Category: Uncategorized

Tauba Auerbach

The Artist’s Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, NY

April 12 – June 1
Opening Reception: April 12, 6-8pm

Tauba Auerbach wants to know how matter and energy flow; how rhythms and patterns emerge from and structure these flows; and how electromagnetic flows in the body and brain amount to life and consciousness. To investigate these things, she pours through scientific journals, attends philosophical conferences, and studies YouTube videos on anatomy, magnetism, and molecular biology. But Auerbach is equally engaged by heterodox theories and indigenous wisdom—panpsychism, traditional medicinal practices, ancient string games—viewing the path of knowledge as a spiral that always doubles back to confirm and revive neglected or rejected perspectives. She approaches all these subjects as an artist, embracing art’s subjectivity and taking bias as a data point in her investigation of the world.

Auerbach’s exploration of fluid dynamics is evident in her Extended Object paintings (2018– ), which freeze a field of cascading droplets that appear to vibrate, swirl, and eddy, though they are motionless. Her Ligature Drawings (2017– ) elaborate on the connections between flow patterns and traditions of ornament, following a pulsing line through improvisational—at times sonically amplified and performed—calligraphy. “I don’t want to just draw the rhythm,” she says; “I want to be the rhythm, to sense the rhythms I already am.”

Auerbach’s latest works—her first kinetic sculptures—push this idea further. Rather than picturing the rhythms of fluids and forms, the sculptures are themselves dynamic, allowing a set of key gestures to unfold over time. A soap film fills the central opening of a mechanism referencing Auerbach’s fascination with fascia (the meshwork of connective tissue that surrounds muscles, organs, glands, and blood vessels) and the interstitium (the newly discovered structure of fluid-filled compartments that extends throughout the body and constitutes one of its largest organs). Another pair of sculptures exhibits different types of spin: exploring the dynamism of asymmetry and symmetry, AC and DC currents. A YouTube video library offers an array of approaches to capturing or modeling the microscopic forms and movements at the heart of Auerbach’s current curiosity.

Koyo Kouoh, Goldberg Visiting Curator Lecture
Hunter MFA Studios, Second Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY
May 15, 7pm

 

 

Malin Abrahamsson: Spaceholders

Thomas Hunter Project Space
930 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY

Through May 18
Opening Reception: April 25, 5-7pm

Thomas Hunter Project Space is pleased to present SPACEHOLDERS, a solo exhibition by Malin Abrahamsson:

“At the heart of my practice lies an interest in transformation: the process through which a thing, place, state, or being changes into something entirely new. The organic world is defined by such metamorphosis, but profound existential change is no less vital to human life. Driven by intuition and experimentation, my current work in Spaceholders conceptually revolves around the idea, shape, and purpose of the vessel. The small-scale mixed-media objects are wonky and impractical containers for everything that is important. Drawn to ceramics for its transformative qualities, I love listening in on the ceaseless chatter between color, contrast, texture, and form.”

Emily Jacir, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, Second Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

May 10, 7pm

Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker. Born in Bethlehem in 1973, Jacir spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia, attending high school in Italy. She attended Memphis College of Art and graduated with an art degree. She divides her time between Rome, Italy and Ramallah.

Jacir works in a variety of media including film, photography, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East since 1994, holding solo exhibitions in places including New York City, Los Angeles, Ramallah, Beirut, London and Linz.

Active in the building of Ramallah’s art scene since 1999, Jacir has also worked with various organizations including the A. M. Qattan Foundation, al-Ma’mal Foundation and the Sakakini Cultural Center. She has been involved in creating numerous projects and events such as Birzeit’s Virtual Art Gallery. She also founded and curated the first International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002.She curated a selection of shorts; Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 – 1982) which went on tour in 2007. Between 2000 – 2002 she curated several Arab Film programs in NYC with Alwan for the Arts including the first Palestinian Film Festival in 2002. She works as a full-time professor at the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine since it opened its doors in 2006 and she also served on its Academic Board from 2006 through 2012. Jacir led the first year of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut (2011-2012) and created the curriculum and programming after serving on the founding year of the Curricular Committee from 2010-2011. (Wikipedia)

do it (in school)

Hunter East Harlem Gallery
2180 3rd Avenue at 119th Street
New York, NY

April 12 – June 1
Opening Reception: April 12, 4-8pm

Works created by New York City High School students studying at Art and Design High School in Manhattan; Fordham High School for the Art in Bronx; Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School in Queens; Manhattan/Hunter Science High School; PS7 8th Graders in East Harlem, among others.

In 1993, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist together with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, conceived do it, an exhibition based entirely on artists’ instructions that could be followed to create temporary artworks to be displayed as an exhibition. do it challenges traditional exhibition formats, questions authorship, and champions art’s ability to exist beyond a single gallery space. Beginning 26 years ago with 12 sets of instructions, do it has grown to include instructions from 400 artists, and shown in more than 150 art centers in over 15 countries.

Building on this history, the latest version of the exhibition is called do it (in school)and is a selection of instructions that form a study-based curriculum for high school students.

 

 

 

Dawoud Bey, Zabar Lecture

Hunter MFA Studios, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

April 17, 7pm

Raúl de Nieves, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

April 10, 7pm

Alvin Lucier, The Queen of the South
and Ron Kuivila, Sparkline, with acceleration

The Artists’ Institute
132 E. 65th Street
New York, NY

April 5, 7pm

Alvin Lucier, The Queen of the South (1972)

Drawing on the experiments of 18th century physicist and musician Ernst Chladni and 20th century physician Hans Jenny, Alvin Lucier’s The Queen of the South  attempts a direct visualization of sonic vibration. In 1787, Chladni drew a violin bow along the edge of a brass plate sprinkled with a thin layer of sand. The vibrating surface bounced the granules into symmetrical forms—stars, waves, grids, and labyrinths—he termed “sound figures.” Nearly two centuries later, Jenny published the book Cymatics, which further explored and photographically documented the effects of sound vibrations on various substances. Lucier’s score calls for performers to sing, speak, or play electronic or acoustical instruments to activate responsive surfaces strewn with fine materials in order to make visible the effects of sound. The title is drawn from a figure in alchemy, which attempts the transmutation of one substance into another. The Queen of the South will be performed by Ron Kuivila.

Ron Kuivila, Sparkline, with acceleration (2003)

A spark is the visual analogue of a sound: it appears briefly and then disappears, leaving a trace in the memory. Curiously, the sound of a spark has no “body.” Instead of vibrating (pushing and pulling the air), it literally tears the air via a flow of electrons. For Sparkline, with acceleration, Kuivila records sparks as they jump across parallel wires and then plays back these sounds at a slowly increasing rate. Initially sounding five octaves below, the sound of the spark gradually accelerates until it is several octaves higher than the initial sound and stops.

This event is free, but advance registration is required and space is limited. Please RSVP here.

Performance: shawné michaelain holloway
part of Refiguring the Future

205 Hudson Gallery
205 Hudson Street, 2nd Floor Flex Space
New York, NY

March 28, 7pm

Free and open to the public

_.Scheduled(VariableRatio):secondary-conditioned-immediateReinforcement(s)-handlerSearch1_DrillAndPracticeVERSION2.exe, is an interactive experiment in operant conditioning to articulate the structure of intimacies inherent in behavioral training.

In a training session for a human puppy and her handler, positive and negative reinforcements are enacted in a circle between audience members and the performer. Engaged together through a system of exchange, they mutually agree on how to choreograph the giving and receiving of a reward. As rewards and punishments offer potentially precarious and playful communication, this choreographic transfer of power is an act of BDSM. Through this temporary relationship, called “pick-up play,” viewers witness a visceral dance that asks questions about how consent is communicated, what qualifies as violence, and how desire can manifest.

Karen Tepaz, Loose Forms

Thomas Hunter Project Space
930 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY

March 29 – April 20

Thomas Hunter Project Space is pleased to present LOOSE FORMS, a solo exhibition by Karen Tepaz.  This exhibition explores the expressive potential of object and the complex spaces that develop when form, texture and color are blended creating a new place between the blurred lines.

Tepaz continues her investigation of form and material while experimenting with the scale and presentation of her work.  Tepaz works the balance between surface treatment and color selection and draws correlations from her influences of flowers, language the body and sounds of fluidity.  Both the work and the viewer are free to shift and transform perspective at every angle as each form unfolds naturally, creating an environment for mindful contemplation.

Karen Tepaz, born in Los Angeles, CA, holds an M.F.A in Sculpture from Yale University School of Art and a B.F.A in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach.  Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Sardine gallery, (Brooklyn, NY) CACTTUS gallery (Long Beach, CA), and group shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA) The Shirley Fiterman Art Center, BMCC (NY,NY), The Gallery ATLAS (Newburgh, NY), BOMB POP-UP (Brooklyn, NY), Basement Projects (Santa Ana, CA) among others. In 2018 Tepaz co-curated “Flat Touch” and “In Between the Lines” in Steuben Gallery at Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY). Tepaz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

 

Grace Weaver, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA, Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

April 3, 7pm