Opening: Friday, April 29th 2016,  6 – 9 pm

It’s amazing how I get so high and stay so down to Earth.Curren$y with Wiz Khalifa, “Surface to Air”

Radiator Arts is pleased to present Surface to Air, a three-person show featuring Scott Alario, Michael Childress and Benjamin Phelan, curated by R.J. Supa.

Surface to Air explores the relationship between physical surfaces (tactile, tangible, real) and the otherworldly (imaginary, celestial, unknown). Physical surfaces are made by hand or machine and oftentimes both. All three artists help to confuse the process.

Alario’s photographs document his family life, exposing intimate moments that draw the viewer in but also shock in their candor – is nothing sacred? There’s a familiarity and tenderness in the objects photographed: candy, pee-stained bed sheets, sticks and stones – a glimpse into childhood fantasy and reality that take on a 1950’s version of the future, a nuclear family in a post-nuclear age. Through analog special effects each images is manipulated for its final presentation.

Childress’ paintings are, at first glance, beautiful yet simple gradients, examining a formal relationship between color and composition.  Through a unique staining process each work delivers a blurred horizon, creating an image of the far reaches of our individual experience of a three-dimensional world. The final result recalls a chemical haze or an altered reality. Something appears beneath the surface, an impending doom or beauty as a result of a man-made disaster.  The paintings can be seen as purely abstract works, buoyant color fields on a flat surface or they can be viewed as representational, allowing the viewer to experience a depth and distance not unlike a vista in the physical realm.

Phelan’s sculptures appear to have a hand in them, or at least a swipe on a screen. Fingertip pressure converting into streaming digital spheres, recorded by CNC milling into polyethylene foam, the mark making is within the ubiquitous preservation material. Stored, but the spectrum is still oscillating; what appears solid is mostly just air, and the speculative topology of machine vision has eyes for the stone forms of antiquity – radiocarbon dating. Oftentimes the larger sculptural work is reminiscent of anatomy, unfurled organs, the brain stretched from end to end. The sculptures serve as pieces of a greater whole – disused components in a body or a building. Things left behind, a piece of a wall, a neuron synapse, the flicker of light emitting diodes.

Together all three create fantasy – an alternative landscape, pitch black, rife with color, stark white illuminated by a rainbow of light – that explores a natural world of either a not-too-distant future or a present happening some light years away.

PRESS RELEASE

CHECKLIST

ARTWORK:

OPENING RECEPTION:

Special event at Radiator Gallery

Friday March 4, 2016. 5:00 – 8:00pm

Drop by to see food nostalgia during the Armory Art Fair, and join exhibiting artist Emilie Baltz for Nutritional Facts, a wearable edibles performative experience. Emilie will have foodstuffs available for you to realize a bit of your own edible body adornment (Lick Me!!).

Food nostalgia, is an exhibition of paintings, photographs, video, sculpture and installation works by artists Cey Adams (New York), Emilie Baltz(New York), Disorientalism (Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim, New York/ Arizona), Gonzalo Fuenmajor (Miami, FL), Kira Nam Greene (New York) and Jonathan Stein (Coral Springs, FL).

“food nostalgia looks at food in contemporary America through a lens of fast food iconography and industrial food production” says curator, Amanda McDonald Crowley. “Participating artists variously draw on popular cultural references, brand recognition, bodies, memory, nostalgia, and playfulness. They ask us to think about our relationship to our colonial pasts, feminist thinking, cultural diversity, and marketing culture. The corporatisation of our food systems is deeply entrenched in our psyche; historical and contemporary trade routes of our food affect our cultural landscape.”

As a framework to explore how we cook, eat, and consume, food nostalgia is a platform to share ideas, and food.

Emilie Baltz is an experimental artist, director and educator with a focus on food and sensory storytelling. She creates playful and unconventional work that moves people to discover new worlds one lick, suck, bite, sniff, and gulp at a time.

Sunday February 28 12:00 – 2:00pm 

Radiator Gallery will host a Junk Food Brunch, where curator Amanda McDonald Crowley will give a walk through of our current exhibition food nostalgia, and talk about the underlying themes of the exhibition. Exhibiting artists Cey Adams, and Katherine Behar will also talk about influences and inspirations in their work in the exhibition.

In addition to serving up delectable and surprising nostalgic packaged foods Amanda, and artist Stefani
Bardin, will be serving deliciously reverse engineered versions of Gatorade and Gummy Bears.

Come expected to have your taste buds tickled by a range of nostalgic taste sensations, and stay for the
conversation. And please feel free to bring along your favorite versions of Junk Food, from around the world.

Food Nostalgia is an exhibition of works exploring food in contemporary America through a lens of fast food iconography and industrial food production. The exhibition runs at Radiator Gallery through March 13.

Amanda McDonald Crowley is a curator and cultural worker who creates new media and contemporary art exhibitions, events, and programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and exchange. One of her key current curatorial research topics explores the intersection of art, food and technology, ArtTechFood.

Cey Adams‘ dismantles contemporary cultural imagery to build multiple layers of color, texture, shadow, and light. From his roots in the NYC graffiti movement and hip hop culture, his artwork draws inspiration from 60’s pop art, sign painting, comic books, and popular culture; he focuses on themes including race and gender relations, pop culture, and community issues.

Katherine Behar‘s videos, performances, and interactive installations explore issues in contemporary digital culture. Disorientalism (whose work is included in the exhibition), is an artistic collaboration between Katherine and Marianne M. Kim, in which the duo study the disorienting effects of technologized labor, junk culture, and consumerism. Disorientalism explores how these forces mediate race, gender, and bodies. In character, the Disorientals expose our hapless submersion in junk culture, and our failed attempts to rationalize it by mistakenly resorting to industriousness and work.

Stefani Bardin explores the influences of corporate culture and industrial food production on our food system and the environment. She works with neuroscientists, biologists and gastroenterologists to ground her research in the scientific world.

Images:

Weekend of Walks, Talks, Screenings and Panel Discussions

We are pleased to announce a weekend of walks, talks, screenings and panel discussions as part of the Chance Ecologies exhibition at Radiator Arts, open through Jan. 22nd, 2016. Events will be held at the gallery as well as in and around the site of Hunter’s Point South, Long Island City, and continue to explore the value of unplanned wild spaces within the urban environment.

Sat. January 16th: 2:30 pm – 4 pm:
Endangered Surfaces Walk to Hunter’s Point South – an experimental walk by Christopher Kennedy and Ellie Irons. Tracing the border of Hunter’s Point South, this participatory walk will explore the remains, edges, and overlaps of the myriad surfaces that covered the land before development began last September.

(Departing from Radiator Arts at 2:30, please dress for cold weather!)

5:30 pm – 6:30 pm:
Screening of “For the Birds” – a series of site-specific video works by Joianne Bittle, followed by a discussion of the selected texts and observations in the field with the artist.

7 pm – 8:30 pm:
Archaeological Panel: “Art, Archaeology and the Curious Activity of Digging Up Nothing” – a public discussion reflecting on the experience and concepts of performing an archeological dig.

Panel speakers: Matthias Neumann, artists of “Dock Street Dig” for Chance Ecologies / Scott Schwartz, archaeologist, CUNY Graduate Center / Megan Hicks, archaeologist, CUNY Graduate Center / Matthew C. Lange, artist / Jeffrey Lee Benjamin, artist and archaeologist, Columbia University

Sun. January 17th: 1 pm – 2:30 pm:
Curators talk and brunch, hosted by Radiator Gallery. The curators of Chance Ecologies (Catherine Grau, Nathan Kensinger, and Stephen Zacks) will give a walk through of the exhibition and engage in a public discussion about the underlying themes of Chance Ecologies.

2:30 pm – 4 pm:
Site and Field: Listening to Hunter’s Point South – an Electromagnetic Field Listening walk by Dylan Gauthier.
(Departing from Radiator Arts at 2:30, please dress for cold weather!)

4 pm – 4:30 pm:
Ceremonial Score – For Grieving the Loss of a Wild Landscape, a participatory performative ritual developed by Allison Danielle Behrstock in collaboration with and facilitated by Catherine Grau.

(Location: please meet at the corner of 2nd Street and 54th Ave. Please dress for cold weather and unsteady terrain – the ritual will take place on the Hunter’s Point South site.)

4:54 pm:
The Rotation of the Earth presents the Sunset – a brief experimental sunset viewing by Dillon de Give. Please feel free to pick up a poster listing the exact times of the sunset for the duration of the Chance Ecologies exhibit at Radiator Arts.
(Location: LIC East River Ferry terminal, Hunter’s Point South.)

SPECIAL EVENT Opening:

SPECIAL EVENT Talk:

February 5 – March 13, 2016

Artists: Cey Adams, Emilie Baltz, Disorientalism (Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim), Gonzalo Fuenmajor, Kira Nam Greene, Jonathan Stein

Curator: Amanda McDonald Crowley

Radiator Gallery is pleased to present food nostalgia, an exhibition of paintings, photographs, video, sculpture and installation works by artists Cey Adams (New York), Emilie Baltz (New York), Disorientalism (Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim, New York/ Arizona), Gonzalo Fuenmajor (Miami, FL), Kira Nam Greene (New York) and Jonathan Stein (Coral Springs, FL).

“food nostalgia looks at food in contemporary America through a lens of fast food iconography and industrial food production” says curator, Amanda McDonald Crowley. “Participating artists variously draw on popular cultural references, brand recognition, bodies, memory, nostalgia, and playfulness. They ask us to think about our relationship to our colonial pasts, feminist thinking, cultural diversity, and marketing culture. The corporatisation of our food systems is deeply entrenched in our psyche; historical and contemporary trade routes of our food affect our cultural landscape.” As a framework to explore how we cook, eat, and consume, food nostalgia will be a platform to share ideas, and food.

Kira Nam Greene’s paintings and drawings are conceptual self-portraits with collaged images of food and complex patterns that represent the plurality and multiplicity of her identity as an Asian-American woman. For Kira, food acts as a metaphor for the idealization of the female body and the surrogate for desire to consume and control. During a residency in the “bread basket” of America, her Nebraska Suite series is the first time that she consciously used fast food imagery in her work.

Emilie Baltz grew up in Joliet, Illinois in a house without junk food. Her French mother was an incredibly creative and healthy cook, but all around her families were serving up junk food. A little jealous, and a lot intrigued, this experience inspired her Junk Foodie series: her images are both alien and familiar, but mostly fun interpretations of traditional recipes rendered using junk food ingredients.

Jonathan Stein finds his inspiration in grocery stores and fast-food spots. In his Shiny Sparkly Goes Down Easy series Jonathan takes iconic images such as Spam, Ritz crackers and a bucket of KFC to create bling objects where shinier is better and a glitzy surface masks a loaded commentary on fast food consumption.

Cey Adams also draws inspiration from popular iconography and brand recognition. In Cream of Wheat Cey takes the iconographic brand image, reputedly a portrait of African American chef, Frank L White and using collage and design principles, creates a richly textured and subtly rendered black on black painterly abstraction.

Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s Papare series examines ideas of exoticism and the complicit and amnesic relationship between ornamentation and tragedy. Opulent Victorian chandeliers and other elements, reminiscent of a decadent colonial past, proliferate from banana bunches, alluding to a tragic and violent history associated with Banana trade worldwide.

Disorentalism’s Maiden Voyage focuses on race and labor in American food production and promotion. The Disorientals track down the Land O’ Lakes Indian Maiden, who has been reborn as an empowered executive.

Food nostagia takes a critical, yet humorous, look at how junk food and brand cultures impact contemporary food systems and consumption.

PRESS RELEASE

CHECK LIST

ART WORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

Hungry Hungarians Book Launch:

Junk Food Brunch:

Opening: Thursday, December 17th 2015, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibiting Artists: Joianne Bittle, Laura Chipley, Allison Danielle Behrstock, Luciana Freire D’Anunciação, Edrex Fontanilla, Dylan Gauthier, Dillon de Give, GH Hovagimyan, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, Anne Percoco, Edmund Mooney, Matthias Neumann, Natalia Roumelioti, Raphaele Shirley, Marisa Tesauro, Sarah Nelson Wright

Curated by: Catherine Grau, Nathan Kensinger, Stephen Zacks

On view at Radiator Arts Dec. 17th through Jan. 21st, Chance Ecologies: The Wild Landscape of Hunter’s Point South, displays the results of a daring summer-long experimental art project on a large plot of publicly owned land in Hunter’s Point, Long Island City, Queens. The accidental post-industrial landscape, predominantly disused for the last 35 years, harbored a rich unplanned ecology that participating artists explored through a series of secret temporary installations, performances, and research interventions. Located in the mouth of Newtown Creek, a federal Superfund site, and facing magnificent views of Midtown Manhattan across the East River, the site embodies the paradoxes of man-made ecological crisis and the continued drive towards the production of human habitats.

Exhibited in the form of photographs, videos, installations, documentation, elaborations of processes, speculative proposals, and an archive of plants and materials, Chance Ecologies is a platform for artists and thinkers to creatively explore the value of wild places in the city, uncovering and mapping their layered histories and the natural ecologies that have evolved in them. Referencing pioneering projects like Art on the Beach by Creative Time that played an instrumental role in reimagining the uses of public land prior to redevelopment, this project belongs to a lineage of public art projects utilizing vacant lots and post-industrial landfills as places of freedom, play, and experimentation.

Immediately following the summer of unpermitted activities, in the fall of 2015, heavy construction equipment leveled the Hunter’s Point site for Phase 2 of the housing and waterfront park development led by the Economic Development Corporation of New York City and designed by Thomas Balsley Associates with Weiss/ Manfredi and ARUP.

As a framework for artistic gestures, advocacy, and research exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills, Chance Ecologies continues to create actions, programs, and discourse around the value of wild spaces in the urban environment, documenting, learning from, and commemorating the naturally occurring ecosystems that are being lost to development, and articulating contemporary interpretations of and new ways of relating to urban wilderness.

Chance Ecologies is produced in affiliation with Amplifier Inc., a nonprofit organization using art and design as tools of urban transformation and city-making. Amplifier creates programs that connect public and private groups with the global art and design field to bring the most innovative work to under-served groups and smaller communities around the country, where it can have the greatest possible resonance.

Chance Ecologies is produced in affiliation with Amplifier Inc., a nonprofit organization using art and design as tools of urban transformation and city-making. Amplifier creates programs that connect public and private groups with the global art and design field to bring the most innovative work to under-served groups and smaller communities around the country, where it can have the greatest possible resonance.

Check List

Press Release

ART WORKS:

OPENING:

Screening and panel discussion with art historian Agnes Berecz, critic and curator Gregory Volk, artists Meredith Drum and Cliff Evans, and curator/artist Eva Davidova. Moderator Daniela Kostova, artistic director of Radiator Gallery.

December 10, 2015, 6-8PM

6 – 6.30 PM: Reception and exhibition walk-through
6.30 – 7 PM: Artists’ presentation
7 – 8 PM: Panel discussion

Happenland is build around the premise “The artist has honored the brainwave”. What does it mean, “to honor”? The artist has made a process of association so direct that it wants to be immediate. What needs to happen in order to lure the concept residing in a mental space into a physical world—the world of the works, which the artist can make—excludes any symbolic processes that could contaminate this “passage”. As an .exe file, the brainwave installs itself in both minds—emitter and receptor—and acts.

There is humor in Happenland, and a recurrent play with dysfunctional ideals—from architecture ones, to philosophical, to almost metaphysical—and dead ends. In the case of Meredith, Cliff and Eva, the works are also clearly stepping into technologically new, semi-reality spaces: 3D animations, the Internet, dystopic imagery, and phantoms of consumerist futures. “Sticking their fingers in the flesh of utopia”, the artists are reaching over some invisible fence, daring to grab and hold on to some utterly impossible, but imaginable “deed”—action, image or idea—and dragging it back to us.

Panelists are invited to discuss the provenance of the mental image and its coming into existence. How the novelty of an image affects its action? How are the artists navigating through permutations of symbols and structures? How are metaphor and contextual dependency resisted? Are we testing meanings for impossible futures?

Agnes Berecz
Ágnes Berecz received her B.A. and M.A. from ELTE University in Budapest and completed her Ph.D. at Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). Berecz specializes in post-war and contemporary art with a particular focus on transnational modernism and the cultural politics of painting. Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Art in America, Artmargins and the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin as well as in European and US exhibitions catalogues. Berecz is the author of the book, Contemporary Hungarian Painting (2001), and the New York correspondent of Műértő, a Budapest based art monthly. Her most recent work includes the two volume monographic study, Simon Hantaï, and the essay, ‘Time to Knot’, published in the catalogue of Hantaï’s retrospective exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and lectures at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Gregory Volk
Gregory Volk is a New York-based art critic and freelance curator. He writes regularly for Art in America, and his articles and reviews have also appeared in many other publications, including Parkett and Sculpture. Among his recent contributions to exhibition catalogues are essays on Joan Jonas (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007), Bruce Nauman (Milwaukee Art Museum, 2006), Ayse Erkmen (Venice Biennale, 2011), and Sanford Biggers (Brooklyn Museum, 2011). His essay on Vito Acconci is featured in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, published by Charta in 2007. Together with Sabine Russ, Gregory Volk has curated numerous exhibitions, including Agitation and Repose at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, Public Notice: Paintings in Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, and Surface Charge at the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Gregory Volk received his B.A. from Colgate University and his M.A. from Columbia University.

About the artists:
Meredith Drum
Cliff Evans
Eva Davidova

More about the exhibition HAPPENLAND here.

Please join us this Sunday, November 22nd for brunch and special guests performance. We are delighted to present poets Chelsea Whitton and Mattew Yeager, honoring a centuries’ old tradition of ekphrastic poetry*

12pm – Reading by Chelsea Whitton and Matthew Yeager: New poems on Happenland.
Q&A with the poets and curator Eva Davidova may follow.

11am – 2pm – Brunch and exhibition talk. Children welcome—Explore the Augmented Reality app Pyrite, destroy digital images, and create virtual reality sculptures, while savoring grapes, oranges and bagels.)

*Ekphrasis or ecphrasis, from the Greek description of a work of art, possibly imaginary, produced as a rhetorical exercise; often used in adjectival form, ekphrastic. A graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art. In ancient times, it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek andphrasis, ‘out’ and ‘speak’ respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.
source: Wikipedia

Matthew Yeager’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sixthfinch, Gulf Coast, Minnesota Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere, as well as Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment” was an official selection at thirteen film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in short prose and two MacDowell fellowships. The co-curator of the long running KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, his first book, Like That, will be out in Spring 2016 from Forklift Books.

Chelsea Whitton holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School and a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various print and online publications, including White Stag, Forklift Ohio, Sixth Finch, Bateau, and Cimarron Review. She lives in Ridgewood, Queens.