Laura Napier’s solo exhibition, "Spontaneous Formations", simulates an extension of her own artistic patterns and interests which since 2003 have focused on photographing and filming visually perceptible patterns of pedestrian behavior, such as the spontaneous formation of lines, circles, and clusters in New York City. As Napier states, “using non-verbal behavioral cues, people repeatedly organize into regular forms, demonstrating emergence theory. These structures also reveal the latent power of the public’s collective intelligence.” The resulting work analytically deconstructs the implied corral that cities, sites and architecture subconsciously enforce on pedestrians. Crowds and congregation are often seen as apparent forms in political rallies, protests, sporting events, rock concerts and religious services but as Napier humorously captures, these unstaged huddles also emerge in the everyday. Strangers become collective participants influenced by the grid and verticality of urban infrastructure.

About the artist: Laura Napier has been finding and photographing momentary crowd formations in New York City, Los Angeles, and most recently, in Lima, Peru. She was selected for a 2008 Swing Space residency by LMCC and is part of the AIM28 program at the Bronx Museum. She completed her MFA at Bard College in 2007.

About the curator: José Ruiz is a New York City-based curator who eschews conventional and established curatorial premises in order to concentrate on the hybridization of context and discourse that surrounds conceptual, sociopolitical and interdisciplinary emerging artists. In 2000, he co-founded Decatur Blue, a gallery in Washington, DC at which he curated more than 30 exhibitions and performances. His interests in alternative spaces and grassroots organizations led him to the Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) in 2006 for which he serves as Gallery Director & Curator. Ruiz’s upcoming projects will spawn across organizations and create curatorial collaborations with Museo de Arte de El Salvador, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Wave Hill, Asian American Arts Center and Lehman College Art Gallery.

Window Shadow, 2007

Drooping, 2005-present

Sarah E. Wood will show recent sculpture in an exhibition opening in the Classroom at PS122 Gallery on March 7 at 5pm. Allen Frame is the curator in a series of collaborations between artists and curators in this not-for-profit space for emerging artists. Wood's work uses motifs of shadows, silhouettes, and negative space to play with ideas of disorder and disassociation. She references familiar forms, both architectural and organic, to suggest the mutability of that order. Her series of constructed house plants, all black and in a state of stasis create a poignant sense of the banal and could suggest the disappointment of good intentions gone awry. Her Window shadow, a piece made of cut mesh that falls across a wall like a stray shadow from Dr. Caligari's cabinet, theatricalizes an everyday lighting phenomenon and lends a bit of drama to her investigations of the mundane. In Wood's use of The Classroom, shadows and silhouettes will mingle with objects to create a sense of a metaphoric dimension that impinges on reality in a dialogue between the material and philosophical.

About the artist: Sarah E. Wood was recently one of four artists included in the exhibition Plastic Poetics at Carnegie Mellon University Gallery, graduated from The Maryland Institute, College of Art BFA program and Rutgers University MFA program.

About the curator: Allen Frame is a photographer whose monograph Detour was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2001. He has been the curator of many exhibitions of emerging artists, including In This Place and Darrel Ellis at Art in General and Bearings: the Female Figure at PS122 Gallery. He teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, and the International Center of Photography.

 

PS122 presents a video installation in our Classroom Project Space by the New York-based artist Susan Jahoda titled ....of a worm in a pomegranate, (2006). This single channel video with sound (13:26 minutes) traces the movement of light as it passes from one interior wall to another. The image provides the visual component for a non-sequential, poetic narrative that calls upon topics ranging from phantom limb phenomena to global warming. In this one continuous capture emotions of melancholy, longing and suspense are rendered through the juxtaposition of sound, voiceover and the shifting illumination of surfaces. The light is “both the language and material of visual practices, or the invisible interweaving of differences which form the fabric of the visible”¹. As part of the sound mix a chanting voice, singing a 17th century Italian love song, deepens the profound ambiance created by the work. ....of a worm in a pomegranate is an affective installation that transcends space confinement by expanding into a timeless existence.

About the artist: Susan Jahoda works in a range of genres including video, sound, photography, text, performance, and installation. Her works have been exhibited widely, including venues in London, Paris, Venice, Basel, Seoul, and New York. Most recently her video, Not a Figment of Imagination, was screened at the XXX1X Moscow International Film Festival, (2007), The Rehearsal, at The Vth Novosibirsk International Biennial of Contemporary Graphic Art, Siberia, (2007), and In the Event of Ignition, at the VII Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, (2007). She has received numerous honors and awards as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

About the curator: Yulia Tikhonova is an independent New York based curator working in-between North America and countries of the post-Soviet block. Tikhonova's recent projects include a lecture and master class with Alfredo Jaar to be held at the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow in April 2008. The project was supported by the grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, NY. She coordinates an International symposium The Philosophy of Gramsci and the Left Alternative in Russia, and curates its accompanying group exhibition by Russian and American artists at the Institute of Philosophy, Moscow, 2008, and guest editor for the journal Rethinking Marxism Vol 20:3.


¹ Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light,Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty,edited by Andrew Benjamin, Routledge: London, New York, 1998, 32.

 

PS122 presents Expelled: a daydream in satin by San Francisco-based artist Cynthia Ona Innis in our Classroom project space. In the spring of 2006 Innis presented a site-specific installation at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at the request of curator Meg Shiffler. The exhibition, Conversation 2: Amy Globus & Cynthia Ona Innis was the second installment of a series of exhibitions pairing Bay Area artists with artists from other points on the globe. First and foremost a painter, Innis jumped at the chance to pop her work into a three dimensional space and begin to conceptualize how her practice could extend beyond the confines of a canvas. The resulting installation combined soft sculptural elements with subtle wall painting. The overall effect was overtly sexual and aggressive, but couched in a pink, fleshy biological/scientific framework. The PS122 installation is both a remounting and a furthering of the SFAC Gallery effort. A greater variety of media will be present in this iteration, including an original sound piece by musician Geoff Soule. Innis teams up again with SFAC Gallery Director and Curator Meg Shiffler to produce Expelled. The artist and curator will host a public conversation about their experience of readdressing a site-specific installation.

About the artist: Cynthia Ona Innis received her MFA from Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her work is in the permanent collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Among awards she has received are 2 James D. Phelan Awards, one for printmaking and another for painting, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Kala Fellowship. Innis is represented in Los Angeles by the Walter Maciel Gallery and in San Francisco by the Braunstein/Quay Gallery. Innis currently lives in Oakland and is a visiting lecturer in drawing at UC Berkeley.

About the curator: Meg Shiffler assumed the role of Director and Curator of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in 2005. Previously Shiffler lived in New York where she consulted with and completed projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Andrea Rosen Gallery and the Ursula Meyer Art Conservancy. From 1998 to 2003 she co-founded and was the Director of Visual Art for the multidisciplinary art space Consolidated Works in Seattle. In the 1990’s she was the Director of the MIA Gallery and then the Director of 20th Century Masterworks for Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery. She has a background in theater and dance, and attended the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

 

Patty Harris
 

broken

The abuse of technology and the increasing power of the machine have been humanistic concerns for the last few centuries. Since the 19th century, there has been a fear of losing control over the instruments of progress that were meant to be in the service of mankind. Today the development of new technologies is so rapid that children have to teach their parents how to use the latest products. An individual cannot assimilate new technologies quickly enough. The technologies then dictate the needs of the individual rather than answer to them. There is a continual necessity to update our technological knowledge. This situation causes generational anxieties unconsciously linked to the feeling of losing control in a present that will too soon become the future. Wellbeing is supposed to depend on improvements provided by the latest technological discoveries. However, what happens when there is excessive attention paid to technological devices based on predetermined scenarios? What happens when an aesthetic testing of these scenarios creates new forms and materials beyond human desire?

Through applying these questions to architecture, the imaginative solutions of John M. Johansen have deeply inspired the Broken artists' practices. Since retiring, the American architect has devoted himself to produce futuristic architecture by using the newest technologies (from nanotechnology to magnetic levitation). His book "Nanoarchitecture, a New Species of Architecture" presents the structure of his buildings as composed of molecules programmed to replicate themselves based on the coding properties of DNA. Tricia McLaughlin and Patty Harris' animations and installations develop the science fiction aspect of these provoking projects. They have both imagined postmodern scenarios where, from the ashes of two buildings, once representing the avant-garde, tentacled protuberances grow excessively, like tumor cells in rebellion to a superimposed and predetermined destiny. In reaction to Le Corbusier's idea of Villa Savoye as a machine for living, McLaughlin's piece makes the house itself come alive, displacing humans in its infinite reproductive madness. Harris shakes Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater apart with an earthquake. Out of these broken bits a new building begins to grow in a prismatic mutation that replicates natural forms around it. The new structures conceived by the artists are based on the original buiding's DNA but they became a species of modular architectural design, organically spreading out from the videoanimation to invade the gallery's walls.

Transparent, white plastic prisms, vinyl and broken lattice coming out of the platform's explosion in the Harris' animation, knot the pink blobs that infested the Villa Savoye's leftovers. McLaughlin's breathing balloons cast in fiberglass and aquaresin will converge with the haunting crystal shapes for a final unpredictable effect.

— Irina Zucca Alessandrelli

 

Stills from Machina, 20-minute animated loop, 2006

Project Description

Machina is a 3D animation portraying the compressed time and space of painting, that shows a dreaming character whose slow, drowsy movements articulate all of the minutia of a single moment. This 4D "painting" is projected life-sized in scale, constructing a representation that is more personae. Machina uses high technology — meaning the most advanced techniques of virtual reality simulation, and a series of animations from key pose to key pose that have been arranged in random combinations on a time line. The result is a representation that is sensual and appears to be biological, yet is intensely erotic with an animated dramaturgy that evokes mechanized clockwork.

Claudia Hart creates temporal, animated paintings using 3D animation to interject sensual female bodies that project emotional subjectivity into what is typically the overly-determined Cartesian virtual world. She currently teaches 3D animation in art and design at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville and the Institute for Integrated Digital Media Institute at Polytechnic Universitly in Brooklyn.

Kathy Brew's hybrid career spans the realms of media and contemporary art. She is currently co-Director of the Margaret Mead Film Festival and from 1997 through 2001 she was Director of Thundergulch, the new media arts initiative of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council that provides new forms of interaction between artists, audiences, and new technologies.

Project Description

Le Moniteur de la Mode, curated by Allen Frame, is an exhibition of paintings on paper by Linda Salerno.

Salerno’s group of 30 by 22 inch paintings, created in ink, acrylic, and mixed media on paper, is inspired by 19th-century fashion drawings. The artist integrates botanical motifs into compositions of stylish female figures, dressed in the fashion of the 1850’s. Salerno builds up a saturated, monochromatic palette through layers of color, applied over the black ink drawing she does as a starting point.

 

Project Description

A collaborative exhibition featuring art works by Jody Culkin, a relative of the 19th century neo-classical sculptor Harriet Hosmer – the protofeminist who lived and worked in 19th Rome. In mounting this exhibition, two of Hosmer's relatives, Jody Culkin, sculptor and multimedia artist, and Kate Culkin, a historian writing a book on Hosmer, have joined forces with curator Kathleen Goncharov to create an exhibition and installation that responds to Hosmer's work and life from the perspective of the 21st century.

 

Project Description

Like is an exhibition of recent works by Ryan Humphrey and Rachel Urkowitz. Blurring the lines between painting, collage, sculpture and installation, the two artists share likeness in their use of color, distinct relationships to pop, and an appearance of abstraction in their work. The second exhibition in a two-part series on painting in PS122’s Classroom Gallery, Like addresses how meaning is embedded within non-narrative and loosely representational painting and its formal extensions. Organized by Sara Reisman.

This exhibition has been funded by the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Friends of PS122 Gallery. Special thanks to Michael Steinberg Fine Art.