The group show “So Real” reflects on the aesthetics and conflicting past relationships between Social Realism art of the West and Socialist Realism art of twentieth century Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The words “subjective” and “official” are paramount in describing the differences between both art movements. Western Social Realism has been described as a “subjective” art form which allows for freedom to express unfavorable narratives. In contrast, Soviet Socialist Realism, Western Social Realism’s evil first cousin, has been described as an official, absolute, oppressive, state-sanctioned art form which denies subjective interpretation. Similarly, recent global instability concurrent to the transfer of power from old regimes to new has cast a fresh light upon the “subjective” vs. “official” narrative. As heads of state draft legislation to address a multitude of geo-political and economic challenges, inherent conflicts undoubtedly arise between balancing personal freedoms and protecting the state against general chaos, terror and/or complete collapse. “So Real” explores these incongruities by exhibiting a group of artworks which suggest the possibility for creating a new genre of socio-political hyperrealities. In addition, the artworks serve as “provocateur” in the form of compressed psychologically charged narratives. Taken one step further, the works function on a plane of personal protest, challenging the sustainability of past and present day utopian constructs.

Lastly, “So Real” alludes to new beginnings in the aftermath of failure, death, and destruction by the inclusion of brutalist inspired sculpture and architectural forms. This “clean slate” segue provides an entry point to explore alternative socio-political models which may provide pathways to discover possibilities for growth and progress in the future.

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Adam Frelin and Rena Leinberger

Curated by Eileen Jeng October 25 – December 13, 2014

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 25, 6-9 pm

Radiator Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent photographs, sculptures, and videos by Adam Frelin and Rena Leinberger. By re-creating, displacing, and transforming seemingly familiar images, objects, sites, and actions, the artists construct distinctive narratives as well as explore the role of the mediums. With their formal qualities, these works subvert art historical conventions as well as cultural and societal expectations. The works conflate fact and fiction, past and present, and the natural and man- made environment. The title of the exhibition, From Within the Flesh of the World, is taken from Victor Burgin’s essay, “Monument and Melancholia” (2008).

nstalled on a diagonal in the back of the main gallery is Frelin’s outdoor sculpture Drifter, a tapered 14- foot long unsealed wood cylinder coated with layers of dirt at the bottom. Having first been situated in a cemetery, the sculpture – symbolic of a safety coffin’s cylinder from the 18th century – has absorbed its surrounding environment. It bridges the uncanny divide between the living and deceased as well as reality and fiction.

Kodamazothgolemnkiski consists of a series of close up photographs of anthropomorphic, totemic sculptures of blackened gum that Frelin scraped off the sidewalks of New York. At a distance, these objects resemble primitive prehistoric figures. The video Firefall is a re-creation of an epic event that took place in Yosemite National Park until the 1960s, where hot embers were shoveled over a cliff, resembling a vivid red waterfall.

Leinberger focuses on the intrigue of the spectacle in relation to constructed and demolished environments in her work. Her Zero Panorama series was inspired by an image she found while searching for historical explosions on the Internet – one of naval officers and one of the wives cutting into a cake to celebrate a nuclear testing site – which was deemed obscene by The Washington Post. Leinberger’s black and white photographs are of re-creations of iconic images, such as the historical explosions of Nagasaki and the Challenger, but in cake frosting. The artist explores the “seduction of the spectacle” of both of the explosion and frosting as well as the dichotomy between the rational and absurd.

In Utopias, Unmoored, Leinberger creates a series of photographs and videos of small-scale islands of urban settings constructed out of unstable and inexpensive materials – foam, colored paper, wood pieces – in the water. Leinberger obscures referential details of location. She examines the relationship between architecture, landscape, and societal interventions as well as failure theory in building materials.

About the Artists

Adam Frelin’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; Las Cruces Museum of Fine Art; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Recent group shows have been held at Sculpture Center, Cleveland; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Columbus Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and part of a screening at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Frelin has published two photography books and has had several public artworks commissioned throughout the world. He received a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art at the SUNY University at Albany, and he lives in Troy, NY.

Rena Leinberger’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois at Chicago, and Evanston Art Center, and in a commissioned public project by NYC DOT’s Urban Art Program in Queens. Her work has been included in group shows internationally in Germany, Great Britain, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates. Recent group shows have been at the Queens Museum; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz. Leinberger received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she lives and works in New York.

About the Curator

Eileen Jeng is an independent curator and writer and the archivist at Sperone Westwater in New York. Her recent projects include Suddenly, There: Discovery of the Find at Garis & Hahn in New York, Break/Step at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, and Facture at AIRPLANE in Brooklyn, among others. She was involved in various other exhibitions, including Out to See at the South Street Seaport and FLOAT at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. She was a research assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned an MA in arts administration and policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in art history and advertising from Syracuse University.

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September 12th – October 17th, 2014

Opening Reception: Friday, September 12th, 6-9pm

Gallery Hours:
Friday and Sunday, 1-6pm and by Appointment

Curated by Marina T. Schindler, Jamie Diamond, Julie Wolfe

Boundaries. Social interaction. Touch. Space. The show explores the guards that we put up as protection against things that may take advantage of our vulnerabilities. This plays out in the show literally through a physical dialogue between humans, the division of space between planes, and the contours that are created to contain and expose alternate shape.

Artist Jamie Diamond exposes body language in her video series Craigslist Strangers. Invited to come have their portrait taken, strangers were put together to mimic the roles of lovers or family. The subjects have agreed to pose for a still image, and do not know that the camera is shooting video. What is captured are hands moving awkwardly over shoulders, fingers tentatively interlacing, smiles fixed on unchanging expressions. The series explores the boundaries that we put up between us and the unknown. Even if we touch, the distance is present in that connection.

Julie Wolfe’s Contour Series explores the theme through thin lines which contour the dancers of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo images from the 1940’s, creating boundaries between the subjects and the outside world. Abstracted, these geometric shapes become icons of confinement that, in effect, limit our ability to share, touch and interact with one another.

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May 2nd, 2014 – June 6th, 2014

Open Fridays and Sundays 1-6 pm or by appointment

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, May 2nd, 6-9 PM

Artists: Maria Raquel Cochez, Michelle Hagewood, Megan Hildebrandt, Sara Holwerda, Lauren Howard, Sarah Kelly, Magnolia Laurie, Cynthia Mason, Ellen Mueller, Briana Phelps, Megan Piontkowski, Christine Sajecki

Curated by Eyesplice Collective Organized by Megan Piontkowski

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Many of us have had feminist theory classes in which we read and discussed fascinating ideas, but often found them inapplicable to everyday life. While theory is important and certainly has its place, I am most interested in the practical side of feminism. What do we say to street harassers? How do we respond to a family member or close friend who says something offhandedly sexist? How do we deal with the insidious undercurrent of sexism that pervades our lives? And maybe most difficult of all, how do we handle internalized sexism? Creating a new world order is not without its difficulties.

After thinking long and hard about these subjects, I have come to the conclusion that confrontation is the short answer. Being mindful of your personal safety, tell others that you do not agree with them, and explain why if possible. This is easier said than done, but it’s a good strategy to aspire to. I most often find the discomfort of confrontation to be preferable to the feeling of powerlessness. I would also add that pervasive insidious sexism discourages women from being confrontational, which is just another facet of the problem. We all need to look into ourselves and confront the sexism within. It’s more productive to ask ourselves “am I being sexist?” than to say, “I am not sexist” and leave our inner workings unquestioned and thus unchanged.

Eyesplice Collective is a group of artists working in similar veins in a variety of media. The artists are spread out across Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, West Virginia, Austin and Panama. The collective was founded in 2012 by Megan Hildebrandt who chose artists whose work she felt drawn to and with whom she had built friendships in educational institutions and artists residencies. All the artists in the group happen to be women… Or do they just “happen” to be women? When forming the group, Hildebrandt had just graduated from an MFA program made up almost entirely of men. Maybe she craved the camaraderie that women provide for each other, or perhaps she was just drawn to the work of female artists.

Practical Feminism is a collection of the work of these 12 female artists who show the ways individuals deal with feminism on a practical level. For example, Sara Holwerda inverts the idea of a lap dance in a video in which a chair, an object, stands in for a man. Megan Hildebrandt’s delicate cut paper work meditates on her child as both a part of herself as well as a separate individual. Maria Raquel Cochez’s photographs offer the viewer a difficult set of questions when confronted with her photographic diptych of self-portraits, which show her body with breast implants as well as after they were removed. Magnolia Laurie’s work explores metaphors of survival and persistence in the face of perpetual hurdles and backtracking, something every feminist can relate to. And finally, my own work uses semaphore flags to spell out things I wish I had said to men in response to street harassment.

But wait, you may ask, what does this work do to fix the problem of sexism? How does this art exhibition help the world? I would respond that it is definitely helping the artists who make it, and hopefully some of our viewers as well, and I think that in it self is important.

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Video+Sound Art Exhibition

March 21st-April 25th, 2014

Open Fridays and Sundays 12-6 pm or by appointment

OPENING PARTY: Friday, March 21, 6-9PM

Artists: Danielle de Picciotto and Alex Hacke Sam Marlow and Alon Cohen Nicole Antebi and Laura Ortman Kitzinger Gabor and Alex Hamadey Shir Lieberman, Jonathan Phelps and Fabio Fonda United VJs, Jim Ellis

Curated by Leo Kuelbs and Karl Erickson

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

“Submerged!” is a new seven-channel video+sound art exhibition based on three short stories by co-curator Leo Kuelbs, making its North American debut at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, NYC. Considered seven pieces of a whole, “Submerged!” brings artists from a variety of backgrounds together to react to the stories, minimizing narrative aspects while amplifying personal response. The result is a presentation of multi-faceted, dynamic perspectives creating a setting and an almost tangible realization of the subconscious. Eyewitness accounts of fictitious happenings, observed through the psyche of the protagonists are blown apart, the reconstituted fragments then put to sound in this series of collaborative works. Digital and hand-drawn animations mix with overlaid imagery and camera-based work to further envelope the viewer in the “Submerged!” experience.

Curators Karl Erickson and Leo Kuelbs have presented works all over the world including: “The Decelerator” and “A Wake: Still Lives and Moving Images,” as well as numerous public and marketing art events including “Blueprints and Perspectives” (Dallas, 2013), “Codex Dynamic” (NYC, 2012) and “Divine Coalescence” for Dom Perignon (Berlin 2012). Concentrating on conceptual and new media art, Karl Erickson has been involved in the NYC art scene as an artist recently exhibiting at The Center for Strategic Art and Agriculture and Winter Shack, as a resident at LMCC’s Swing Space, and as the Executive Director of Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn.

Radiator Gallery, located in Long Island City, NYC, has continuously presented a cutting-edge program of conceptual and international works. With its ingenious integration of gallery and studio spaces, Radiator not only presents, butalso develops new artists and ideas for the international arts community. Innovative programming also moves beyond Radiator’s walls. International exchanges and off-site collaborations round out Radiator’s ambitious program.

Interesting Artist Notes:

*Contributing a soundtrack to “Submerged!” is Alex Hacke of Einsturzende Neubauten and other groups who is married to artist and author Danielle de Picciotto who also contributes to the show.

*Shir Lieberman is not only a talented animator, she also creates films for textile artist OLEK.

*Jim Ellis’ work has appeared in movies like Terrance Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”

*“Submerged!” artists come from Brazil, Germany, Hungary, The US, Israel, Italy and Native America, making it a truly international show.

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Opening Jan 23 6-9pm
Show Jan 23 – Feb 27 2015
Special Event: Reading Feb 8 2-4 pm

Artists: Micah Danges, Jamie Diamond, Jeff Fichera, Maria Lynch, Elisabeth Smolarz, Weston Teruya & Andrea Wolf.

Writers: Hossannah Asuncion, Christian Hawkey, Hari Kunzru, Ann Neumann & Uljana Wolf.

Curated by: Elisabeth Smolarz and Jamie Diamond

Radiator Arts is pleased to present cake, dolls, gift bags and other things; a group exhibition of the works of Micah Danges, Jamie Diamond, Jeff Fichera, Maria Lynch, Elisabeth Smolarz, Weston Teruya & Andrea Wolf. Employing a variety of media including photography, painting, sculpture and video, each of the artists in this show examines object-hood and it’s relationship to representation, the uncanny and memory.

Our everyday lives are populated and beautified by objects: we collect, organize and fetishize. They are symbols of our desires, surfaces for our projections and vehicles for our memories. By collaborating, constructing, displacing and documenting, each of the works in the show tempts to subvert our vernacular relationship to objects, collapse the temporary and permanent, past and present narratives and confuse ideas of fact and fiction.

Weston Teruya’s sculptures are based on interviews with members of the New York firefighting community. Utilizing spray paint and drawing media on paper, Teruya recreates everyday objects based on these interviews. The final work: a reconstructed cake, sink and an air tank, become symbols of the history of activism which enabled women to join the department in 1982 and continued struggles for more equitable representation today.

In Nine Months of Reborning, Jamie Diamond photographs sculptures of fictional children. The series documents her entry into the Reborn community over nine months and the making of nine dolls. Each hyper-real doll is photographed on completion before being put up for adoption on eBay and recirculated within the community.

Maria Lynch’s sculptural works are psychologically charged and investigate child’s play, fear,and memory. Lynch’s colorful stuffed animal like sculptures engage with a fantasy world where figures exist on the border of abstraction and are suspended like fetishized shrines.

Elisabeth Smolarz utilizes objects as portals to memory by collaborating with individuals to create shrine like installations of their own objects in their home environments. Smolarz’s photographs are loaded with personal meaning and codes. The installation of their precious objects tells the story of each individual, and forms a series of intricate non-concrete portraits.

Andrea Wolf’s video in which a photograph is slowly decomposed through a pixel sorting algorithmic manipulation process investigates our relationship to images, memory and time. Symbolic for the tension between remembering and forgetting the video shows a found photograph as an object which was produced in order to index a lived experience, which functions as a dynamic trigger of perception through which remembrance is activated.

Jeff Fichera’s photo realistic paintings inspire questions of expectation and desire. His works depict the beauty and fascination of detritus, banal objects and gift packaging, immortalizing each object’s unique narrative through the dents and dings in what was once a pristine and structured surface.

In, 2 Towels, Micah Danges’s documents two isolated objects, towel and sand, into one single photographic frame, creating a disorientating tromp l’oeil effect. Danges manipulates photographs beyond the two-dimensional print creating a visceral relationship with the final sculptural image and the viewer.

About the Curators: Jamie Diamond and Elisabeth Smolarz are visual artist based in New York.

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February 7-March 15th, 2014

Opening reception: Opening February 7th, 6-9 pm

Curated by: Sarah G. Sharp

Participating Artists: Martha Clippinger, Molly Dilworth, Carolyn Lambert, Beth Letain, Stacie Johnson, Sarah G. Sharp, Parsley Steinweiss

In the 2012 ArtForum article “Whatever Happened to Digital Art?” Claire Bishop described what she sees as a lack of critical response within the artworld to the digital era: “Why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution? While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital?” OFFLINE proposes that part of this “invisible” response to the overwhelm of information, access, images and mutable identities that come with life lived on the internet and mediated through a screen, includes a re-envisioning and invocation of the very thing the digital era suggests we leave behind: the “real.” The show presents seven artists who respond to these contemporary “upheavals” by reframing the mundane, concrete material of their lived experience in light of contemporary metaphors like rhizomatic relationships, the recombinant, virtual reality and the network. Without nostalgically fetishizing the analog or relying on anti-technology rhetoric, these artists use familiar forms like abstract painting, sculpture, performance and photography to re-imagine our new everyday in concrete terms and provoke altered perceptual readings of our “offline” experiences. We are reminded that our concrete experiences and identities are both re-framed by and persist alongside our online “lives.”

Stacie Johnson’s tightly designed paintings play with our perceptions of illusionistic space. Smooth surfaces, precisely rendered shapes and hand-made gradients reference the hyper-real while subtle shifts between painted surface and the wall challenge our perception of space, flatness and illusion. In her Photo Objects Parsley Steinweiss also investigates perception, illusion and surface. By combining photographic reproductions of various textures with “real” materials Steinweiss’s images force us to flip between an easy recognition of familiar objects and the sense of the uncanny that surrounds digital production methods.

Literally taking from the everyday, Martha Clippinger invests found objects with new life as colorful installation elements. In each exhibition Clippinger’s familiar objects are carefully placed within the space and in relation to each other suggesting an infinite number of combinations of form and possible new meanings. Sarah G. Sharp’s recent collages re-combine found images of utopian communities from popular media sources, reinvigorating what was once mundane and disposable with a new “aura.”

The compositional energy in Beth Letain’s abstract paintings relies on subtle shifts between object, surface and edge. Letain references recent visual forms like scrolling screens, signal strength bars and the ever-present “glitch,” within a complex visual syntax that is deceptively casual. Molly Dilworth’s Archive presents us with collected and combined scraps left from other works; an index of unseen objects and labor.

Carolyn Lambert’s performative work relies on personally formed research methods and activities that disrupt flows of condoned behavior for the tenant or citizen. In Gutter the abstract concept of gleaning one’s own water is made concrete by connecting the body, architecture and what is at hand with the basic act of survival through provisional infrastructure.

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February 1^st – March 1^st, 2013

Opening reception: February 1 st 6-9 pm

Artists: Guy Ben-Ari, Keren Benbenisty, Andrea Bianconi, Ariel Efron, Reuven Israel, Bill Jacobson, William Lamson, Dana Levy, Avigail Talmor

Curator: Guy Goldstein

Radiator Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Tracing The Fish Bladder show. This group exhibition curated by Guy Goldstein, is exploring the boundaries of curatorial practice in acceptable ways. This is Goldstein’s, an established Israeli sound and visual artist, attempt to explore the synergy between artist and curator role and the limitations of curatorial leeway. Goldstein is handling the curating project as his own personal artwork, using other artists’ works as components in his equation. Thus, creating new relations as well as confrontations and connections by juxtaposing them his way. A diverse range of works, from video to painting, photography, performance, interactive projection and more, is transformed into a versatile installation.

The selection of works is similar to the curatorial approach, which leans on the graphic representation of the set theory (union and intersection sets) one of the fundamental operations through which sets are combined and related to each other. The image of two overlapping circles, creating a Vesica Piscis shape (literally means a “fish bladder” in Latin). These chosen artworks, are trying to define containment and unification.

For instance, in the video Time is Like The East River, artist William Lamson is creating a micro-cosmos of two small boats made from a single canoe that was cut in half, subjected to nature’s opposing forces of the East River at slack tide. The boats are going towards each other trying to meet and link to become a single canoe again. This focuses on a rare moment in time when everything seems to be possible; by zooming out of this scene, we realize this is only a minor part of a wider context.

Throughout the performance and drawing (titled U&I) by Keren Benbenisty a new unification, between the artist and audience occurs. Keren creates her drawings in front and in collaboration with the viewer, by using their fingerprints. An intimate moment is created, reminding in a way a contract signing with the viewer.

In his photograph, taken from the series Place (2012), Bill Jacobson created a minimalist still-life image. Using layered blank boards, in minor colors, placed in the center of a photographic format which blurs the differences between what seems to be both abstract and real, painting or photography at the same time. The way in which the photographed object was placed in this work, usage of specific color scale and the attempt to create a “place within no space” are all an expression of the “union and intersection sets”, as this exhibition trying to do.

This is only a glimpse at a partial list of works exhibited in the show, whereas the wider view is revealing both questions and doubts regarding similarities, common denominators, and concepts all woven by the curatorial act.

Guy Goldstein is an artist and musician, currently lives and works between Tel-Aviv and New York. Holds a MFA from The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (2005-2007). Studied visual communication art and design in Wizo Haifa Academy of Art & Design (1997-2001).

Goldstein’s works exhibited worldwide (Europe, USA and Israel) in museums and galleries, he awarded the Minister of Culture Award for Visual Artists (Israel, 2012) among other imported awards and scholarships in the past. Guy participated recently in Residency Unlimited program in Brooklyn (April-August 2012). Guy Goldstein is a bass player, member at the Israeli Rock ‘n’ Roll band – Reines Girls. Goldstein is the Director of the Visual Communication Department at Musrara School of Photography and New Media, Jerusalem.

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January 27th – February 18th, 2012

Curated by: Jean-Michel Ross

The second event will present the work of the following artists:

Itziar Barrio (Bilbao-New York)
Alex Clark (North Jersey)
Petros Chrisostomou (London-New York)
Gabriela Galvan (Mexico-New York)
Sarah Greig (Montreal)
Milutin Gubash (Montreal)
Theresa Mastroiacovo (Montreal)
Ève K. Tremblay (Montreal-New York-Berlin)
Kim Waldron (Montreal)

The second event will be a group show of artists that have contributed in defining the platform that is Galerie Thomas Henry Ross art contemporain. After two and a half months of research in residence at ISCP, it is now time to work, play and display artworks that have had an impact on the creation of this pop-up gallery. Gallery Radiator, a newly constituted space that defines itself as a radical mediator for the arts, has generously opened its doors for the project by providing a physical space for the exhibition. This collaboration will be the first official show of this new actor on the New York scene situated about two minutes from PS1 MOMA.

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We cannot display this gallery

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