Prolonged Exposure

Photograph by Francisco Westendarp

Curated by Kaegan Sparks

At The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St, Brooklyn (Map)

On view November 3-November 10

Opening November 3, 6-10pm

Click Here To View the Prolonged Exposure Press Release

Images from the opening of Prolonged Exposure

Prolonged Exposure explores boredom and restlessness as charged affects, suspended between detachment and agitation, inertia and change. Works in the exhibition respond to potentially paralyzing states of waiting, idleness, distraction, and fatigue, urging viewers to consider new modes of attention.

Video works and installations by Beyza Boyacioglu, Lizzy De Vita, Lanny Jordan Jackson, Daniel J. Wilson, and Jonathan Rajewski deal with friction between multiple, syncopated temporalities, especially through loops and repeated gesture. Ilene Godofsky, Elizabeth Duffy, Megan Liu Kincheloe, and Nicholas Warndorf translate banal and appropriated imagery via tedious formal processes in their works, while Ellen Grossman, Francisco Westendarp, and Murphy Chang register the time and labor of production more literally in drawings and photographs. The soothing, homogenous patterns of videos and sculptures by Jess Levey, JaeWook Lee, Laura Arena, and Cheryl Yun distract from disjunctive, disquieting undertones, while conditions of stasis and ambience considered in works by Luke Munn, Ian Addison Hall, Robert Brush, Cassandra Guan, and Eddie Hopely plumb boredom’s latent energy, commanding alternative means of perception and presence.

The Curator: Kaegan Sparks

Kaegan Sparks writes, edits, researches, and curates in New York City. While studying poetics and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, she directed a gallery called KWH Art, where she organized exhibitions, programming, and publications. She has worked for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Dia:Beacon, The Kitchen, and Parkett, and is currently Special Events Associate at The Drawing Center, where she will produce a series of public programs in 2013. Recent projects include research for the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative toward a forthcoming book on post-1968 innovations in curatorial practice, and co-curating two seasons of the Segue Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club.

The Artists

Laura Arena

Laura Arena is a curator/artist/designer living and working in Brooklyn and Berlin. Arena is a multidisciplinary artist and has participated in exhibitions and events in the US, Europe and the Middle East. She was awarded residencies in Iceland and Palestine in 2010 and participated in Artist Summer Institute in 2011 in New York City. In 2012 she will return to Iceland for a residency at The Shell in Hólmavík. Arena is an independent curator at Lucky Gallery

Beyza Boyacioglu

Beyza Boyacioglu‘s work reflects upon the limits of language and the flaws of communication. She is fascinated by the myth of a perfect language, which can express everything the mind can think of. The impossibility of such a language nurtures her artistic practice. In her time-based pieces, she investigates the question of translation from ideas to language and also from one language to another.

Robert Brush

Robert Brush lives and works in Beacon, NY. He creates conceptually-based work in a variety of mediums including neon, bronze, photography, and painting. He is presently showing an installation of a reworking of the American Flag called Let’s Roll at Artspace in New Haven, CT. Earlier this year his neon piece We Buy God was featured on Bloomberg News, and was purchased by Raymond Learsy and Melva Bucksbaum, Art News magazine’s top 200 collectors in the world 2012. Brush’s work has also been included in “Art to the Point” at the Katonah Museum of Art this year, juried by Donald Sultan, in which he received First Prize for his sculpture Golden Diaphragm. His work has been written about in the New York Times, the Miami Herald, DART Magazine, Chronogram, and Bloomberg News.

Murphy Chang

Murphy Chang is a classical musician who went to an art school where she studied Calculus and read lots of Virginia Woolf. Luckily she found an advisor who supported sideways learning and the rest, they say, is history.

Lizzy De Vita

Lizzy De Vita was raised in Pittsburgh, and attended Barnard College where she studied English Literature and Art History. Trained at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University, De Vita has worked at various print shops, including Pace Editions, Inc. in New York and Artists Image Resource in Pittsburgh. Her work tends towards a constellation of media, including traditional printmaking, installation, digital video, digital printmaking, animation, sculpture, and performance. Though diverse in form, her work is unified by an underlying interest in the relationships between structure and content, perception and consumption. De Vita’s work has been exhibited in venues in New York and Pittsburgh, including group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Lizzy currently lives and works in the East End of Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth Duffy

Elizabeth Duffy‘s current body of work investigates perceived ideals about security and comfortable living and its attendant risks. She creates installations using objects covered with patterns from the inside of security envelopes from bills and credit card offers she receives in the mail– so-called Data Protection Patterning. The purpose of these patterns is to keep us secure; in turning them outward their role becomes subverted. Offers of credit and low interest loans have provided us an illusory material wealth and what we discard and consume have become topical issues in this increasingly digitized moment in history. For these reasons, these throwaway envelopes are compelling for both their symbolic cultural resonance and impending obsolescence. They embody the uncertain prospect of security that the objects they cover hope to provide.

Ilene Godofsky

Ilene Godofsky was born in 1987 in Washington D.C. She received a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 and a Post-Baccalaureate degree in Photography from the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2011. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ellen Grossman

Born in Brooklyn, NY. Ellen Grossman moved to Long Island, NY suburbs when she was 5. When she returned to New York City as an adult, she knew she had come home. She has a BFA from Cooper Union and a 2011 NYFA fellowship for her drawings. These drawings are a response to topographic maps, satellite photos, scanning electron microscope images, astronomy and the unfolding of intertwined relationships. They emphasize the sensuous aspects of water currents, land masses and the wind made visible.

Cassandra X. Guan

Cassandra X. Guan is a New York based artist with an interdisciplinary practice. Through research and art-making, she explores the mediating role of images between perception and history. Her work utilizes elements of sculpture, photography, drawing, film, and video. Guan was born in Beijing and immigrated to the US during her early teens. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2010. Currently, she is attending the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Ian Addison Hall

Ian Addison Hall was born and raised in West Virginia. He now lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Using photography and found imagery, his work brings to light common underlying values that we all share. Focusing on communal thoughts and feelings (rather than the ones that make us feel different) can conjure an inherent understanding that we have of one another. Each series focuses on different aspects of global intellectual and emotional knowledge, and attempts to make them accessible in new ways.

Eddie Hopely

Eddie Hopely is a writer, performance artist, and small press publisher from the United States, now living in Sydney. He organized Blanket, a Philadelphia poetics/talk series, and is the author of chapbooks such as Cannot Contract, Rude Door, and New International Collaboration in Pen and Ink (2009-2010).

Lanny Jordan Jackson

Lanny Jordan Jackson is an artist whose work circumscribes poetry, performance, audio/video, and the ‘occasional’ object or two. He has participated in various shows, screenings, and performances at venues such as Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, The Emily Harvey Foundation, The Poetry Project, The Segue Reading Series, and MoMA. He currently lives in New York City.

Megan Liu Kincheloe

Megan Liu Kincheloe lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in Painting from Pratt in 2012 and my BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009.

JaeWook Lee

JaeWook Lee‘s work references various theoretical and pedagogical catchphrases in the realm of social practice such as relational aesthetics, social sculpture, participation, and site-specific art. He produces a collision between the pleasure of urban superficies and the unease in their nature by engaging situations where ambivalent meanings have been encoded throughout modern history. Through interdisciplinary research and video-based ephemeral bodily tasks, installation, and photography, he creates projects that focus on the way modernization and neo-liberal capitalism reshape our social, political, and cultural topography.

Jess Levey

Jess Levey is a New York based conceptual artist and documentarian who works in photography, video installation, and sound. Her work has been exhibited at various art spaces in NYC including Exit Art, NurtureArt, The Invisible Dog, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Levey lives in Brooklyn, NY where she was born. She received her BA from Barnard College at Columbia University and her MFA from Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Luke Munn

Luke Munn is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin with work focusing on sound, new-media and social engagement, using the body and code, objects and performances to activate relationships and responses. His projects have featured in the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Electrosmog Festival, Resound Falmouth, Q-O2 Brussels, Laborsonor Berlin and Window amongst others, with performances in Paris, Dublin, Chicago, Berlin, Auckland, and New York.

Jonathan Rajewski

(b. 1986 in Bismarck, ND) Jonathan Rajewski received a bachelors degree in Philosophy from Michigan State University before pursuing painting and other inquiries. Common motifs in his work deal with conditions of linguistic bondage, repetition, monotony, surveillance, confession, anxiety, and the political institutions that enforce them. His paintings are abstract, large-scale works that suggest large sweeping gestures of color and panicked, scrawling pencil lines. 0% his is first real piece using the video medium. He currently works in the exhibitions department at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) and lives in Hamtramck, MI, an island city surrounded by Detroit and Highland Park.

Nicholas Warndorf

Nicholas Warndorf‘s current work is influenced by the effects of technology and digital media on our lives. He is interested in the ways people interact with technology and how this interaction shapes our perception of the world around us.

Francisco Westendarp

Born in 1978 in Mexico City Francisco Westendarp is a visual artist interested in creating systems where it is possible to analyze relations between time, space, memory and movement. He received an MA in Documentary Production in 2005 from the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain. In 2009 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to complete his MFA degree at Stony Brook University in 2012. Recent group exhibitions include Macabre & Mysticism, Red Roots Gallery, New York; Continuum. Intervention Gallery, London. England; (ready)Media, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico. Recent Solo exhibitions include The Self-Portrait of a Sleeping Man at the Oasis Gallery in Michigan.

Daniel J Wilson

Daniel J Wilson is an artist and filmmaker working across multiple media, based out of New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited at galleries and festivals internationally, including Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow, Broadway Media Center in Nottingham, The European Independent Film Festival in Paris, culturaDigital in Rio de Janeiro and Design Festa in Tokyo. He was also a co-founder of the one year pop-up non-profit artspace MMX in Berlin in 2010. Wilson’s work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the National Film Board of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Cheryl Yun

Cheryl Yun is a visual artist currently residing in Connecticut. The Cheryl Yun Collection is a range of image-based sculptural objects or “products,” from handbags to clothing, which simultaneously mirror and subvert fashion and consumer culture to reveal, question, and reevaluate one’s relationship to the world. Her work has recently been seen in exhibitions at Roebling hall, New York to the New Benaki Museum, Greece. Yun has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times and the Village Voice and various major art publications including Art in America and Flash Art.