EVENTS


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Talks | Aug 9 2018 7pm
17ESSEX & RU:
Verica Kovacevska in Conversation with Lisa Sigal

Thursday, August 9, 2018
7pm (free and open to the public)
17ESSEX 17 Essex Street, New York, New York 10002
 

SCREENING & CONVERSATION with Verica Kovacevska & Lisa Sigal
 

Join us for a screening and conversation with Verica Kovacevska and Lisa Sigal. The talk will center on Kovacevska's three recent projects. Titled Future Nomads, Master Plan (Children’s Edition), and The House We Grew Up In. Each work focuses on the polemics of gentrification from multiple perspectives—activist, futurist, and autobiographical. Together the artists will discuss the socio-political, historical, and personal traumas sustained by those affected by the urban planning policies that brought about the development. The event is organized by 17ESSEX  in collaboration with Residency Unlimited. Kovacevska is currently an artist in residence from July through August 2018, where she is researching the rapid changes in her (temporary) Brooklyn neighborhood.
 

Verica Kovacevska uses various media (performance, video, installation, new technologies) to research and interact with the public urban spaces. She often creates projects that are participatory in nature.

In Master Plan (Children’s Edition), twenty children drew their proposals for the Kasernen-Areal, a former military complex in Zurich, which were submitted as proposals for the city’s forthcoming Master Plan. Their ideas not only highlighted the desire for a greener and more child-friendly environment in the city, but also advocated for the participation of children in the planning of land use.

Future Nomads used the existing infrastructure on a construction site, a web camera mounted on a crane, to start a dialogue about artists and their place in the city. Twelve artists who would soon lose their studios to a new luxury development (Europaallee) held letters that read ‘future nomads’ in front of the live webcam. The work reflected on the process of gentrification and the increasingly nomadic existence of the contemporary artist today.

Finally, The House We Grew Up In reflects on intimate childhood memories of Skopje‘s prefabricated architecture, as well as the changing face of the city as the prefabs make way for re-development. The work is the first of its kind to look into Skopje’s disappearing prefabricated homes, raising questions about their status and importance and more broadly the way that Skopje deals with its post-earthquake architectural heritage.

 

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Verica Kovacevska (b. 1982, Skopje, Macedonia) is a 2018 DENES / Young Visual Artist Awardee in Macedonia. She graduated in BA (Hons) Visual Arts with Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth in 2004, and achieved her MPhil in Arts, Culture and Education at the University of Cambridge in 2007. Since 2009 she lives and works in Zurich. In her work Kovacevska often uses elements of performance to create projects that are open to participation. She focuses on issues within the urban environment, from the use of personal space in public surroundings to more contemporary issues that plague our cities such as gentrification. She has taken part in many international exhibitions and festivals, such as Manifesta 11 (Zurich); Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (Moscow); 255 804 km2, Brot Kunsthalle (Vienna); Belgrade: Nonplaces, Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade); This Is Not A Gateway Festival (London); Re.act.feminism – Performance Art of the 1960’s and ‘70s Today, Akademie der Künste (Berlin). Among her solo exhibitions were Everyday Art, Art of the Everyday, Museum of Contemporary Art (Skopje) and Two and a Half Rooms, National Gallery of Macedonia (Skopje).

 

Lisa Sigal is an artist, curator and activist based in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum's Biennial 2008, The New Museum, MoMa/PS1 Museum, The Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox , the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect.3 International Biennial in New Orleans, the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Essl Museum in Vienna, LAXART space in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in Boston, The Mattress Factory and the most recent iteration of the Anyang Public Art Project, Korea among other venues. As part of the Percent for Art program Sigal’s art will be permanently displayed by the MTA. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Time Out and Modern Painters among other publications. Sigal is a 2015 Anonymous Was A Woman, grantee, 2012 Art Matters Foundation grantee and Creative Capital grantee, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee, a 2002 NYFA grantee and received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. Sigal has been an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, the Skowhegan School of Art, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989. Sigal is a founding artist/activist of Blights Out a coalition of people generating art, dialogue and action around the issues of blight, housing affordability and gentrification and in support of housing as a human right.
 

Blights Out (www.blightsout.org) is an activist, artist, and architect and citizen collective in New Orleans, cofounded by Lisa Sigal, formed to fight housing injustice.

Image: Verica Kovacevska, The House We Grew Up In, 2017 (detail)

 

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17ESSEX/RU: Screening & Conversation / Verica Kovacevska & Lisa Sigal, Thursday, August 9, 2018, 7pm

 


 
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Monday, April 23, 2018, 7pm          

e-flux lectures: Ala Younis, “The Works Were Limited: Baghdad and Her Architects

e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York, NY 10002, USA


The Saddam Hussein Gymnasium was designed by Le Corbusier, and metamorphosed through numerous iterations of plans over twenty-five years before it was inaugurated in Baghdad in 1980. Heavily based on archives, found material, and the stories of its protagonists, the artist’s project Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015) looked into the making of this gymnasium as part of performing plans for Baghdad as an expression of power, and at the men who appear in these plans as they gesture their parts in the denouements of the historical time. In 2018, the whole work was reproduced in an all-female voice. Titled Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad (2018), it located the place of women within these plans, looking beyond the dominant narratives to the unwritten local dynamics/legacies in and outside Iraq.

This lecture analyzes the words chosen by the female architects, interns, artists, poets, jury members, wives, and other protagonists who inspired, informed, and critiqued the research and presentation of Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad.

Ala Younis is an artist, trained as an architect in Amman. Research forms a big part of her practice, as do curating, collaboration, film, and book projects. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice, Gwangju, and Istanbul biennials, the New Museum Triennial (New York), and the Home Works Forum (Beirut) among other places. Her projects include Tin SoldiersAn Index of Tensional and Unintentional Love of LandPlan for Greater Baghdad, and most recently, Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad which opened at Delfina Foundation (London) and Art Jameel Project Space (Dubai) earlier this year, and will be on view at 17ESSEX in New York in April and May. Younis curated the first Kuwaiti Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; and the Museum of Manufactured Response to Absence and its interventions in Algeria, Kuwait, and Ramallah. She is co-founder of the non-profit publishing initiative Kayfa ta.
 

Image: from the working files of Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad by Ala Younis, installation view at 17ESSEX

 

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e-flux lectures: Ala Younis, “The Works Were Limited: Baghdad and Her Architects", Monday April 23rd, 2018, 7pm

 


 
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BOOK LAUNCH & CONVERSATION

with Bonnie Lucas & Vanessa Thill

Saturday, March 17th, 4:00-6:00pm
 

Please join us to celebrate the book launch of Bonnie Lucas' N is for Nice. The book is designed and published by Pacific in collaboration with the gallery, and in conjunction with Bonnie’s solo exhibition of new works (2016-2018). The book launch and signing will accompany a conversation with Bonnie Lucas and Vanessa Thill. The exhibition is extended through April 1st.
 

 "I grew up in Syracuse, in New York, in a time girls were very circumscribed...'sugar and spice and everything nice and that is what little girls are made of.' I had a pink bedroom filled with pretty dolls and lace curtains. I loved this stuff, but I also knew that as a girl and young woman, I was not particularly sugary or nice. In fact, just being sexual and growing up in that environment made me feel completely alien to what a girl was. And, my mom never once talked about things like menstruation or sex. So I was baffled and ashamed but went ahead anyway being the real girl that I was and I turned it all into art. I guess the strange shame and pain that I felt was transformed into images that are beautiful, strange, not nice, complicated, and funny. I think that is what life in general is like. You see, one is told what one should be and do and feel but that is only one part of the story. I kind of knew when I was young that I had a story to tell and I wanted to tell it. I embraced the Feminist Movement in the late 1960’s and felt vindicated and powerful." 

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Bonnie Lucas (b. 1950, Syracuse) is a New York-based artist. She earned her BA in Art History at Wellesley College, and her MFA from Rutgers University. Lucas' work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad; recent exhibitions include 99 Cents or Less at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit and a solo exhibition of works from 1980s at JJT New York in 2017. A 40-year survey retrospective of her work opened at Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, New York, in 2014. Lucas' work has been reviewed in a number of publications including The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artforum, The New Yorker, ArtSlant, ARTnews, The Village Voice, Womens Wear Daily, Office Magazine, Urban Memory Project, TimeoutArts Magazine, and The East Village Eye.

Vanessa Thill is a writer, curator, and multimedia sculptor. She has contributed critical writing to Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze, among others. Since 2014, she has produced exhibitions, publications, and other projects as Sorry Archive. Her visual work has recently been exhibited in New York at Dispersed Holdings, Bible Gallery, and Nicelle Beauchene, as well as No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. She avidly collects liquid and powdered ingredients of all varieties, creating evaporative compositions on paper that are interlaced with knots or other hardware and coated with resin. Her work seeks out porous relational beings, non-human systems, and energetic flows and leakages. 
 

Pacific is a New York-based design and publishing studio with a focus on print publications and ephemera.
Quote: Lucas Bonnie. “Bonnie Lucas Interview” livingcontent.online 
Image: Good Times, Bonnie Lucas, 2016. plaster, purchased objects, oil paint, 9 ¼ x 8 inches. Photo: Bridget Casey

 

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Book Launch &  Conversation with  Bonnie Lucas & Vanessa Thill, Saturday March 17th, 2018, 4-6pm

 


 
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Utopia Free

Conversation with 

Lisa Sigal & Rachael Rakes

 Friday  15 December  7-8:30pm

 

Join us for an evening of conversation with Lisa Sigal and Rachael Rakes, presented in conjunction with Utopia Free. The talk will revolve around Sigal's new plaster and cardboard works, which translate layers of architectural material into abstractions to reflect on "property" as a trait, a condition, something owned or possessed, and property rights. Together they will discuss contempoarary possibilities for addressing political and historical phenomena through abstracted forms. Utopia Free is on view through December 22nd.

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“Curbside” is a series cast from, with, and on cardboard. Splayed and sprayed sections of the exterior and interior of shipping boxes hold an inventory of marks, branding, shipping labels, remnants of packing tape, stains and effects of weather. Like spongy palimpsests, the cardboard surfaces have absorbed impressions of past use, tracing records of times and places, and raising questions about systems of distribution. While remaining formally abstract, the graffiti-like scratches and outlines of fences, beds, and carts diagram the absence of an object. Multiple frames, filled with images hugging their edges, nest inside each composition, serving to merge the container with the contained. Imagery and its support contribute to a logic of material transformation by referring us to a cycle of transference and exchange outside the studio.

Mat (Utopia Free), part of “Curbside,” is cast from cardboard pulp and ochre pigment, and resembles a flattened cardboard box. The piece functions like a shield or amulet to ward off the effects of capitalism. This hybrid image/object evaluates the things we prize as fugitive impressions, captured in a process on their way to the garbage, or renewed for future circulation in defense of meaning.

“Break It Down” is a series of wall sections possessing the characteristics and appearance of blighted houses. The term “blight,” originally used to describe diseased and browning plants, has been appropriated by the state to describe dwellings occupied by predominantly low-income people of color. By focusing on cosmetic blight when describing individual or community-wide disinvestment, the state deflects attention from structural classism and racism.*

The plasters in “Break It Down” were made by sandwiching a core of plaster between sheets of heavy and translucent paper, mimicking the mechanical fabrication of drywall. These plasters explore a process of practical and experiential sensations of time and place, recorded on the most common and ubiquitous material. Painterly incidences of color, density, and luminosity alter the physical nature of the materials. Taken together, the works investigate how art can challenge set ideas about value, property, structure and containment. 

*This definition of “blight” is featured in a glossary of development terms, which will be highlighted in Blights Out For Mayor, a billboard project in New Orleans. Blights Out (www.blightsout.org) is an activist, artist, and architect and citizen collective in New Orleans, cofounded by Lisa Sigal, formed to fight housing injustice. 

 

Lisa Sigal is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum's Biennial 2008, The New Museum, MoMa/PS1 Museum, The Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox , the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect .3 International Biennial in New Orleans, the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Essl Museum in Vienna, LAXART space in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in Boston, The Mattress Factory and the most recent iteration of the Anyang Public Art Project, Korea among other venues. As part of the Percent for Art program Sigal’s art will be permanently displayed by the MTA. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Time Out and Modern Painters among other publications. Sigal is a 2015 Anonymous Was A Woman, grantee, 2012 Art Matters Foundation grantee and Creative Capital grantee, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee, a 2002 NYFA grantee and received the Joan MItchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998.  Sigal has been an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, the Skowhegan School of Art, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989.  Sigal is a founding artist/activist of Blights Out a coalition of people generating art, dialogue and action around the issues of blight, housing affordability and gentrification and in support of housing as a human right.

Rachael Rakes is a curator, critic, and teacher from New York City. She currently serves as a section Editor for the Brooklyn Rail, Editor at Large for Verso Books, and Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Rakes has recently contributed criticism to Art-Agenda, Artforum, and Ocula, among other publications. She has recently organized exhibitions for A.I.R., ArtCenter/South Florida, The Knockdown Center, International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), Malmö Konsthall, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Rakes is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and currently teaches a critical history of socially-engaged art at The New School. She has recently been a Curator in Residence for the CPR: Mexico program, an Arts Writer in Residence for Contemporary Art Stavanger, a Fellow with the Bruce High Quality Foundation MFU in Miami, and Researcher in Residence at Squeaky Wheel Media Art Center. With Leo Goldsmith, Rakes is at work on a book on radical filmmaker Peter Watkins, which received a 2015 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. From 2010-2013, Rakes was the Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, and from 2012-2014 she co-directed Heliopolis Project Space in Brooklyn.

Image: Curbsides (cracked export) / Curbsides (orange salvage) -Installation view: Utopia Free at MILLER, laminated painted cardboard, handmade cardboard paper, each panel 60 x 40 inches, 2016. Courtesy MILLER. 

 

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Utopia Free: Conversation with Lisa Sigal & Rachael Rakes, Friday December 15th, 2017, 7-8:30pm

 


 
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TIME PASSES

11.24.2017

Julia Bland & Noah Garabedian on loom and bass

with Julia’s reading of To The Light House by Virginia Woolf.

 

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Time Passes, Julia Bland & Noah Garabedian on loom and bass, with Julia’s reading of To The Light House by Virginia Woolf. In collaboration with Know Wave.

 


 
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Things To Say At Night

Reading & Cooking by Julia Bland

Sunday  October 15th  6-8pm

 

Join us for an evening of reading and cooking by Julia Bland, in conjunction with her solo exhibition Things To Say At Night. Julia will be serving her home-made soup and reading "Part II: Time Passes" from Virginia Wolf's To The Light HouseThings To Say At Night is a solo exhibition of new works by Julia Bland organized by MILLER in collaboration with Stellar Projects. The exhibition is on view until October 29th.

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The shapes I use come from the loom, my body, history, from use and reuse.  Like the way a memory becomes a story, through unconscious sifting and longing.  Meaning rises as the shape of your hands, or light through the trees.  Stories are woven from these fragments.  They have their own aim in mind:  to warn, to revel, to end.

Things To Say At Night pursues darkness.  At night, edges soften, lines are crossed, secrets flow.  Images appear in shadows.  Dreams unwind the day’s constant turning.  Eternally bound and distinct, they pour their contents from one glass to the other, altering the clear shape of thought.  As apparent clarity falls deeper into shadow, these works seek night as the equal half of day. 

-JB

Julia Bland earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and her MFA from Yale in 2012.  She has been an artist in residence at The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, Lighthouse Works, Yaddo, The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  She has been awarded The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, The Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Travel Fellowship, and the Florence Leif Award.  She has exhibited with On Stellar Rays, The NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and Asya Geisberg Gallery in NYC, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, CES Gallery in Los Angeles, Porsesh Institute(Anahita Gallery) in Tehran, and Motus Fort in Tokyo.

 

Image: Spine; Wicked Listen; The Kettle Black (detail), 2017, 25 x 60 x 3 inches, Burnt canvas, linen threads, denim, ink, oil paint. Courtesy the artist and MILLER. 

 

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Things To Say At Night: Reading by Julia Bland, Sunday October 15th, 2017, 6-8pm

 


 
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Kristen Jensen

Performance: Some Grace ll

Thursday  July 20th, 2017  6-8pm

 

On the occasion of the final weeks of her solo exhibition at MILLER, Kristen Jensen will stage a partially scripted, partially improvised movement conceived specifically for the space of the gallery. Seeking to expand on the performative aspect of the exhibition, Jensen will enter and then leave the gallery at an intentionally slow pace while awkwardly handling her sculpture, Weighty Ornament llI, treating it as both an inanimate vessel and another living body. While some movements will be predetermined, others will unfold spontaneously as a result of the growing discomfort of this absurd exercise in duration. Lighter, Later is on view at MILLER through Sunday, July 30th.

 

Kristen Jensen / "Lighter, Later

June 4 – July 30, 2017

“If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.”  ― Jun'ichirō  Tanizaki, “In Praise of Shadows”
Been keeping my hands busy, occupied: it helps to dull my thoughts. I’ve never owned a rug, rather preferring to feel the uneven floorboards beneath my calloused feet.
I usually fall asleep in the clothing I’ve worn all day then change in the morning. It’s not because I’m too fatigued but because I feel more comfortable shrouded than naked. I prefer a well worn pillow with a freshly laundered case.
"Lighter, Later", a black hole, hand braided rug with embedded ceramic objects. These nuggets bound by material from used clothing, a collection of disparate use and histories. A personal meditation on compromised comfort, both physical and mental. Viewers are invited to walk on it, resulting in this transference of experience both emotional and physical.
Observing this activity from the window vantage point is another sculpture: a ceramic vessel with questionable functionality barely supported by a soft totem. Both spectator and participant in this production, it struggles to remain upright.

Kristen Jensen is an artist living and working in New York City. She received her BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University and her MFA from Hunter College in Combined Media. Jensen's practice is interdisciplinary, often taking quotidian experiences and domestic objects and reinterpreting them in diverse mediums. The artist’s desire for control and perfection is often challenged by both the unpredictability of the materials she chooses and the traces of the artist’s hand. This tension is reflected in the flaws, cracks, and subtle finishes that transform everyday objects into things both pathetic and poetic. She has exhibited domestically and internationally at Simone Subal, Wallspace, Nicelle Beauchene, Norte Maar and Bortolami Gallery among others.

 

Image detail: Kristen Jensen, "Weighty Ornament lll", 2017, (detail). Courtesy of MILLER and the artist. 

 

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Kristen Jensen, Performance: Some Grace llThursday  July 20th, 2017, 6-8pm

 


 
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2265

Closing Reception

Adelita Husni-Bey & Amanda Parmer in conversation

Thursday, June 1st, 7:00-9:00pm

 

Please join us for a closing reception and conversation with artist Adelita Husni-Bey and Vera List Center for Art and Politics Curator, Amanda Parmer, on deferred notions of community, radical pedagogy, habitability, the question of origin and a trip to Mars. 
 

*Tell me about your hands
*Tell me about what happens when you are hungry
*How long ago has the Perpetual War ended? Has it ended?
*Teach me how to say I love you with this technology?
*How does this society ‘know’?
*Where do they keep the things they ‘know’?

These are some of the questions that structured a workshop produced in collaboration with Authoring Action, a group of teen authors headed by writer Nathan Ross Freeman and held at the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in January 2015. The workshop explored capitalist colonialist futures and the prospect of populating Mars through writing exercises and experimental pedagogical practice. The resulting 2 channel installation displays both the performance crafted by members of Authoring Action in collaboration with the artist and parts of the workshop, both held in an empty theater. A surreal to and fro across deserts and poisonus landscapes, the promise of digital sociality through genetic modification and a ‘perpetual war’ structure the performance, while the workshop screen centers on the ways we understand words such as development vs. imperialism, or uninhabited vs. empty and the socio-historical lineage of these concepts from the ‘outset’ to the year 2265. 

 

Adelita Husni-Bey (Italy-1985) lives in New York. She stages workshops and produces publications, radio broadcasts, archives and exhibitions focused on using collectivist and non-competitive pedagogical models within the framework of urban studies. In her 10 years practicing as both an artist and a pedagogue Adelita has worked with activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, students and teachers on unpacking the complexity of collectivity. To make good what can never be made good: what we owe each other. Recent solo exhibitions include: A Wave in the Well, Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016, Movement Break, Kadist foundation, 2015, Playing Truant, Gasworks, 2012. She has participated in The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2016, Ennesima, Triennale di Milano, 2015, Undiscovered Worlds, the High Line, 2015, Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia museum, 2014, Utopia for Sale?, MAXXI museum, 2014 and has held workshops and lectures at ESAD Grenoble, 2016, The New School, 2015, Sandberg Institute, 2015, Museo del 900, 2013, Temple University, 2013, Birkbeck University, 2011 amongst other spaces. She is a 2012 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow and will be representing Italy at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Amanda Parmer's writing, archival and curatorial work focuses on developing community through pedagogy and our elected affinities. She was a 2009-10 Whitney Independent Study Program Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow and is currently the Curator at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and co-curator of Maria Thereza Alves' Seeds of Change: Botany and Colonization. She has presented exhibitions, programs and events in collaboration with e-flux, the New School, The New York Armory and Volta Shows, The Kitchen, and Cleopatra's, Brooklyn and Berlin. She has most recently published "Yoko Ono Shaking the Sign" for the Henie Onstad Kunstcenter's A Pendaflex, "Tunisian-Lampedusian Migrants as Commodities" for The Ocean After Nature organized by Independent Curators International; "Our Human Entanglements with Corporeal and Terrestrial Grounds" for Marie Kølbæk Iversen's If the Earth Were a Body Borders Would be Wounds; and "Interval" for the Dictionary of the Possible. In 2014 she initiated Parmer, a curatorial project looking at matrilineal relations that has taken place at 464 Quincy, Abrons Arts Center and Sunview Luncheonet. 

 

Image detail: video still, 2265, 2 channel video installation, HD video, color, sound, 2015. Courtesy MILLER, New York and Galleria Laveronica, Modica.

 

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2265, Closing Reception: Adelita Husni-Bey & Amanda Parmer in conversation, Thursday June 1st, 2017, 7-9pm

 


 
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CATALOGUE RELEASE & CONVERSATION

Leeza Meksin & Benjamin Sutton

Sunday, March 26tH, 2017  5:00-7:00pm

 

Please join us for a catalogue release and conversation with artist Leeza Meksin and art critic Benjamin Sutton, in conjunction with her exhibition / site-specific installation Purse Strings and Body Bags. The exhibition has been extended until April 2nd.

Leeza Meksin gives gray inanimates the chance to become charismatic drag performers, exploding static categories into brilliant shards. A humdrum building gussies itself up in colorful spandex; a gloomy basement room turns into a psychedelic cave oozing sexual innuendo; a sculpture is disguised as a collage disguised as a painting. Genders, mediums, structures, patterns, textures collide and burst into something new. Soft mesh becomes a rigid barrier; a roll of tulle is a man’s fat lip. –Sophie Pinkham

 

LEEZA MEKSIN is a New-York based interdisciplinary artist. Born in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Meksin has created site-specific installations at The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City (2016), The Kitchen, NYC (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015), Brandeis University, Waltham (2014), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project at Artspace, New Haven, CT (2012). Meksin’s work has been featured in BOMB magazine, TimeOut Chicago and Chicago Tribune, among others. She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist grant (2015) and the co-founder and director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, NY, founded in 2013. Meksin has been teaching at Columbia University School of the Arts since 2015.

BENJAMIN SUTTON is an art critic, journalist, and curator who lives in Brooklyn. His articles on public art, artist documentaries, the tedium of art fairs, and other divisive issues have appeared on Hyperallergic (where he is the news editor) as well as in The L Magazine, Modern Painters, Art+Auction, artnet News, BKLYNR, and Brooklyn Magazine. He has curated exhibitions at the Lower East Side Printshop, Field Projects, the Spring Break Art Show, and the Gowanus Loft.


Image detail: Leeza Meksin, Purse Strings and Body Bags, Site-Specific installation at MILLER, 2017.

 

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Purse Strings and Body Bags, Catalogue Release & Conversation: Leeza Meksin & Benjamin Sutton, Sunday March 26th, 2017, 5-7pm

 


 
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SCREENING NIGHT

Jane, Grace, and Emily

Amanda Friedman & Lauren Anderson

Saturday, January 14th, 5-7pm

 

Throughout Amanda Friedman's solo show at MILLER, she has been working with Lauren Anderson in the gallery at night. Together, they made a video from within and with the space of the exhibition, playing with lights and reflections. What they have generated activates the installation, and pushes Friedman's idea of time-based painting.

Anderson and Friedman have also invited several artists they are in conversation with to screen their short videos. The screening will begin at 5:30pm and features: Lauren Anderson & Amanda Friedman, Josh Brand, Heather Anne Halpert, Kate Ruggeri, and Alina Tenser.

 

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Screening Night: Jane, Grace, and Emily / Amanda Friedman & Lauren Anderson, Saturday January 14th, 2017, 5-7pm

 


 
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DWELL

ARTIST TALK

Corydon Cowansage in conversation with Henri Neuendorf

Saturday, November 19th, 4:30pm

 

Please join us for an artist talk with Corydon Cowansage, moderated by writer Henri Neuendorf, in conjunction with her exhibition Dwell. The exhibition has been extended until November 27th.

The paintings presented in Dwell explore the psychology of space and the relationships between the built environment, landscape, and abstraction. Using repeating forms like blades of grass, roof shingles, bricks, and leaves, she makes optical, meditative abstractions that creep into representation. Forms also reference the body—bricks are fleshy, leaves have veins, grass stands in for hair or fingers, and dirt becomes skin. Shapes almost touch, poke, rub.

 

Corydon Cowansage (b. 1985, Philadelphia) received her MFA in painting from RISD and BA in art from Vassar College. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Her paintings have been exhibited most recently at Deli Projects (Basel, Switzerland), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY), James Graham & Sons (New York, NY), harbor (Brooklyn and New York, NY), and projekt722 (Brooklyn, NY). She lives and works in New York.

Henri Neuendorf is a journalist and critic specializing in contemporary art. Neuendorf is an associate editor at artnet News.

 

Image detail: Corydon Cowansage, Dwell at MILLER, 2016. Photo credit: Kirsten Kilponen

 

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Dwell, Artist Talk: Corydon Cowansage in conversation with Henri Neuendorf, Saturday November 19th, 2016, 4:30pm

 


 
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B A D  K O R E A N

BOOK SIGNING

Saturday, October 8th, 4-7pm

 

Please join us for the book signing of Kyung Me's Bad Korean at MILLER.

Bad Korean is a series of drawings about a naïve young woman looking for love in New York. She discovers certain forms of love, but also a toiling agony and an inescapable boredom. The series follows a linear narrative thread, existing as the artist’s pictorial diary from 2013 to 2014.

The series title Bad Korean carries multiple meanings; standing for the artist’s exploration of herself, as well as her personal feelings of disappointment, being a second generation American raised within a family of Korean immigrants. Through drawing, Kyung Me expresses her dismay, and feelings of lovelessness experienced in her daily life in the city. The name of the series also refers to the titles of each drawing, which Kyung Me purposefully and awkwardly translates on Google, not knowing the language of her ancestors.

 

Kyung Me (b. 1991) is currently enrolled in MFA Painting at Yale University. The Bad Korean series was published into a book earlier this year.

 

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Kyung Me, Bad Korean: Book Signing, Saturday October 8th, 2016, 4-7pm