2010
The Mothership Has Landed
February 2 – March 20, 2010
BRANDON C. COX
LAINIE DALBY
AYANA V. JACKSON
GLENDALYS MEDINA
MARCUS MORALES
JACOLBY SATTERWHITE
Guest Curator: Derrick Adams
The Mothership Has Landed is a group exhibition featuring sculpture, video, photography and painting by Brandon C. Cox, Lainie Dalby, Ayana V. Jackson, Glendalys Medina, Marcus Morales and Jacolby Satterwhite. The title of the show borrows from the infamous George Clinton + Funkadelic and their decades-long experimental movement combining music, fashion, illustration and performance. Their phrase, "The Mothership Has Landed" can roughly translate to "The shit is about to hit the fan!" and illustrates the collective nature of the group's overall expressive and raw quality. A similar expressive and raw quality can be seen in this group of artists. Their works are cultural hybrids borrowing from the familiar and inspired by their investigation of media transformed through personal experience, resulting in a cosmic array of images, objects and performance. "Here's a chance to dance our way out of our constrictions…with the groove our only guide, we shall all be moved." One Nation Under A Groove -George Clinton + Funkadelic
Lynn Elizabeth Palewicz
February 2 – March 20, 2010
selves
Curator: Nico Wheadon
selves is a solo project space exhibition featuring photographs and drawings by Lynn Elizabeth Palewicz. The title of the show refers to Palewicz's ongoing investigation of self-portraiture: the self as subject, the self as material, and the self as creative impulse. The exhibition includes works from her girl series, and torso series as well as drawings and sketches illuminating her creative process. ''These are not scenes from so-called real life, yet we utterly believe in them, as if they were stills from a heretofore unsuspected collective memory.'' - Guest Writer: Marcelle Clements
Leor Grady
February 2 – March 20, 2010
Curator: Nico Wheadon
Leor Grady contemplates language and intimacy in his site-responsive installation in the gallery's new exhibition space; a 3' by 5' glass display case located near the entrance that caters to small-scale works that are sized to fit yet loud and unconvential in message. A tiled backdrop alludes to the oddly private yet performative space of the bathroom and foregrounds small, embroidered textiles that weave plural language and meanings into familiar objects.
2009
BORDERLINE
November 24, 2009 - January 6,2010
Carla Aspenberg
Andrew Demirjian
Nicky Enright
Hong Seon Jang
Yeni Mao
Noelle Lorraine Williams
Curator: Nico Weldon
The multimedia works of Carla Aspenberg, Andrew Demirjian, Nicky Enright, Hong Seon Jang, Yeni Mao and Noelle Lorraine Williams uniquely engage notions of placelessness, loss and nostalgia to redefine the borders that limit our definitions of self, otherness and history. Borderline mines our indefinable position on the timeline between creation and extinction and celebrates the uncertainty of our future through imagery that borders on the simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic. These works erase the functionality of familiar objects and places—dolls, hammers, bananas, books, zipties, doorways, classrooms and stairwells—to suggest new contexts, memories and psychologies. What were once binaries become valued as diverse sites of transition where plural meaning is embraced.
ACCOMPONG MAROONS
November 24, 2009 - January 16, 2010
Jennie Baptiste
Accompong Maroons is the culmination of a two year journey by London-based photographer Jennie Baptiste. The colorfully rich digital canvas prints on panels form a collage, giving insight into the Maroon lifestyle and heritage. Baptiste is a photographer inspired by youth culture and music in relation to her identity. She has documented many genres within youth culture and photographed P Diddy, Mary J Blige, Nas and Jay Z to name a few. In her own words, “I continue to be fascinated by the influence of Black Youth Culture in London. I wish to use my work to inform and educate people about Black Youth Culture outside the stereotype. So that our history is also their history, creating a greater understanding of the different cultural diversities that makes up British society here and beyond.” CURATOR: NICO WHEADON
That was then…
September 25 – November 7
Kevin Baker
Rashaad Newsome
Ardan Özmenoglu
Guest Curators: Casey Fremont + Vanessa Riding
That was then… examines the personal histories of 3 artists; Kevin Baker paints psychedelic and autobiographical floral imagery over the kitschy patterns of classic oil cloth. Ardan Özmenoglu adorns and rearranges everyday objects that reference imagery of her native Turkey. Rashaad Newsome films contemporary Vogue choreography and documents the dance in two-dimensional line drawings.
Lester Julian Merriweather
Vanilla Extract
September 25 – November 7
Curator: Derrick Adams
The Vanilla Extract Series explores the frequency and/or lack of black representation in mainstream media outlets. Merriweather “extracts” white people from the pages of high-end fashion magazines, as well as other printed materials, to illustrate the universal social imbalance in reference to the representation of African Americans within society.
Keith Anderson
Glass Case Exhibition Series
September 25 – November 7
Curator: Nico Wheadon
Keith Anderson showcases a diverse collection of fertile, vast, combustible, inclusive and malleable works inspired—yet not defined—by a multitude of cultural and artistic resources. Anderson’s work hovers between minimalism, arte povera and abstraction and employs a minimalist simplicity of form and an emphasis on process and unconventional materials such as raisins, cotton puffs, black-eyed peas, felt pads, match heads, clothespins, flammable glue, straight pins, egg whites, onions, and patternmaking paper.
In Progress Residency
Carol Pereira and Jonas Olson
August 3 – September 12
Curator: Derrick Adams
For their residency, Pereira and Olson showcase an experimental collaboration between two people employing wall drawing, video projection and performance. The pair transformed the gallery into a multi-sensory environment that engaged their spatial surroundings and audience to interrogate notions of power, body and space.
The Happening: Kinesics as Art Object
April 14 - May 30
Keith Anderson
Johannes DeYoung
Wayne Hodge
Jessica Lagunas
Regina Rocke
Lerato Shadi
Ezra Wube
Curator: Nico Wheadon
In the early 1950s, Ray Birdwhistell—a dancer turned anthropologist—termed kinesics, the study of the way people communicate through posture, gesture, stance, and movement. Paralleling the birth of the “science of expression” was an unprecedented cultural awareness of the body’s ability to transform creative production away from the tangible and toward a multi‐sensory experience that challenges traditional modes of perception and highlights body language as a nuanced tool of not only expression but also liberation. The work of these seven artists unites and expands upon these foundations laid more than half a century before and employs media to both document an autobiographical exploration of kinesics and place themselves in position or opposition to global discourses on identity and representation.
Fiona Gardner
Meet Miss Subways
April 14 - May 30
Curator: Derrick Adams
Fiona Gardner exhibits carefully constructed portraits of the former Miss Subways contest winners wearing sashes with lettering taken directly from their original Miss Subways placards. Her photographs' dramatic lighting references the glamour of pageantry, while the settings—homes and places of work—are the everyday spaces of the women's lives. Her images focus on the personal stories of these briefly famous women, while also viewing their lives through a wider historical and feminist context. There were nearly 200 winners of the Miss Subways beauty contest held by New York City's transit system between 1941 and 1976.
Latitude
February 3 - March 28
Sung Jin Choi
Brendan Fernandes
Mona Kamal
Sungmi Lee
Vered Sivan
Jessica Vaughn
Curator: Nico Wheadon
In the many modes that latitude can describe place on both a personal and global scale, the six artists in this exhibition investigate the complexities of mixed cultural identity and the increasingly unstable political and emotional notions of homeland. Each approach visual narrative and representation uniquely yet share a communal emphasis on material and process. Much like the longitudinal and latitudinal lines of the globe, the highly-detailed, repetitive quality in these works highlights the prescribed parameters of the gallery space and challenges this rigidity to further complicate the boundary of experiences and redefine notions of identity, authenticity and heritage outside of a hegemonic vernacular.
Pierre Obando
Nowhere
February 3 - March 28
Curator: Derrick Adams
The works of Pierre Obando operate with a minimal and graphic aesthetic that suggests blankness, and a lack of identity. The paintings challenge our tendency to place them in customary categories like abstraction or representation, and also emotional categories like sincere or ironic. His techniques of using dots to render his images give the impression that the image we are looking at has been enlarged. Like views under a microscope, over vision is enhanced while the identity of what is seen is obscured. These paintings offer no reassurance that what we perceive is an immediate entity, like a lyrical abstraction, or a typological example of that style of painting.
2008
White Lies, Black Noise
November 14, 2008 - January 24, 2009
Ricky Day
Anthony Fuller
Amin Rehman
LaToya Frazier
Shani Peters
Philip A. Robinson Jr.
The photography, sculpture, video and text-based work of Shani Peters, Ricky Day, Amin Rehman, LaToya Frazier, Anthony Fuller and Phillip Robinson are juxtaposed to demonstrate how source material is used to explore subculture and subtext, questioning social awareness and relevance. These six artists explore the relationship between communicator and communication and illuminate communal experiences—in both marginalized and non-marginalized communities—through iconic subject matter and technology.
Ashanti Chaplin
ROMANS 14:11 every tongue shall confess…
November 6-8
ROMANS 14:11 every tongue shall confess… is a multimedia installation created by Ashanti Chaplin, that consists of performance, sculpture, video, and sound. The content of the installation explores themes of voyeurism, mimetic desire and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The elements of the installation were created to construct a narrative. The assemblage of recorded and edited confessions combined with live confessions of attendees will create a story about that day, the space, and the people who occupy the space. The layering of confessions will ultimately act as an unreliable narrator that attempts to present a tale that is a reflection of contemporary times. It is the artist’s intent to explore the nature of public and private dialogue and the connection between the sacred and the sinister. As an artist Ashanti is interested in how repression, whether it is political or psychological, shapes the landscape of things desired and furthermore how those desires are realized and revealed in the collective conscience.
Off Color
September 23- November 1
Elizabeth Axtman
Andrea Chung
Russell Watson
Kareem Black
Pamela Sunstrum
Petrushka Bazin
Nekisha Durrett
Guest Curators: Kalia Brooks and Hank Willis Thomas
Off Color highlights the work of twelve emerging international artists who employ video, photography, and illustrative software to investigate the formative possibilities within the image-narrative complex. These artists encapsulate a generation of creative inquiry that reflects an impulse to purse a variety of technological media in order to construct images that challenge authorship and traditional visual representation.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
Mildendranthema Grandeflorum
September 23- November 1
Mildendranthema Grandeflorum, a piece that incorporates photography, video, installation and sculpture, is a performative work by Lyn-Kee-Chow who embodies a mythical character, appropriately called the flower thief. In dynamic and vividly colored photographs, Lyn-Kee-Chow transcends spatial and temporal parameters as we witness the flower thief treading grounds in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, the White House’s Rose Garden in Washington D.C., and Queens, New York. Although the artist has contextually anchored the protagonist’s location in Jamaica, it is simultaneously transnational in scope and speaks to how this legend can be applied universally.