Past Exhibitions - 2015

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.

October 30-December 11, 2015

Artists: Marlon de Azambuja (Spain/Brazil), Augmented Mountain (USA), Almudena Baeza (Spain), Heleno Bernardi (Brazil), Elena Blasco (Spain), Eva Davidova (USA/Spain) Jorge Diezma (Spain), Meredith Drum (USA), Cliff Evans (USA), Juan Ugalde (Spain) and Marina Zurkow (USA)

…I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences…
– Joseph Beuys

HAPPENLAND, curated by Almudena Baeza and Eva Davidova, presents installation, sculpture, video art, painting, photography and augmented reality by 10 internationally acclaimed artists from Spain, Brazil and USA. The exhibition brings rarely seen together, visually resolute works engaging public space, behavior, and environmental activism, with the underlying 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”. The artist wants to get out of the fundamentally variable and equivocal realm of language, and take us into a kind of imagination space, obliterating translation in the meantime. As an .exe file, the brainwave installs itself in both minds—emitter and receptor—and acts.

The artists in Happenland see the models, the events, the purposes or the issues they are about to address as a group of relationships univocally associated to the creative action. That’s why we say that the works in Happenland are “ways of being” of a relationship. They exist in a relationship of identity of shape. The meanings may be equally unknown to all, but they “exist” in their material representation. From Marlon de Azambuja’s mission of defining and revealing territories, the bodies turned architecture in Heleno Bernardi or Eva Davidova’s work, Juan Ugalde’s magic overlaying of depths and Almudena Baeza’s sharp pensiveness, Cliff Evans carnal dystopia, Elena Blasco’s psychedelic humor, Meredith Drum’s wrath against the ethos of avatars-for-sale worlds, Jorge Diezma’s passive-aggressive “painting as action”, right to Marina Zurkow’s extending the mechanisms of construction and geometrical interdependencies to the living organisms, the works subvert the obvious—they happen as something that, by being so direct, resists interpretation.

Checklist

Press Release

ARTWORKS:

OCTOBER 17, 2015

PREFORMANCE BEGINS at 5:00pm

Project Description

HEART/BEETS explores the relationship of physiological, affective and cognitive states, and the effect each has on the other. It pretends to reflect upon love seen through the eyes of Neuroscience, “Misattribution of Arousal Theory” and using Garcia Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” as a framework that represents love’s strict protocols based on societal principles-infused with catholic tradition which dictates females behavior. Themes such as marriage, virginity, monogamy and fidelity are touched upon by Lorca and compared with “The Effects of Beetroot Juice Experiment” and “The Capilano Suspended Bridge Experiment” in an interactive way. The main goal is to create awareness about the way each individual function and then relates and affects others.

HEART/BEETS is a multidisciplinary project that studies Love from a scientific perspective in a creative and artistic experiment. In a performance, Araujo in collaboration with Tyler Ashley seek to confront public members through physicality, music that includes Araujo’s own heartbeat, immersive interactions with audience members and photography and videos made by the artist utilizing hearts and beets blending the line of reality and metaphorical worlds. She invites audiences to use what is given in the present moment and add it previous experiences to access deep awareness.

Creating awareness and consciousness are Araujo’s main interest. Araujo uses diverse media to focus stimuli to be experienced by each sense individually. Once awareness is awakened, there is an invitation to re-experience and engage all the senses as a collective. Through a contemplative practice of sensation, audiences can observe affective and cognitive process triggered by the external world. Senses, sensation, perception, awareness and consciousness is the path Arantxa Araujo suggests for mindful presence. Araujo attempts to spark curiosity in observers about theses processes to scrutinize about the relation of the exuberant world of stimulants and the inner personal journey of perception and its role on defining behavior.

As a multidisciplinary project, Araujo not only incorporates film, theater, photography, performance and installations with original music; but also incorporates her expertise in Yoga, Theater, Neuroscience and her upbringing as a catholic woman in Mexico City to share personal and professional experiences, and merge the world of Science with that of Art with strong passion hues and possibly a tasteful beetroot juice shot.

She encourages active participation of audiences where they become inhabitants of this world. Audience members are asked to write a piece and leave it in a “shrine” to explore the theme of detachment and ritual.

Artists Bios

Conceived Without Sin Paddle8 Auction

September 18-October 23, 2015

Conceived Without Sin is an exhibition and silent auction curated by Culturadora to benefit Radiator Arts. Radiator Arts (Radical Mediator for the Arts) provides local and international emerging and mid-career curators and artist-curators an excellent opportunity to work and learn about the operations of a multi-disciplinary organization. Radiator will regularly present contemporary art exhibitions, performances and video programs.

Visit Paddle8 Auction

Curator: Culturadora

Artists: Rachel Libeskind, Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde, Nick Fusaro, Romina Hendlin, Mei Xian Qiu, Tracey Snelling, Diego Zaks, Ariela Kader, Eric Corriel, Aranzazu Araujo

ARTISTS BIOS

“The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might.” Mark Twain.

Conceived Without Sin is an exhibition that proposes a new religion that reframes the longstanding ideology of Judeo-Christian thought. Participating artists have transformed the space into a modern day sanctuary, governed by the laws of communication and open thought, challenging archaic binary notions of good and evil. Conceived Without Sin presents how religion could look like from the perspective of a generation that has inherited the lessons of the most important social and political revolutions in history.

Growing up with the ubiquity of the Internet meant that at a young age we were granted immediate access to scientific data and different currents of thought, often with little oversight. Access to information encouraged challenging seminal religious stories like Virgin Mary’s mysterious pregnancy and aroused questions such as: Why does female sexuality have to be condemned? And, why must homosexuality be categorized as deviant behavior?

This proposal challenges the myths that religion has perpetuated regarding sexuality at large, but specifically homosexuality and bisexuality. The widespread political reform regarding same-sex marriage in North America has propelled some of these artists to question the ideology of the Judeo-Christianity model. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, Millennials have the highest acceptance for same-sex marriage than any other generation. At 70 percent approval rating, this generation’s acceptance of sexual independence has led to greater social tolerance and is closing the gap of gender disparity. With such acceptance, religions are losing their power as the sole compass of morality and virtue.

The limited representation of race in religious imagery is another challenge we propose to address in the context of this exhibition. Historically, groups looking to strengthen their powers and suppress individual thought often devised artistic depictions of religious myths that favored their own agendas. Those without power were left out of the visual narratives that have served as the aesthetic norm for centuries.

Conceived Without Sin proposes a new religion where diversity is heralded, sexuality is respected, and debate is not only fostered but encouraged.

About Culturadora: Culturadora’s mission is to activate the next generation of art lovers and collectors by showcasing international artists through special projects and exhibitions.

Featured Image: Rachel Libeskind, Family Void, 2011, toothpaste and mixed media on scanner bed, dimensions variable

Press Release   Checklist

ART WORKS:

Sunday, August 23rd, 8:00 pm

Join us for a public discussion with the curators and artists of Chance Ecologies, a public art project currently taking place in Long Island City, Queens. This event will be a roundtable conversation about Hunter’s Point South, a historic post-industrial site on the East River which has been left to become a wilderness over the past 30 years, and which will soon become a residential development. A group of artists is currently creating new artworks focused on this unique site, and will discuss some of their initial findings with the community at Radiator Gallery on Sunday, Aug. 23rd at 8pm, over drinks and light refreshments. 

This Sunday is the third in a month-long series of events for Chance Ecologies – Exploring the Wild Landscape of Hunter’s Point South, a public art project is bringing together a coalition of artists and thinkers to creatively explore and document a large plot of publicly-owned land in Long Island City, Queens. Over the last 35 years, an unplanned ecology has taken root in this fenced-off post-industrial landscape, which will soon be razed to make way for a new residential development. During the month of August, we are organizing a series of events celebrating this wild site, leading up to a winter exhibit at Radiator Gallery.

This Sunday will feature a performative walk with artists Chris Kennedy and Ellie Irons at 5pm, an unguided tour with author Daniel Campo at 6pm, and a public discussion with the curators and artists of Chance Ecologies, hosted by Radiator Gallery, at 8pm.

SUNDAY, Aug 23rd
5 – 6pm:
Endangered Surfaces Walk: A movement-research investigation with Ellie Irons and Chris Kennedy
Join us for a guided walk through the re-wilded landscape of Hunter’s Point. We’ll follow desire paths that flow through the site, exploring the overlaps, edges and frictions between the man-made and long re-wilded. Along the way we’ll identify wild urban plants, take rubbings, and engage in movement-research to create an archive of endangered surfaces found amongst the ruderal terrains soon to be developed.Meeting Point: East River Ferry terminal in Long Island City / Hunter’s Point Park

6 – 7:30pm: 
Accidental, temporary and wild: An unguided tour of the Hunters Point waterfront by Daniel Campo
Through this (mostly) unguided tour, explore one of New York’s last accidental waterfront wild spaces before it is swallowed by the voracious development practices that have transformed Queens’s East River edge and the waterfront of the greater city. Through intimate and unmediated immersion into this unique postindustrial site, the tour will draw upon all of your senses in exploration of thoroughly contradictory conditions and contexts. At the fulcrum of land and water, nature and city, abandonment and reclamation, history and possibility; this experience will incite a similarly contradictory range of emotions. The tour will culminate with an open discussion led by urbanist, critic and professor, Daniel Campo (author of The Accidental Playground).
This tour is limited to 20 people, please RSVP via this link to sign up!

Fri, May 15, 6:00-9:00 PM
Performance begins at 6:30 PM

Musician Laura Ortman (The Dust Dive, Stars Like Fleas) and Raven Chacon (Postcommodity, Mesa Ritual) will join together for a collaboration set at Radiator Gallery on Friday May 15th. The event is in conjunction with the exhibition YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND on view at Radiator through May 22.

Ortman’s songs utilize violin, electric guitar, Apache violin, piano, megaphone, samplers, electric keyboards, pedal steel guitar and musical saw with Chacon accompanying on his custom electronic instruments.

YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND

Artists: Edgar Heap of Birds, Nicholas Galanin, Postcommodity, Marcus Amerman.
Curated by Erin Joyce Projects

The art of Native Americans and First Nations peoples is often marginalized and thought of in stereotypical forms of representation. Oil paintings of Chiefs in war bonnets, pottery, beaded regalia and woven rugs; and while these are accurate representations of a portion of the Indigenous North American art community, it is not by any means the whole picture.
The Indigenous North American art world is one that is rich with artists creating controversial, provocative, and diverse works in a myriad of mediums. With that, Erin Joyce Projects and Radiator Gallery are pleased to announce their latest exhibition, You Are On Indian Land, featuring the work of leading contemporary American Indian and First Nation artists from across the North American continent including Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) and artist collective Postcommodity – comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano), and Nathan Young (Pawnee, Kiowa, Delaware).

These artists all actively engage the notion of pop-culture, contested landscapes, misappropriation, and cultural imprisonment in their work. Utilizing pastiche, they create imbricated works that will stand-alone, but also enter into dialogue with one another in the gallery space. Pieces in the exhibition include assemblage sculpture, multi-channel video work, monoprints, and installation pieces. The exhibition, curated by Erin Joyce Projects, will be a three-venue installation, premiering at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, New York April 17th, at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico featuring the work of First Nations artist Dana Claxton April 23rd, and completing its run at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona featuring work by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Postcommodity, Cheyenne Randall (Lakota), Steven Yazzie (Navajo), and Michael Namingha (Hopi-Tewa).

PRESS RELEASE   CHECKLIST

Edgar Heap of Birds in conversation with Sara Reisman.

Friday, May 1, 6:00-8:00 PM
Discussion will begin promptly at 6:30
RSVP only – space is limited! Please RSVP to: daniela@radiatorarts.com

THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION
THE 8TH FLOOR
17 West 17th Street
New York, NY
(646)-839-5908
www.the8thfloor.org

Join us on May 1st for a conversation with contemporary Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds and curator Sara Reisman. The speakers will focus on the ongoing mono print project Dead Indian Stories by Edgar Heap of Birds, presented at Radiator Gallery as part of the exhibition You Are On Indian Land. Curated by Erin Joyce, the exhibition offers critical perspective on the representation of the art of Native Americans and First Nation peoples. It features the work of leading contemporary artists including Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) and artist collective Postcommodity – comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano), and Nathan Young (Pawnee, Kiowa, Delaware).

This exhibition, which takes place in three venues, is curated by Erin Joyce Projects and premiered at Radiator Gallery April 17. The second iteration will open at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art April 23, 2015, and the final at the Museum of Northern Arizona November 20, 2015.

On view at Radiator Gallery from April 17 to May 22.
Learn more about here: http://www.radiatorarts.com/you-are-on-indian-land

About Edgar Heap of Birds:
Heap of Birds received his Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1979), his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas (1976) and has undertaken graduate studies at The Royal College of Art, London, England. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts (2008). The artist has exhibited his works at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, Documenta, Kassel, Germany, Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, Association for Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa, Lewallen Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hong Kong Art Center, China, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia, Grand Palais, Paris, France and the Venice Biennale, Italy.

Heap of Birds has served as visiting lecturer in London, England, Western Samoa, Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Barcelona, Spain, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Norrkoping, Sweden, Hararre, Zimbabwe, Verona, Italy, Adelaide, Australia and India. Heap of Birds has taught as Visiting Professor at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island and Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. At the University of Oklahoma since 1988, Professor Heap of Birds teaches in Native American Studies. His seminars explore issues of the contemporary artist on local, national and international levels.

Heap of Birds has received grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Lila Wallace Foundation, Bonfil Stanton Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trust and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In June 2005, Heap of Birds completed the fifty-foot signature, outdoor sculpture titled Wheel. The circular porcelain enamel on steel work was commissioned by The Denver Art Museum and is inspired by the traditional Medicine Wheel of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.

Heap of Birds’ artwork was chosen by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as their entry towards the competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He represented the Smithsonian with a major collateral public art project and blown glass works in Venice, June 2007 titled: “Most Serene Republics”. In 2012, Heap of Birds was one of fifty artists honored by United States Artists with an individual fellowship award of $50,000 and named USA Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts category.

About Sara Reisman:
Sara Reisman is the Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation which promotes access to arts and culture in New York City through grant making, public programs, and exhibitions. As an independent curator Reisman’s projects have focused on a variety of themes including the politics of public space, globalization and site-specific practice, social practice, collaboration, sustainability, and cultural identity and transformation. Additionally, Reisman has curated numerous solo exhibitions, most recently Christopher K. Ho: Privileged White People (2013), Claudia Joskowicz: Sympathy for the Devil (2012), and Leslie Johnson: Days to Go (2012) (all for Forever & Today, Inc., where she was the 2012-2013 guest curator), and Peter Rostovsky: Still (2011) at the Hillwood Art Museum. From 2008 to 2014 Sara Reisman was the Director of New York City’s Percent for Art program that commissions permanent public artworks for newly constructed and renovated city-owned spaces, indoors and out. Recently commissioned artists include Mary Mattingly, Duke Riley, Odili Donald Odita, Julianne Swartz, Kanishka Raja, and Karyn Olivier, among many others. Reisman was the 2011 critic-in-residence at Art Omi, an
international visual artist residency in upstate New York.

About the Rubin Foundation:
THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION believes in art as a cornerstone of cohesive, resilient communities and an aid to greater participation in civic life. In its mission to make art available to the broader public, in particular to underserved communities, the Foundation provides direct support to, and facilitates partnerships between cultural organizations and advocates of social justice across the public and private sectors. Through grantmaking, the Foundation supports cross-disciplinary work connecting art with social justice via experimental collaborations, as well as making cultural resources available to organizations and areas of New York City in need. Areas of funding include arts education, artistic activism, public art, and community-based artistic programming.

SPECIAL EVENT:

PRESS RELEASE

Extended through June 14, 2015
Opening: Friday, April 17, 2015, 6pm – 9pm
Artists: Edgar Heap of Birds, Nicholas Galanin, Postcommodity, Marcus Amerman
Curated by Erin Joyce Projects

The art of Native Americans and First Nations peoples is often marginalized and thought of in stereotypical forms of representation. Oil paintings of Chiefs in war bonnets, pottery, beaded regalia and woven rugs; and while these are accurate representations of a portion of the Indigenous North American art community, it is not by any means the whole picture.

The Indigenous North American art world is one that is rich with artists creating controversial, provocative, and diverse works in a myriad of mediums. With that, Erin Joyce Projects and Radiator Gallery are pleased to announce their latest exhibition, You Are On Indian Land, featuring the work of leading contemporary American Indian and First Nation artists from across the North American continent including Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) and artist collective Postcommodity – comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano), and Nathan Young (Pawnee, Kiowa, Delaware). These artists all actively engage the notion of pop-culture, contested landscapes, misappropriation, and cultural imprisonment in their work. Utilizing pastiche, they create imbricated works that will stand-alone, but also enter into dialogue with one another in the gallery space. Pieces in the exhibition include assemblage sculpture, multi-channel video work, monoprints, and installation pieces. The exhibition, curated by Erin Joyce Projects, will be a three-venue installation, premiering at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, New York April 17th, at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico featuring the work of First Nations artist Dana Claxton April 23rd, and completing its run at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona featuring work by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Postcommodity, Cheyenne Randall (Lakota), Steven Yazzie (Navajo), and Michael Namingha (Hopi-Tewa).

About Erin Joyce Projects: Erin Joyce is an independent curator, art critic, and scholar of contemporary art. Erin is a contributing writer to Hyperallergic, art critic for Canvas Magazine, and has held editorial positions at GOOD Magazine, ULTRA: EXTRA, and Aslan Media. In addition, her writing has been featured in Salon, SHFT, NPR Art & Seek, and the Modern Art Iraq Archive. As a curator, Erin seeks to bend the notion of how contemporary art is presented and understood. Looking both inside and outside the construct of the museum and gallery as venue for art presentation, Erin seeks to refract art through the prism of the environment and contexts in which it was created.

ARTWORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

PRESS RELEASE   CHECKLIST

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.

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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.

ARTWORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

SPECIAL EVENT:

PRESS RELEASE   CHECKLIST