Posts Tagged ‘This’

One Not To Miss: Wooster Collective’s “Hybrid Thinking” This Saturday in New York

Posted on January 15th, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

DAL

 

Vinz Feel Free

Hybrid Thinking
Group Exhibition curated by
Marc + Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective

January 14—February 11, 2012
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 14, 7—9pm

Jonathan LeVine Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

Hybrid Thinking brings together six preeminent emerging artists from around the world and for some it will mark their first exhibition in New York. The show features work by: Dal, from Beijing, China (now based in Cape Town, South Africa); Herakut, a duo based in Frankfurt, Germany; Hyuro, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, currently based in Valencia, Spain; Roa, based in Belgium; Sit, from the Netherlands; and Vinz, born and based in Valencia, Spain.

With a wide array of discipline, medium, style and cultural influence, work by the six artists in this exhibition is thematically cohesive in its related subject matter—through figurative pairings of human and animal elements, the artists explore concepts of instinct, identity and metamorphoses. In the curators’ words: “Hybrid Thinking refers to the current zeitgeist of our time: disparate cultures coming together to create something completely new. Though from distinctly different cultural backgrounds, these artists share an understanding of our cities, of the human condition and our complex relationship with nature.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Dal was born in Beijing, China in 1984 and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts. The tactile quality of his three-dimensional work is complimented by the gestural approach and ribbon-like structure of forms in his works on canvas.

Herakut is the collaboration between Hera and Akut, a duo based in Frankfurt, Germany. Their work, in itself, is a hybrid of two styles. Hera’s traditional art training combined with Akut’s years of graffiti experience results in an intriguing combination of organic line and form.

Hyuro, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974, is currently based in Valencia, Spain. She has an art degree from Escuela Nacional Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires, and a Master degree from Politecnic University in Valencia. Her black and white imagery is striking in its poetic simplicity yet rich in existential concepts, the work translates gracefully from canvas to mural form.

Roa is originally from Belgium. His large-scale black and white murals of animals can be found in cities throughout Europe and the US. His gallery work is often painted on multiple panels or objects, echoing the effect and imaginative placement of his images painted on public architecture.

Sit, born in 1976, lives and works in Amsterdam. In his NOIR series, he examines the troubled relationship between mankind and the animal kingdom through a bold black and white palette. Sensual textures of fur and feathers are rendered in dark brush strokes in contrast with pale, soft skin tones of female nude figures and the rigid bone of animal skulls.

Vinz was born in 1979 in Valencia, Spain, where he is currently based. He paints animal heads on large-scale photographs of human figures, and applies the work using wheatpaste to city walls. Taking a similar approach to his studio work, the artist collages paper ephemera into a background texture which he prints figures onto, then paints heads and other details in enamel or gouache.

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“Lunation: Art on the Moon” Opening Party, Observatory, This Saturday, January 7

Posted on January 5th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

This Saturday at Observatory we will he hosting the opening party for Lunation, our first group-curated show. Admission is free, and the art will be intriguingly wide-ranging. I have a few pieces in the show, as do many other familiar faces.

Full details follow; hope very much to see you there!

LUNATION
Art on the Moon
Observatory’s first group-curated show • January 7 – February 26, 2012

Opening Party: This Saturday, January 7th, 7–10 PM, FREE
Closing Party/Observatory’s 3rd Anniversary Fundraiser: Saturday, February 18th, 8 PM/$20
Show Viewing Hours: Thursday & Friday 3–6 PM, Saturday & Sunday 12–6 PM

Artists and scientists have always been attracted to the moon…
Our closest celestial neighbor, the earth’s little sister, the moon creates the tides and illuminates the woods at night. For centuries, humanity believed the moon provided a key into the invisible realm: it called out the beast within us, freeing us to act as wolves, to run, to dance, to chant—and sometimes (as in Duncan Jones’ Moon) to split in two, to find our double, our changeling moon-self.

Is the moon home to life? Today we know it isn’t, but even as of 1830, speculation was rampant that the moon was inhabited by Christianized bat-people who worshiped in great ziggurats. (See The Sun and the Moon by Observatory alumnus Matthew Goodman for details.) Still, life comes to the moon. We know the moon contains frozen water, and we dream of using it as our jumping-off point for visiting even more alien vistas.

Down here, despite all the prowess and nuance of our latest telescopes, earthlings still look up naked-eyed with excitement at the full moon. Lovers and children gaze up at its slowly blinking façade in mute wonder. Artists portray the moon as a source of danger and power, and latter-day sorceresses and men of magic call up to that heavenly lamp, seeking to transcend the ordinary night. For them, the old myths have not changed so much: the moon is still a secret mirror, showing in pale light how the familiar contains always an element of the unexpected…

Artists Included

LUNATION Dates to Save:

  • Sat., Jan. 7 – LUNATION opening! Come drink wine with us and celebrate the many phases/faces of the moon—including ones you’ve never seen before
  • Sat., Jan. 22 – Moon Magick ritual workshop presented by Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile
  • Friday, Feb. 17: The Moon and Its Closest Inhabitants: A 3D Slideshow with 3D Legend Gerald Marks
  • Sat., Feb. 18 – 3rd Anniversary Observatory Fundraiser Party: Help support your favorite interdisciplinarian art, science, & occult event space!

You can find out more about Observatory–including directions–by clicking here.

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Excerpt from “Take This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street”

Posted on December 20th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

An excerpt from Take This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, an extended essay by Melissa Gira Grant, forthcoming in print, epub, and as a Kindle single. Available to support on Kickstarter.

Instagram Photo by Melissa Gira Grant

Remove everything but the books. The librarians who were most versed in direct-action tactics—from participating in various peaceful and spirited disruptions, at street protests against the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, or while bringing cheer to Wall Street police barricades as a roving brass band—had worked out a plan for what they would do in case of a raid. Whoever was in the library would grab the laptops, the archives, the reference section—countless signed editions among them—and ferry them to safety.

“Philosophically,” Jaime, one of the librarians, said, “the books stay with the occupation.”

There had been a dry run, too, the night the Occupiers prepared for the city to evict them. On October 13, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Brookfield Properties, which legally owned the park, wanted to clean Zuccotti, and the Occupiers anticipated that the mayor would also send in the New York Police Department to remove them. So the Occupiers took this order both graciously and defiantly: They would clean the park themselves, and early in the morning, when the cops and the cleaners were to arrive, the Occupiers would refuse to leave. Someone posted an invitation to Facebook on the day of the cleanup, calling people to gather before Wall Street’s opening bell, and to bring brooms and mops and pails. All day, wearing ponchos and latex gloves, Occupiers scrubbed the stone steps of Zuccotti, swept the grounds, and straightened their camp’s stations. As night fell, some of the camp’s infrastructure was evacuated: most of the Kitchen, the Media Center, and almost all of the sleeping bags, foam mats, and blankets that people weren’t using at that moment, and at that moment, the moment I entered the park, just after two in the morning on the day we’d been told we’d be evicted, a dozen or two people were still curled up on mats, plastic tarps drawn over their faces, in the swells of rain that joined us as we arrived in the park, that took us down the clean stone steps leading to Broadway, and that ran two-inches deep and quick, into my boots and into the blankets of the few people still trying to sleep.

But near those stone steps, just off to the north side of the park, along Liberty Street, was the library. It was still there, raised up on clear plastic bins, taped over with tarps covered in slogans. That afternoon and into the night, a librarian named Stephen Boyer prepared it: lining up the boxes and taping down the tarps. If someone had slashed into the plastic, she would have seen yards and yards of books, lined up in their clear plastic bins, and there would be no doubt that what she had discovered had been ordered, taken care of, and if doubt still remained, then there was the poetry written on the tarps, too.

The covered-up mass of the library stretched at least 20 feet in length, five or so feet high, a dull-blue mound gleaming with rain that sheltered those of us sitting beside it. There was the woman with the ash-blond curls and the good boots and trench coat, a media badge around her neck, who, each time I looked up at her over the course of hours, could be found rolling a cigarette on the top of her suitcase. There were the three of us—my protest pals for the night, Darryl and Joanne —talking and pacing and inadvertently sleeping on the stone bench set into the wall along Liberty, which was where I always told people who were coming to the park for the first time to meet me. We didn’t talk about where we were going—I just led us there, and we sat. Darryl had two onions in his canvas tote bag because when he had been in Tahrir Square that summer, he had learned that if they use tear gas against you, you should bite into an onion to counteract the gas. Every 10 minutes, I thought I might throw up because nobody knew if or when the cops were coming, how many there would be, how they would move or remove us. So that was how I ended up spending hours in the library, with the library, and woke from a soft sleep around half past four as someone called out Mic Check! and asked for help carrying the library to a van parked down Broadway. I don’t know how many hands came forward to do it, but the transfer was done in just a few minutes and then nothing but a corkboard was left on the stone bench where the library began.

 

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Morbid Anatomy and Observatory Holiday Fair, THIS WEEKEND December 17th and 18th

Posted on December 18th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments


This weekend, why not come by The Morbid Anatomy Library for the second annual Morbid Anatomy and Observatory Second Annual Holiday Fair? Just a few things you will find here: anatomical blocks, macabre drawings, taxidermy, tableaux, ceramic reliquary bat heads, wet specimens, photographs, tons of books, and much, much more! You will also find free beer complements of our sponsor Brooklyn Brewery.

Full details follow; Hope very much to see you there.

2011 Morbid Anatomy and Observatory Holiday Fair
Holiday fair with multiple vendors serving your alternative holiday needs including taxidermy, miniature insect tableaux and more
Dates: Saturday, December 17 & Sunday, December 18
Time: Noon – 6:00 PM
Admission: Free
Free beer courtesy of our sponsor Brooklyn Brewery

Please join us on December 17th and 18th for a holiday fair presented in conjunction with partner spaces Proteus Gowanus and Observatory. Here you will find such covetables as steampunk jewelry, anatomical blocks, macabre drawings, ceramic reliquary bat heads, wet specimens, photographs, and books, books and more books, all to music DJed by Lado Pochkhua and washed down with beer provided by our sponsor Brooklyn Brewery. This will be the perfect place to purchase unique, niche, and off-the-beaten-path gifts for those hard-to-please folks on your shopping list! Hope to see you there.

For directions, click here. To see some press coverage of the fair, click here, here, and here.

Image: Crocheted Skulls by Dewey Decimal Crafts, a featured seller at last year’s fair. More of her work can be found here.

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