Chance Ecologies

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.

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