Invisible Labor
Curated by Artnezs
EXHIBITION INTERACTIVE VR EXPERIENCE DIRECTIONS:
Choose the "Box" icon at the right for Full Screen (best for viewing.) Navigate by 4 methods: (1) Hit the “Play” button for the guided timed tour OR (2) Choose your own slower timing, by clicking your mouse in the space and walking through yourself OR (3) Use the "Down Arrow" to visit a specific Curator Bookmarks (down arrow is located next to the "Play Icon”) OR (4) Use the "Map Icon" at the lower left to click and visit different spaces. Click each Artist image to view the artwork title/size and media.
Invisible Labor
Curated by Artnezs
Rolling on the ground involves endurance. When they dress in a costume and set out on a mission, the work holds power. M_m<M is a visual & performance artist based in Chicago that pursues research by being an active participant in new narratives. The work is paired becomingly with Miami artist Jeanne Jaffe’s 5 Elegy For Tesla, a video based loosely on the life and work of Serbian-American inventor, Nicola Tesla and the desire to complete one’s own work. The artist as the misunderstood inventor who transcends time is ever present in Jaffe’s work. Invisible Labor represents the inner monologues of artists who are involved with administrations and institutions.
Are artists misunderstood and the systems in place broken? Invisible Labor is centered around this dichotomy and artists whose work has in some way been shaped by or examined this quandary up close at the institutional level. Exhibitions appear to be seamless, their presentation mirroring the markets surrounding them. Yet, floods of emails, DMs, zoom calls, and hours at the computer are behind exhibitions to present ideas arranged at their best. Can we become more comfortable with these loose ends becoming more visible?
The fragile art ecosystem is multifaceted with both artists and galleries being at the epicenter of vulnerability. Artists work across disciplines and roles to support their lives and practices. Galleries often close and some are self-funded. Professors are often independent contractors who write letters of recommendation for free to the universities to which their students are applying, and tenured positions are fading in American society. Artists often have to choose their own paths to both earn income and honor their genuine interests. This has to change through various efforts.
New Haven-based artist Susan Shutan and Miami-based artist Laura Marsh share spherical forms and tactile experiences. IRL their works can be fondled and interacted with. For Shutan, pom poms on wire rods bounce when eager hands run along a line of them for an exhilarating experience. The architecture of the spaces becomes an integral part of the work. Each section of Becoming contributes to the whole with the work dialoguing from wall to wall and space to space, like a book with chapters where each section unfolds. Marsh’s Nazar and Catalan Combinations repeat motifs that represent protection from toxic thoughts and explorations in how the third eye and sun motifs have been used culturally to ward off interruptive impressions and toxic actions. The pieces can be bounced, sat upon, and at times gravitate on their own. In digital space, the work can be seen as volumetric forms of color, texture, and motif.
Networked System 2 incorporates the technological structures of expended work typically concealed to erase the process and labor invested in artmaking. Through the display of interface coordinates and representations of bodies at sites of physical, mental, and social exertion, the work visually manifests the typically hidden layers of time and effort. In revealing these invisible networks, we are simultaneously confronting hidden institutional political protocols in Miami-based Ricardo E. Zulueta’s work. The piece is timely, recalling durations of separation during Covid and social distancing.
New Haven-based artist, Allen Camp paints iconic gestures that reflect both the tools used in artistic production and the humorous mindset of duplicating, projecting, and paying homage to objects in one’s own practice. The paintings’ titles, Sandwich Memento Mori and Six Assholes with Objects seem to recount ironies in everyday life with lightheartedness.
Miami-based artist Morel Doucet recalls The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, the famously revolutionary work by black artist, Betye Irene Saar in his installation The Brown Menagerie that is complimentarily paired with references of black exploitation at minstrel shows, public hangings, and domestic wrongdoings with a seductive voice that flows like maple syrup itself. Three shelved figures sway to the right with floral forms and a safety pin for heads, recalling the political nuances of black and brown bodies. The forms are well-crafted, historically considerate, and evocatively inventive.
“At one point in my life I worked long continuing education hours so I had to make (art) work at work, and since there was only a desk. I had to make small work. My choice of drawing tools was a marker and a pen. These simple tools stayed with me as some sort of subconscious connection to the office - I am still using a marker to draw with,” says Miami-based Lidija Slavkovic. Her ephemeral works involve tracing, cutting, and reconstructing the lines that were laid down before as a sculptural excavation process.
All seven artists at different periods of their lives work(ed) in administration alongside balancing their practices. I venture to say that their pieces are experimental, historical, and timely. Some are not for the faint of heart and can evoke strong feelings, providing you with a sense of belonging in this multi-layered discourse.
the Fall
Curated by Shirley Irons
the Fall
Curated by Shirley Irons
Fall is the beginning of death. And the anticipation of it. Like all waiting it contains boredom, dread and excitement. Beyond the season, fall includes gravity, the fall from grace, Icarus with his heedless ambition, not keeping on one’s feet. Fall is an entry, it isn’t an end. This exhibition contains a small variety of artists who address some hopefully surprising aspects of the idea of fall.
Missing from this exhibition are Yves Klein A Leap into the Void, Rodney Graham’s drip paintings and inverted trees, Pat Steir’s waterfalls, Rafael Ferrer’s Three Leaf Piece, Vija Celmin’s comets, Jack Pierson’s Icarus and many that don’t come immediately to mind, but I hope the viewer will keep those works present in their imagination. And I hope the viewer gets as much pleasure seeing this as I did choregraphing it. It is as close as I can come to making a show that is “good art by some artists I like.”
The Roman writer Publilius Syrus (~100BC) wrote that “the fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.” Fall, as echoed in Staza 9 of The Ship of Death, below, offers the optimism of the eternal return. To everything there is indeed a season.
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
And the long journey towards oblivion
…
Wait, wait! Even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush
of rose.
A flush of rose, and the whole things starts
again.
The beginning of the first and end of the 9th stanza of D. H. Lawrence’s The Ship of Death (Last Poems, 1932):
Art in Isolation
Curated by HC Huỳnh
Presented by Art School Pedagogy 2.0 symposium, organized by Teachers College, Columbia, and Maryland Institute College of Art, and will be featured by Macy Art Gallery and CPIVRP.
Art in Isolation
Curated by HC Huỳnh
“Awareness of [bodily proximity] is heightened due to being in
isolation after a year—longing for
closeness, touch, & connection.
Working through sculpture, video, photography, painting, and installation, the artists in Art in Isolation responds to the challenges, possibilities, and contradictions in the abrupt shift of [bodily proximity] during the solitary experience due to the current pandemic.
The works in the show weave through the physical and psychological effects of distanced togetherness that introspects on cherishing memories of closeness to speculating the potential of connections in the future.
Facing the barriers to closeness, the artists embody their experiences in works that augments our awareness to the physicality of our bodies through a virtual exhibition.
“Art is part of the human condition---it is brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience” - John Dewey, “Art as Experience”
PS122 Presents: Downtown Train Virtual Exhibition
Curated by William Corwin
Presented by Ian Cofre, Director PS122 Gallery, NYC
PS122 Presents: Downtown Train Virtual Exhibition
Curated by William Corwin
Presented by Ian Cofre, Director PS122 Gallery, NYC
The freedom of downtown is the freedom to say NO. “No” to a fixed social order; “no” to social prerogatives; “no” to gender and romantic designations. That doesn’t mean that the downtown creed is an act of negation: in its purest state, it is the ability to say “yes” to anything without limits. Part of this rejection of rules comes from the simple fact that for many in downtown communities, the rules don’t serve the needs of the community, so there’s no use buying into them in either social or economic terms. The artistic and political agendas of the downtown are inalienably intertwined with poverty, and this leads to a very specific kind of cultural production. Downtown is not just a place that artists inhabit, in fact, very often the arrival of artists heralds the gentrification of a downtown neighborhood. The exhibition Downtown Train at PS122 Gallery focuses on the particular slice of downtown artistic production that engages with political or theoretical activism, which either portrays, helps, or transforms the community in which the artist lives, or reorganizes, along activist terms, the means by which art is viewed and interacts with the viewer. The artist inhabits many positions here: instigator, mediator, recorder, disruptor, interrogator, and/or ally. This show aims to catch the elusive kernel of interactivity with the community, localized social activism, and surrounding environment within which the works were created.
Painting Differences: Induction and Seduction
Adam Henry, Adam Simon, Gary Stephan
Curated by Saul Ostrow
Painting Differences: Induction and Seduction
Adam Henry, Adam Simon, Gary Stephan
Curated by Saul Ostrow
Placed side-by-side, Adam Henry, Adam Simon, and Gary Stephan’s works represent a spectrum of subjects associated with abstract art. Despite their stylistic, aesthetic, and generational differences, what is common to their paintings (and by extension to Painting per se) is their works are the result of a syntheses of formal (structural) and non-formal (conceptual and aesthetic) elements that they assemble into visual events, which serve as visual narratives; whose conflicting pictorial cues and pathways generate doubt and uncertainty as to how best to assemble them into a cogent text.
CPI_VRPrə'jektions
CPI has consistently engaged in either face-to-face situations such as LTR and 21ST.PROJECTS or published works that were conceived of and designed for reproduction. With the launch of CPI_VRPrə’jektions, we continue to maintain CPI’s commitment to unmediated experiences. Within this format, CPI has set out to develop a multi-media curatorial platform, which generates hybrid, interactive publications. The format consists of a custom-built VR exhibition spaces that may be engaged by the viewer in various ways — random access, programed or guided. It is possible to install in these VR spaces simulated 2&3D works, and time-based video and audio works. The VR program includes dialog boxes that permit the works to be annotated, as well as supply links to the artists’ websites, works of other artists, and other relevant information. Beyond that, the projects may include a curator’s walk through, voice over narratives, or discussions with the artists. Since each CPI_VRPrə’jektions is a singular event accessed via the CPI website, they will be archived in perpetuity — while they have an inception date, technically they have not been given a termination date.
The graphic of name of this program, CPI_VRPrə'jektions, is the phonetic representation of the pronunciation of the word projection. This was done to emphasize that while these projects are phantoms, they are not simulacra — what is experienced is what there is. These works have no other form, which might be thought to be its actual mode of being. These projects were conceived to be as they are, subsequently rather than viewing them as exhibitions. We propose these presentations be thought of as inter-active catalogs — documents that brings to fruition the original promise of the hyper-text as an interactive multi-media text/experience.
As with all of CPI’s programs, VRPrə'jektions shares its anagram, VRP, with other programs that by analogy inform its content. In this case, VRP stands for Versatile Routing Platform, which is a network operating system applied in Huawei network devices like routers and switches. It provides users with a consistent and powerful configured platform by standardizing the user’s management interfaces. We also find it amusing that this program shares its anagram with Vocational Rehabilitation Program, which are retraining programs for those who skills have been made redundant in the job force.