Ensign Sgr A* Live Part 2 with Elaine Tin Nyo, LoVid, MTAA, and special guests 

Saturday, March 28, 2015, Radiator Gallery, 10-61 Jackson Ave, LIC, New York 11106

4:00 pm MTAA – Live Dramatic Reading
(Disconnection of HAL 9000’s Higher Functions) v5.
4:30 pm Elaine Tin Nyo – I Will Eat Half Your Donut
5:00 pm Special guest Prof. Luther Meme on the subject of very large numbers.
5:30 pm LoVid – Finite but Insurmountable

In the second of a series of live events as part of the Ensign Sgr A* exhibition at Radiator Gallery, the artist Elaine Tin Nyo, LoVid and MTAA present three time based artworks.

Elaine Tin Nyo is a conceptual artist with a kitchen and a studio in Harlem. She has produced work at the Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Bronx Museum, The Swiss Institute, and Brooklyn Museum in New York among others. For the past two years, she hasposted a photo of every donut she’s eaten to her Instagram feed.

A Very Very Cold Martini with Elaine Tin Nyo, 2014 
https://vimeo.com/81952624

LoVid’s collaboration began with audiovisual performances and has expanded to include a wide range of media, from prints to App-Art. LoVid’s performances were presented at Museum of the Moving Image (NY), Graham Foundation (Chicago), Eyebeam (NY), MoMA (NY), FACT (UK), PS1 (NY) and The Kitchen (NY), among many others.

LoVid – Long Live, 2012
https://vimeo.com/31228834

MTAA have presented work at The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Whitney Museum, and Artists Space, in New York City. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA; and SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA and the National Museum, Warsaw, Poland and more.

MTAA – Maybe Manifesto, 2014
https://vimeo.com/83993017

SPECIAL EVENT:

PRESS RELEASE

March 6 – April 10 2015

Artists: Amelia Bauer, Joianne Bittle, Aviram Cohen, G.H. Hovagimyan, Nicholas Knight, Esperanza Mayobre, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, MTAA, Shannon Sberna, Raphaele Shirely, Janice Sloane, Colleen Rae Smiley, with exhibition graphic by Charles Orr and OTO.

Curated by: Over The Opening (OTO)

Every 365.25 days, the Earth revolves once around a star we call the Sun. Approximately every 225 million years, the Sun revolves around Sgr A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”) which presides at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is now theorized that Sgr A* is not actually a star but a supermassive black hole that is currently eating planets, stars, light and even smaller black holes. Of course, the thought of an unseeable thing / dimensional portal actively swallowing our galaxy is keeping me awake some nights.

Meanwhile back in Long Island City, Radiator Arts and Over The Opening (OTO) are pleased to present Ensign Sgr A* featuring artist using negation and absence as ensigns or banners for states of exploration and loss. The exhibition operates as part wunderkammer and part memory hole with past prime astronomy, geography, technology, and superstition as the backdrop. Battles will be fought and journeys begun but broken and disappeared, in the long view of time, approach.

Amelia Bauer stages alien nocturnes in the Western landscape. Joianne Bittle shows space age couture and found prehistoric displays. Aviram Cohen sets contact mics to trace invisible pathways. G.H. Hovagimyan forms ARs for floating zombie teen avatars. Nicholas Knight renders codes. Esperanza Mayobre maps points with no return. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy scan future ruins.  MTAA prepares to disappear. Shannon Sberna sees hypnosis and future luck. Raphaele Shirley enlightens worlds and historic technologies. Janice Sloane performs and documents dark acts. Colleen Rae Smiley sews signals and Charles Orr with OTO design a graphic to inform and educate.

About OTO (Over The Opening)  From the fall of 2007 until the winter of 2009, the artist collaboration MTAA  invited artists and art collectives to present one-night exhibitions of time based art in their North 6th Street Brooklyn studio. This ongoing monthly event curated under the name Over The Opening (OTO) operated as a blurring of studio space, exhibition venue and social experiment. The artists who worked with OTO represented a diverse array of practices. Works ranged from a tamale making workshop, to endurance karaoke to experimental computer games. Over the years, OTO presented 26 exhibitions of expansive scope with modest means. Ensign Srg A* at Radiator Arts marks the first OTO exhibition in a gallery setting.

ARTWORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

PRESS RELEASE     CHECKLIST

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.

ARTWORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

SPECIAL EVENT:

PRESS RELEASE   CHECKLIST