Conceived for the 4th installment of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York City's curator-driven art fair-held during Armory Arts Week and running concurrently with The Armory Show today, March 3 - 8, 2015-AKArt curators Amy Kisch, Ricky Lee, Lizzie Jones, and Alexandra Wagle, present the group exhibition Transgressive Inversions + Identities. With its commitment to appropriating historic and culturally relevant non-traditional exhibition spaces, this year, SPRING/BREAK Art Show will inhabit a new location within the third and fourth floors of Skylight at Moynihan Station in the former offices of the Post Office at 307 West 31st Street at 8th Avenue.
Given the fair's 2015 theme
TRANSACTION, the artists featured in the group show investigate exchange-each through a different medium: sculpture, video, print, and performance.
Kristin McIver, Sean Fader,
Allie Pohl, Johanna Evans-Colley, Craig Damrauer, Ujin Lee, and
Katya Grokhovsky, respectively, explore identity production and consumption, technologically manufactured landscape and psyche, the invisibility of historical semiotics via palimpsest, and social contracts of intimacy and vulnerability. The aesthetic ebb and tide presented in their work, speaks to both explicit and implicit social contracts that underscore fiscal, emotional, political, spiritual, and communal daily experience. Additional support for
Transgressive Inversions + Identities is provided by
The Compleat Sculptor.
Through text-based objects, Kristin McIver explores the phenomenon of the "selfie"-the self-portrait of the digital age. McIver's Typecast series centers on her writings-with script-like descriptions staging a narrative that reads as a set of directives for a perfect self picture. Using conventions of screenwriting and the structures of cinema, the texts become a set of performative instructions, describing the posture of the selfie-sitters found on the internet. The artist carefully analyzes the poses and gestures as self-conscious acts, where the camera is substituted for the mirror-affixed on the opposite side of the text panels-representing vanity. Recognizing the acquisition of perceived status through accumulated "likes" and "friends," the appearance becomes a contest, very similar to a beauty pageant-ambiguous as to whether the role of judge falls upon the gaze of the viewer, or the self. McIver's Data Portrait (Selfie)-part of the artist's The Selfie Project, and also on view-transposes Facial Recognition Data (generated via social media networks such as Facebook), into colorful abstract data-portraits on canvas using acrylic paint. McIver transforms the personal data of a 'Faceprint'-a string of code used by computer algorithms recognizing individual's faces within photographs, and a form of biometric surveillance which identifies individuals with 97% accuracy (the same as that of human capacity)-into physical artworks.
Playing with performative aspects of self, Sean Fader's site-specific presentation of Backdrop for the Rebirth of the Collective Author ("There's a Whole Lot of Authorship Going On." - Richard Prince)-the artist's ongoing dialogue with Richard Prince about collective authorship and reappropriation after Fader's 2014 PULSE Art Fair performance of #wishingpelt-includes a large-scale piece featuring Fader, which Prince had printed on canvas, and included in hisNew Portraits show at Gagosian. Fader then created a diptych-adding a second panel with the words: "Our pictures are for each other #wishingpelt #collectiveauthorship #artselfie," when the work was displayed at Denny Gallery in December. The last hashtag explicitly invites viewers to photograph themselves with the piece, thus sending the image back to Instagram from whence it came. For Transgressive Inversions + Identities, the participatory installation will be accompanied by images from Fader's #wishingpelt performances-where visitors were invited to whisper a wish in his ear, run their hands through his chest hair, and seal their wish with a selfie tagged on Instagram with #wishingpelt. These exchanges were sealed by photographic contracts and shared publicly-fulfilling the demands of social media, while maintaining private moments of intimacy between Fader and his participants. During the course of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Fader will be present for #artselfies and us-ies during the opening and select hours of the show. In the spirit of TRANSACTION, the price of an #artselfie image will be a follow on Instagram.
Questioning the social constructs of communication as well as perfection, works by conceptual artist Allie Pohl will include a gender-based transactive installation of the artist's Ideal Womanand Peacocking series, engaged in a back-and-forth dialogue. Pohl created the Ideal Womanby digitally enhancing Barbie to fit Western society's ideal female measurements of 36-24-36. This avatar symbolizes anti-perfection and is repeated throughout Pohl's work in sculpture, video, ceramic, installation, and neon. Pohl's installations show how these normative conceptions of perfection can be represented by trends in pubic hair (the Chia series andJennifer Love Hewitt), bondage (Leather and Lace), and fashion-which chain us to socially constructed ideals (Caryatid: Ruby Slippers). In her Peacocking series, Pohl turned her attention 180 degrees to the male set of the species-playfully engaging how half of society markets themselves in today's over-amped, image-conscious times. Gathered via long-term personal interactions, and increasingly pervasive online dating tools such as Tinder, OkCupid, HowAboutWe, et al., Pohl focused on common themes men consistently tried to convey in order to "market" their image in everyday life situations. Her dissected male mannequin sculptures-history-laced fragments of mannequin torsos and parts, finished in the most popular car colors across the decades-highlight how society's conception of the ideal male form has transformed over time. Pohl's series of oversized, manly Merit Badges, based on the tradition developed by the Boy Scouts-celebrate the traits for which we seem to reward men in contemporary culture, such as Able to Show Emotion, Bro, Good in Bed, Athletic, Worldly, Successful, and Confident.
To further highlight the implicit and underlying monetary, emotional, and aesthetic transactions involved in these social constructions, a Pop-Up Shop of Pohl's Ideal Woman jewelry line-carried by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and MASS MoCA-sticker packs, and Merit Badge hats, along with Sean Fader's #wishingpelt t-shirts, necklaces, bomber jackets, and leggings will accompany the exhibition.
The video and photographic works presented by Johanna Evans-Colley, explore experimentation, process, materiality, modes of perception, and technology. Interested in the convergence and dissonance of high tech and low tech, old tech and new tech, she highlights what happens in between. Camera, Paper, Light, Pin; White Sands National Park; Horizon, Study: Clouds, Sea, Mountain, Sand; and Portrait with an 8x10 Negative, Camera, and Hotel Room. Setting: Los Angeles, are visual studies of/glimpses into illusionistic space. Invented horizons and vistas are created using only a camera and different paper/mylar/plastic/film. These materials are manipulated in front of the camera while filming to create horizon-like effects. There is no post-production of any kind. Everything has been done "in camera," or, more specifically, outside the camera by manipulating materials in front of the camera. Both the video, and the materials used in them, become art objects. Her work brings forth questions about illusion and artifice, while literally revealing the artists hand in the work. The films simultaneously destroy and create; presenting an illusion while divulging it's process. Conflicting notions of the celestial/mundane, high/low tech or handmade, flimsy/substantial, perfect/imperfect are also investigated in the videos and photographs. It is these dualities, the tensions between opposing forces or conceptions, that drive and inform Evans-Colley's practice.
Craig Damrauer's work is a mode of quasi-scientific research for a single-pointed explanation, feeling, or observation. In All the Black People in Citizen Kane, Damrauer spent over a year, hand erasing, frame by frame, the entirety of the most iconic movie of the 20th Century: Citizen Kane-with the exception of the 22 African-American people who appeared in uncredited, tangential roles in the film. Damrauer essentially takes what was once invisible in Orson Welles' masterpiece and flips it so it's unmistakable. The artist also worked to find the actors' names and as much biographical details as possible-done by digging through archives in various libraries. Pieces from newspapers and magazines will be presented along with stills from the film portion of the project. Damrauer's investigation of social contracts and semiotics continues in All The Japanese Words in John Hersey's Hiroshima, [a written piece published byThe New Yorker in 1946 and soon after as a book]. Hershey's novel-told in English for an American audience and punctuated by Japanese words: exclamations, observations, and cries for help-tells the story of six survivors of the August 6, 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan and details the first time this weapon was used on human beings. Erasing everything that surrounds these words, and leaving them in the exact place on the page they existed in the first edition of the book, Damrauer reveals a poem with a complete narrative arc. The trajectory of this poem is one of discovery, pain, confusion, bravery, and acceptance. Taken together, the words walk quickly up the spine and place a viewer abstractly and uncomfortably at the center of it all.
Equally engaged in a process of occupying and emptying the time-flow continuum of history, isUjin Lee's site-specific performance Small Rotunda. In this participatory performance, Lee fills the exhibition space with a common household item bojagi-traditional cloths collected from Lee's hometown of Seoul, South Korea, used for wrapping and transporting goods from time immemorial. The loosely folded and individually-tied bojagi pieces are placed on the floor one by one, contiguously in a clockwise motion, gradually building a bigger circle. When all the pieces have been placed-creating a kaleidoscopic circle 12 feet in diameter-Lee will exit and her silent, reparative, and somewhat meditative performance will end. Fair visitors will then be invited to take a piece of the work home, contributing to the slow disappearance of the installation-and reflective of the 2015 fair's curatorial theme TRANSACTION. The work continues a theme that Lee has been exploring in the past several years, mixing performance and public participation, with installation, in her large-scale site-specific projects-held at major New York public spaces, including Washington Square Park, Hudson River Park, Thomas Paine Park, and Tompkins Square Park. Lee's performances will take place Tuesday, March 3, 1-5pm and Saturday, March 7, 12-4pm.
Katya Grokhovsky also will engage exhibition attendees with her performative bodily explorations Slow Dance-a participatory, live, durational performance-intervention-andStatus Update-a durational action-intervention, in which digital social media status updates are transported into physical reality via acrylic-on-canvas banners. In Slow Dance, the audience is invited to slow dance with the artist and numerous performers. Based around the idea of a couple dancing or an old-fashioned mating ritual, the piece is an exploration of urban estrangement and intimacy, loneliness, and the persistent human desire to connect. Echoing this alienation, in Status Update, hand held banners are carried into public domain as signifiers of simulated privacy, exploring isolation in the digital age. Post-performance, post-eventual residue, and ephemera is exhibited and in itself re-constructed and created as evidential presence of the event. Grokhovsky's performances will take place Tuesday, March 3, 5-8pm; Wednesday, March 4, 5-7pm; Thursday, March 5, 4-7pm; Saturday, March 7, 4-7pm; andSunday, March 8, 3-6pm.
DATE/S + TIME/S + RSVP
Preview Day: Tuesday, March 3, 2015 [RSVP ESSENTIAL]
Collectors Preview: 1-4pm [RSVP HERE]
Press Preview: 3-5pm [RSVP HERE]
VIP Vernissage: 5-8pm [RSVP HERE]Regular Show Hours
Wednesday, March 4: 12-8pm
Thursday, March 5: 12-8pm
Friday, March 6: 12-8pm
Saturday, March 7: 12-8pm
Sunday, March 8: 12-6pm
TICKETS
Advance tickets to VIP Vernissage and regular show days available through Artful.ly HERE
Admission is $10 at the door or free with presentation of SPRING/BREAK Art Show VIP Card, VOLTA NY VIP Card, The ARMORY SHOW VIP Card, or PULSE VIP Card.
LOCATIONSPRING/BREAK Art ShowSkylight at Moynihan Station
307 West 31st Street
Entrance on 31st Street [at 8th Avenue]
