David Winton Bell Gallery, located on the first floor of List Art Center, 64 College St., is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call 401/ 863-2932.
Featured Installations/Artists:
Fred Wilson’s installation in the Bell Gallery space, My Eco, My Shadow,and Me, features nine works all made of blown glass. Although functioning as individual pieces, the works—Viscous Risk, Chandelier Mori, First Spurt, Dark Down, Black Memory, and Black Present—are interrelated, creating a unifying walk-through space, that evokes poetic or melancholic sentiment while also bringing an awareness of blackness or black consciousness.
Wilson is best known for his site-specific exhibitions—such as the groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society—in which he re-contextualized objects and artifacts from various museum’s collections thereby changing their traditional meanings and interpretations. Wilson’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX; the Venice Biennale, Italy; the Whitney Biennial in New York, NY; and the International Cairo Biennale, Egypt.
Xavier Veilhan’s installation Mobile occupies the List Art Center lobby. It is comprised of fifty spheres in varying sizes, and suspended from the ceiling. Fabricated in plastic (according to the artist’s computer generated renderings) and with a matte black finish, the full-volume spheres activate the lobby in a way that is neither obstructive nor purely decorative. With its strong physical presence and in constant motion, Mobile arouses a sense of weight and lightness, density and transparency, producing a space that envelops both the architectural surrounding and the viewer.
Veilhan is one of the most prominent contemporary artists in France who lives and works in Paris. His work employs a wide range of media from traditional practices of photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture to innovative digitally-based production, computer simulation, and filmmaking. Veilhan has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the US, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Le Magasin in Grenoble, France; Barbican in London, England; Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain; and in New York City at the Jewish Museum, National Academy Museum, and Sandra Gering Gallery.
Magaly Ponce’s video projection Subject, Horizon, Reflection spans the entire hallway on the second floor of the List Art Center. Six video projections of horizon, shadows, reflections and blurred figures/subjects are projected on different walls and in between the elevators creating an encompassing space in which the imagery of vast un/known landscapes, merges with those of water, sunlight, people and their reflections, thereby exploring the experience of (self)reflection, and the idea of mirroring or doubling of the self and the surrounding, altering an ordinary walk-way space into a poetic, dreamscape.
Ponce is a Chilean-born video and installation artist who currently lives in Providence and teaches new media at Bridgewater State College, MA. Her work has been exhibited widely in her home country, as well as in Denmark, Korea, Turkey, and in the US, including at the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, and the Saint Louis University Museum in St. Louis, MI; the America Fest and the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA; the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY; and most recently at inSite_05 in Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, CA.
Sharon Louden’s outdoor installation Faires is situated on the lawn facing the main entrance to the List Art Center. More than 200,000 feet of black tie-wire is arranged into an organic configuration that elegantly merges with its natural setting. Within theses piles of raw wire thousands of small, flickery “lights” (reflective sheeting imbedded in the piles of wire) absorbs and reflects the constantly changing light from its surrounding, creating a magical lighting field. As such, Louden’s Fairies, much like fairy-creatures themselves—delicate imaginary beings with supernatural power—triggers fancy and delight.
Louden is a New York-based artist who works in numerous media, from drawing and painting to sculpture, installation and mostly recently video animation. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT; the Drawing Center in New York, NY; Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, DE; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO; and most recently the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY.
Peggy Diggs’ installation Resolution Room—presented in the second floor gallery of the List Art Center—captures the physical and visual aspects of the resolution process, the key to human understanding and communication. It consists of a circular pathway with two straight paths intersecting at the circle's center. The circular pathway is covered with sand, while the intersecting paths are covered by large rocks, except for a few feet at the exact point of intersection. The remaining spaces of the room are occupied by glasses of water, items often present at negotiations, providing solace for the voice. Hence, Resolution Room may function on two levels: as a metaphor of conflict resolution or as an actual space for resolving conflict.
Diggs is best known for her activist and public art projects oriented toward social justice and marginalized groups. Her public art installations include the interactive project Here and Then currently on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; Make Do at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC; Recollection for Wave Hill in the Bronx; and Finding Home in Chicago. She has also done projects in Boston and other US cities, as well as in Canada and Venezuela.
Laura Evans’ installation Sinuendo is displayed in the north stairwell of the List Art Center. It consists of two main parts: a large mass of curling yellow forms clutched together and suspended from the ceiling, and multiple snaking forms made from painted pipes, coated wire, soft fabric forms, and flexible plastic tubing that emerge at different levels throughout the stairwell. It is in this sense that the installation bares the name Sinuendo referring to serpentine forms and sinuous movement.
Evans lives and works in Boston. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and groups exhibitions mostly on the East Coast, including at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York, NY; and in Boston, MA at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Barbara Krakow, Mills Gallery, and Harbor Gallery, University of Massachusetts Galleries.
subRosa’s Love is Strong as Death: A Convivial Feast is performance of hosting on the List Art Center terrace. Modeled on the tradition of Plato’s Symposium, as well as on bell hooks’ and other feminist’s notions of hospitality and collaboration, the performance functions as a site for critical conviviality, addressing the ideas about politics of friendship, especially those between women.
subRosa is a feminist art collective (Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis), committed to producing artworks, activist campaigns and projects, publications, media interventions, and public forums that explore the effects of new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work. While the name subRosa honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, science, and politics: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks and Rosie Franklin, the collective’s practices focus on “art of social relations developed around critical issues of feminist concern.”
Brown alumnae
Arlene Chung’s installation Untitled (The Legacy of Gaetan Dugas) in the interior lobby of List Art Center consists of hundreds of syringes with needles suspended from the ceiling alluding to human conditions of disease and medical protection, illness and recovery. Chung graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown Univesity in 2006 with a concentration in neuroscience.
Hilary Leewong’s installation Pasa is made of sugar, sugar substitutes, paper, PVC piping, fishing wire, and is displayed on the north lawn of List Art Center. By using organic, perishable substances and more sturdy industrial materials, she questions, in her own words, “what is artificial and what is real,” and “how we construct a nation,” on real or artificial grounds. Leewong graduated in 2006, concentrating in Art Semiotics and with Honors in English literature.
Nico Wheadon's interactive installation Soft Mathematics: Numbers Revisited—presented in the second floor video room,—is comprised of sound objects activated by touch and wall text taken from the artist’s own fictional writings inspired by the Dewey Decimal System. Dwelling on the sensual, soft aspects of numbers or mathematics, Soft Mathematics “revisits the numbers” via words, objects and sound creating multi-sensory environment in which the viewers are engaged in the experience of touching, reading and listening.
Support for InTransit has been provided by the Creative Arts Council, Brown University.
All events are free and open to the public. The David Winton Bell Gallery, located on the first floor of List Art Center, 64 College St., is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call 401/ 863-2932.
