October 30-December 11, 2015

Artists: Marlon de Azambuja (Spain/Brazil), Augmented Mountain (USA), Almudena Baeza (Spain), Heleno Bernardi (Brazil), Elena Blasco (Spain), Eva Davidova (USA/Spain) Jorge Diezma (Spain), Meredith Drum (USA), Cliff Evans (USA), Juan Ugalde (Spain) and Marina Zurkow (USA)

…I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences…
– Joseph Beuys

HAPPENLAND, curated by Almudena Baeza and Eva Davidova, presents installation, sculpture, video art, painting, photography and augmented reality by 10 internationally acclaimed artists from Spain, Brazil and USA. The exhibition brings rarely seen together, visually resolute works engaging public space, behavior, and environmental activism, with the underlying premise: The artist has honored the brainwave.

What does it mean, “to honor”? The artist has made a process of association; so direct that it wants to be immediate. What needs to happen in order to lure the concept residing in a mental space into a physical world – the world of the works, which the artist can make – excludes any symbolic processes that could contaminate this “passage”. The artist wants to get out of the fundamentally variable and equivocal realm of language, and take us into a kind of imagination space, obliterating translation in the meantime. As an .exe file, the brainwave installs itself in both minds—emitter and receptor—and acts.

The artists in Happenland see the models, the events, the purposes or the issues they are about to address as a group of relationships univocally associated to the creative action. That’s why we say that the works in Happenland are “ways of being” of a relationship. They exist in a relationship of identity of shape. The meanings may be equally unknown to all, but they “exist” in their material representation. From Marlon de Azambuja’s mission of defining and revealing territories, the bodies turned architecture in Heleno Bernardi or Eva Davidova’s work, Juan Ugalde’s magic overlaying of depths and Almudena Baeza’s sharp pensiveness, Cliff Evans carnal dystopia, Elena Blasco’s psychedelic humor, Meredith Drum’s wrath against the ethos of avatars-for-sale worlds, Jorge Diezma’s passive-aggressive “painting as action”, right to Marina Zurkow’s extending the mechanisms of construction and geometrical interdependencies to the living organisms, the works subvert the obvious—they happen as something that, by being so direct, resists interpretation.

Checklist

Press Release

ARTWORKS:

Sunday, August 23rd, 8:00 pm

Join us for a public discussion with the curators and artists of Chance Ecologies, a public art project currently taking place in Long Island City, Queens. This event will be a roundtable conversation about Hunter’s Point South, a historic post-industrial site on the East River which has been left to become a wilderness over the past 30 years, and which will soon become a residential development. A group of artists is currently creating new artworks focused on this unique site, and will discuss some of their initial findings with the community at Radiator Gallery on Sunday, Aug. 23rd at 8pm, over drinks and light refreshments. 

This Sunday is the third in a month-long series of events for Chance Ecologies – Exploring the Wild Landscape of Hunter’s Point South, a public art project is bringing together a coalition of artists and thinkers to creatively explore and document a large plot of publicly-owned land in Long Island City, Queens. Over the last 35 years, an unplanned ecology has taken root in this fenced-off post-industrial landscape, which will soon be razed to make way for a new residential development. During the month of August, we are organizing a series of events celebrating this wild site, leading up to a winter exhibit at Radiator Gallery.

This Sunday will feature a performative walk with artists Chris Kennedy and Ellie Irons at 5pm, an unguided tour with author Daniel Campo at 6pm, and a public discussion with the curators and artists of Chance Ecologies, hosted by Radiator Gallery, at 8pm.

SUNDAY, Aug 23rd
5 – 6pm:
Endangered Surfaces Walk: A movement-research investigation with Ellie Irons and Chris Kennedy
Join us for a guided walk through the re-wilded landscape of Hunter’s Point. We’ll follow desire paths that flow through the site, exploring the overlaps, edges and frictions between the man-made and long re-wilded. Along the way we’ll identify wild urban plants, take rubbings, and engage in movement-research to create an archive of endangered surfaces found amongst the ruderal terrains soon to be developed.Meeting Point: East River Ferry terminal in Long Island City / Hunter’s Point Park

6 – 7:30pm: 
Accidental, temporary and wild: An unguided tour of the Hunters Point waterfront by Daniel Campo
Through this (mostly) unguided tour, explore one of New York’s last accidental waterfront wild spaces before it is swallowed by the voracious development practices that have transformed Queens’s East River edge and the waterfront of the greater city. Through intimate and unmediated immersion into this unique postindustrial site, the tour will draw upon all of your senses in exploration of thoroughly contradictory conditions and contexts. At the fulcrum of land and water, nature and city, abandonment and reclamation, history and possibility; this experience will incite a similarly contradictory range of emotions. The tour will culminate with an open discussion led by urbanist, critic and professor, Daniel Campo (author of The Accidental Playground).
This tour is limited to 20 people, please RSVP via this link to sign up!

HYPERALLERGIC: In Long Island, Local Artists go Big and Bold 

November 18, 2019
by Alissa Guzman

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WHITE HOT MAGAZINE: “The Cured” at Radiator Gallery

June, 2019
by Jonathan Goodman

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ART FUSE: “The Cured” at Radiator Gallery
June 19, 2019
by Ilsy Jeon

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QUEENS CHRONICLE: Works that elevate both form and textual ideas

March 2, 2018

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HYPERALLERGIC: Best of 2017: Our Top 20 NYC Art Shows
 December 20, 2017

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HYPERALLERGIC: Artworks Woven on the Loom and in Looping Video

by Patric Neal on July 6, 2017

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New York Times: What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

by Will Heinrich on May 19, 2017

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HYPERALLERGIC: As Dakota Access Pipeline Leaks, Native Artists Examine Contested Landscapes

by Christopher Green  on May 26, 2017

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CFILE DAILY: Exhibition | My Country Tis of Thy People, You’re Dying – Examining Contentious Land & Violence

by Whitney Jones, on June 17, 2017

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QUEENS CHRONICLE: AMERICAN INDIAN ART, OBSERVED WITH A WIDE LENS
by Tess McRae, qboro contributor | Posted: Thursday, April 23, 2015 10:30 am

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HYPERALLERGIC: EXPLORING THE TERRAIN OF CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN ART
by Ryan Wong on May 19, 2015

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AMERICAN INDIAN ART, OBSERVED WITH A WIDE LENS
by Tess McRae, qboro contributor | Posted: Thursday, April 23, 2015 10:30 am

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QUEENS CHRONICLE: WITH AN UNWORLDLY PULL, ART EXPLORES THE UNKNOWN
by Lisa Granshaw, qboro contributor | Posted: Thursday, March 26, 2015 10:30 am

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NY ARTS: HEAT, CHAOS, RESISTANCE AT RADIATOR ARTS

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VINE – SUBERGED! OPENING TONIGHT
Post: Mar 22, 2014

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REBECCA CHILD: RADIATOR ARTS

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ELLEN MUELLER: PRACTICAL FEMINISM AT RADIATOR ARTS
by Ellen Mueller on April 22, 2014

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ARTSLANT NEW YORK: RADIATOR GALLERY

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GUY BEN-ARI: TRACING THE FISH BLADDER AT RADIATOR GALLERY, LIC, QUEENS, NY
January 15, 2013

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NY ART BEAT: RADIATOR GALLERY, GALLERY IN THE QUEENS AREA

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FRENCH EMBASSY IN THE UNITED STATES: EXHIBITION AT RADIATOR GALLERY – THE LEFTOVER METHOD
Sept 6 – oct 13, 2013

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HYPERALLERGIC: FORMS OF LIFES: BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO TRADITIONAL GENRES
by Patrick Neal on April 19, 2012

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QUEENS CHRONICLE: RADIATOR GALLERY EXPLORES THE DANCE BETWEEN HUMANS AND NATURE IN NEW EXHIBIT

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FORTH EASTATE: BREAK/STEP RADIATOR GALLERY

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Fri, May 15, 6:00-9:00 PM
Performance begins at 6:30 PM

Musician Laura Ortman (The Dust Dive, Stars Like Fleas) and Raven Chacon (Postcommodity, Mesa Ritual) will join together for a collaboration set at Radiator Gallery on Friday May 15th. The event is in conjunction with the exhibition YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND on view at Radiator through May 22.

Ortman’s songs utilize violin, electric guitar, Apache violin, piano, megaphone, samplers, electric keyboards, pedal steel guitar and musical saw with Chacon accompanying on his custom electronic instruments.

YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND

Artists: Edgar Heap of Birds, Nicholas Galanin, Postcommodity, Marcus Amerman.
Curated by Erin Joyce Projects

The art of Native Americans and First Nations peoples is often marginalized and thought of in stereotypical forms of representation. Oil paintings of Chiefs in war bonnets, pottery, beaded regalia and woven rugs; and while these are accurate representations of a portion of the Indigenous North American art community, it is not by any means the whole picture.
The Indigenous North American art world is one that is rich with artists creating controversial, provocative, and diverse works in a myriad of mediums. With that, Erin Joyce Projects and Radiator Gallery are pleased to announce their latest exhibition, You Are On Indian Land, featuring the work of leading contemporary American Indian and First Nation artists from across the North American continent including Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) and artist collective Postcommodity – comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano), and Nathan Young (Pawnee, Kiowa, Delaware).

These artists all actively engage the notion of pop-culture, contested landscapes, misappropriation, and cultural imprisonment in their work. Utilizing pastiche, they create imbricated works that will stand-alone, but also enter into dialogue with one another in the gallery space. Pieces in the exhibition include assemblage sculpture, multi-channel video work, monoprints, and installation pieces. The exhibition, curated by Erin Joyce Projects, will be a three-venue installation, premiering at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, New York April 17th, at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico featuring the work of First Nations artist Dana Claxton April 23rd, and completing its run at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona featuring work by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Postcommodity, Cheyenne Randall (Lakota), Steven Yazzie (Navajo), and Michael Namingha (Hopi-Tewa).

PRESS RELEASE   CHECKLIST

Edgar Heap of Birds in conversation with Sara Reisman.

Friday, May 1, 6:00-8:00 PM
Discussion will begin promptly at 6:30
RSVP only – space is limited! Please RSVP to: daniela@radiatorarts.com

THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION
THE 8TH FLOOR
17 West 17th Street
New York, NY
(646)-839-5908
www.the8thfloor.org

Join us on May 1st for a conversation with contemporary Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds and curator Sara Reisman. The speakers will focus on the ongoing mono print project Dead Indian Stories by Edgar Heap of Birds, presented at Radiator Gallery as part of the exhibition You Are On Indian Land. Curated by Erin Joyce, the exhibition offers critical perspective on the representation of the art of Native Americans and First Nation peoples. It features the work of leading contemporary artists including Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) and artist collective Postcommodity – comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano), and Nathan Young (Pawnee, Kiowa, Delaware).

This exhibition, which takes place in three venues, is curated by Erin Joyce Projects and premiered at Radiator Gallery April 17. The second iteration will open at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art April 23, 2015, and the final at the Museum of Northern Arizona November 20, 2015.

On view at Radiator Gallery from April 17 to May 22.
Learn more about here: http://www.radiatorarts.com/you-are-on-indian-land

About Edgar Heap of Birds:
Heap of Birds received his Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1979), his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas (1976) and has undertaken graduate studies at The Royal College of Art, London, England. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts (2008). The artist has exhibited his works at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, Documenta, Kassel, Germany, Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, Association for Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa, Lewallen Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hong Kong Art Center, China, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia, Grand Palais, Paris, France and the Venice Biennale, Italy.

Heap of Birds has served as visiting lecturer in London, England, Western Samoa, Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Barcelona, Spain, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Norrkoping, Sweden, Hararre, Zimbabwe, Verona, Italy, Adelaide, Australia and India. Heap of Birds has taught as Visiting Professor at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island and Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. At the University of Oklahoma since 1988, Professor Heap of Birds teaches in Native American Studies. His seminars explore issues of the contemporary artist on local, national and international levels.

Heap of Birds has received grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Lila Wallace Foundation, Bonfil Stanton Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trust and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In June 2005, Heap of Birds completed the fifty-foot signature, outdoor sculpture titled Wheel. The circular porcelain enamel on steel work was commissioned by The Denver Art Museum and is inspired by the traditional Medicine Wheel of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.

Heap of Birds’ artwork was chosen by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as their entry towards the competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He represented the Smithsonian with a major collateral public art project and blown glass works in Venice, June 2007 titled: “Most Serene Republics”. In 2012, Heap of Birds was one of fifty artists honored by United States Artists with an individual fellowship award of $50,000 and named USA Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts category.

About Sara Reisman:
Sara Reisman is the Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation which promotes access to arts and culture in New York City through grant making, public programs, and exhibitions. As an independent curator Reisman’s projects have focused on a variety of themes including the politics of public space, globalization and site-specific practice, social practice, collaboration, sustainability, and cultural identity and transformation. Additionally, Reisman has curated numerous solo exhibitions, most recently Christopher K. Ho: Privileged White People (2013), Claudia Joskowicz: Sympathy for the Devil (2012), and Leslie Johnson: Days to Go (2012) (all for Forever & Today, Inc., where she was the 2012-2013 guest curator), and Peter Rostovsky: Still (2011) at the Hillwood Art Museum. From 2008 to 2014 Sara Reisman was the Director of New York City’s Percent for Art program that commissions permanent public artworks for newly constructed and renovated city-owned spaces, indoors and out. Recently commissioned artists include Mary Mattingly, Duke Riley, Odili Donald Odita, Julianne Swartz, Kanishka Raja, and Karyn Olivier, among many others. Reisman was the 2011 critic-in-residence at Art Omi, an
international visual artist residency in upstate New York.

About the Rubin Foundation:
THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION believes in art as a cornerstone of cohesive, resilient communities and an aid to greater participation in civic life. In its mission to make art available to the broader public, in particular to underserved communities, the Foundation provides direct support to, and facilitates partnerships between cultural organizations and advocates of social justice across the public and private sectors. Through grantmaking, the Foundation supports cross-disciplinary work connecting art with social justice via experimental collaborations, as well as making cultural resources available to organizations and areas of New York City in need. Areas of funding include arts education, artistic activism, public art, and community-based artistic programming.

SPECIAL EVENT:

PRESS RELEASE

March 6 – April 10 2015

Artists: Amelia Bauer, Joianne Bittle, Aviram Cohen, G.H. Hovagimyan, Nicholas Knight, Esperanza Mayobre, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, MTAA, Shannon Sberna, Raphaele Shirely, Janice Sloane, Colleen Rae Smiley, with exhibition graphic by Charles Orr and OTO.

Curated by: Over The Opening (OTO)

Every 365.25 days, the Earth revolves once around a star we call the Sun. Approximately every 225 million years, the Sun revolves around Sgr A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”) which presides at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is now theorized that Sgr A* is not actually a star but a supermassive black hole that is currently eating planets, stars, light and even smaller black holes. Of course, the thought of an unseeable thing / dimensional portal actively swallowing our galaxy is keeping me awake some nights.

Meanwhile back in Long Island City, Radiator Arts and Over The Opening (OTO) are pleased to present Ensign Sgr A* featuring artist using negation and absence as ensigns or banners for states of exploration and loss. The exhibition operates as part wunderkammer and part memory hole with past prime astronomy, geography, technology, and superstition as the backdrop. Battles will be fought and journeys begun but broken and disappeared, in the long view of time, approach.

Amelia Bauer stages alien nocturnes in the Western landscape. Joianne Bittle shows space age couture and found prehistoric displays. Aviram Cohen sets contact mics to trace invisible pathways. G.H. Hovagimyan forms ARs for floating zombie teen avatars. Nicholas Knight renders codes. Esperanza Mayobre maps points with no return. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy scan future ruins.  MTAA prepares to disappear. Shannon Sberna sees hypnosis and future luck. Raphaele Shirley enlightens worlds and historic technologies. Janice Sloane performs and documents dark acts. Colleen Rae Smiley sews signals and Charles Orr with OTO design a graphic to inform and educate.

About OTO (Over The Opening)  From the fall of 2007 until the winter of 2009, the artist collaboration MTAA  invited artists and art collectives to present one-night exhibitions of time based art in their North 6th Street Brooklyn studio. This ongoing monthly event curated under the name Over The Opening (OTO) operated as a blurring of studio space, exhibition venue and social experiment. The artists who worked with OTO represented a diverse array of practices. Works ranged from a tamale making workshop, to endurance karaoke to experimental computer games. Over the years, OTO presented 26 exhibitions of expansive scope with modest means. Ensign Srg A* at Radiator Arts marks the first OTO exhibition in a gallery setting.

ARTWORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

PRESS RELEASE     CHECKLIST

February 8, Sunday, 2pm-4pm

Please join us this Sunday for an afternoon of readings that relate to the show cake, dolls, gift bags, and other things, currently on view at Radiator Gallery.

This event will host five award-winning and published poets and writers. Afterwards there will be time to see the exhibition. Prosecco and strawberries will be served.

We look forward to seeing you!

Hossannah Asuncion was raised near the 105 and 710 freeways in L.A. She currently lives near an A/C stop in Brooklyn.

Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections, four chapbooks, and the cross-genre book Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). A new book, Sonne from Ort, a bi-lingual collaborative erasure made with the German poet Uljana Wolf, has just been published (kookbooks Verlag, Berlin, 2013).

Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011) as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006) and a novella, Memory Palace (2013). In 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists. His short stories and essays have appeared in diverse publications including The New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, London Review of Books, Granta, Book Forum and Frieze. He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New York City.

Ann Neumann has written for The New York Times, Bookforum, The Baffler, New York Law Review, The Nation, Guernica, and others. Her monthly column, “The Patient Body,” about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine, appears at The Revealer, a publication of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, where she is a visiting scholar. Neumann’s first book, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America, will be published by Beacon Press in January, 2016.

Uljana Wolf is a German poet and translator based in Brooklyn and Berlin. She published four books of poetry with kook- books (Berlin), most recently meine schönste lengevitch and SONNE FROM ORT, a collaborative erasure of Elizabeth Bar- rett-Browning’s sonnets with Christian Hawkey. Wolf translated numerous poets into German, among them John Ashbery, Charles Olson, Matthea Harvey, Christian Hawkey, Erín Moure, and Cole Swensen. A new English translation (by Sophie Seita) of her work is forthcoming with Wonder Press, Brooklyn, in Spring 2015. She teaches poetry and translation at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Institut für Sprachkunst in Vienna, and Humboldt University in Berlin.

Radiator Gallery
10-61 Jackson Ave, LIC, New York 11106 Tel: 347.677.3418
Email: info@radiatorarts.com www.radiatorarts.com

September 8 – 30, 2012

Opening reception: Friday, Sept. 7, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Donovan Barrow, Brian Belott, Natasha Bowdoin, Maximus Clarke, Floto+Warner, Sara Klar, Todd Knopke, Michael Lee, Elisa Lendvay, Abraham McNally, Andrew Mount, Ryan Sarah Murphy, Francesca Pastine, Javier Pinon, Leslie Siegel

Curated by Michael Lee

Radiator Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its sixth show This Is How My Brain Works, a group exhibition that inaugurates the gallery’s second season. With over 30 works made by sixteen artists, the show examines the practice of collage through its many iterations and permutations ranging from works on paper to artist books, photographs, sculpture, textiles, digital projections and video. Through the presentation of visually diverse but not conceptually disparate works, the show helps define collage as both a working method still robust at the turn of the 21 century but more importantly as a manner of processing information either willfully or uncontrollably. The show’s title is a comical send-up of the precognitive jumble that is the necessary basis for the eventual creation of meaningful logic in the human brain.

Whether culled from magazine pages, scavenged from a neighbor’s recycling bin, plucked from the uncharted corners of the internet–or the physical corner of an urban street—this group of artists shares a love for material with a history. It can be cultural memory, what artist Christian Marclay describes as the “recognition of the source material with the pleasurable violence of transformation”, or it can manifest itself in the physical wear objects undergo with the passing of time. Whatever the case, the audience’s synapses begin to fire upon seeing this new/old thing well before a fully formed idea congeals in their heads. This is what all art is about. Collage highlights this fact.

The current generation of collage and assemblage artists is conversant in the standard and accepted history of the form as modernist paradigm par excellence. While this history obviously informs artists in this show, they have an advantage over their predecessors in contextualizing this working method as pre-modern far more easily due simply to their place in time. The palimpsests of ancient cities and the collage roots of film projection start to seem much closer when looked at from this perspective. What was once considered an artistic reaction to the specific age of communication can be seen in retrospect as a responsive method to connect art and the world in any age.

Michael Lee is an artist and teacher. This is his first curatorial effort. He was awarded a residency at Cooper Union in 2005 and at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio in 2008. Michael earned a BFA in art history from The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York.

ARTWORKS:

EXHIBITION:

PRESS RELEASE   CHECKLIST

May 4 – June, 2012

Opening Reception: May 4, 6 – 9PM

Performance by Marni Kotak

Artists: Jeanie Choi, Camilo Godoy, Ted Kerr, James Richards, Aldrin Valdez, Sam Vernon Curated by Kris Nuzzi

Radiator Gallery presents Don’t Worry What Happens Happens Mostly Without You, an exhibition that explores the personal identities of artists Jeanie Choi, Camilo Godoy, Ted Kerr, James Richards, Aldrin Valdez and Sam Vernon, as they navigate through a world 
shaped by experiences of marginalization, silencing and difference. Whether speaking from their own life, recreating a historical memory or representing an underrepresented community, their work explores poetic and subtle ways to communicate issues of immigration, race, queerness and desire. Together they reveal the connections and differences between these loaded social issues and invite the viewer to share in their intimate experiences.

Artist Jeanie Choi explores our longing to confess the unspeakable. Through a series of collaborations, her work mediates a language through gesture and silence by examining the relationships between the confessor and the unreciprocated other. Using photography, video and performance, the reiteration of symbols and mistranslations never reach a conclusion, but reassure us that we are all trying to broaden the possibilities of truth between us.

Camilo Godoyʼs work is concerned with the politics of migration and citizenship in the U.S. by drawing upon the immigrant experience and playing upon narratives extracted from government documents. Through these intimate and powerful works, we hear their personal stories in deportation proceedings while addressing the quotidian struggles detained immigrants face in the U.S.

Ted Kerr’s piece FOR MYSELF IN THE SCENE is a poster installation comprised of 3 posters that are available for viewers to take. Through the work, Ted works to find himself amid socio-political-sexual anxieties produced in a time of ongoing AIDS, increased articulation of queer vs. LGBT politics, self-as-brand and digital culture. Using the poster, a format popularized during the AIDS crisis by Fierce Pussy, Gran Fury and General Idea, this work explores identity, activism and visual culture.

At the same time, James Richards’ poster Donʼt Worry is inspired by a quote by Joseph Albers and is part of an ongoing project by James and artist Matt Keegan. He works with existing text, accessible images and footage from disparate sources that he then remixes and returns back into the world.

Aldrin Valdez tells his story through an installation that is a personal mix of collage and family photos, piecing together memories of his childhood. He presents images of being a child in the Philippines, photos of his parents in the U.S. when he and his siblings had not immigrated to America yet, and collages that explore patterns and surfaces.

Exploring identity and memory, Sam Vernon creates fictional characters that symbolize parts of her culture while blending aspects of neo-futurism with stereotypes, images, spirits and ghosts. Her work takes the form of drawing, painting, installation, photography and printmaking to pay homage to the past, while addressing questions of postcoloniality, racialization, sexuality and historical memory. Her work reminds us that our ghosts and past histories always remain with us and at times are unsettling and challenge us to remember.

The exhibition is on view from May 4th to May 27th 2012. The opening reception will feature a performance by Marni Kotak. In conjunction with the exhibition, on Sunday, May 20th, there will be an event on deportation titled Retracing I.C.E., organized by artist Camilo Godoy. On Sunday, May 27th, there will be a salon organized by Ted Kerr and Kris Nuzzi titled I am not alone in this way, featuring live performances that invite viewers to consider how our most intimate ways of being—striving and surviving, often in a hostile world—can be viewed as responsible for positive social change.

Kris Nuzzi is a Brooklyn based independent curator and currently works as an art advisor. She received her BA in art history from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and her MA in the art market from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where her focus was site-specific installation art. She is the 2011-2012 recipient of the Lori Ledis Curatorial Fellowship, where she had the opportunity to curate the exhibition Figured as well as organize the public program Embody at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery. She is a former intern and continued supporter and volunteer for Visual AIDS, using art to fight AIDS through initiating dialogue and supporting HIV+ artists to remind us that AIDS is not over.

ARTWORKS:

OPENING RECEPTION:

PRESS RELEASE       CHECKLIST