Category: Past

Dense Bodies Bend Solid Ground

 

April 27th – June 29th, 2018

Opening Reception April 27th, 6-9pm 

 

Lara Atallah, Leah Beeferman, Alta Buden, Carolyn Lambert

Curated by Rachel Steinberg

This exhibition brings together works from four artists that consider bodies – human, earthly, and political – through evidence of their edges. Conceptually, we are taught to understand a body as individual and whole as far as it is contained within its designated boundaries or skin. That there even exists a line dividing one’s feet from the dirt, one nation state from the next, or the sand from the sea, is a fiction, perpetuated by an oblique understanding of the material world.

The works employ photography, video, sculpture, performance, and text in order for different bodies to push or sink into one another. In each work, the dense, autonomous human body leaves a record of its emergence – a fusing together of material relationships over the breadth of time. Although each artist’s body itself is absent, its imprints and perspectives are what forms each work. The flexibility and porosity of these boundaries are experienced through the document of an impression, and made conspicuous by the futility of their capture.

Lara Atallah’s series 34.5531° N, 18.0480° E consists of Polaroids made along the Southern European and Western Asian coastlines, along with sun prints made from pebbles and small rocks, culled from the different beaches that were photographed. Bordered by over 20 countries, the Mediterranean is commonly perceived as a place for recreation and leisure, but the sea has become the only viable route to safer shores for the many refugees fleeing war zones. The Polaroids are all deliberately damaged within the first 30 seconds of their development, crushed between the artist’s hands or under her feet. The images themselves are devoid of any human depiction. Instead they infer a subtle violence in the emulsion’s veins and fissures. The sun prints are weighted for a period of time by pieces of the same landscape, but only the earth’s specter remains within the prints. Both the Polaroids and the sun prints attempt to capture the earthly materiality of a contentious political boundary, as well as the impressions from where they came into contact with light and the human body.

Leah Beeferman’s recent work considers boundaries and edges as human concepts. Her video, Coast Forms, uses the idea of a coastline to examine, and reimagine, our formal delineations of space. Borrowing notions from quantum physics, she posits a coast as forever shifting in time, space, and materiality. The fifteen-minute video pulls the viewer into different conceptions and arrangements of spacetime through a careful combination of reality and abstraction. She uses footage of waves hitting the shore overlaid with gestural digital forms to create fluidity between digital space, video documentation, and our own focused — yet blurry — acts of perception. In her accompanying newsprint piece, also titled Coast Forms, she uses speculative text, alongside terms from physics and geology, to reflect on overlaps between scientific and personal observation. Similar to the conceptual demarcation between sea and shore, we tend to see a boundary between these different types of looking — but perhaps, Beeferman suggests, we should not. In both works, she highlights the unfixed nature of something human logic has classified as a ‘line’, while pointing out the impossibility for us, at a human scale, to ever really capture such fixity.

Alta Buden is a Brooklyn-based visual artist concerned with the human relationship with our environment. Consisting of a series of sculptures made of rocks, concrete, light, and hand blown glass vessels, Intertidal traces the path of pollutants from the heart of Newtown Creek, a Brooklyn Superfund site contaminated in the 1800’s, from the Hudson River to the Atlantic Ocean where its pollutants become part of a global water entity. Integral to her process is the time spent at these shoreline sites, indexing objects that contain an untranslatable piece of their origin. Each glass vessel is supported by objects–rocks collected at the various sites and cement casts of the shore. Before the hand blown glass has solidified, she presses select pieces onto their support object, forging a relationship through the shared edge of glass and rock or cement – as if attempting to speed up the evolutionary fusion of these materials. Together they form a portrait of the legacy of pollution of a city, told through its shorelines. Lit to show their abstract reflections, and displayed in a style referencing a natural history museum, these objects illuminate the disconnect between knowledge and beauty through the interconnectedness of disparate things.

In Performance for a Permeable Body (toxicity, build-up, frottage, residue), Carolyn Lambert uses mark making as a performative gesture to think about the impact that humankind is having on the surface of our planet. Mixing a digestible form of carbon with her own saliva, she applies this residue to her arm and shoulder, then rubs it repeatedly on the wall. This action designates the surface of the wall as both stand-in for the skin and recipient of its residue, making visceral the porosity of the body. The remains of this gesture is a smudge. The mark is accompanied by a broadsheet connecting the action to a larger context of landscape and time.

PRESS RELEASE 

CHECKLIST

BOOKLET

Check out a live feed video from the event here.

Artwork Images 

Opening Images 

Brunch / Artist Meet & Greet

Sunday, March 11 at 11:30 am 
 
Join us for brunch at Radiator Gallery and meet and greet artists Maria Dimanshtein, JF Lynch, Nicholas Fraser and curator Patrick Neal who will be on hand to discuss the work in Night Regulation. The discussion will examine the role text plays in the artists’ own works, elaborating on forms of messaging, poetry and drawing as part of an artworks gestalt. The event will examine the existence of words within the context of the exhibition and studio practice in general, opening up the conversation to audience participation.

Images: 

Night Regulation: Literati

Friday, March 30 at 7 pm , 2018
 
While the exhibition Night Regulation considers a unique subset of possibilities where visual artists incorporate text into the substance of their works, Night Regulation: Literati will examine the flipside of this practice; poets and writers who work in relation to the visual arts. Teaching in art schools, working as practicing artists, collecting artwork or performing themselves, the evening will include readings by authors Maria Dimanshtein, Jeremy Sigler, Paige Taggart and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright. By contemplating and observing art and the creative process as facets of life, the writers similarly ponder varied aspects of the human condition, weaving these themes into poetry, stories, comedy and tragedy.

Check out a live feed video from the event here.

Images:

Gaza frequens libycos duxit karthago triumphos

Gaza frequens libycos duxit karthago triumphos:
a conversation between Federico Pérez Villoro and Roxana Fabius 

On January 26th, 7.30pm at Radiator Gallery please join artist and designer Federico Pérez Villoro for a conversation with curator Roxana Fabius. They will discuss IV — an exercise on performative writing and printing where Christopher Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro highlight the secret codes that most consumer printers leave on their output, while looking back at centuries-old encrypting practices.

Pérez Villoro will present the work which, during the run of the show, explored the transitory condition of magic as it relates to technology and other forms of power. Viewers/readers in the gallery will have access to a series of near invisible materials by utilizing custom-made LED blue lights.
 
The event will mark the closing of the exhibition “Mage.”

About the exhibition “Mage”
November 17th 2017– January 26th 2018
Mage presents the work of Aron Louis Cohen, Dana Levy, Enrique Ramírez, and Erica Stoller.
The exhibition is accompanied by piece of performative writing and publishing by Christopher Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro.
Organized by Roxana Fabius
 
Historically, a mage was defined as someone who possessed a special type of knowledge. A learned person, who could through language, manipulate objects and people, attaining the desired effect of their spell. Today, technologists with specialized knowledge write code that manages objects and people. However, our difficulties to understand the technologies we use, leave us in a position of impotence. The artists and designers included in the exhibition take a poetic stance at technological opacity, to playfully manage the seeming magic spells they cast around us.  
 
Dana Levy produced an archeological site in which layers of time are confounded, and fossils are brought to life, to reveal the relationship between mining interventions and the long-lasting results on the land. Aron Louis Cohen surgically dismembers tools only to reassemble them through the accumulation of their inside parts, thus creating a thick layer of transparent material that doesn’t let light through. This piece is accompanied by a meditative guide to the end of the world. Enrique Ramirez takes the viewer on a journey to the salt flats of Uyuni, Bolivia, where the sky and the earth are continuous with each other, and the elements of the shaman’s magical mask get a contemporary update. Erica Stoller built an installation made of the cables that wondrously disappear from our sight, while introducing the invisible pulses of energy we so much depend on in our daily life. Christopher Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro disclose the secret codes that printers leave in all our documents, looking back at their relationship with centuries-old encrypting practices. This group of works focuses our attention on how technologies and infrastructures create a mysticism around their functions that is akin to magic, while projecting towards the past, present and future tools of the mage.

The exhibition is the New York premiere of “Pipelines and Sinkholes” by Levy and “Un Hombre que Camina” by Ramírez, which was exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale “Viva, Arte Viva.”
 
Mage is supported by the generous support of the Artis Grant Program
For more information please go to: http://artis.art/what-we-do/grant-programs/

 
Images: 
 

A Roll of the Dice

Performance by András Böröcz 

December 14, 2017, 7:30 pm

Videography by Klára Palotai, Live sound by László Gőz and Tibor Szemző

Andras Borocz will do a performance with 2 film projections and a live sound collaboration by Tibor Szemzo & Laszlo Goz. The walls of a parking lot in Greenpoint consisting of three by three by three-foot concrete blocks piled on top of each other, was the inspiration for this performance by Borocz. The artist continues his explorations as the idiot savant, presenting concrete poetry, a concrete cube costume, and cube boxes made of matzo, which he calls pandoras. These activities were documented by his long-time collaborator, Klara Palotai.

Böröcz started his art career in Budapest in the seventies. During the repressive 1950s, art was dominated by Social Realism. Following the defeat of the 1956 uprising, as János Kádár (the new communist leader) consolidated his power, a new system of cultural politics emerged in Hungary, defined by the so-called “Three T’s” of cultural activity: Támogatott (supported), Türt (tolerated), and Tiltott (prohibited).

Böröcz’s art practice fit into all three categories: After graduating with a degree in painting from the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, he received the (supported) state-sponsored Derkovits Scholarship, a three-year grant for visual artists. As an active member of Fafej and Indigo (two underground art groups), he created experimental, multimedia performances, which were either tolerated or prohibited.

Böröcz moved to New York City in 1985 where he started to carve wood. In the nineties, Böröcz fell in love with the pencil, as he saw its potential as a material created from a tool. His exploration began with small single totemistic pencil figures and escalated to the creation of large organic plant-like forms from thousands of laminated pencils. Over the years he has continued to make sculptures from a range of common materials, such as corks, bread, toilet plungers, eggs, etc.

Böröcz continues to make multimedia performances. His performances have two basic parts:
1, documentary video, 2, live performance with video projection.

His artwork is represented by the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea.

Klára Palotai is a videographer and was a member of the former Squat Theatre.

Tibor Szemző and László Gőz were the founders of the Group 180 contemporary music ensemble at the time.

The program is organized as part of the official closing event of the HCC’s Counter/Culture programming series focusing on Hungarian artistic resistance during State Socialism.

 

Images:

Night Regulation / Storytelling in the Land of Text, Identity and Pictures

February 2 – April 20, 2018
Opening Reception February 2, 6-9pm 

Loren Britton, Maria Dimanshtein, Nicholas Fraser, JF Lynch and Andrew Prayzner

Curated by Patrick Neal

Different media comprising the visual arts like painting, drawing or sculpture have their own
constitutive language. One can list off, color, line, value, texture, viscosity, composition as formal
components with which an image reveals itself. So too, does literature in the form of morphology,
syntax, phonetics and semantics. During the heights of Modernism it was sometimes considered a
fraught ground to mix these two distinct systems, diluting one at the expense of the other. In our
more permissive art climate of the twenty tens, this sort of cross pollination between words and
pictures is not only considered healthy, but essential to convey a climate of image saturation,
global and digital networks, and physical and virtual modes of representation.

The aesthetic coexistence of words and pictures dates back to ancient cultures and reached a high-
water mark with Conceptual Art of the sixties where linguistics sought to elevate idea over form.

Text-based art of that period traded in philosophical puzzles that sought a distillation aimed at
revealing the true essence of art. In the twenty-first century, this approach has proven to be too
reductive, and the purview of words has come full circle, serving as verbiage, image and substrate.
Without the imposition of a doctrinaire ideology, text based visual art straddles abstraction,
figuration and conceptualism and the studio practice of artists cuts across a broad swathe of art
history and media. Words and pictures are mined from the contemporary urban landscape as text
messages, Instagram posts, Google and dark web searches, photos, research, ephemera and
taxonomy, grant applications, philosophy, fake news, protest banners, computer bots, poetry,
prose, novellas, pictographs, logos, graffiti, classifieds, dating apps, computer code, the Second
Amendment, junk mail, phishing spam, fairy tales and cartoons.
Andrew Prayzner draws on sourced images like snapshots or postcards as subjects to ground
his own paintings, then disrupts his compositions by scrawling words across the surfaces. Pictures
of ambiguous locales or clichéd sunsets are paired with sharp, clear phrases; words like ESTEEM,
DEVIL, FROG N SCORPION stylishly unfurl across the field of the painting. Private axioms writ
large are mingled with hand painted, albeit found imagery, suggesting a quest for sincerity in the
midst of a simulated mediascape. An authentic attempt at feeling and communication struggles
against an ocean of mass production and the shortcomings and abuse of language to convey truth.

Loren Britton massages the poetic associations between words, paint and paper, into abstract
works that tenderly contemplate the gender fluid body. Distinctly aware of the symbols and
codification of sexual signification, Britton mingles color, texture and material with sign language,
poetry, and notation in sensually evocative ways. Working within the spaces of shifting venues,
time constraints, budgets and current events, they embrace a lo-fi craft and stay open to creative
happenstance. For Night Regulation, Britton has created a site-specific installation, where cursive
hand written text, absorbed into paper pulp sculptures is set against a wall covering that utilizes
the unique confines of the gallery.

The attempt to ignite romance through public message boards or dating apps, makes its way into
Nicholas Fraser’s Left Hanging series. Fraser, long interested in the variety of soulless junk
communication (spam, phishing, bots, Internet dating) that pervades our lives, juxtaposes these
with soulful attempts at human connection. Working with hanging banners, he cuts personal
intimate correspondence into the surfaces that are equally sad and hilarious. Lit from above, and
using warped letterforms and distorted blocks of text, his black, tyvek banners cast shadows with
a permanence that rivals the fragility of the conversation. Other banners advertising Rap, Reggae
and Bollywood performance are overlaid with letterforms in a “Tower of Babel” style mishmash
that confuses public and private expression.

“Night Regulation” are the words found on signs along city streets warning drivers someone is
watching and that their cars could be towed in the wee hours if they violate parking restrictions.
It’s also a delightfully grandiose man-made proclamation, as if humans can control the heavens.
This sort of hubristic ambiguity is not lost on the artist Maria Dimanshtein who likes to
confront viewers with direct, existential truisms and dry humor. Working in a monochromatic
palette of black, white and silver, Dimanshtein arranges letters, words and phrases in sequential
grids that read like prose poems or pages from children’s books. Assembled in bookform, she
arranges words next to symbols to convey the mundane and cosmic aspects of the human
condition.

JF Lynch teases words into pictographs and drawings into primal utterances, digging for the
precise point where the act of writing becomes the act of drawing. His works have an assertive
physicality sometimes originating in studies from polymer clay letter maquettes; hybrids of art
and text. Lynch is attuned to the creative revelations dislodged from idle wandering,
disorientation, free association, brainstorming, and multi-tasking and organically cycles among
charcoal on paper, modeled clay, photography, mural, relief assemblage and video. These
different processes and materials literally rub off on one another and Lynch’s large word drawings
and sculptures dominate physical space, removing the barriers between writing, drawing,
sculpture and site-specific installation.

Patrick Neal is a NYC based curator, arts writer and painter. In 2016, he organized Beautiful
Object: Upsetting Still Life at Jeffrey Leder Gallery in Queens, NY, a show of contemporary still
life painting and sculpture. He served as curator of the Chocolate Factory’s art gallery in Long
Island City, NY during the Spring and Fall Seasons of 2007. Neal is a contributing writer for
Hyperallergic and has written monographs on artists Franklin Evans, Zoe Pettijohn Schade and
recently Scott Schnepf for Tether arts journal. Neal’s own painting and catalog essay will
accompany the upcoming exhibition, The Nature Lab at LABspace in Hillsdale, NY and he will
have a solo show at the Oresman Gallery, Smith College, Northampton, MA in December 2018.

CHECKLIST

PRESS BOOK

PRESS RELEASE

BROADSHEET

Check out a live feed video from the opening here.

Opening Reception

Artwork Images 

 

Space Odyssey: Beyond Material Confinements, Brunch/Exhibition Walkthrough

Screening by Claudia Hart and Susan Silas

November 5th 2017, Noon 

RadiatorArts is pleased to present an exhibition walkthrough and video screening brunch on Sunday, November 5th at noon with participating artists Shanjana Mahmud and Nadja Verena Marcin. The event is part of the exhibition Space Odyssey: Beyond Material Confinements, curated by Nadja Marcin exploring themes like artificial intelligence, gravity, the explosion of movement and feminine architecture. Beginning with Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), as a reference point, Marcin considers the four artists as a Monolithic mastermind via their collective brain trust. Suggesting that the age of globalization has brought new invisible walls—harmful to society—the show stages manifestations that perforate existing walls and search for those that are invisible.

The walkthrough will be followed by a screening of Claudia Hart’s Dark Knight, 2012 and Susan Silas’s TORSOS, 2017. Marcin invited Susan Silas to screen a work related to theme of the exhibition and she in turn suggested the pairing of herself with Claudia Hart and added this commentary:

When we think of walls we often think of fortifications. Trump’s absurd border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, the wall the Israeli’s built as a barrier along the West Bank green line, the Great Wall of China; the one man made structure that is visible from outer space. And yet, the primary wall of our experience is in fact our own skin. It is the separation wall between ourselves and everything else we experience. It defines the location of the self. Now we are thinking seriously about breaching this wall with new technologies. People have talked of outer body experiences before, usually in spiritual testimonials. But now we are considering leaving the boundary wall of the body altogether and uploading our brains to computers.

We practice for this penultimate event more and more often now, through the imagining of androids and replicants, through the creation of computer code, in the advancements of artificial intelligence and by visiting 3D spaces with VR headsets on. Will we simply merge with our fantasies and artificial creations? It is an open question whether or not we will take the unconscious with us on our journey into the computer. The unconscious is thought to reside in the body, as does the DNA of nearly “everything that came before us: except in the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.” Will we exchange that archival database, as coder Ellen Ullman calls the body, and the unconscious, for immortality?

Claudia Hart and Susan Silas come at these issues from nearly diametrically opposite directions in the two short videos presented here. In Claudia Hart’s Dark Knight, 2012 an animated female figure bangs endlessly against a wall that is invisible to the audience. The figure appears to be attempting an escape from the virtual world. Once inside, will we be desperate to get out? If we have tossed our bodies, what will we escape to? Susan Silas’s TORSOS, 2017 was created using digital tools, but is, in essence, a meditation on the analog world. She considers the limitations of the physical body; its slow decay and transformation into matter no longer recognizable to us as the self that once inhabited an individual body.

At the same time, we watch the destruction of the physical world happening at a madcap rate and it may be that the only form of survival available to us will be cold storage in a computer cloud farm owned by Google or Facebook. Will we too dream of electric sheep?

For more information on the exhibition please go to: http://www.radiatorarts.com/space-odyssey-beyond-material-confinements/

 

Images:

Mage

 

November 17th – January 19th, 2017

Opening November 17th 6 – 9 pm

Mage presents the work of Aaron Cohen, Dana Levy, Enrique Ramírez, and Erica Stoller.

The exhibition is accompanied by piece of performative writing and publishing by Christopher

Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro.

Organized by Roxana Fabius.

 

Historically, a mage was defined as someone who possessed a special type of knowledge. A

learned person, who could through language, manipulate objects and people, attaining the

desired effect of their spell. Today, technologists with specialized knowledge write code that

manages objects and people. However, our difficulties to understand the technologies we use,

leave us in a position of impotence. The artists and designers included in the exhibition take a

poetic stance at technological opacity, to playfully manage the seeming magic spells they cast

around us.

 

Dana Levy produced an archeological site in which layers of time are confounded, and fossils

are brought to life, to reveal the relationship between mining interventions and the long-lasting

results on the land. Aron Cohen surgically dismembers tools only to reassemble them through

the accumulation of their inside parts, thus creating a thick layer of transparent material that

doesn’t let light through. This piece is accompanied by a meditative guide to the end of the

world. Enrique Ramirez takes the viewer on a journey to the salt flats of Uyuni, Bolivia, where

the sky and the earth are continuous with each other, and the elements of the shaman’s

magical mask get a contemporary update. Erica Stoller built an installation made of the cables

that wondrously disappear from our sight while introducing the invisible pulses of energy we

so much depend on in our daily life. Christopher Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro

disclose the secret codes that printers leave in all our documents, looking back at their

relationship with centuries-old encrypting practices. This group of works focuses our attention

on how technologies and infrastructures create a mysticism around their functions that is akin

to magic, while projecting towards the past, present and future tools of the mage.

The exhibition is the New York premiere of “Pipelines and Sinkholes” by Levy and “Un Hombre

que Camina” by Ramírez, which was exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale “Viva, Arte Viva.”

Mage is supported by the generous support of the Artis Grant Program.

PRESS RELEASE

CHECKLIST

ARTISTS CVs

ARTWORK:

OPENING RECEPTION: 

SPECIAL EVENT:

Space Odyssey: Beyond Material Confinements

“I’m sorry, Frank, but I don’t think I can answer that question without
knowing everything that all of you know.” (HAL 9000)

September 15 – November 10, 2017

Opening Friday, September 15, 6-9pm

Featuring video, sculpture, performance, and photography by Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Shanjana Mahmud, Nadja Verena Marcin, and Ann Oren.

Curated by Nadja Verena Marcin.

The exhibition explores themes including artificial intelligence, gravity, the explosion of movement, feminine architecture, among others.

Referencing Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the exhibition, curated by Marcin is based on the idea that the four artists form a Monolithic mastermind via their collective brain trust. Suggesting that the age of globalization has brought new invisible walls—harmful to society—the show stages manifestations that perforate existing walls and search for those that are invisible. As ‘fantasy’ is defined as “the power or process of creating, especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to a psychological need,” Space Odyssey will turn Radiator Gallery inside out, from the center, towards the walls—symbolically beyond these material confinements, and into the world.

In author Gregory Caicco’s Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, he writes that Kubrick’s Space Odyssey illustrates how our quest for space is motivated by two contradictory desires: a “desire for the sublime,” characterized by a need to encounter something totally other than ourselves—”something numinous,” and the conflicting desire for a beauty that makes us feel no longer “lost in space,” but at home. Whereas the Monolith in the movie represents and triggers epic transitions in the history of human evolution—from ape-like beings to civilized people—in Space Odyssey: Beyond Material Confinements, the artists take responsibility for ‘advancing intelligent life’ and creating ‘something that has no shape’ but meaning. They play the alien, the ‘other’ coming to earth, experiencing the dawn of mankind as a thought experiment in the 21st century.

Premiering in New York, Ann Oren’s newest video NATURE SPEAKS TO SELF. ONLY, deflates the heroic figure of Dave, the astronaut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 by introducing him to his alter-ego Marquis de Sade of De Sade, 1969. Both roles are played by actor Keir Dullea. At first sight, a hero lost in space, doomed by technology, confronted with his own mortality, he is later doubled as a perpetrator possessed with the banalities of his sexual desire. By interconnecting both roles performed by the same actor into one video, Oren becomes the puppeteer, speaking to the darker side of co-existing realities. She states: “Both genres, Sci-Fi and Pornography, are referred to as fantasy. Narrated by de Sade and a cameo by Hal 9000, the two Dulleas become entangled in a logic alluding to the pleasure and guilt found in online consciousness: from social media to cybersex, to virtual gaming, all enabling an individual to privately fulfill their desire while participating in a community.” Oren’s cinematic video manifests the collective desires found in online communities and subcultures, freeing observations on human isolation, loneliness and desires of tomorrow–offering us distance and clues to the world of simulacra to which we succumb.

Juliana Cerqueria Leite’s sculpture Curls 1, 2014 was born out of a work-related injury—her injured body vulnerable to the weight of heavy sculptural materials. Curled up, she casted the right side of her body, part-by-part, experimenting with the limits and boundaries of her strength during a period of recovery. As Martha Graham developed the idea that healthy movement is concentric, and keeping the body in a curled pose while under exertion employs its natural strengths and protections, Leite “explored the idea of the protective capacity of the body, its ability to be a safe space.” Metaphorically, the sculpture depicts a bodily architecture that speaks to the simple need to build a protection for the self—a space for recovery and resilience in a technologically absurd destructive society. In Concentrics, 2016 (see exhibition image) she goes a step further, dissolving her body-parts inside a photographic cut-out representation based on a similar curl. She notes her “interest in the mutability of the body in relation to her permanent sense of self,” in other words, the chance to encounter self in still moments of absence.

In Cover Girls, Nadja Verena Marcin plays upon the anonymity and animosity of said photographic avatars and the viewer’s human experience. Marcin states “Regardless that a ‘cover girl’ is a constructed lie, an anonymous avatar, an alien behind a doll face, her haven environs—albeit deadly—makes her increasingly attractive.” Transforming herself into different cover girls from women’s magazines such as Vanity Fair, Elle, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Playboy and Vogue, which the artist describes are “designed to keep women in their place, quieted, mirrored, narcissistic, and in infinite conflict with their bodies,” Marcin’s girls are superimposed with unlikely headlines. Referencing military slang and warfare, the magazine covers are spiked with the words “Bitchin’ Betty” (a descriptor of the U.S. military aircraft warning systems that frequently utilize female voices); “Chest Candy” (slang for ribbons and medals worn on a uniform); “Fashion Show” (a Naval punishment where a sailor is required to dress in each of his uniforms over several hours); “Hit the Silk” (ejecting from an aircraft and utilizing a parachute); “Latrine Queen” (an Air Force-specific term for a trainee in Basic who is in charge of cleaning bathrooms); “Oxygen Thief” (slang for someone who is useless); and “Pill Pusher” (a U.S. Navy term for a hospital corpsman). In a metaphorical sense, Marcin subverts the ‘power’ of the “seemingly perfect” female body towards itself –making visibile, the human warfare on women’s bodies.

In 11.03.82, Shanjana Mahmud takes a closer look at the physical perimeter of the human body: the skin. In her video she examines a male body whilst pinching its skin with two fingers in the eye of the magnifying glass of the camera. This miniature act of violence becomes endlessly repeated across the body, the head, the limbs, the male genitalia. The macro-perspective, anonymity and private event evoke a scientific test lab—the body becoming an abstracted, sterile, uncanny landscape. Mahmud states, “This topography of the body contours the internal structure of our being. With the simple act of pinching, I observe and feel, almost with alien eyes, it’s markings, consistency, and sensitivity—an act that verges on cruelty that is all too easy to achieve.” By strictly excluding the person, and muting their personality, Mahmud draws attention to the inner landscapes of being—to be thick-skinned in order to withstand life’s daily punches.


ABOUT CURATOR NADJA VERENA MARCIN

 German-born artist and curator Nadja Verena Marcin lives and works in New York and NRW Germany. In her performance-based work, Marcin examines the constructed persona, looking at the way the artist is an implicit figure. By creating a “theater of cinema” in which the audience can be immersed, Marcin brings awareness through a hyperbolic interpretation of relatable scenarios, enacting symbolic actions, catalyzing the visibility of hidden codes, and mirrors the ambiguities of human behavior and psychological mechanism. Marcin graduated from the Visual Art Department of New Genre, School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York in 2010. She has taught and lectured at P.I. Arts Center, New York, City College of New York and Brooklyn College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Abrons Art Center, New York; Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Human Resources, Los Angeles; ZKM- Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Middle Gate Geel’13, Belgium; Dortmunder Kunstverein; VOLTA 9, Basel; amongst many others. She has received grants, residencies, and prizes such as the Fulbright Award; DAAD Grant; Int. Artist Career Development Grant, Artworks Int; Film Production Grant, NRW Film-und Medienstiftung; Prize for ‘Art and Language,’ Kunststiftung Sparkasse UnnaKamen; ISCP Residency; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant; Arbeitsstipendium, Kunststiftung Bonn; and Franklin Furnace Grant. 

PRESS RELEASE             

 CHECKLIST

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Deep Time Live #2

Music and video performancesJuly 13th, 7pm at Radiator Gallery

Featuring artists Lucy Lewis, Jay Hines, Little Aga and King Pong

Curated by T. CrossLucy Lewis is an artist and musician, based in NY. Her practice is largely an experimentation with analog hardware devices and modular synthesis. She has performed at MATA Festival, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Non-Event, Goethe Institute Boston, among others.

Jay Hines is an artist and musician, sometimes performing music under the name Balloon Monument. He’s exhibited in various galleries and museums.Both Lewis and Hines work collaboratively on publishing commissioned sound-related works by contemporary artists, under their own editions umbrella Shift Registry. This marks the first musical collaboration, between the two.

Little Aga is a music duo consisting of multi disciplines artists, Jon Nicholson and Erica Kenia. Both are members of long running avant electronic rock outfit, Excepter. Little Aga is a waking dream, translated into our version of what popular music should be. 
King Pong is an international, hyper sensory digital landscape birthed by the artist and man, Siebren Versteeg. Analog alliteration approved. 

Ear Plugs are not required, however, strongly suggested.

About Deep Time
June 2nd – July 14th 2017Radiator Gallery is pleased to present artists:
Mike Andrews, Robin Kang, LoVid, Jodie Mack, Leeza Meksin and Mitch Patrick
Curated by Tali Hinkis.Throughout the course of history, humans have gradually perfected their actions. Like Pleistocene glaciers gliding down the face of North America, our hands, fingers, and brains have been epochally evolving, our nimble fortitude advancing towards an intricate comprehension of complex systems. The human mind and its dexterity provided the skillset for creation to become a meditative act – one with spiritual and philosophical inclinations. Our simple utilitarian survival tactics made way towards a higher purpose – comfort, texture, design and craftsmanship ultimately became their own objectives.Textiles and their ilk have long represented a bridge between the two principles of functionality and higher design. They provide coverage from the elements and allow us to flex our aesthetics; we may appreciate the plain rug beneath our feet, but our souls (soles?) revere a Persian motif. The historical context of fiber is a synopsis of human history, interwoven and mired in the politics, mores, and spirituality inherent in every civilization. Initially manifested by one of the oldest advanced cultures, Ancient Egypt, its production has seen us through the highs of human spirituality (the Kaaba’s Sitara in Mecca) and its abominable lows (the rampant colonialism and slavery tied to its manufacture). Nonetheless, its prolific necessity has spun into godly legend, its natural emblems tied to divine desideratum. The spider, an internationally and historically venerated symbol of weavers and cunning, can claim immortal lineage from Greek αράχνη and higher intellect from the African Anansi. According to the Hopi, the world would not even exist if it weren’t for Grandmother Spider weaving the thoughts from her head. Fabric and its design has become part of the human tapestry, its threads and folds changing course with time.

Here in the Anthropocene, we have developed new dimensions beyond the tangible realm. Cyberspace is its own universe of creation, a networked state of intuitive architecture where coded logic reigns supreme. One would fear a coldness in these ciphered margins, but artists have co-opted its language and rules for an anarchic mission: to define and reorder the human condition. By molding the fleshy, organic tactility of IRL to the digital cloud, creative inspiration has pulled textured corpulence into the mainframe. At first, we looked through the blue-lit prism to see our reflection on the screen. New media art was once synonymous with hacking into a new form of digital DNA and creating our own transcendence, but now, the pendulum swings back towards our original concept of craft. The patterns and glitches so diligently formulated through computations, mouse clicks, and Photoshop layers can be recycled through the speculum into 3D objects with stitches and shuttles – the new hyper-contemporary relics of an electronic age.

DEEP TIME provides a canny and sensitive lexicon of artists to this new symbiotic structure, as the heart and spirit of this exhibition can be found in the intersection of the media and material. The cerebral approach of Mitch Patrick, Jodie Mack, and LoVid in their analog work juxtaposes beautifully with the palpable emotional adroitness behind the craft of Robin Kang, Mike Andrews, and Leeza Meksin. DEEP TIME is an ambitious and canonical translation of our current relationship with art and technology, and serves to remind us of our own nebulous existence – for here we are, all of us: abundant matter and pixelated light.
Text by J. Simmz

J. Simmz is an independent curator, writer, and co-founder of Doppelgänger Projects, based in Ridgewood, Queens.