NURTUREart 2012/13 by NURTUREart

2012 / 2013

Introduction p04 Monochrome p07 the escape from the banal everyday XX life to the world of the ideal p13 The Order of Things p27 Never While Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re Sleeping p33 On the Golden Wire for Thirty-Four p39 Cashing Out p49 The Indifference of Wisdom p55 On Hold p65 Videorover Season 5 and 6 p71 Special Projects p83

Freedom is… by Marco Antonini

Throughout this past season, we have seen lots of hard work, a few bold decisions taken at the right time, and escalating support from our audience and constituency bloom into today’s NURTUREart. This is not the same organization that greeted you one year ago in a similar catalog, and we think that the change is remarkably all for the better. By using our gallery space more creatively and collaborating with other venues and organizations such as Tribeca’s {TEMP} art space, our friends and neighbors at Storefront Ten Eyck, and the Rapid Pulse Performance Festival in Chicago, we have expanded our program to host and promote a higher number of emerging artists and curators than ever before. In this season alone, NURTUREart organized a total of 6 solo shows, 7 group shows, and 5 video screenings, together showcasing the work of 5 emerging curators and 79 emerging visual artists. Add to this the hundreds of students reached by our education program, 10 speakers in our popular Muse Fuse series, and more than a thousand artists and curators featured on the pages of our online registry, and you’ll get a quick sense of how busy and exciting this season has been to all of us. My own title changed this year when the board formalized my role as the organization’s Curator and Executive Director. All staff members at NURTUREart have taken on great-

er responsibility, and we recently welcomed the newest addition to the team: Education Coordinator Cody Rae Knue. Our general growth pattern is reflected in a blazing record of attendance and in the following and loyalty of our audience on various social media platforms. Thanks so much for getting (and staying) in touch! Current and upcoming projects include the publication of a book of essays and interviews dedicated to an assesment of the meaning and relevance of contemporary abstract painting, a topic we decided to tackle in response to the ubiquity of abstraction in Bushwick galleries and studios. On other fronts, we have been (and still are) busy organizing programming for fellow organizations in St. Louis, New Orleans, Chicago, and Belfast… expanding our reach and our networks in every direction, in preparation for future projects that will align our work with a decidedly more international context. Behind the scenes, more is changing. As the Registry becomes increasingly populated, we get closer to reintegrating its original role as “source material” for our programming. Starting with the 2013/14 open call, curators and artists sending exhibition proposals to NURTUREart will once again be required to join the registry themselves and use this valuable resource as a research tool in the

preparation of their proposals, contributing to its function as an increasingly exciting platform for visibility and exchange. As the great Italian (sorry, I had to!) songwriter Giorgio Gaber wrote and sang at the top of his lungs: “Libertà è Partecipazione!” (Freedom is Participation!). This invisible bond with our constituency—this participation—is really at the core of what we do. Therefore, our biggest thanks go to all of you, for submitting proposals to our open calls, volunteering in the gallery or during fundraising events, donating fantastic artwork, and signing up for workshops, talks, and events. Without your participation, we would not exist or remain relevant. Thanks to your generosity and support, we celebrated an über successful 2012 Benefit Party, which was dramatically marked by the events surrounding Superstorm Sandy’s unwelcome arrival in our beloved city. Building on that success, our Trustees have been at the forefront of internal and external development by welcoming new members to the Board, reenergizing our Advisory Board, and planning well ahead via a meticulous strategic planning campaign. The commitment of this extraordinary group of individuals is the foundation of whatever present and future we imagine for NURTUREart. I reserve my last-but-not-least thanks to all of them. Ad Majora!

Scott Lawrence

Monochrome

From September 28 to October 27, 2012

Pants, Shirts, etc. The raw and the cooked in Scott Lawrence’s art by Marco Antonini

We all, more or less, wear pants. Old and young, women and men, tall and short people from all parts of the world (with a few awesome exceptions) pick their style of casual, sporty, uniform, fancy pants basically every morning right before going out in the world and putting on their public selves for just another day. As much as any other popular clothing item, pants are mundane, yet culturally charged objects. History-rich as in the case of Jeans: durable sailing pants first popular in Genova, --hence the name-- made of Denim cotton imported from Nimes that have become a symbol of pragmatism (some would call it freedom) worldwide thanks to their success in North America. Strongly codified as in a pair of formal, business-minded pinstripe pants, so indissolubly tied to the ethics and aesthetics of Capitalist power, their cold elegance echoed by Frank Stella’s ominous, great early canvases and by Minimalism’s nods to what Rosalind Krauss has not hesitated to describe as a “violent” form of abstraction. And of course all-out weird like a pair of exaggerated, funky designer pants, engendering the kind of common taste disruptions that visual artists have often themselves adopted to defy and elude expectations. From tradition-rich sartorial models to uniforms, to silky/silly Hammer (actually, “Harem”) pants to stretch sequined overalls to eye-piercing floral extravaganzas; all pants can, in their own way, make sense, and generally exist

Pants Sculpture II, 2009. Pants and wood, 20 x 28 x 28 inches.

for a reason that’s far beyond their practical usevalue. While something like a pair of pants contains distinctive elements of material culture, design and style, it can also be considered as raw material whose modicum of creative surplus is surpassed and shadowed by its own ordinariness. In Scott Lawrence’s hands, pants become a skin, stretched to their limits and re-objectified in sculptures whose appearance range from the hopelessly clumsy to the positively elegant, somewhere between high-minded Minimalism and dive-bar joke. Lawrence’s approach fits perfectly in a history of artistic media that has seen a constant development in the definition of “raw” materials, upgrading them to increasingly impure and sophisticated products on a path defined by both technological innovation and consumerism. One of the biggest and most fascinating promises of late modernist art and design was that of elevating the physical qualities of even the humblest material to the raison d’etre of the final product, adapting creativity to circumstances and/or need, and not the other way around. Lawrence’s pants sculptures, canvas frames wrapped in dress shirts, and repurposed picture frames work in the same direction but privilege finished products and pre-processed components. Often elegantly monochromatic or otherwise visually understated, Lawrence’s works reveal a desire to explore materials in a reverse method that is

aimed at locating a poetic, imaginative and often humorous surplus within the rigorously limited number of structural variables that they offer. Using deconstruction, multiplication, obliteration or any other form of manipulation that is directly suggested by the form and function of the original products (sometimes by their name as in his video-performance Folding Chair), the artist reveals their innermost possibilities, investing them of new meanings, ultimately inviting us to reconsider their potential, question their original identity and, in his own words, setting up a clear context/logic against which poetry may exist.

Pants Sculpture VI, 2009. Pants and wood, 17 x 34 x 34 inches.

Jonathan Allmaier Tamara Gonzales EJ Hauser Stephen Truax Maria Walker

The escape from the banal everyday life to the world of the ideal Curated by Brooke Moyse

From November 2 to November 30, 2012

The escape from the banal everyday life to the world of the ideal by Brooke Moyse

Artspeak If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal itself for what it is, what we all burn to know. As for our certainties, it would fetch a dry yawn then take a minute to sweep them under the rug: certainties time-honored as meaningless as dust under the rug. High time, my dears, to listen up. Finally Art would talk, fill the sky like a mouth, clear its convulsive throat while flashes and crashes erupted as it spoke—a star-shot avalanche of visions in uproar, drowned by the breathy din of soundbites as we strain to hear its august words: “a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z.” Dorothea Tanning

The title of this exhibition is taken from a note in artist Charles Burchfield’s sketchbook. Burchfield worked in relentless pursuit of the elusive center of his artistic practice. His sketchbooks are filled with elaborate notes and codes, which he would deliberately refer to in crafting his surrealistic landscape paintings. Burchfield’s paintings and drawings are unique in that they do not fit into conventional formal categories. They are simultaneously surreal, abstract, and representational descriptions of the natural world. The sincerity of his marks make it difficult to know if he thought that he was fabricating environments, or believed he was painting from life. These fantastical landscapes gave Burchfield a framework through which to investigate his true subject: the ability of a work of art to transcend the constrictions of its own physicality. This exhibition brings together five artists - Jonathan Allmeier, Tamara Gonzales, EJ Hauser, Stephen Truax, and Maria Walker - who make abstract work that is simultaneously conceptual, formal, and sincere. Their works discuss the history of the art object and mark-making, and the way that these two things can join to articulate a new experience. I am presenting pieces that are a bit different from what each artist is known for, and that share a particular power that I feel is relevant to the idea of making timeless and vital art.

Formal abstraction first started to emerge through the Symbolist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American artists who were interested in mysticism at that time often used nature as a departure point in exploring those ideas. Many artists, like Arthur Dove or Georgia O’Keefe, gradually moved on from nature into formal abstraction as their interests in the occult and mysticism became essential source material for their paintings. The intuitive and non-representational nature of formal abstraction lent itself to the investigation of the more personal (rather than institutional) type of spirituality that these artists were considering at the time. The new form of art thus became more about exploring the human mind and the role of the artistic object towards deepening our understanding of it, than about literally telling a story. The first half of the 20th century was an incubator for the formal and ideological developments of abstract art, introducing concepts and notions that would become establishment by the 1960s. While the critical establishment was preoccupied by the formal elements of abstraction, the artists who were exploring it were primarly interested in its power for conveying a transcendental experience. The subsequent years of modernism and post-modernism have changed the way that we experience art. Our relationships with images and objects have evolved as both became more disposable and less precious in this age of excess and remote living. Digital reproduction has helped to make the impossibility of creating an original image increasingly obvious. However, the great secret behind this notion is the knowledge that it has always been the case, and that there probably has never been

an original image, since it all first appeared in nature. What makes this time interesting for art and for abstraction in particular, is the way that abstract gestures have become less precious and more colloquial. Companies like Apple have brought modern design into mainstream life, causing those lines to become more familiar and prevalent in places like street signs or web design. This attention to form and design affects the way that we interact physically with the art object, and perhaps even what that experience means, since looking at a painting is a uniquely slow and meditative interaction. “I’ve always felt with her a sense of common purpose, ambition and predicament: that painting should engage an urgent sense of responsibility to life in this moment, yet with no roadmap for how to even begin, there is a void which begs the question: what is real? What can be made vivid? What is the cost of launching oneself into this act against all odds of making it new and vital?” Jacqueline Humphries on Charline von Heyl’s work, in the catalog for von Heyl’s Tate Liverpool exhibition, 2012. The artist Jacqueline Humphries’ observation of the inherent impossibility of making a “new and vital” image in art directly reflects not only the digital age’s wealth of resources, but also the always-present weight of art history. Charline von Heyl is an example of an artist who does not discriminate between sources or influences. She has a deep and varied body of work that is at once current, ancient, and futuristic. In a 2010 interview with Shirley Kaneda for BOMB

Magazine, von Heyl states that “What I’m trying to do is to create an image that has the iconic value of a sign but remains ambiguous in its meaning. Something that feels like a representation but isn’t. Something that looks as if it has a content or a narrative but hasn’t. Something that is kind of hovering in front of the painting instead of just being it.” Von Heyl is talking about the desire to somehow present or create a vital and authentic experience that balances between having no roots, and remaining deeply integrated with all aspects of history and culture. Additionally, the idea of creating an image that hovers in front of the painting reflects the timelessness and spacelessness of the Internet, and brings us back to the non-linear commonality between it and art history. The abstract quality of the pieces in this exhibition is a consequence of the artists’ pursuit of a similar sense of authenticity. Their works reflect both the sincerity of ambition and the pointed power and presentness where Charles Burchfield intersects with Charline von Heyl. The power of the work is located in that ambiguous experience between the viewer and the painting in which the image attempts to transcend its objecthood (thus “hovering in front of the painting”). In bringing these artists together, I hope to facilitate such an experience of groundlessness in the gallery, as boundaries between new and old, virtual and real, disappear to reveal something similar to Burchfield’s vibrating auras.

Tamara Gonzales: The Sun Goes Down, 2011. Spraypaint on canvas, 60 x 88 inches.

EJ Hauser: Moonflower, 2012. Oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches.

Ali vs. Foreman; POV and personal identity by Jonathan Allmaier

In Ali vs. Foreman, 1974, “The Rumble in the Jungle”, we can see the triumph of point of view over personal identity. When Ali does the rope a-dope, he does not say “I am Ali,” or “this is Ali.” The rope-a-dope is not about identity – it is about context. The rope-adope only addresses the (contingent) circumstance at hand; it does not assert a (necessary) identity. Foreman fights the way he fights: he punches hard, and so he usually wins. The fight is for him an abstraction, and necessity is how abstractions are addressed. For Ali, there is no Platonic fight, just the fight he happens to be fighting that moment. The actual fight at hand is all that is real for Ali; this fight is what dictates his actions. The rope-a-dope would be absurd in another fight; punching hard in a fight is never absurd. Since Foreman’s punching is categorically necessary – it is who he is as a fighter – it lacks the immediate necessity that only exists within a particular circumstance, regardless of his enragement. His necessity, his punch, has an arbitrary flavor, precisely because it is always so strong. The rope-a-dope – not in general, but in this particular fight, 1974, Zaire – is urgent: it is necessary because it is dictated by contingency.

Wish for Paul (Thek) + Susan (Sontag) by EJ Hauser

Reproduced photographs 2005/2012 by Stephen Truax

Three 24x36 inch framed photographs are enlarged images of three unique 4x6 inch photographic prints taken and printed in Rome, Italy, in 2005. The prints were drum scanned edited and printed by photographer Scott Tavitian in Los Angeles. Fingerprints, scratches, creases, dust, paint splatters, tack holes, and other traditionally undesirable elements that developed on the original prints through years of being present in the studio are visible in high resolution on the reproductions, fetishizing the originals. These elements link the objects back to the practice of painting. They qualify the minor action of taking a snapshot and using it as source material in a painting practice as an artistic gesture. All four snapshots were taken in quick succession to capture a unique light phenomena that lasted only a few minutes at Santa Maria in Trastevere. Sunlight projected through stained glass windows and as colored oval shapes on marble columns. Although the images are difficult to identify, they address the clichĂŠ of light streaming through cathedral windows, an image often invoked to suggest the literal presence of God. The images are motion blurred and out of focus, suggesting the haste of their making in a moment of inspiration. The images depict signifiers of true authenticity: real marble columns, light, an ancient cathedral, etc.; their allover compositions and emphasis on color have

an ancient cathedral, etc.; their all-over compositions and emphasis on color have a strong relationship to abstract painting. The light picked up on the edges of the prints making them seem larger, heavier, and more sculptural than the originals ever could be. Despite these signifiers of authenticity, the final artworks are reproductions: photographs of photographs. They have been highly refined and run through multiple professional and technological processes to realize the final works. Romantic excitement about an instant of visual beauty is analyzed and reproduced to a degree that negates the originalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spontaneity, and questions the authenticity of the actual experience.

Next Page: Stephen Truax: Reproduced Photographs, 2005/12. 3 parts, each 24 x 36 inches, Ed. 1 of 3.

Five Poems for and from the Studio by Maria Walker

A stretcher A shelf A sled A ladder

The Shaker Room at the Met

Painting says I can stand on my own, see

â&#x20AC;&#x153;ultility, neatness, simplicity, perfection pine, cherry, maple, beech, cedar

work see wait look work see wrong look and there wait work work space look Hello. Painting, we hang up your coat of canvas today you are standing wood.

Blanket chest Boxes Hangers Candlestand Side chairs Work stand Revolving chair Sconce Candlesticks Bed Work table Spool stand Rocking chair Sewing steps Stove, shovel, tongs Wash stand Looking glass (cedar, maple) Towel rackâ&#x20AC;?

What are the Materials of Painting? There is the wood. There is the cloth. There is the paint. There is the water, the staples, the wood scraps, screws and glue. There are the toolsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; hammer, pliers, jars, drill, plastic, arms.

Wise Object (Talking to a Tough Painting) Ladder, what? What? What? What? What? What? What?

The Studio Window The studio window brings light and night to the studio.

Left to Right: E. J. Hauser Maria Walker Jonathan Allmaier E.J.Hauser Stephen Truax

E.J. Hauser (detail)

Clockwise from left: Maria Walker (detail) Jonathan Allmaier (detail) Gallery view with works by Tamara Gonzales, E.J, Hauser, Maria Walker

Lisha Bai Leah Beeferman Ethan Greenbaum Elisa Lendvay Demetrius Oliver Allyson Vieira Joe Winter

The Order of Things Curated by Jamillah James

From January 4 to February 1, 2013

The Order of Things by Jamillah James

The Order of Things considers the shift in our relationship to the universe in light of recent apocalyptic predictions. An acute awareness of time, as some wait with baited breath for “the end”, engenders a special attentiveness to space, materiality, and objecthood, with smaller details emerging and becoming foregrounded. The artists in this exhibition use a nearly scientific vernacular, either through their own experimental studio practice, or in how they visualize and aestheticize the passage of time. They are addressing cosmological hierarchy from the bottom up, reiterating the impulse of subjects to understand their existence and the world through objects. Lisha Bai uses sand and Plexiglas to form columns and leaning slabs, referencing the visual language of Minimalism and more directly, the hourglass, the classic marker of time. Bai’s intensive manipulations of her material leave little to chance. The collection of pink, blue, and violet grains contrast with the vast expanses of darkness, creating the illusion of bands of refracted light or celestial bodies in the cosmos. Leah Beeferman studied science for a number of years before becoming an artist. Beeferman creates animations, laser cut etchings, drawings, and installations with geometric renderings of data culled from various scientific journals. When taken out of context, the resultant images appear as particles floating in the ether. On a recent residency in the Arctic Circle, Beeferman made a field recording of her explorations of the

terrain in isolation. Sounds of water gurgling, wind howling, and some moments of relative silence comprise a sonic record of the unusually harsh, mostly uninhabited sublime landscape. Ethan Greenbaum uses a combination of processes to make large scale reproductions of forms we encounter and mostly overlook on a daily basis. Greenbaum is particularly interested in architecture and landscape; he walks and bikes around parts of the city, photographing surfaces--particularly crevices, sidewalks, and foundational materials--reinforcing that perception is governed primarily by the body’s relationship to space and the objects within it. Elisa Lendvay’s small, hand built sculptures made of wire, clay, plaster, junk and other found material have the appearance of being unearthed from another time. Lendvay sometimes refers to them as “thoughtforms”, which are traditionally understood as the physical manifestations of mental energy and intent. Those objects are sometimes used in magic, a practice that falls outside of the realm of perception and runs counter to theology, science, or other explanations of the workings of the universe. In her interdisciplinary practice, Lendvay is interested in the quasi-spiritual relationships we form with environments and objects and the lives and value of objects beyond visual fancy. Demetrius Oliver reveals a fascination with outer space, the romanticized final frontier. Over the past few years, Oliver has made

ings on paper, using the broken spines of umbrellas and spray paint, the action leaving behind abstracted impressions resembling constellations. Telescope (2008), made from a configuration of 48 stacked buckets. The other component, a slide projector, was once a popular visual aid for science lecturing now nearing obsolescence. A slowly rotating image of an ocean’s tide is projected inside of the buckets; tides are caused by the Sun and Moon’s force of gravity and the Earth’s rotation. With each click of the projector, Oliver alludes to this cosmic and temporal phenomenon. Allyson Vieira’s “Torso” series of sculptures are accumulations of debris from her studio stratified in plaster, investigating what Vieira has referred to as “geologic time”. Vieira keeps a collection of empty buckets around her work space, using them for mixing plaster, holding and carrying objects and waste disposal. After she has filled the bucket, she pours excess plaster from other projects into the bucket, each bucket becoming a time capsule of her process. Finally, the work of Joe Winter demand attention to minute changes on the part of a viewer. He allows invisible forces—sunlight, gravity, and so forth—to determine the outcome of the work and act upon the surfaces in a carefully protracted manner. Winter embeds these “experiments” within an aesthetic informed by institutional spaces such as offices and classrooms. Here, Winter uses a fabricated office file sorter as

a receptacle for colored construction paper, onto which he places custom-cut glass, which acts as both a paperweight and a conduit for near-photographic exposure. The naturally faded prints are then displayed on cork bulletin boards typically used for the display and collection of information. The exhibition borrows its title from the text by Michel Foucault, but is more interested in the use of the phrase as it predates the text. Most manners of existence are stratified in one way or another—the distribution of power and agency touches upon all systems of order. This exhibition engages the primary, phenomenological relationship between subjectivity, perception, time and space with work unified by a scientifically-informed aesthetic, examining banality and the existential in equal parts.

Left to Right: Lisha Bai Leah Beeferman Demetrius Oliver Ethan Greenbaum Allyson Vieira

Joe Winter

Opening reception

Left to Right: Allyson Vieira Leah Beeferman Elisa Lendvay

Siobhan McBride

Never While Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re Sleeping...

From February 8 to March 8, 2013

The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. “Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being. Vladimir Nabokov, “Symbols and Signs,” The New Yorker, May 15, 1948.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality.â&#x20AC;? Michelangelo Antonioni

Snow Globes by Dustin London

Siobhan McBrideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings feel like the memory that changes a little every time I try to recall it, but which I know I cannot truly hold. Yet, they are also beautifully solid nuggets of experience, like an egg-stained shirt. They cut and shift and slide. They stay and they fade. They are fields of wildflowers and they are nightmares. They are snow globes with every experience you could ever have inside. The space of these paintings never sits still, sliding behind itself, obscuring senselessly or insetting abruptly within some alien shape. It creates pockets and poses choices where the stakes are indefinable but feel very high. At other times the space is completely straightforward, but things hover so slightly as to be terribly disconcerting. There is a chronic sense of anxiety in these paintings. Edges cut the surface with precision and a tense atmosphere is created when harsh, off-kilter angles dominate compositions of otherwise innocuous domestic scenes. Forms defined with exquisite clarity are set against those in ghostly silhouette, or which simply feel vacuous, as though their identity has been stolen. Light scrapes against a chalky surface and a nightstand sits sadly, uncomfortably against a

Grid (detail), 2011. Gouache on paper on panel, 8 x 12 inches.

wall. The evocations are so specific and familiar, as if these scenarios exist in my own memory. McBrideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s color is at once swampy, metallic, sulfuric, brilliant and glowing, and absolutely lovely in its subtlety. The surfaces are dense with the residue of previous choices and layers of color, yet they remain surprisingly fresh. Surgical incisions delineate clear, taped-off shapes that feel like they have been transplanted into the painting and could perhaps be peeled away, leaving a hole in the reality of the image. Light gleams off of surfaces and activates spaces, allowing us into an eerie dark past in images reminiscent of old flash photographs. It creates the stillness in a bathroom on a soft overcast Sunday. Or, glowing orbs of light hum and carry their own sense of being and otherworldliness.

Bedroom, (detail), 2012. Gouache on paper on panel. 9 1/4 x 12 inches.

The paintings are like some new language, telling us stories of the deepest and most magical truths of the universe that we can only scarcely understand. Things are close but they are hiding right in front of us. They contain the complexity and depth of what it is to be human without any sense of grandeur. McBrideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings provide fleeting moments of perfection, where reality infuses itself with all the possibilities of existence, mirroring our world yet conjuring parallel universes or lucid dreams. They hold me to their surfaces, as they require such intimate inspection. They make me feel my interior world and the world around me more acutely.

Marysia Gacek Natalie H채usler Katharina Marszewski

On the Golden Wire for Thirty-Four

From March 15 to April 12, 2013

On the Golden Wire For Thirty Four was a collaboration between Marysia Gacek, Natalie Häusler, and Katharina Marszewski. The project was one of the winners of NURTUREart’s 2012 open call to artists and curators and took place at NURTUREart Gallery between March 15 and April 12. 2013. Starting with the general idea of an exchange of content between artists, the initial focus of this project was put on the materiality of such content, rather than its possible meaning. The point of departure was the limit: the weight and volume of the most standard international package between the USA, UK and Germany. Each collaborator supplied one third of the materials and contributed to one Care Package*, which traveled from New York to Berlin to Glasgow to Berlin, before returning to its city of origin. This exchange of matter focused on the process, rather than what it manifested itself as in the end. The package was meant to supply three artists with the same materials to work with, without a pre-envisioned outcome. The collaboration examined individual methodologies leading to creating work using a model of giving and taking away. When the package returned to New York, it was put on display alongside artworks inspired by its content in a gallery exhibition at NURTUREart.

Although “CARE package” is a registered trademarked term, origi-

nating in the wake of a World War II campaign to send food and supplies to Europe, the expression is still used in everyday vernacular to share the idea of providing comfort by sending food, supplies and small mementos. In 1945 Americans were given the opportunity to purchase a care package for 10 dollars to send to their friends or relatives. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy said that every CARE package is a personal contribution to the world peace and it expresses concern and friendship in a language all people understand.

Katharina Marszewski: DER HEISSE DRAHT (Detail), 2013. Silkscreen, collage, dimensions variable.

Left: Instructions by Katharina Marszewski, assembled by Marysia Gacek + Natalie H채usler: Yunnan Tea, 2013, loose tea, water, bowl, burner, strainer, dimensions variable.

Exhibition view with works by Marysia Gacek, Nathalie Hausler and Care Package box.

Conversation edited by Marco Antonini

Marco Antonini: How did this project start? How did the idea of the Care Package come about?... I really wanted to start from a simple, almost obvious questions, because so many details in the project, its proposal, progress and outcome point to a pretty rich and complex shared history, to a friendship - I suppose - that is at the core of the gesture of exchanging and collaborating. It would be interesting to understand what of your personal life and of your relationship with each other went into the idea... and maybe what didn’t... and ultimately why, or why not, you would feel that’s important. Marysia Gacek: Fabio [Cavallucci, Director of Unosunove Gallery, Rome] emailed me one day and told me about NURTUREart’s call for proposals. I thought it would be interesting to do something with Natalie and Katharina. I met Natalie in 2010 when we did a residency at PS 122. We shared a studio for 2 months and had an exhibition there at the end. I met Katharina through Natalie when she came from Berlin to visit her in New York. We spent 2011 New Year’s Eve together. A lot of things have changed since then. I reached out to them and they suggested the care package idea. We didn’t have a clear vision of what the project was going to look like at the end. I think that the exchange of materials was the most important part of the idea, for us. Care packages bring out a lot of memories. I grew up in Poland so I had a chance to experience the world before

the email. I used to send and receive real letters from my friends, I still have many of them. I love how personal that type of communication was. A shared object carries a lot of information. Katharina Marzewski: I was in the kitchen. Natalie told me about the possibility of making a show together with Marysia in your space in New York and we both agreed that we would like to do that. At that time we were often busy preparing portfolios and other office stuff, and I think this was the reason why we thought about a care package... the idea brought us to “act” as artists again: we kind of combined our habits (preparing texts, photocopying stuff, filling out motivation letters, going to the post office) together with the further goal of setting up an exhibition. We knew that it was going to be hard, because we all lived in different countries and never really worked together before. I have meet Marysia in New York on a New Years Eve, as she just recalled. I found her to be an interesting and vivid person. Our backgrounds are similar: born in Poland, but emigrated early... I knew we would have shared similar feelings for the care package. Natalie Häusler: I also remember it very well. Katharina and I were both sitting together in the kitchen when we received Marysia’s email. We had to come up with an idea really fast, like, on the very same day. So Katharina and I started

discussing and sending ideas back and forth with Marysia instantaneously. Something we had talked about earlier that day was the relationship of an artist to her/his materials and how the material itself by repetition becomes a content of its own throughout time. An initial idea and question was whether it could be interesting to treat material as content, in an almost literal way, to supply material and have the material chosen by each artist generate the content. At the same time we were interested in a gesture of sharing and the suggestion of another artist as an impulse, and where that would lead us.

sense embody the meaning and the mission of a non profit gallery like NURTUREart, where taking chances and letting diverse ideas, attitudes and styles in the general program is part of the daily “routine.” The final show was not so distant from what I expected, in terms of how it felt. I had no specific image in mind, I guess. I much liked the idea of leaving the contents of the box unaccessible and secret, instead of showing them. Let’s talk about the genesis and history of some of the work. Marysia, where did (if ) the Salt has lost its Savour came from? I seem to remember that there was no actual salt in the Box...

KM: I have a question for you, Marco: how did you feel about this project, before and after the exhibition? Was the care package idea, and its promise, more fascinating than the actual exhibition? Did you have a mental image of any kind of how the show could have ended up looking?

MG: It’s true, the package didn’t contain salt, but there was a box of Yunnan tea distributed in Poland that Katharina sent to me in Glasgow, from Berlin. I decided to trace it back to its origins in China. I was fascinated by the rich history of tea trade. Originally, tea was carried by foot from China to Tibet over the Tea Horse Road, through Himalayas. That’s when I got interested in the mountains and what words like “Tibetan” and “Himalayan” actually mean and represent in contemporary Western culture. “Himalayan salt” is just a marketing term for rock salt from Pakistan, mined about 300 km away from the actual Himalayas. Still, the salt was formed 250 million years ago and it has been highly valuable for centuries for its qualities. When I decided to paint a gallery wall with the salt, I thought of preservation, purification, provenance and val-

MA: My feeling was... well, that the project would have represented a challenge. And I felt that it was appropriate for us at NURTUREart to take such a challenge, and help produce and present an exhibition that was inherently “difficult” to communicate in an open call proposal. I think this feeling was shared by the voting members of our panel. they voted the project based on the quality of your previous work and based on the assumption that this kind of experimental projects need a leap of faith and in a certain

ue. Research only served as a point of departure. Without the package and this particular context the piece would have never happened. MA: Katharina, do you want to spend a few words on your wall piece and Tea brew? KM: We were having a very cold winter, my feet nearly froze away. Then the care package really surpassed itself, as I found some self -reacting chemical insoles in it, the kind that get really warm. MG: I stole those insole warmers from my boyfriend. KM: I also found two blue and red carbon-paper sheets in the box, and came to think about the relation between those two colors and the temperatures (red=hot, blue=cold) they represent... all of a sudden McLuhan’s theory of hot and cold media also came to mind: we were communicating through the package, but also via Skype, mail, telephone, etc... but in the end, no work could have happened without trust and deeper understanding. My piece is based on these ideas. In the last few months I have been making lacquer-pigment drawings sealed with adhesive tape, and in this case i added a silk screen with our eyes and a wire, as a kind of totemic image. The whole thing looks a little beaten up, as if it had spent some time travelling, but that’s good. MA: The wire connection in Katharina’s wall piece definitely suggests a “mediated” dialogue (via phone in this case) were you girls interacting and talking a lot with each other all along this process? Or did you rather let the objects “speak” and determine the direction the show

would take? KM: Sometimes I wonder how the exhibition would have looked, if we had the chance to meet and talk to each other in real life at least once (maybe during a small tea ceremony?) … as Natalie mentioned before, the objects from the package where rather treated as material. Rather than “listening” to them, I considered them as evidence of the present life of the other girls... and in this way they somehow influenced my decisions and works. So the coiled wire of that image represents a form of trust in each other. MG: We had a few Skype meetings and exchanged some emails. We all have our own ways of working so we didn’t know what the final result would be till the very end. MA: Marysia, another curiosity I have is the idea of smell and taste in your work (the salt piece ended up being licked by unruly elementary school kids!)... and both your photographic pieces seem to imply the sense of smell... can you tell me a little bit more about those? One even bears the name of our organization which, I must say, was quite funny and flattering. MG: I’m glad some people had the courage to taste the wall. I still remember the thrill of secretly trying to lick walls of an old salt mine in Poland when I was a kid. Maybe that’s where the idea came from. I took a lot of photographs of the contents before I sent them back to Berlin. I spent some time just observing the objects and analyzing their qualities. I think Nurture is more about absorption than smell. The other one is a photo of an opened perfume bottle. It was

inspired by my favorite Hans-Peter Feldmann’s piece which is a collection of pictures of car radios taken while good music was playing. MA: Ha! I didn’t think about it... there is certainly a synesthetic quality to all of the pieces that you presented... taste, smell, sight... what do you mean by absorption? Did you use the word metaphorically? MG: I used it quite literally actually, both the sponge and the plant absorb water. Again, it’s the idea of giving and taking away. MA: Natalie, would you help us crack the code of your intriguing center piece to the exhibition... I can hear the Pants speaking to me as I write this. NH: Well, Crisis 3, as the piece ended up being called, was almost entirely made during my stay in New York. I spent most of my time with the package in Berlin reading the two books that were in there, The Crisis and Crisis in the Life of an Actress by Søren Kierkegaard and 73 poems by E. E. Cummings. I also looked at all the objects in the package and started doing recordings where I would describe each object, comment on it and ask questions to the person who supplied it. I did only use very few of those recordings in the end. The ones that I used were recordings from the bathtub of the Berlin apartment I shared with Katharina. But the piece developed gradually, from finding the title on my way to the studio, where I saw an advertisement for the computer game Crisis 3, to finding a copy of the Manhattan Yellow Pages in Chelsea one day. I then decided to record all the jobs listed in the Yellow Pages, reading from A to Z. A section

of the Kierkegaard text where he speaks about the decay of recognition and the Robert Creeley poem “I Know a Man” are the main components of the other two recordings. MA: And how did you connect that job directory (quite a feat. of endurance performance if I can say so... I love the parts where you get exhausted of reading and kind of crack up laughing) to the Kierkegaard and Cummings texts? Or was there some sort of link to your experience here in NY, to the way you perceived the city back then? NH: This sound collage was meant to be a sort of factual inventory of the concept of “crisis” at the current moment. One recording contains the sentence: “This crisis seems to reappear in infinite new versions of itself” which can be seen as a link between the three disparate components. The job directory reading forms a strange counterpart to the in-depth inquiry of a persons’ “craft” in Kierkegaard’s Crisis in the Life of an Actress. When I was reading out all those jobs I often had to read a description several times to understand it, or read it wrong, because I am not a native English speaker... which creates interesting ruptures with the quite different atmosphere of the two other recordings. And then certain job categories e.g.: “anxiety disorders” or “auto body coalition repair,” create interesting additional undertones in the pairing with sentences from the two other recordings. In the piece, Manhattan is read as a sum of all its professions, which in order become definitions of states of crisis.

Shinsuke Aso Nicky Enright Heather Hart Mary Jeys Michelle Kaufman Carolyn Lambert Scott Massey

Cashing Out Curated by Petrushka Bazin Larsen

From April 19 to May 16, 2013

Cashing Out by Petrushka Bazin Larsen

In today’s economy where there is a gross disparity between haves and have nots, how does one survive while living on the margins of not having? Some artists in Cashing Out offer creative proposals for living a sustainable life that is supported by cooperative economics while others prompt us to examine our notions about value. This exhibition considers the possibility of paying for goods and services using local currencies and through bartered exchanges. It challenges us to evaluate our own value systems, and affirms that time is always more valuable than money, but with it, trust and cooperation strides can be made towards ensuring a more sustainable albeit utopic life for all. Departing from his postcard project SAPC where he makes postcards from found paper and sells them for a quarter, Shinsuke Aso’s new project Useful Things for Sale invites viewers to purchase such items as an orphaned glove, miscellaneous plastic toy parts, a piece of rope, and broom stick, among other merchandise for what some may deem significantly inflated and deflated prices. For instance the broom stick may be priced at $20 while the glove may cost $.50. In this colorful pop-up shop of carefully selected objects, Aso suggests that there are a variety of ways to value things while inviting the customer to decide what is valuable to them based on their needs. In his video, Money Talks, Nicky Enright shares the results of an anonymous personal finance survey taken by 88 artists and arts profes-

sionals. The results are revealing as we learn that the net worth of this group are in the negative millions while 48% of respondents have health insurance only because of their partner or other family member’s affiliation. Globo is an international currency created by Enright that is meant to evoke a vision of world unity and progress while simultaneously suggesting the ever-increasing reach of globalization. Part of her larger Trading Posts series, Heather Hart’s Trading Post IX provides a literal post for visitors to exchange an object of equal or greater non-currency-based value for the object that is provided on the post by the previous participant. The exchange is anonymous and is based on the honor system. Barter Town, which is also part of Hart’s Trading Post series, has the appearance of a carnival or block party, but is a bartering only event where “vendors” offer such things as chocolates, massages and haircuts in exchange for other goods or services. Included in this exhibition is documentation of Barter Town’s various iterations. Mary Jeys is the founder of the Brooklyn Torch—a local currency that can only be used in North Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint neighborhoods. Jeys’ project offers residents the opportunity to acquire this currency and purchase goods at trade stores held in Greenpoint on first Saturdays of the month. There, Jeys stimulates her local economy by pay-

ing those who have services to offer Torches for adding themselves to the project’s registry. When setting prices, Jeys instructs vendors to be fair and reasonable based on what they believe others will pay. In its current manifestation Brooklyn Torch is a hybridized pawnshop for goods and services as local storefront business owners are currently not supported by the currency. With over 20 years experience managing mutual equity funds on Wall Street, Michelle Kaufman, who is now an artist, explores power structures and the emotions felt as social equity changes. Path references a period of time when farmers’ debts could be wiped clean because the single entity in charge of justice and banking needed them to also fight as soldiers in military conflicts. Her work considers the leverage workers have over their power-wielding authorities. The words presented in this work also lead viewers to consider the relationship between phrases like “take what you need” and words like “surplus,” “value,” and relativism.” In her video Raw Material, Carolyn Lambert pushes viewers to assess how cultural context can skew our opinion of what is valuable. The video shows a woman carrying a slab of MDF board through several of New York’s commercial and cultural districts. In some cases the viewer is left to question whether she is carrying art or construction material as she navigates each neighborhood. The ambiguity of her action focuses attention on context as an operative mechanism

for value within the realms of art, economics, and everyday life. Scott Massey attempts to pay his debts with his words in his video One Thousand Four Hundred and Ninety Two Fifty Two. A bank representative explains to Massey that in order to pay the money owed, he must pay with actual currency. He persistently attempts to pay by simply saying the sum of his debts. The absurdity of this exchange does remind the viewer that the only thing that makes money real is our faith and cooperative understanding of its value.

Left to Right: Mary Jeys Heather Hart Shinsuke Aso Nicky Enright Carolyn Lambert

Nicky Enright

Opening Reception

Left to Right: Carolyn Lambert Nicky Enright Michelle Kaufman

Clem Chen Ernest Concepcion Caroline Falby Annette Rusin Sarah Wang Paul Wiersbinski Matthew Silver

The Indifference of Wisdom Curated by Project Curate with Julian A. Jimarez Howard

From June 14 to July 12, 2013

Caroline Falby: Motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Death Tape, 2013. Mixed- media site-specific installation, dimensions variable.

Project Curate 2012- 2013: Kiana Alvardo Cesar Beltre Cristal Cruz Nicholas Diaz Yadira Gomez Rafael Gonzalez Amanda Hernandez Andrew Hernandez Darrin Jones Miguel Lopez Genesis Lozano Mariela Lozano Cintia Machuca Jasmine Mediavilla Tiffany Negron Nathaly Peralta Noel Ramierz Charisma Rios Yunior Rivas Tiffany Rivera Chastity Rodriguez Destiny Rodriguez Yesenia Santiago Bishme Smith Chastity Tores Teacher Partner: Denise Martinez Project Curate provides a class of advanced art students from Juan Morel Campos High School in an opportunity to experience contemporary curatorial practices by working closely with a professional curator for the whole school year, culminating with an exhibition at NURTUREart Gallery. This year their mentor is Julian A. Jimarez Howard, Co-Owner and Director of OUTLET Fine Art and Co-Director of Associated Gallery. Project Curate is part of NURTUREartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Education Program, dedicated to nurturing and enriching the next generation with its unique arts programs that connect professional artists and curators with students and teachers.

The Indiffererence of Wisdom by Julian A. Jimarez Howard

The history of the word curator comes from the Latin curare, referencing the care of souls. The term curate can still be used as a noun to talk about a parish priest. However, this is hardly the context in which we are accustomed to hearing the word. The more familiar curator-as-part-ofan-institution-responsible-for-exhibiting-objectsof-social-significance is a notion that emerged around the mid 16th Century. This was, of course, at a time when curators were more tied to these physical objects, like zookeepers of the eclectic collections of European nobles and aristocrats. While the term’s specific relationship to art is quite a bit more recent, the way in which it nevertheless implies a responsibility for a deeper level of wellbeing is, perhaps, closer to its original meaning. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the process of teaching curating. It is said that teaching teaches the teacher the subject being taught. Tongue twisterliness aside, the insight a curator can gain from the teacher’s predicament is, in many ways, priceless. Confronting a room full of individuals unfamiliar and often uninterested in the subject at hand is one of the most perfect methods for evaluating not only one’s interest in that subject, but also one’s knowledge of it. It requires passion, flexibility, patience, compassion, and often, guile. This is all the more true for high school students as they are in the process of cementing their identities, yet overwhelming judgmental.

The task, then, of teaching curating becomes a meta-exercise in the study of patterns of organization: explaining curating through one’s own system, while simultaneously evaluating that system as it is being explained. Curators typically apply an idiosyncratic methodology to create a system of thematic and often visual relationships between objects, in this case artwork. This involves many steps, but can be boiled down into: selecting a theme, researching that theme, researching artists, selecting work for the show, and finally mounting the exhibition. But working with students who may have never approached a topic in such a methodological way raises all sorts of poignant questions. How do we come up with a theme? Why do we need a theme, and if we came up with it, why do we need to research it? What if we already know the artists? Making an analogy to the scientific method or to the process of following a cooking recipe seems only to solicit the claim, but this is art! Yet, it is in these complaints that the true heart of curating contemporary art arises, that is, asking questions. For what is a theme, but the synthesis of a series of questions? What is a system if not a logical answer to the question, how does this work? The aim of Project Curate is to pair a professional curator with high school art students through a yearlong course to produce a capstone exhibition at NURTUREart’s gallery with artists selected through an open call. My aim as that professional curator was of course, to produce a

memorable exhibition with the students. But more so, I wanted, and was encouraged, to structure the course such that the beneficial skills inherent in the curatorial process (active questioning, associative thinking, plotting systems) might filter down into other aspects of the student’s lives. The real objective and value of this program is in this cross application of knowledge. Working on a professional grade curatorial project, not only do the students get a taste of working in the art world, but hopefully see the larger picture in which the dots between asking valid questions and making reasoned decisions connect the image of a greater methodological problem solving whole. In this way curating is more about understanding the process of evaluating various inputs and generating a compelling and cohesive output, be that artworks -> exhibition, philosophies -> essay, or ingredients -> cake. It came, then, as no surprise to me that as we endeavored together as a class to select a theme, we kept coming back to issues of identity. This concept was omnipresent through field trips to various art institutions, art historical slide shows in class, and systems thinking oriented activities. Our eventual theme of “transgression personified” morphed out of the collective interest in exploring notions of embodiment, social mores, and humor. What was surprising however, was the way in which the students oriented that exploration towards an open-minded, if not moralistic, direction. After receiving submissions from NUR-

TUREart’s open call, we reviewed the work and found ourselves selecting artworks that somehow reminded us to be comfortable in our own skin and/or to question the status quo. It was from this realization that we embraced the know-all attitude of youth dubbing the exhibition, The Indifference of Wisdom. As if we had turned the phrase on its head, projecting it from the perspective of youth, our position was polemic: Be wise enough not to care about what doesn’t matter and to embrace what does. What was also interesting and completely unintentional was the way the exhibition came together out of almost every type of medium: painting, drawing, printing, sculpture, video, and performance. In the end, however, it seems that our polemic brought us back to the root of curating; with The Indifference of Wisdom the students have become teachers, showing and asking viewers to take care of their own identities.

Left to Right: Paul Wiersbinski Annette Rusin Caroline Falby Clem Chen

Left to Right: Clem Chen Sarah Wang Ernest Concepcion Annette Rusin Paul Wiersbinski

Margaret Coleman Jeff Feld Tracy Grayson Jennifer Gustavson Allison Maletz Andrea Suter Jeanne Verdoux

On Hold Curated by Alma Egger

From July 19 to August 23, 2013

On Hold by Alma Egger

On Hold is an exhibition that aims to transform our perception of daily occurring pauses from anxiety-producing events to an opportunity for reflection. These occurrences range from being put on hold during a telephone call to glancing at a newspaper at a kiosk while rushing to the subway. The featured artworks change our perception of time and space by suspending a sense of urgency. Through this suspension, a reevaluation of the quotidian is encouraged: from a waste of time into new values. The exhibition is a reflection on (and critique of) the unrelenting pace of contemporary society, and the consequent dangers of not using time, even the short span of an elevator ride, to pause. Being on hold, can open creativity portals that are essential to the human experience and ultimately, human progress. Several works in the exhibition evoke everyday life’s involuntary pauses and moments of suspension caused by public symbols, signals and other signs we routinely oblige to. The sound of a telephone on hold, a traffic light or an exit sign, exist to improve our lives by creating order and direction, yet frequently leave us feeling anxious and helpless. Working against the stringency of such norms, art can help us find focus and create an awareness of suspended time, freeing ourselves from anxiety, or maybe depict actual manifestations of wasted time, thereby asking us to redefine them in new ways and on our terms. In the unrelenting pace of contemporary society, most everyday routines seem point-

less. These “wasted” moments can be located at the threshold of an interruption, such as the instant before stumbling over an empty crate on the floor or experiencing a rainstorm. Other times, it is our unproductive interaction with everyday objects (old pictures, teddy bears) that translate into the impression of dissipated time. Finally, pausing can be a voluntary act, such as looking up at the sun, or taking a deep breath. On Hold addresses the real and imaginary connotations of all sorts of suspended time by suggesting the presence of a transformative potential in those very same intervals, events and objects typically categorized as wasted, inviting us to contemplate their value rather then merely ignoring them. The artists in this exhibition not only allow the viewer to determine a personal value for everyday life time, but allow their own artworks to exist “on hold,” freeing their materials from the slavery of performing daily utilitarian purposes. Therefore, the artwork often feels suspended, given the opportunity to be uplifted and transformed from banal to extraordinary. It is through this liberation and appreciation of the everyday that we can find the extraordinary within our own everyday. Most importantly, the works instigate pause, furthering the aim of the exhibition to examine moments in time that have the potential to become welcome respites throughout a hurried, chaotic day. A pause is a pause, so you may as well feel good about it.

Top, Left to Right: Jeff Feld, Margaret Coleman, Allison Maletz Bottom Left: Jeff Feld Bottom Right: Opening reception

Left to Right: Tracy Grayson Jeanne Verdoux Jeff Feld Jennifer Gustavson Jeanne Verdoux

Margaret Coleman

Tracy Grayson

Left to Right: Allison Maletz Margaret Coleman Andrea Suter

Videorover Seasons 5 and 6 Curated by Rachel Steinberg

Videorover, seasons 5 and 6 by Rachel Steinberg

Videorover, NURTUREart’s semi-annual video series, is an ever-expanding forum for emerging and underrepresented artists working in video. While producing and sharing video is becoming increasingly easier, truly exceptional video works still deserve to be presented and appreciated in the best possible way. To this purpose, Videorover aims to present a wide range of videos from local and international artists who are willing to question and extend the perceptual limitations of this medium. Started in 2010 by NURTUREart’s Assistant Director Rachel Steinberg, each season of Videorover is presented in a variety of ways: as an installation in NURTUREart Gallery, as an itinerant screening series, or most often on rotation in the Videorover project space, just outside of NURTUREart Gallery. Since its inception, the Videorover program has presented the work of over 75 local and international video artists. Videorover has been shown at NURTUREart Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; IndieScreen Cinema, Brooklyn, NY; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, New Orleans; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York; and the Nightingale Cinema, Chicago (as part of the Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival). Videorover: Season 6 was presented in partnership with RAPID PULSE, an International Performance Art Festival based in Chicago. The

Jessica Segall: Dual Horsepower, 2012. Two channel video loop.

works in this exhibition were created using performance as a departure point and medium, privileging the body as the vehicle for production but also looking to the camera as a collaborator. In these works, performance acts allowed the camera to complete them, mediating the gap between performer and audience. Co-curated by Rachel Steinberg and Giana Gambino, Videorover: Season 6 featured works by artists: Bridget Batch + Kevin Cooley, Heather Delaney, Kerry Downey + Joanna Seitz in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit, Michael H Hall, Constantin Hartenstein, Gabriel Hosovsky, Lindsay Packer, Daniel Seiple, Alina Tenser, Jacob Tonski, and Roland Wegerer. Videorover: Season 5 was presented in two iterations, the Program #1 as an installation in NURTUREart Gallery, and Program #2 as an itinerant screening series. Curated by Rachel Steinberg, Program #1 celebrates the physical nature of video art through it’s relationship with objects. Whether depicting a time activated object or body, or the absence of an expected physical element, each work challenges the typical medium of moving images by presenting a product that is sculptural, not just transient. Although the video timeline creates the intrigue and impression with each piece, the medium of video itself is only a surrogate for a tactile interaction. This is as much an exhibition of objects as video; a guided tour of images and manipulated objects that form new situations and angles of observation. Program #1 featured artists: Matthew Cowan, Yael Frank, Da-

vid J Merritt, Zach Nader, Jessica Segall, Adrien Siberchicot, and Frank Zadlo. Program #2, featured artists Lena Bergendahl, Stefan Demming, Jonathan Durham, Ellie Irons, Mary Ivy Martin, Maria Rapicavoli & Janne Schäfer, and Elisabeth Smolarz. This selection of videos focused on the mystification or de-mystification of a single character or group. They served as quasi-fictional documentaries, left upon the viewer to decide the level of truth. The information presented was missing a link, leaving a subtle uncanniness, understood through this character, or his/her traces. This selection of more narrative works were shown at IndieScreen Cinema in Brooklyn, NY, and at Press Street’s Antenna Gallery in New Orleans, LA.

Michael H. Hall: Lost Count, 2012. Video loop.

Lena Bergendahl: The Celestial Equator: Diffractions, 2012. Video still.

VIdeorover season 6 (in collaboration with Radid Pulse, Chicago), screening night.

Kerry Downey and Joanna Seitz in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit: To Do List, 2012. video still.

Kerry Downey + Joanna Seitz in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit: To Do List, 2012. Video still.

Special Projects

Welcome to the Real Curated by Marco Antonini From March 2 to March 31, 2013 {TEMP} art space, 57 Walker St., New York

Artists: Nobutaka Aozaki, Conor Backman, Nanna Debois-Buhl and Liz Linden, Lisa Fairstein, Patrick Meagher, William Miller, Mamiko Otsubo, Gabriele Picco, Netta Sadovsky, Jessica Segall, Helmut Smits, Slobodan Stosic. With a closing performance by Alexa Hoyer.

Netta Sadovsky

This exhibition presented a selection of artworks privileging a sense of realness, tangibility and matter-of-fact-ness as departure (or arrival) point in their otherwise wide-ranging visual and conceptual articulation. In keeping with the nature and scope of the artworks, the exhibition was presented without further explanations, introductions or descriptions.

Clockwise from top left: Nanna Debois Buhl and Liz Linden (detail), Mamiko Otsubo (detail), Gabriele Picco.

Clockwise from top left: Jessica Segall Helmut Smits Patrick Meagher Conor Backman

Clockwise from top: Lisa Fairstein Nobutaka Aozaki William Miller

Scene Four â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Catholic Charities, from Alexa Hoyerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eavesdropping performance. Photo by Pillip Greenberg Eavesdropping Actors: David Andrews Thomas Bradshaw Julie Kilzer Melissa Jourdana Cole Oscar Montoya Adam Pasulka Thom Pinto Gloria Rosen

Antoine Lefebvre: There are no accents on my qwerty keyboard Special project for Bushwick Open Studios 2013 There are no accents on my qwerty keyboard, by artist Antoine Lefebvre, took place at the 56 Bogart St. Gallery and opened on Friday, May 31 through Sunday, June 2. French-born and Brooklynbased, Lefebvre examined how our relationship to places has been deeply transformed by the advent of globalization and digital technologies. NURTUREart presented a group of 4 new works using cnc cut polystyrene letters, computer generated animations, power balls, bricks, aluminum tubing and a bindle stick.

Matthew Cowan: The Trees are Thick with Butter Special project for Bushwick Open Studios 2013 The Trees are Thick with Butter, a new performance and exhibition by Matthew Cowan, was presented in conjunction with the Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) weekend and in the future home of Storefront Ten Eyck, at 324 Ten Eyck, St., Brooklyn. Matthew Cowan is a New Zealand artist, working in the realm of traditional European customs. His works are photographs, videos, installations and performances, which play with the inherent strangeness of the continued popularity of long established folk customs in a modern world. These works can be viewed as mock folk performances in themselves, playing with the elements of folk rituals that give people a link to the past.

Jeanne Berger: Knee-High 56 Avenue C, New York NURTUREart presented Knee High, a one night exhibition and performance event by artist Jeanne Berger as a special off-site project on Friday, June 21. Berger is a French artist working in video, installation, choreography, performance and sound. Her work focuses on re-enacting narratives through the observation of peoplesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; everyday habits in public spaces. Through a language of playful actions and accidents, she communicates the feeling of these environment-specific movements. She is attached to small quotidian actions, reproducing gestures, attitudes, and the madness that attests the singularity of each existence.

NURTUREart Non-Profit, Inc. is a 501(c)3 New York State licensed federally tax-exempt charitable organization founded in 1997 by George J. Robinson. NURTUREart receives support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, including member item funding from City Council Members Sara Gonzales, Stephen Levin, and Diana Reyna, the New York City Department of Education, and the New York State Council on the Arts. NURTUREart is also supported by the Harold and Colene Brown Foundation, Edelman, the Greenwich Collection, Ltd., the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Laura B. Vogler Foundation, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, No More Poverty, the Puffin Foundation, Urban Outfitters, and the Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation. We receive in-kind support from Brooklyn Brewery, Societe Perrier, Tekserve, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. NURTUREart is grateful for significant past support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Liebovitz Foundation, and the Greenwall Foundation, and to the many generous individuals and businesses whose contributions have supported us throughout our history. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the artists who have contributed works of art to past benefits—our continued success would be impossible without your generosity.

Staff: Marco Antonini, Executive Director and Curator Louise Barry, Development Director Molly O’ Brien, Education Director Cody Rae Knue, Education Coordinator Rachel Steinberg, Assistant Director __________________________________________ Board of Trustees: Deborah Brown Katey Chapman Heather Bhandari Liz Dimmitt Asya Geisberg David Harper Eliot Lable Karen Marston Renwick Paige Carol Salmanson Benjamin Tischer Advisory Board: Catherine Hannah Behrend Christine Dobush Richard Fisher Julie McKim Sarah Monteleone Fraser Mooney Lee Pacchia Alexander Rahul Sara Reisman Richard Stewart

Volunteers: Jeanne Berger Naomi Edmondson Susannah Feinstein Jacqueline Ferrante Robin Harbour Celine Katzman Cody Rae Knue Julie Moon Lyndsey Patton Sara Rappa Nikki Refghi Joana Ricou

56 Bogart Street Brooklyn, NY 11206 L train to Morgan Avenue T. 718 782 7755 F. 718 569 2086 E. gallery@nurtureart.org www.nurtureart.org

Directions: By Subway: L train to the Morgan Avenue stop. Exit the station via Bogart Street. Look for the NURTUREart entrance on Bogart Street, close to the intersection with Harrison Place. By Car: Driving From Manhattan: Take the Williamsburg Bridge, stay in the outside lane, and take the Broadway / S. 5 St. exit. Turn left at light onto Havemeyer St. Turn right next light onto Borinquen Place, continue straight, street will change name to Grand Street. Turn right onto Bushwick Ave, left onto Johnson Ave, then right onto Bogart Street. Look for our entrance at the corner of Bogart Street and Harrison Place.