Momenta Art Annual Catalog 2008-09 by Momenta Art

08 09

INTRODUCTION FOREWORD

SHAUN EL C. LEONARDO & CLIFFORD OWENS ERIK MOSKOWITZ AND AMANDA TRAGER GROUP VIDEO SHOW

3 4

6 12 18

INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

THE MOOD BACK HOME

CHAIN OF LOVE

MIRA SCHOR

HUNTER REYNOLDS

08 09

INTRODUCTION FOREWORD

SHAUN EL C. LEONARDO & CLIFFORD OWENS ERIK MOSKOWITZ AND AMANDA TRAGER GROUP VIDEO SHOW

3 4

6 12 18

INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

THE MOOD BACK HOME

CHAIN OF LOVE

MIRA SCHOR

HUNTER REYNOLDS

INTRODUCTION by ERIC HEIST and MICHAEL WAUGH

This catalog chronicling our 2008-2009 season demonstrates Momenta’s continuing commitment to work that is critically important and connected to contemporary concerns. It also demonstrates a level of maturity in presenting work that is self-aware, by artists who are focused about what they wish to convey through visual means. Besides emerging artists like Sean El C. Leonardo and Clifford Owens or Amanda Trager and Erik Moskowitz, we continue to support established but underrepresented artists like Mira Schor and Hunter Reynolds. It is a pleasure to work with an array of such talented individuals such as those you will find represented here.

Acknowledgements Momenta Art is an artist-run charitable institution that works to promote emerging and underrepresented artists. The organization seeks to expand the dialogue of art by showing work that is not well represented in commercial galleries because of its form or content. Momenta Art promotes artists of all ages, races, and ethnicities, and particularly work that explores the nature of aesthetic experience balanced with social engagement. ISBN # 978-0-557-45655-0 Momenta Art 359 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, NY, 11211 tel 718.218.8058 www.momentaart.org This is a publication of Momenta Art. This catalog was made possible with a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The publication of this catalog was made possible through the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Program Sponsors: The Greenwall Foundation, The Greenwich Collection, Ltd., The Jerome Foundation, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, New York State Council on the Arts, The New York State Office of Parks, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Recreation and Historic Preservation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and White Columns. Contributors: Ray Mortenson and Jean Wardle, Milton and Ruth Parnes, Robert Thill, and Nick Winter.

Founding Members: Donna Czapiga and James Mills. Design by Jeremy Mickel Photography by Frank Schwere Cover image: Shaun El C. Leonardo & Clifford Owens Some things we do together… All rights reserved. 2

We’d like to take this opportunity to summarize Momenta’s achievements during our tenure at 72 Berry Street in Williamsburg. When Williamsburg was being touted by the media as the next “hot” neighborhood for galleries to emerge in the mid 90’s, much of the attention focused on the market and entrepreneurship. Momenta, on the other hand, never thought of Williamsburg as a stepping-stone, and we have been gladdened to see a resurgence of artist-run spaces in the neighborhood. While at 72 Berry Street from 1995 through 2006 we presented work from Brooklyn balanced with work of global scope, seeing our space as a center for the exchange of ideas both locally and internationally. Our humble space on Berry and North 10th Street welcomed a diversity of thought and experience, managing somehow to present exhibitions originating in Japan, France, Thailand and Uruguay. This was done with no budget, only through the will of the artists involved and the shared desire to connect through art. Some of the artists we showed there later became internationally recognized. These include Omer Fast, Kristin Lucas, Sue Debeer, Banks Violette, and Wangechi Mutu. But the work we exhibit is not chosen for its commercial potential. We never consider market realities in making curatorial choices. These artists are making work that is challenging both in its own criticality and, sometimes, in its relation to marketability. This is what motivates Momenta as a not for profit, endeavoring to continuously define notions of “value.” Momenta embraces Williamsburg’s grassroots, artist-run history. This community of art spaces was evident in the Chain of Love event presented in the spring. Some galleries in Williamsburg cooperated to make a one-night chain of performative events. Momenta presented a carnival-like atmosphere of artists making presentations and performing. It was intimate and free of monetary considerations, and we were happy to work with like-minded spaces in the neighborhood. Momenta will continue to strive to present challenging, critical, and engaged approaches to art-making, and Williamsburg remains a vital place to do so.

Board of Directors: Ann Fensterstock, Christopher Gaillard, Aunrico Gatson, Eric Heist, Bob Marty, Valerie Mckenzie, Laura Parnes, and Jude Tallichet. Advisory Committee: Amy Ben-Ezra, Huma Bhabha, Jody Culkin, Julie Durkin, James Elaine, Omer Fast, Jason Fox, Kathleen Goncharov, Peter Hopkins, Kristin Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, O. Donald Odita, Janet Phelps, Rebecca Quaytman, and Ellen Salpeter. 3

FOREWORD by CARRIE MOYER

MY MOMENTA

Momenta Art is a place that has always attracted a distinguished congregation of devotees (MADs for short) and, I am but the latest MAD to be recruited to the role of Essay-Writer. Calvin Reid wrote about the years 1999-2004 in Momenta’s first catalog. Since that time, annual catalogs have included introductions from Akiko Ichikawa, Barbara Pollock, and William Powhida respectively. I am honored to join this stellar group of thinkers and sing the praises of Momenta Art’s 2008-9 exhibition season. ______________________________________________ Over the course of nearly a quarter century, Momenta has developed a lively, socially conscious curatorial program, earning them the affection of artists and freethinking art-lovers alike. Founded in 1986 by a group of artists in Philadelphia, Momenta Art moved to New York City in 1992. In 1995 the gallery opened their initial Williamsburg location on Berry Street, and this was where I first visited them. A brand-new art scene was booming in Brooklyn and yet Momenta was one of the few spaces where socially engaged art was always on the docket. A vibrant nexus of relevant political and social concerns continues to define much of the art that one encounters there. A lot has changed in the world and art world since Momenta Art began in the late 1980s. While political art of that time often employed a mix of strategies derived from Conceptual Art, Post-Modern theory or populist activism, artists usually seemed to cleave to one “camp” or another. Early Conceptual Art set the stage for artists such as Martha Rosler and Adrian Piper to investigate their own subjectivity as Jewish and Black women using what Benjamin Buchloch called the “aesthetics of administration.” Post-Structuralism and media theory of the Pictures Generation made way for the museum-friendly Identity Art of the 1990s. On the outer fringes, “in-your-face” body-based video and performance art drew license from Feminist Art and the Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 70s. The visual codes that once primed the viewer to anticipate particular kinds of social and political content have long since been atomized and repurposed, converting them from potent signals to academic allusions. Today most art audiences know how to recognize contemporary “political art” based on its formal and/or material properties. Often it’s plain — and requires a lot of reading. Or it’s glossy like an advertisement, communicating to us from the “real world.” It could also be ephemeral — a poster, print, installation, video or performance. What’s it’s not going to be is a watercolor, engraving or a bronze sculpture. (Unless it’s ironic and then of course it would.) In other words — viewers are versed in the look of the “political” even if they aren’t familiar with the axioms of Conceptual Art and post-studio production. Into this thicket of assumptions comes Momenta Art. As their Mission Statement makes clear: “…we promote work that explores the nature of aesthetic experience balanced with social engagement.” A quick scroll down their roster of previous exhibitions confirms this: Your Utopia (1998), Pop Patriotism (2002), Corporate 4

Bodies and Enemy Image (both 2005). At a time when many artists see donating work to an Obama fundraiser as a means of taking a conspicuous political stand, Momenta Art affirms that the most relevant art challenges and even implicates us, shedding light on what it feels like to be alive at this moment. The personal still is political. And, just in case you are susceptible to the charms of a classical landscape painting, the artists at Momenta are here to remind you that the world is sexist, racist, homophobic, economically unjust, polluted, and generally on its way to hell in a hand-basket. And they’ll do so with a bright smile and a swift kick under the table. This wonderfully astringent attitude can be attributed to the fact that Momenta Art has been run by practicing artists since the beginning. Under the current direction of Eric Heist and Michael Waugh, Momenta Art displays a clear-eyed understanding of how artists actually work — an awareness that is not often apparent in the larger art world. They make room for the unruly bits of art making that may not fit neatly into commercial and academic contexts or even the parameters of one’s own day-to-day studio practice. Based a camaraderie that comes from years of slugging it out in New York, Momenta’s artist-friendly attitude is grounded in a few other important tenets: CRANKS RULE. In many of the exhibitions at Momenta Art, the artist implicitly or explicitly assumes the role of critical observer, curmudgeon or canary in the coalmine. In our current environment where all dissent (no matter the veracity or origin) is treated to the same mediated cacophony of opinion, this role may appear to be counterintuitive and even old fashioned. Nonetheless, artists tend to be very good critics and continue to embrace their time-honored role of Official Naysayer. During Momenta’s 2008-09 season, some of the shows examined the schism created when the world that we want comes up against the world as it is. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager’s collaborative video and sculptural installation, the utopian aspirations of one present-day family are literally hung out to dry. Mounted in Fall 2008, the piece was constructed around the narrative of the family’s move into a progressive, contemporary commune. The disjuncture between the desire for alternative community and the actual feelings generated by that move are enacted through a series of mediated and physical tableaux. Later that spring, Hunter Reynolds presented Real Love: Hurricane Wilma, Hurricane Hunter, a solo exhibition comprised of “photoweavings,” video and a remote performance aired via Skype. The show came after a long hiatus from the art world during which the artist experienced a variety of man-made and natural catastrophes, including 9/11, Hurricane Wilma and the collapse of his immune system. Reynolds eradicated all didactic membranes between maker and viewer, resulting in work that was simultaneously painful, beautiful and hilarious. FEMINISM — NOW MORE THAN EVER. One of the most notable and appreciated aspects of Momenta Art’s programming is its willingness to demand a kind of communicative urgency from art. While it is difficult to escape the shell game between intention, tone and delivery that defines the art of our time, Momenta Art does not shy away from work that employs legible political codes, particularly those that address race, gender and sexuality. It is one of the very few

spaces where overtly feminist art is the norm and not the exception. Momenta Art’s unrepentant, ongoing commitment to feminism is especially remarkable in an art context that swings happily between moral ambiguity and activist playacting, both of which stand in for intellectual rigor. In a gesture of curatorial synergy, Momenta Art used the 2008-09 season to look more closely at the legacies of the Feminist Art Movement uncovered in WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution and Global Feminisms, two widely publicized museum shows of the previous year. Momenta Art started their year with a twoperson show by performance artists Shaun El C. Leonardo and Clifford Owens. Drawing from the pioneering work of Carolee Schneeman and Joan Jonas, El C. and Owens staged a number of by-invitation-only performances in which ideas of exclusivity, privilege, privacy, and personal boundaries were interrogated. In February 2009 The Mood Back Home: an Exhibition Inspired by Womanhouse opened. Organized by artists Leslie Brack and Suzy Spence, the exhibition took a wry look at how women, mothers and women-artist-mothers continue to struggle with issues of gender and domesticity forty years after the advent of Women’s Liberation. The gallery’s consideration of Feminist art practice found its natural conclusion in Suddenly, a solo show by renowned critic and painter Mira Schor. In her first one-person show in over a decade, Schor used a new body of small paintings to reexamine her trademark interest in the relationship between paint, language and gender. MOMENTA (HEARTS) LIVE ONES. Buried in another part of the Mission Statement, the phrase “artist-run charitable institution” is used to describe Momenta Art. While this may be code for “tax-exempt,” it’s also a nod to those who see the gallery as a kind of refuge, highly prized in a city with so many working artists and very little available real estate. Momenta provides artists with the three things we most need: space, audience and access. We need the space to test out new ideas, a place to fall short or fall flat, to make a debut or to return to the spotlight after an absence. We need access to viewers and reviewers alike. We also need to look at, study and interact with the work of other artists — a demand that the gallery meets every day through a diverse curatorial program and its acclaimed Video Library where visitors can watch the work of over 60 different artists. All in all, Momenta Art’s paramount gift is the space for curatorial speculation. Here a “well curated” exhibition means unapologetically including art that is too obvious, too obscure, too ephemeral, too unwieldy, too kitschy, too dry or just too much. (I think the only work they don’t show is the stuff that’s too nice.) That being said, Momenta Art still is run by artists and they’ll call your bluff the minute you start to get too comfortable. During Winter 2009, the gallery mounted Infinite Possibilities, a rare exhibition that would have looked right at home in Chelsea because of both its elegant collection of prints, photographs, video and discrete objects and its open-ended curatorial premise. In recent years, commercial galleries have adopted this notion of curatorial speculation and used it as an occasional branding device. At Momenta Art speculation is a constant, serving us in the present and reminding us that the alternative space has always been the primary site for open-ended thinking. Infinite possibilities indeed. Momenta Art stays true to its mission: no dogma, just art (and generosity). We are all the better for it. 5

SHAUN EL C. LEONARDO & CLIFFORD OWENS SOME THINGS WE DO TOGETHER…

SEPTEMBER 5 – OCTOBER 6, 2008 Momenta Art presented a collaborative performance series by Shaun Leonardo and Clifford Owens entitled Some Things We Do Together... These artists share an interest in conflict as a means to self-discovery. In his past work, Leonardo, or El C., a masked wrestler thrills the crowd with his dramatic and seemingly painful leaps and stunts set within elaborate cages and rings. But there is no visible, corporeal opponent, leaving the viewer to wonder whom this invisible foe may be. Is it the unseen forces of political power or his own inner struggles made manifest? Clifford Owens’s past work presents the artist as a means to other’s ends. In videotaped studio visits with Carolee Schneemann, Patty Chang, and Joan Jonas, Owens cast himself as a naked tool for the women to utilize to make their own work, allowing them to manipulate his body in any ways they choose. He became a subordinate, non-presence in his studio. His identity as an African American male complicates readings of the performance further. For the exhibition at Momenta, the artists built a private performance room within the gallery. The series of performances explored notions of exclusivity, privilege, privacy, and personal boundaries. Some events were by invitation only, others required the viewer to sign non-disclosure contracts with the performers that will guarantee secrecy. The artists chose to maintain secrecy about the actual content of each performance in keeping with the intentions of the event. Following performances, ephemera and detritus were left to be viewed during regular gallery hours. September 5 – During a series of intimate performances, individuals were asked to enter a private enclosed setting within the gallery to experience a personal, customized action with the artists.

SHAUN EL C. LEONARDO received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the painting department at the San Francisco Art Institute and currently lives/works in Queens, New York City – the borough in which he was born and raised. He has received residencies/grants from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The New York Studio School, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Art Matters, and has recently been awarded a 2008 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in the category of painting. El C.’s work has been shown nationally and internationally and is represented by Rhys Mendes Gallery, Los Angeles/Brazil with recent solo exhibitions in New York City, Hartford and Boston. CLIFFORD OWENS’ art has appeared in numerous group exhibitions including Performa05, New York, NY; Freestyle and Quid Pro Quo both at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Greater New York 2005 P.S.1, Queens, New York; Influence, Anxiety, Gratitude List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA. Clifford studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of Visual Art at Rutgers University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He was an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005-06 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004. He has received many grants and fellowships including Art Matters, Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, NewYork Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, , Lambent Foundation, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Graduate Fellowship. Clifford was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he lives and works in Queens, New York.

(at left) Installation following final performance

September 13 – 3 groups of pre-invited guests were asked to enter a private enclosed setting within the gallery to witness an action that reflects the artists’ relationship to each other and their chosen company. September 20 – a specific group of performers along with some members of the audience were asked to enter a private enclosed setting within the gallery to execute a mosh-pit with the artists During all three weekend performances the general public, if not invited into the interior space, experienced the action from the exterior gallery.

Nondisclosure Agreement for Art Performance

This agreement ("Agreement") made this ________ day of ___________, 20____, is entered into by ___________________&_____________________ ("Artists") and _________________________________________________ ("Participant"). WHEREAS, Artist has an art performance entitled, _______________________, ("Performance") to take place at _______________________________________ on the ___________ day of ____________, 20_______; and WHEREAS, Participant desires to be admitted to said Performance for the sole purpose of witnessing, participating, and interacting with Artists and Performance.

(above, top) Agreement form between artists and participants (above, bottom) Performance (at right) Performance ( following spread) Installation after final performance

ERIK MOSKOWITZ AND AMANDA TRAGER CLOUD CUCKOO LAND OCTOBER 17 – DECEMBER 1, 2008 Cloud Cuckoo Land was a collaborative video and sculptural installation by Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager. The lead roles were played by Moskowitz and Trager with Joan Jonas, Robert Janitz, and Ronnie Bass featured in the supporting cast. The seductive cinematography and richly layered music of the video was shown within an environment of objects that served as a set for filming. These included a number of wall-sized semi-transparent photographic scrims that described a domestic interior within the gallery. The translucency of the scrims allowed viewers to watch other viewers as they moved between divisions, one room of the set bleeding into the next. Additional objects, with skewed proportions and unconventional relations to space, further dissolved physical boundaries. A more uncanny dissolution occurred when the characters opened their mouths to speak. The timing of the footage had been altered to a dissociating effect. The actors haltingly mouthed their dialogue, individual voices replaced by a unifying soundtrack sung by the artists The title of the piece, Cloud Cuckoo Land is taken from the Aristophanes’ play The Birds, which first put the possibility of progress (and the goal of Utopia) into doubt. The narrative encompasses a family’s move to a contemporary, progressive commune in which the central character is confronted by her own intolerance and inability to let go of the conventions of individualized life. The familiar boundaries to which she clings and the unclear spatial relations within the gallery coalesce and call into question how we envision comfort and safety both societally and psychologically.

ERIK MOSKOWITZ received a BFA from The School of Visual Arts, NY. His work was recently exhibited at Freight and Volume, NY, Holiday, Brooklyn, and Le Sous Salon, Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally at Pixeldance Festival, Kodra, Greece, Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands, Oberhausen 2005, Oberhausen, Germany, Momenta Aristiques, Paris, and Experimenta, Bombay, India among others. AMANDA TRAGER received an BA from Antioch College, OH. She has had solo exhibitions at Le Sous-Salon, Paris, Bowery Poetry Club, NY, and Momenta Art(in 2001). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Triple Candie, White Box, Feature, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Following the exhibition at Momenta, Cloud Cuckoo Land was exhibited at 303 gallery, New York, and the Pompidou Centre, Paris.

(at right) still from Cloud Cuckoo Land, 2008, HD Video (edition of 6) ( following spread) Cloud Cuckoo Land, (Installation). 2008, mixed media with video, dimensions variable

In creating the work, these boundaries were actively tested by the artists. Trager and Moskowitz, themselves a couple, shared their home/studio with coperformer Robert Janitz during the period of time in which they developed this piece. Artifacts of this living arrangement, redolent of the mundane tensions of an unconventional “family-life” remained in the installation, functioning as a nearly hidden narrative-within-a-narrative. These artifacts of a lived experience made A Cloud Cuckoo Land as authentic as it was critical.

still from Cloud Cuckoo Land, 2008, HD Video (edition of 6)

GROUP VIDEO SHOW OCTOBER, 2008 NEIL BELOUFA BRENDAN FERNANDES ANTONI MUNTADAS DIANE NERWEN Momenta presented screenings of videos to be added to our video library, including artists Neil Beloufa, Brendan Fernandes, Antoni Muntadas, and Diane Nerwen. The gallery’s video library allows viewers to choose and view work by over 60 video artists who have shown with Momenta since 1991. The four artists featured in this screening were presented in a show curated by Momenta Art for the Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen, Norway in October 2008. NEIL BELOUFA, Kempinski, 2001, 13:44. The scenario of Kempinski, filmed in various towns in Mali, is defined by specific rules: interviewed people imagine the future and speak about it in the present tense. Their hopeful, poetic and spiritual stories and fantasies are recorded and edited in a melodic way; Kempinski thus cleverly challenges our exotic expectations and stereotypes about Africa. Neil Beloufa is an Algerian artist living in Paris. His work has been screened internationally in London, Moscow, Berlin, Brooklyn, Geneva, Mali, and elsewhere including the Jeu de Paume, Palais de Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Paulo Biennal, la Biennale de Lyon et La Havana and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Wexner Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio, le Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, le Capc de Bordeaux, France, the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. DIANE NERWEN, Open House/ Chapter 1: Removal, 10:00. This piece documents the development that occurred as a result of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s re-zoning and the recent loosening of building codes. Nerwen presents a neighborhood being torn apart by both developers and property owners desperate to cash in before the market crashed. The piece chronicles the resultant violence and displacement in a condensed and effective manner. Diane Nerwen is a video artist and media arts educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings at the Berlin Film Festival, the New York Video Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, NY and the Tate Modern, London. Her work has been supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Creative Capital Foundation.

BRENDAN FERNANDES, Foe, 2008, approx. 6:00. Foe presents video footage of the artist receiving lessons from an acting coach to learn the “accents” of his own disparate cultural backgrounds: Goan Indian, Kenyan, and Canadian. The artist struggles, twists his speech, is softly corrected by the coach as he recites a passage from Robinson Crusoe by J. M. Coetzee. In this book, Friday (the savage) has been mutilated; his tongue has been removed and he cannot speak. Fernandes completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has received grants from The Ontario and Canada Councils for the Arts. He has exhibited widely, including The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China and at The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. ANTONI MUNTADAS, On Translation: Fear/Miedo, 30:25 min. For this project, Muntadas weaves together interviews with people who experience the tensions of border zones on a daily basis and refers to the idea of fear on the border between Mexico and the United States. In the video, fear reveals itself as a translation of politics and economics. The piece was created to be broadcast in four locations that connect the centers of power/decision-making with the places where these policies are evident everyday: Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City, and Washington, DC. Antoni Muntadas has received several prizes and grants including those of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts. His works have been exhibited throughout the world, including the Venice Biennale, Documenta Vl and X in Kassel, the Sao 18

(at right)

ANTONI MUNTADAS On Translation: Fear/Miedo, 2005, 30:25

(opposite)

DIANE NERWEN Open House:Chapter 1: Removal, 2008, 9:49

BRENDAN FERNANDES

NEIL BELOUFA

Foe, 2008, 6:00

Kempinski, 2007, 13:44

INFINITE POSSIBILITIES JANUARY 9 – FEBRUARY 9. 2009 MIKE ASENTE NATHAN BENNETT VINCENT COMO ELAINE KAUFMANN CARRIE MOYER

SARAH OPPENHEIMER YUMI JANAIRO ROTH RUSLAN TRUSEWYCH ARNOLD VON WEDEMEYER

Infinite Possibilities was a group show of environments, images and objects that promote social or political transformation. MIKE ASENTE’s drawings are a manifestation of what could be described as a parlor game of the 21st century, “What would you blow up?” Asente’s repeated explosion image is hand scratched onto the surface of 1960’s advertisements printed surfaces. The physical act of removal of the actual image suggests a simultaneously additive and subtractive process of construction and destruction. Acting as forgotten and inoperable Flavin sculptures, the ghost-like, minimalistobject, dangling, fluorescent fixtures of NATHAN BENNETT refer to the abandoned warehouses where the artist discovered them. Pure and derelict, these sculptures embody a false ready-made that has lost its functionality while confronting authenticity and form. A source photograph of the original warehouse in Ithaca, NY will be included with the sculpture. VINCENT COMO explores the qualities of black from the standpoint of a color theorist, physicist, alchemist, and heavy metal connoisseur. The work takes given structures with an existent relationship to black and filters them into artworks, creating an expansive matrix of associations including Malevich and Reinhardt as aesthetic origins. ELAINE KAUFMANN’s International Design is a series of exquisite pencil drawings that appropriate the layout and text of home design magazines. Images of provisional housing are substituted for images of luxury while retaining the text describing the amenities of wealth. This work contrasts media projections of the normalcy of luxury with the more common state of worldwide poverty. Inspired by Feminist Art as a young artist as well as the recent critical reassessment of that movement, CARRIE MOYER’s paintings embrace an expanded lexicon of gesture, process and sign. Invented avatars — reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf, ceremonial instruments, human beings and animals — are evoked through the interplay of abstract shapes, flows of pure color, glitter and transparent veils of poured acrylic.

film – particularly the film Rythmus 21 – by Hans Richter (1921). In the drawings included in Infinite Possibilities, the artist segmented the film into a discrete set of stills so as to further analyze the progression of frame alterations. YUMI JANAIRO ROTH presented casually placed work pallets incongruously inlaid with decorative mother of pearl designs. Mother-of-pearl, a process and material associated with traditional Filipino furniture, suggests that the pallets serve as symbolic surrogates for Filipinos who have migrated around the world. The work functions to expand the aesthetic dialogue by exploring the interdependence of an historical artistic technique and its globalized mirror: the functional aesthetics of commerce. SEHER SHAH’s Black Star Project, a portfolio of 25 prints, is a study into the geometry of the cube and its multiple associations as both an architectural element, religious symbol, universal geometry and reductive massing. Using elements from ornamental art, animation, graffiti and architectural drawing, the studies use the power of transformation in symbolic meaning. Shah defines the Cube as the Black Star and represents ideas and connections of childhood memory where geometric forms and architectural spaces, part autobiographical, part mythology and part fairytale are woven together to create the visual narrative. RUSLAN TRUSEWYCH presented the phrase “and by you I mean me,” in laser cut acrylic letters, resting inconspicuously amid an accumulated structure of tetrahedrons constructed of gold-glitter, hot-melt glue-sticks. Conflations of value become a stable support for a shifting casual proposition as this work fulfills its contained mission. In another work, an informal collection of marks is torn out of a notebook and triangularly framed in a reflexive manner that echoes the drawing’s diagrammatic quality. Its formal elements, balanced, cancel each other out and leave an object that is not anything but nonetheless does what it says. ARNOLD VON WEDEMEYER’s painstakingly produced video work On-Time Still Life I presents a vase of tulips withering, a slice of bread hardening, a monitor depicting rolling waves with a stock ticker screen crawl, and light moving across the entire tableaux. Three contradictory levels of time are shown at once in this 9:20 piece. It is a carefully manipulated, computer-controlled series of photographs shot over a period of two weeks at minute-and-a-half intervals. The imagery refers to the first stock market crash in history, “Tulipmania.”

Much of SARAH OPPENHEIMER’s recent work has been an exploration of how the subject’s progression through architectural space approximates filmic experience, transforming the experience of moving through a space of display (museum, gallery) into a filmic progression, in which the body of the viewer becomes the body of the camera. The work is linked to early abstract

MICHAEL ASENTE Oh where oh where. 2008, ink removal from magazine, trade, and corporate annual report images and advertisements, dimensions variable

YUMI JANAIRO ROTH untitled shipping pallet. 2009, found shipping pallet inlaid with mother-of-pearl, 48x36x5” untitled shipping pallet. 2009, found shipping pallet inlaid with mother-of-pearl, 48x36x5”

VINCENT COMO Un/Folding Time/Space. 2008, creased paper, 25 1/2” x 19 1/2” Un/Folding Time/Space. 2008, creased paper, 25 1/2” x 19 1/2” Un/Folding Time/Space. 2008, creased paper, 25 1/2” x 19 1/2”

RUSLAN TRUSEWYCH Translation. 2008, mixed media, 41x30”

RUSLAN TRUSEWYCH untitled (a statement is not a bearer of meaning). 2008, gold glitter, glue sticks, lasercut acrylic, dimensions variable

(at left)

CARRIE MOYER Messenger. 2008, acrylic, glitter on canvas. 60 x 40 inches

(below)

SEHER SHAH Black Star Project: Cube 9, Cube 14, Cube 10, Cube 15, Cube 25, Cube 12, Cube 24, Cube 1, Cube 11, Cube 3. 2007, archival giclĂŠe prints, 7x7â&#x20AC;? each, ed. 20.

(opposite)

ELAINE KAUFMANN (clockwise from top left): International Design ( from International Design). 2008, pencil on paper, 12 x 9.5 inches American Empire ( from International Design). 2008, pencil on paper, 12 x 9.5 inches The Greatest Pleasure ( from International Design). 2008, pencil on paper, 12 x 9.5 inches Kid-Centric Condos ( from International Design). 2007, pencil on paper, 12 x 9.5 inches

ARNOLD VON WEDEMEYER

VINCENT COMO

On-Time-Still Life. 2006-2007. HD video, 9’20” (ed. 10 + 2 AP)

Blackspace. 2009, acrylic on canvas over board (ed. of 100 w/ cardboard box)

NATHAN BENNETT Cascading Light Fixture. Fomecor, 2008, dimensions variable

THE MOOD BACK HOME AN EXHIBITION INSPIRED BY WOMANHOUSE FEBRUARY 13 – MARCH 16, 2009 ORGANIZED BY LESLIE BRACK AND SUZY SPENCE ALYSON ALIANO AM PAM BUTLER LESLIE BRACK NICOLE EISENMAN JESSICA JACKSON-HUTCHINS KAREN LEO TARA MATEIK KARYN OLIVIER BEA ROMEO SUZY SPENCE KIRSTEN STOLTMANN TOOFLY JEANNE TREMEL PINAR YOLACAN FEATURING JOHANNA DEMETRAKAS’S FILM WOMANHOUSE, 1972

The Mood Back Home developed from discussions between two artists/mothers, Leslie Brack and Suzy Spence, about the landmark project Womanhouse, created in 1972 by a group of CalArts students and their professors. Like Womanhouse, The Mood Back Home addresses the stubborn nature of gender prescribed domesticity and its effect on women artists. The exhibition highlighted Johanna Demetrekas’ documentary film, Womanhouse, in the gallery – but otherwise focused on work of a new generation of women, the ostensible inheritors of 70’s era feminism as well of the Reagan-era backlash that followed. Kirsten Stoltmann contributed a collage titled Autonomous Wife made of Snoopy stickers and a rug defaced with the text, “It’s Just Complicated” in spray paint. Alyson Aliano’s photographic portraits of individual mothers at home with their children puts a new spin on the often saccharine genre of mother and child. Nicole Eisenman’s watercolor portrays a cheerful domestic scene in which breast milk is squirted into the cereal bowls of hungry children. Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ hobby horse encrusted with ceramic growths updates the original “Nursery” in Womanhouse. Tara Mateik’s video of the performance Putting the Balls Away relives and comments on the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” which pitted tennis players Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs against each other in a rare moment of sports competition between genders. Jeanne Tremel’s sculptures disconnect the humble home practice of crochet from any practical use, unleashing a modest and rebellious exuberance. One of Karen Leo’s two videos, Momma’s House, has the artist dressed in a knitted Bruce Willis costume dancing with her mother to a John Denver sound track. Pinar Yolacan contributed portrait photographs of aging women whose elegant presentation is complicated by dresses adorned with meat and organ products. Suzy Spence’s Auctionhouse is a Duchampian box containing paper miniatures of Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer selling art works from the original Womanhouse to eager collectors. Leslie Brack’s paintings based on photo fragments from 1970s Life magazines project a black humor that seems uncannily congruous to our own time. During rare quiet moments between mothering responsibilities, Bea Romeo uses delicate ink lines to render family members as featureless, floating heads of hair. Womanhouse is remembered for its site-specific domestic installations in which artists responded to every room of the house. In this spirit, Karyn Olivier created a piece for the Momenta Art office while Pam Butler took over the bathroom with a plethora of imagery And on the front of the gallery, street artists Toofly and AM painted a site specific mural. Also included, Mira Schor and Faith Wilding, two of the original participants, introduced and screened a little-seen PBS video, A House if Not a Home by Lynne Littman, KCET Los Angeles, originally aired February 1972.

BEA ROMEO

NICOLE EISENMAN

(clockwise from top left):

Breakfast. 1995, ink on paper, 8.5” x 11,”

Vagues. 2008, ink on paper, 17¼”x12” (unframed size), Droits. 2008, ink on paper, 29½” x 22½” (unframed size) Elephant Man. 2008, ink on paper, 13½” x 12” (unframed size) De Face. 2008, ink on paper, 23¼” x 18” (unframed size)

KIRSTEN STOLTMANN Autonomous Wife. 2007, reflective posterboard, stickers, 21½”x 29,”

(at left, below)

PINAR YOLACAN PYM2.22. 2007, c-print, 40” x 32” (unframed size), ed. 6 PYM5.22. 2007, c-print, 40” x 32” (unframed size), ed. 6 PYM19.22. 2007, c-print, 40” x 32” (unframed size), ed. 6

JESSICA J. HUTCHINS

LESLIE BRACK

Rocking Horse with Birthday Party Turf. 2008, rocking horse, plaster, mixed media collage and ceramics, 22¾” x 48” x 39¼,”

The Mood Back Home. 2009. oil on panel, 8” x 8,”

SUZY SPENCE Auctionhouse. 2009, mixed media on paper, 22.5” x 15” x 16,”

KARYN OLIVIER One Week. 2008/9, c-prints, 16” x 20,” (each), ed.8

(opposite)

TARA MATEIK Putting the Balls Away. 2009, mixed media video installation (DVD), size: 84”x 93”x 67,” time: 22’ 45,” ed. 3 40

CHAIN OF LOVE MARCH 7, 2009 ORGANIZED BY ELISABETH KLEY JOJO AMERICO/THE ONES OLIVER HERRING ELISABETH KLEY LARRY KRONE STEVE KEISTER MICHAEL MAHALCHICK ROBERT MELEE PSYCHIC TV WITH EDDIE O’DOWD HUNTER REYNOLDS RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ AND KATHLEEN WHITEAND TABBOO! ETHAN SHOSHAN CHRYSANNE STATHACOS MIKA TAJIMA/NEW HUMANS A group of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Southside galleries a cooperatively presented a staggered series of evening perfomances/events.

(opposite)

Poster designed by Ingrid Bromberg Kennedy

HUNTER REYNOLDS AND ETHAN SHOSHAN

MICHAEL MAHALCHICK performing

LARRY KRONE performing

ETHAN SHOSHAN and SUR RODNEY SUR

RAFAEL SANCHEZ 46

OLIVER HERRING

HUNTER REYNOLDS 47

MIRA SCHOR SUDDENLY

MARCH 20 – APRIL 20, 2009 What would the self-portrait of a thought look like? Momenta Art presented Suddenly, New Paintings by Mira Schor, Schor’s first one-person show in New York in over a decade. These works mark a departure in Schor’s work, from the depiction of language as image to the suggestion of its lack in a space where we expect to see it. Suddenly marks the moment when personal loss or political babble creates a loss for words. Schor has turned to the most basic form that came to mind: the empty thought balloon, where language was or will or should be. Richly surfaced, bold, witty, notational, provisional, the paintings in this show were made in quick gestures, taking five minutes to an afternoon. They function unpredictably, as existential encounters that emerge from political absurdities or epochal tragedies – experienced in the everyday.

A conceptual artist who is a painter’s painter, a feminist who is an odd inheritor of the approaches to painting of the New York School, a noted writer on both feminism and painting, Mira Schor has long worked at the razor’s edge between visual and verbal languages. Her paintings have been foregrounded by these various disciplines: by painting, with shows such as Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, at P.S.1; by feminism, with shows such as Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, at the Armand Hammer Museum; and by language, with shows such as Poetry Plastique, at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism (both from Duke University Press) and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/ Schor had two new books published in 2009, The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, which she edited, from Yale University Press, and a new collection of her own writings on art and culture, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, published by Duke University Press. Haunted Conversation, 2007, oil on linen, 18”x25”

Portrait of My Brain, 2007, oil on linen, 16”x12”

The Professor, 2008, oil on linen, 16”x12”

( from left to right) Suddenly, 2005, oil on linen, 18”x25” Influence, 2008 oil on linen, 24”x28” Suddenly, 2009, ink and gesso in tracing paper, 12”x38” Untitled. , 2009, ink on tracing paper, 12”x25” A Life, 2008, graphite, ink, gesso on linen, 16”x12” Anonymity, 2007, ink, graphite, and gesso on tracing paper, 12x27” 52

HUNTER REYNOLDS REAL LOVE: HURRICANE WILMA, HURRICANE HUNTER MAY 15 – JUNE 15, 2009 Momenta presented Hunter Reynold’s first solo exhibition in New York in five years. Since 2001, Reynolds experienced a series of life-altering events: 9/11, substance abuse, surviving AIDS, Hurricane Wilma, a close friend’s suicide, the collapse of his immune system, and four HIV-related strokes that left his right hand partially paralyzed. These events are the raw material out of which this exhibition was born. Viewers entering the gallery were surrounded by a series of large-format works called “photo-weavings” formed by physically sewing together hundreds of smaller photographs. Though stunningly beautiful, the photographs that make up these pieces document a cathartic meltdown during which Reynolds, together with Hurricane Wilma, destroyed his Florida studio in the fall of 2005. The documented wreckage includes Reynolds’ own paint-splattered and waterdamaged work from earlier series, artwork by other artists, CD covers, paper fragments, and shards of broken glass that were thrown and bonded by the forces of wind and rain. Bits of this detritus will be on view in the gallery along with the photo weavings. In addition, Reynolds presented several remote story-telling/ conversation performances via Skype and a mini-documentary covering the hurricane and Reynolds’ salvage efforts in his studio, efforts that transform the wreckage and personal history into testaments of survival. For almost thirty years, Reynolds’ work has engaged with gender identity, body politics, and personal histories. But it is the broad generosity of his work, and this installation in particular, that reveals the artist’s particular strength at forging hope and beauty out of the sometimes dark totality of life.

HUNTER REYNOLDS has exhibited his work at museums and galleries widely in the US and abroad. He has exhibited at Artists Space, New York; Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; and at Gavlak in West Palm Beach, Florida. He has been the recipient of many grants residencies including a Pollock Krasner Grant this year. As an AIDS activist, he was an early member of ACTUP and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT-UP, to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. An essay written by critic G. Roger Denson accompanied the installation. Music Video edited by George Lyter with orginal song Neurobotic by Mike Alike. Streaming video performance consulting by Wayne Ashley and Dan Winckler. Special thanks to Justin Gooding.

(opposite top, left to right) DRAMA QUEEN. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x72” Brain Spot. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x72” The Scream. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x101.5”

(opposite bottom, left to right) HURRICANE WILMA, HURRICANE HUNTER. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x84”

Art has always been one of the tools I have used to heal myself and others and to find order in the chaos of my life, by not only telling the story through art, but by transforming myself in the process of making it, using it to rebuild my life, finding hope and beauty and a desire to be alive.

Rasmussen. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x72” REAL LOVE. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x72”

– Hunter Reynolds

(above) Hurricane Hunter artifacts, 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable (opposite) 56

Brain Spot. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96â&#x20AC;?x72â&#x20AC;?

HURRICANE WILMA, HURRICANE HUNTER. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x84” REAL LOVE. 2009, c-prints, thread, 96”x72”

$30