Chelsea Knight
On Being an Artist and a Mother
by Alicia Eler
What does it mean, bodily, physically, emotionally, mentally, and perhaps spiritually, to be what Simone de Beauvoir deemed “the second sex,” to be a woman and, moreover, to be a mother? These are questions that Chelsea Knight explores in her latest video work “The Breath We Took” (2013), now on view at Aspect Ratio.
The 22-minute video blends Knight’s philosophical musings about motherhood with a curious montage of personal biography, fictional references, and documentary-style interviews with her mother and grandmother about how they married and when they became mothers — or became aware of their roles as mothers. These conversations about motherhood and the blood relationships between generations of women are cast against the social construct of marriage mostly through other women’s and the artist’s own weddings. The video itself utilizes a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness aesthetic style, making this work flowing and fluid — like fragments of poetry snipped from the page and translated into the moving image.
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DESHORAS
by Yann Gerstberger
Date: April 20th – June 15th
Opening: April 20th 4:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: Galerie Alain Gutharc 7, rue Saint-Claude Paris 75003
For more information click here
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD
Opening : May 10th 7-9pm
Show runs till June 19th 2013
Location: 10-61 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11106 (near PS1 MOMA)
Curator Sarah Walko
Artists Eve Bailey, Rachel Bernstein, Ryan V Brennan, Diana Heise, Roxanne Jackson, Coralina Meyer, Sono Osato, Malingering Uvula, Gabriela Vainsencher, Camilla Ha and Michael Merck
The exhibition “The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague” permanently on display at the Kafka Museum was the impetus for this exhibition. Kafka’s relationship with cities through his surreal lens coupled with his imagination and during the context of his time brought the simultaneous nightmare/dreamscape of the budding technological age into the realm of the real in his stories, projecting super psyches onto our cities.
The artists in this exhibition are all exploring the surreal space of our time now. Large cultural and philosophical shifts due to massive environmental and economic challenges and the level of technology we are reaching and working with daily is all ushering in new branches of consciousness and new approaches to how we live. The artists, like Kafka did, address our current cosmic predicament in various ways; our relationship with nature, our relationship to self within today’s technological tools, and with objects of alchemical/shamanic ritual and ceremony. They are writing out the dreamscapes of our now and a vision of the future that lacks the pasts’ patriarchal aesthetic and imagines the opening up of a future with more feminine traits, including acts of reclamation and the healing of our past and ourselves within our cities.
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THIS SPRING CHECK OUT FOUR EVENTS BY ARTIST TAMAR ETTUN
Do it (outside) Socrates Sculpture Park
Curated by: Hans Ulrich Obrist
May 12, 2013 – July 7, 2013
Opening: May 12, 2013 (2:00pm – 6:00pm)
Tamar Ettun Presents The Lion Who Liked Strawberries
The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
Art Production Fund
MAY 16 – JUNE 16, 2013
Hours: Wednesday – Sunday | 6 – 11PM
Artist talk-Tamar Ettun in conversation with curator/writer Naomi Lev
JUNE 27, 2013 at 6:30pm
Hosted by ICI-Independent Curators International
LMCC Open Studios
MAY 25-26
JULY 13-14
For more information click here
DECOLONIZING THE ‘COLD’ WAR. BE.BOP 2013. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS
DECOLONIZING THE ‘COLD’ WAR is the first Afropean performance showcase and will be accompanied by roundtable discussions on the aesthetic legacy of the Black Power movement in the radical imagination of Diaspora artists. Parallel to this, its influence in liberation and decolonization struggles in the Global South during the so-called “Cold” War will be approached from the continuities of coloniality. According to Enrique Dussel, a liberation philosopher and decolonial thinker, this war was never “cold” in the Global South.
After its outstanding debut last year, this new edition of the series BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS will be inaugurated with an all-day screening commemorating Malcolm X´s birthday at the Hackesche Höfe Kino, in cooperation with AfricAvenir.
Date: May 19-23.2013
Time: 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM (PDT)
Art Labour Archives & Kultursprünge im Ballhaus Naunynstraße gemeinnützige GmbH Berlin, Germany
Memphis Social: an apexart franchise exhibition curated by Tom McGlynn for Beautiful Fields: Projects
Memphis Social draws upon a “social turn” in contemporary art and performance that has influenced curatorial criteria for some time now. In her 2006 essay, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” art historian Claire Bishop critiques contemporary, “socially engaged” practices as being philosophically based in a neo-Platonic idealism which proposes ideal solutions that don’t reflect contingent reality. She explains that this attitude generates, “homilies (that) unwittingly push us back towards a platonic regime where art is valued for its truthfulness and educational efficacy—not for inviting us to confront the more complicated considerations of our predicament.” Bishop observes how contemporary artists have responded to this tendency, writing, “Instead of extracting art from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic and fusing it with social praxis, the most interesting art today exists between two vanishing points: “art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art.” While Bishop addresses artists’ strategies for making relevant work, the philosopher and cultural theorist Jacques Ranciere positions both artist and audience as “emancipated spectators” jointly escaping the hypnotic trap of the mediated spectacle. Ranciere suggests that we not merely react to what he calls “partitions of the sensible” that perpetuate a fractured sense of society, and that a refusal to do so might lead to a more profound experience of both aesthetics and ethics. Memphis Social seeks to combine, and critique, both of these ideas in an exhibition that examines how to present artwork that is truly socially engaged with its environment and audience. The project is a temporary intentional community of artists and cultural organizations gathered together to form a contingent society that addresses combined aesthetic and ethical concerns.
Date: May 10th through 18th
For more information about the exhibition click here
Also check out Canadian based Studio Beat’s piece about their NYC visit with Suzanne Broughel here
Opening events: May 8–11, 2013
Artistic director: Piotr Krajewski
WRO Art Center director: Viola Kutlubasis-Krajewska
The WRO International Media Art Biennale is the major forum for new media art in Poland, and one of the leading international contemporary art events in Europe. Since its inception in 1989, WRO has been presenting art forms created using new media for artistic expression and communication. The array of exhibitions and presentations that make up every WRO Biennale feature a wide variety of genres and forms, including video art, installations, multimedia concerts and performances, interactive works, net and social-media projects.
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The MFA Fine Arts program at Parsons is proud to present its 2013 thesis exhibition. The MFA in Fine Arts is a two-year program in which emerging artists develop the formal, intellectual, and conceptual dimensions of their work. A cross-disciplinary program, MFA Fine Arts houses students and faculty whose practices span a range of genres and fields of research.
This year’s exhibition is curated by Wendy Vogel and Jess Wilcox. Wendy Vogel is a writer, editor, and independent curator based in New York who has worked in the curatorial departments at MoMA and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. She has served as editor at Flash Art International and has written for many publications, including Artforum.com. Jess Wilcox is a curator and the programs coordinator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She has worked on the curatorial teams for the exhibitions 100 Years (MoMA PS1), PERFORMA 11, and The View from Here: Storm King at Fifty (Storm King Art Center).
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There is still time to submit your application for our 2014 studio residencies! Click here for details and a link to the application…Good luck!
