What is the Where?: A Recession Art Show

November 13-21, 2010 at The Invisible Dog Art Center

The perception of art is shaped by its location, but art can be a location itself. What is the Where? asks how artists can respond to the relationship between location, identity, and perception.

Click here for our gallery of images from the show.

The group show focuses on installations and photography by 15 artists: Louise Barry, Katrina Boemig, A. Bonnel, Heejung Cho, Stephen Eakin, Ryan Frank, Ian Addison Hall, Jess Levey, Elias Necol Melad, Lawrence Mesich, Evan Robarts, Patrick Serr, Katie Shelly, Celia Tobin, and Matt Woodward.

What is the Where? was guest curated by Risa Shoup. Shoup is the Residency Manager of the BRIC House Fireworks Residency Program, a collaborative artists’ residency at BRIC Arts|Media|Bklyn. An Independent Curator and Development Consultant, she has spoken about nontraditional artspaces at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, NYU and the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, and at Harvard University.

Events Included:

Opening Night
Opening Night included a performance by guest artists Jennifer Mills, who used brief one-on-one encounters with visitors as source material to instantly create personalized paintings. Participants could then choose how much they wanted to pay for their custom made painting.

Young Curator Panel
Discussion with young independent curators working in New York.
Panelists: Risa Shoup, Simmy Swinder, Ryan Frank, and Gianna Leo Falcon.
Moderator: Monica Westin, a Chicago art critic.

Watch This! Emerging Filmmakers at What is the Where?
Curated by Jesse Wakeman and Risa Shoup
View the Trailer or Read More About the Films
Get a peek at the next big thing in the film world, including Kirsten Kearse’s Horsefingers from Slamdance and new work from Sam Fleischner, the award winning director of Wah Do Dem, plus feature film trailers, music videos, and documentaries. You’ll get an inside look at the next generation of New York filmmakers. Don’t miss this! Watch This!

About the Artists:

Louise Barry

Louise Barry’s The Missing House is a project based on a set of architectural plans found in her parents’ basement. In an attempt to recreate a space she has not seen or visited, she built a scale model from the plans, which is installed in its original basement location. The model will be shown in What is the Where? as part of an installation involving painted backdrops, drawings, and text. The different components will work together to describe a space that is both real and imaginary.
(royalbruise.tumblr.com)

Katrina Boemig

Katrina Boemig creates cuttings of remembered travels, retracing wanderings in places of significance. For What is the Where?, she will cut passages of significance through the streets of New York. During the show, the memory mapping can and will be altered by gravity and the actions of humans nearby.

A. Bonnel

A. Bonnel is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily with video. She conceives each project as a singularity that can be presented in a number of ways. Samsara is a Super 8mm/digital short that deconstructs the cycle of rebirth according to concepts found in Ancient Eastern religions. A representation of esoteric ideas, the film is both myth and metaphor in the vein of the narrative trance-film. Installed as a triptych in three dimensions, Samsara invites the viewer to enter and then repositions them as an outsider looking in.
(vimeo.com/15307702)

Heejung Cho

Heejung Cho makes three-dimensional paintings and compiles them into installations, creating a map of her personal life and a collage of different neighborhoods. However friendly the neighborhoods, they are anonymous and represent the displacement and nomadic lifestyles of the city.
(heejungcho.com)

Stephen Eakin

Stephen Eakin investigates the processes we have for remembrance and the leaving of a legacy. Typically using himself as a starting point, he engages with his own personal mortality and familial traditions, experiences, narratives, and memories in a way that foregrounds practices of dying. Some of his projects are interactive, while others are purely sculptural. All are designed to provide spaces of contemplation, rather than conclusive statements or solutions.
(stepheneakin.com)

Ryan Frank

Ryan Frank uses a combination of photography and installation to frame images within thematically appropriate industrial materials and other found objects. For What is the Where?, he will create an installation of a typical apartment building entryway using a mailbox and an accompanying front door, each of which will be used as a frame for displaying photographs, and exploring the monotony of daily routine and the demise of tangible mail.
(ryanmfrank.com)

Ian Addison Hall

Ian Addison Hall uses negative space in photographs to disguise locations, inviting the viewer to shed their preconceptions and truly appreciate elements of each anonymous landscape. For What is the Where?, he focuses on the unifying similarities between his current residence in Brooklyn and his hometown of Weston, West Virginia.
(dontnotlook.com)

Jess Levey

Jess Levey uses her work to question the pervasiveness of corporate dominance on our daily existence, while exploring the impending loss of autonomy that results from this power. Using a video/photography hybrid process, she investigates the over-development of Brooklyn. These works can be described as multimedia collages, juxtaposing experiences in a futile attempt to reconnect.
(jesslevey.com)

Elias Necol Melad

Elias Necol Melad’s work in What is the Where? concerns the myriad of ideals and “ism’s” to which human beings (himself included) pray; it explores three of these tenets using the traditional form of the altar as the framework.

Lawrence Mesich

Lawrence Mesich’s At Work investigates the relationship between the interstitial spaces of institutional interiors – lobbies, waiting areas, hallways – and the routines of the people who inhabit them. The piece consists of video monitors mounted in enclosures that mimic the infrastructure of spaces they inhabit. The monitor enclosures emphasize the mundane qualities of those spaces and the gestures in them.
(lawrencemesich.com)

Jennifer Mills

Jennifer Mills uses her improvisational comedy background to inspire large, labor-intensive performative installations that use humor, an amateur aesthetic, and gift giving to promote interaction and accessibility. Designing systems of creating and distributing original art for free or at a low cost, she parodies the art market and cultivates an energized, joyful atmosphere centered on the creative process and labor of an artist. During the opening of What is the Where?, she will use brief one-on-one encounters with visitors as source material to instantly create personalized paintings. Images specific to geography and memory will map a collective and individual experience of the city we share. Participants can purchase their custom made paintings at an extremely low price.
(mnartists.org/Jennifer_Mills)

Evan Roberts

Evan Roberts’ abstract and formal-based sculpture is inspired by forms found in the natural world outside of our realm of understanding. Objects like molecules, bacteria, stars, and black holes all whisper to him about the mysteries of our existence. The materials he works with are found, traded, bought, or stolen, whatever is necessary to fulfill the creative vision. The most important element of his work is the process, in that it is a meditation, one that helps him learn more about himself. As his work evolves, so does he.

Patrick Serr

Patrick Serr is interested in the collapse of private and public spaces and the limits of intimacy amongst proliferating language. He explores the way small scale sculptures can form relations between one another, and collectively alter the wider gallery space.
(patrickserr.com)

Katie Shelly

Katie Shelly’s installation for What is the Where? consists of two sculptures: Untitled Neutral Viewing Area No.1 and Untitled Neutral Viewing Area No.2. Each sculpture is a small house, sized for one. Visitors may crawl inside to view photographs and video work. A space within a space, these spartan plywood houses will playfully confront the white cube gallery convention.
(katieshelly.com)

Celia Tobin

Celia Tobin  believes that we live in a society that sees humans as outside of the natural equations of the planet. The Gorges examines what is inherently present in both humans and nature: an energetic fluidity that is both tangible and intangible at the same time.
(celiatalbottobin.com)

Matt Woodward

Matt Woodward’s work is about the overlapping identities of the American City, as understood through the rusting and broken ornaments of a ubiquitous architectural heritage, which is both fed and mirrored by a culture that insists on tearing it down and replacing it or, more often, forgetting it altogether.
(mattwoodwardart.com)

 

What is the Where? Press

The Huffington Post: November 16, 2010