Dear Artists, Collectors, Fans, and Friends,
I am writing to share some information about the future of Recession Art.
Recession Art will be leaving our space at 47 Bergen Street at the end of January. Rather than look for another location, we have decided to take our commitment to emerging artists and affordable/accessible art in new directions. Recession Art will continue to exist online. We will update our website with alumni activities and will continue to use this mailing list to alert you to open calls and other opportunities to show, sell, and purchase art.
Our team will continue to promote emerging artists in new ways. Anthony Tino, my assistant/collaborator for the past 1.5 years, is launching a new project called Endless Editions (endlesseditions.tumblr.com) that will take up Recession Art’s mission to support emerging artists. Endless Editions is a publication and press focused on producing and exhibiting unique prints, books, zines editions by emerging artists dealing with themes of simulation, mediation and digital media. It will be launching this month with an exhibition, Endless, at Con Artist Collective in Manhattan and currently has an open call that can be viewed at http://recessionartshows.com/exhibitions/upcoming/. You can also contact Anthony at anthony@recessionartshows.com with questions.
In addition, our co-founder Ani Katz is continuing to pursue her career as a solo artist (click here to view her recent work: anikatz.com). And for my part, I will be continuing to work with emerging artists, collectors, and creative people as an independent consultant (click here to learn more: emmabkatz.com).
Before we say goodbye, we’re inviting everyone to the gallery for one last hurrah as we de-install our SALONUKAH show. Join us on Thursday, January 9th from 6-9pm at 47 Bergen Street for a final sale on everything in the space (including the furniture!). Artists will be picking up unsold work throughout the evening, so the earlier you come, the more likely you are to get a great last minute deal on original art. Click here to RSVP on Facebook.
It has been a pleasure and an honor to work with all of you over the past five years. When Ani and I started Recession Art, I could never have imagined then what we would accomplish- how many amazing people I would meet, how much great art I would see, and how much joy it would bring me to build this community. If you have ever applied to an open call, purchased a print, attended an opening, or hung your art on our walls, then you have been an essential part of making this possible. Thank you so much and best wishes for 2014 and beyond.
Sincerely,
Emma Katz, Executive Director and Co-Founder
Suddenly it’s the most wonderful time of the year, and we’re here to make your holiday shopping a little easier with our Recession Art gift guide! We’ve gone through our inventory with a fine-tooth comb to find something just right for everyone on your list – get something truly unique this year by supporting local and emerging artists.
Plus this week only, we’re partnering with the Lower East Side’s Con Artist Collective to offer 10-40% off in our gallery and online. Stop by the gallery for affordable art from Con Artists and discounts on your favorite Recession Artists.
a PAINTING (for the superhero):
Tate Foley’s Supermaximum is a one of a kind “paintcut” created by layering acrylic paint and carving through it with woodcut tools to reveal the colors underneath. Each piece is a one of a kind work of art that takes months to complete. A video of the paintcut process can be seen here: http://www.tatefoley.com/paintcuts.htm
A Love Song Played at a Very Specific Frequency by David Rodriguez is a 24″ x 30″ inkjet print in an edition of 5. Rodriguez He builds and photographs objects in order to create a fictional function and purpose for the things he builds outside of their material failings. The object in this photograph is based on an imagined machine that transmits sounds at a frequency that only one person can hear.
a PRINT (for the aesthete):
Part of her newest series, Megan Berk’s I Came In From The Wilderness is a 34″ x 46.5″ unframed silkscreen print in an edition of 10. Created with the generous support of the Lower East Side Printshop’s Keyholder Residency program, these prints reflect the organic surfaces of Berk’s layered paintings and capture the tension in the quietest moments in the home and garden.
a PRINT (for the social critic):
Tate Foley’s How The West Was Won comes from his eight print Oil Can series. Foley takes this symbol of American progress and prosperity and emblazons it with slogans and images invoking the darker side of American economic expansion both throughout our history and into the present. This 3-color screenprint is printed on Rives BFK paper in an edition of 9.
a COLLAGE (for the dreamer):
Ashley May’s Lake Powell Navajo Mountain is a 4″x6″ collage of postcards mounted on an 8″x10″ mat board. In her recent collage work, May uses multiples of the same vintage postcards of landscapes to create mirrored images as well as other psychedelic effects when positioned together. May’s work makes us feel like we are walking effortlessly through one moment in space and time to the next far off location.
a COLLAGE (for the sportsman):
America’s Pastime #11, from Christopher Gideon’s “America’s Pastime” series is a one-of-a-kind collage created entirely from the artist’s collection of baseball cards. This series confronts the topic of cultural indulgences and why we go to such great lengths in order to preserve and protect them. By distorting and rearranging the symbols of the cards, something new emerges – something less perfect, but perhaps more valuable – something that represents a more universal truth.
a BOOK (for the satirist):
Doom/Doomed/Dooms by Matthew Scott Gualco and Nathan Schultz is an independently printed, thirty-page appropriation of quotes from various highly-influential individuals, where all quotes relate to impending doom. Quotes from such characters such as Mark Twain, Confucius, Groucho Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, FDR, and Henry David Thoreau are all juxtaposed with a simple, colored pencil drawings, which draw upon the style and symbolic language of children’s illustration.
On Wednesday October 30th Recession Art presents
Pop Authentic explores the possibilities of pop art in the 21st century in relation to the rampant appropriation of social media self-branding. This pop appropriationist gesture—while significant for its commentary on art production, and all the more relevant thanks to retweets and reblogs—capitalizes off foreign labor, usurping credit and amassing fame. Many of the pop art greats owe much of their artistic production and financial compensation to their sources of labor and inspiration.
How does one reclaim what has been appropriated? How does performance reenact lost histories? how can we take back what is ours? In the spirit of valerie solanas’s manic attempt to retrieve her lost work, iSHOT ANDY invites inappropriate appropriations that recapture voices silenced in the name of pop.
The performances and videos in iSHOT ANDY reclaim appropriation from the passive regurgitation common in the everyday performance of social media. The resulting works appropriate in a manner that is intentional, critical, and in its own way—new. In some, marginalized voices center their cries over the words of their oppressors. In other, mimicry points a finger at the end of uniqueness in the digital age. All interventions pull a trigger.
iSHOT ANDY features videos and performances by Genevie?ve Belleveau , Andrea Crespo. Kate Durbin, HAG, Laura-Marie Marciano & Marisa Maffeo Robinson, Grace Miceli, and Tinuade Oyelowo. The night of performances is curated and produced by Ana Cecilia Alvarez, a writer and independent curator living in Brooklyn, NY.
In Pop Authentic, Recession Art’s 9th group show at the Invisible Dog Art Center, we prompted artists with questions about relevance, symbolism, and the identity of the 21st century pop artist. The result was a group of 12 artists who are examining their identity as artists in a world of appropriation, discussing whether this type of art making can or should create authentic experiences, and investigating how artists come to terms with profiting from the pop aesthetic.
We are pleased to announce the artists of Pop Authentic:
Theatre Reverb: Kristin Arnesen and Radoslaw Konopka | In 2006, Kristin Arnesen and Radoslaw Konopka founded Theatre Reverb in order to create original hybrid productions in the form of performances, live art, and video works. They treat commercial culture and mass media as a unifying network of resonant symbols that invoke a shared national mythology and cultural imagination. Arnesen and Konopka insert items of found culture into hyper-real associative dreamscapes. This allows re-appropriated materials to be consumed differently, providing a platform to explore the agenda of the “originals” and the mechanism by which culture is produced and consumed.
Brian Cavanaugh | Brooklyn-based artist Brian Cavanaugh is an artist whose digital art practice explores data, technology, and privacy. He received his BFA in Art and Digital Media from Albright College in 2008 and his MFA in New Forms from Pratt Institute in 2010. His artistic practice is focused on using technology to collect and analyze data. In the work on view for Pop Authentic, Cavanaugh utilizes hashtags – keywords that connect visual information, ideas, and people through a common linguistic marker. These works find the average color within public Instagram photos that use the same keyword. Cavanaugh writes, “by distilling this data as a source for new work, I believe that art from popular digital culture can exist outside the traditional norms of appropriation.”
Charlotte Emerson Fassler | Originally from Los Angeles, California, Charlotte Fassler graduated with a BA in Art History from Barnard College in 2013 with a concentration in Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in New York. Growing up at the height of the digital information age, Fassler feels a lingering nostalgia for pop culture of the past – nostalgia for an era without the omnipresence of technology. Her work investigates the role of irony in the recontexualization of mass-produced images. Fassler writes: “I err away from the comfort of the familiar and ironically reframe recognizable images to evoke a sense of displacement utilizing dark, perverse humor. In addition to the product, my process itself is rooted in irony. I find a sense of catharsis in working in mediums that veer away from the digital and explicitly show the careful mark of my hand.”
Tate Foley | Born in Millerton, Pennsylvania, Tate Foley currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned his BA in Studio Art from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in 2007 and his MFA in Printmaking from Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia in 2010. Foley’s paintcuts are created through a process of layering acrylic paint and carving through it with woodcut tools to reveal the colors undermeath. The text that is revealed represent and magnify the big ideas and aspirations of popular culture.
Chris Gideon | Living and working outside of Detroit, Michigan, Christopher Gideon is an emerging artist and designer with an extensive background in architecture. He earned his BS and MAR at Lawrence Technical University in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Gideon creates collages using baseball cards from his childhood collection. He states that, although as a child these cards signified organization and monetary value, they are now completely worthless except as symbols of nostalgia. Gideon writes: “the main objective of my collage work is to reinstate a sense of importance back into that which has lost its significance and value over time. The irony in the work comes from not only the new objects that are created, but also how they are created: through the destruction and reconstruction of what was once so precious to me.”
Matthew Scott Gualco | Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Scott Gualco earned his BFA in Painting from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008 and his MFA in New Genre from San Francisco Art Institute in 2012. Gualco writes: “My work forms an allusive hybrid between drawing and literature by interjecting the subject matter with literature and symbols. There is rawness in the manner that is within the understanding of the viewer. Based on my experiences and everyday life, I portray society with all of its imperfections that we all enjoy.”
Khanh H. Le with Thanh T. La | Born in My Tho, Vietnam during a time of conflict, Khanh H. Le and his finance Thanh T. La currently live and work in Washington, DC. Le graduated with an MFA from Syracuse University in 2008. Le explores and questions the notion of identities through the lenses of culture and memories, probing his personal and familial histories in an attempt to carve out a cultural identity for himself. Through the process of collage, Le layers fragmented photo images collected from family photo albums, digital photographs, and fashion and home decor magazines to create photogravure etchings that embody a new historical narrative reflective of the tension within his own identity.
Katie Mackowick | Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Katie Mackowick currently lives and works in Queens. Primarily working through collage, Mackowick embraces the appropriation of imagery. By deconstructing vintage images of people, places, and symbols of our collective unconscious and juxtaposing them in a new way, her work serves to both repurpose and completely recontextualize the final products in a way that reflects society’s obsessions with the manic, instantly gratifying, and visually consumptive culture of the 21st century.
Joshua Pelletier | Originally from Maine, upstate New York-based artist Joshua Pelletier received his BA from Bard College in 2000, and his MFA degree from UC Davis in 2010. He writes that his pieces in Pop Authentic are “essentially an appropriation mash-up. They are a forced collaboration between two artists: self-proclaimed “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkaid and Kensuke Tanabe, the game designer responsible for Super Mario Brothers 2. Initially in these works, I was using the NES characters as a way to troll Thomas Kinkaid’s work, as he always seemed to me like he was a pompous master of self-promotion and schmaltz. But after a while, I began to really appreciate the naive beauty of the Mario 2 characters, their economy of form and their wild inventiveness.”
Dave Rittinger | Dave Rittinger is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer whose work is often playful, contextual, and opportunistic. Embodying a sense of humor and dueling spirit of critique and optimism, he makes work that relates to our contemporary place in time through the embrace of wry subject matter and eccentric selection of materials. His sculptures and prints use brightly playful objects like neon squirt guns and toy soldiers to touch on larger issues like the normalization of violence.
George Spencer | Originally a young street artist, under the tag name MIZER since the age of 14, Spencer draws inspiration from the street art and culture of New York City. After attending SVA and living in the East Village, this series of boxers are now Spencer’s sole focus. Since 1989 (the date of his first use of the subject matter) Spencer has created over 1,000 pieces in the series. In discussing his choice of subject with Erika Stahlman of The Aesthete, Spencer stated “I am a loner, and boxers tend to be loners. And I’m a fighter, like most of us. But sure, there are people that don’t struggle in life. And those people don’t get it, those people don’t get my art.”
Joash Tuinstra | Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Joash Tuinstra graduated with a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2006. He currently lives and works in the West Village. Through painting, Tuinstra explores explores style and originality related to art. His work in Pop Authentic investigates the concept of branding, trends in artistic style, and the gap in communication between art and culture.
Pop Authentic will open at the Recession Art Gallery and the Invisible Dog Center (47 and 51 Bergen Street) on October 26th. The show will be open in both locations through November 3rd, and will continue at Recession Art exclusively through November 24th.
With an emphasis on locally-focused production and distribution, the alternative economic model of the CSA (community-supported agriculture) has expanded from fresh produce to contemporary art over the past few years. In 2010, the standard for community-supported art was set by the Springboard Center for the Arts, a nonprofit located in St. Paul, MN. Since its inception, this CSA model has spread to at least 40 locations nationwide, from Miami, FL to Fargo, ND, and now, for the first time, to our very own borough of Brooklyn.
A sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a national nonprofit providing a variety of services to the independent arts community, CSA+D (Community Supported Art & Design) provides an alternative way to collect art and sponsor emerging artists and designers. Funded through a subscription service and shareholding model, artists and designers selected by a jury are commissioned to create 50 pieces for CSA+D. A full share includes six pieces from a variety of media – painting, sculpture, textiles, decorative objects, ceramics, prints, lighting, t-shirts, and music are all prospective options. Not all shares are identical, and the exact contents of each share are not revealed until pick-up. While an element of surprise still remains, information about the artists and designed who have been announced so far can be found here.
In making contemporary art and design available to the community through local involvement and support, CSA+D directly connects artists and collectors as an alternative to more traditional means of art sales, such as galleries or online retail. The inaugural pick-up event is open to the public and will take place at Recession Art from 4-7pm on September 21st. Although shares have sold out for the first event, a number of artists and designers will bring additional pieces for sale. We hope to see you there!
