2021
EXHIBITIONS
2021
My relationship to Open Source Gallery began shortly after I finished graduate school and moved to Brooklyn. Much like the materials that so many of their artists work with, I was fresh and raw—an unadorned mid-twenties writer trying to make my way in the most intimidating city on earth. I was learning how to use the subway system, how to pay a bill on time, and I was living in a tattered old building with a damaged foundation (and therefore, reduced rent) on fourth avenue that sat behind another larger building. I loved it because it was placed so far back from the street. It was quiet, and I lived on the top floor. There was a courtyard in between the two buildings. An alley led up to it, running alongside the front building. You had to get through a gate to enter that alley, to walk through the courtyard, to get into my building. A month after I signed the lease, Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City, and many parts of Brooklyn. That winter, the pipes constantly froze, and the courtyard might as well have been a sheet of ice. When spring came, and the weather warmed, my neighbors, who’d lived in the building in front for years, started using the courtyard. They would sit out there at night, drinking wine, grilling, playing with their daughter, a toddler. We became friends, and I learned that the husband, Terry, was a poet. “In this neighborhood, you throw a rock and you’ll hit a writer,” he told me, laughing over a beer. That was how I spent my first summer in the city: I was the young one in the apartment complex, sharing meals and drinks with my neighbors in this courtyard, swapping stories and babysitting. Sharing ice cream on the fire escape and tacos at the picnic table while their daughter strumed her ukulele. Terry, it turned out, had started a storytelling series called
How To Build a Fire at a local gallery a few blocks away. He invited me to tell a story one night, to regale a small audience with some kind of true tale, in-person (remember when that was a thing?), from memory. I agreed, then spent the next few weeks panicking. But I was working hard to stick to my commitments. I’d said yes, so I had to do it. And it turned out to be one of the defining moments of my experience as a young New Yorker. A few months later, Terry invited me to run the series, along with Kate Hill-Cantrill for the following season. We would select each month’s storytellers, and each month’s theme. It was never the sort of thing I saw myself doing, but I loved every minute of it. I loved the locality of it, the way we uncovered gems from our neighborhood. It struck me as the most intimate of generosities: giving a neighbor the floor, listening to a story they wanted to share, spirits coming together in this most human of ways. I grew up immensely during that second year, and I felt as though in some way, I became part of the fabric of this community in a way that hadn’t seemed possible in this day and age, and in a city such as this. Perhaps that’s what is most exciting about Open Source Gallery. The commitment to the free exchange of ideas, of art intersecting with the community and the larger world. It’s the sort of community presence that doesn’t seem possible—and yet, here it is. In a way, Open Source reflects what it is to be human: rooting us in our localities, while simultaneously keeping our minds, hearts, and bodies moving through the world around us. I’m so happy to be a part of its story, and for it to be a part of mine. —Denne Michele Norris
J A M E S H ANNAH AM JIM C R OW H E L L N O
When I was young and tried to question something my mother had forbidden, she would sometimes declare, “I am the voice of authority!” I took it seriously, but it wasn’t a tone she adopted often. The element of surprise made it more effective, but also a tiny bit funny. DeLora usually led by example, defying authority just by going about her business as a single Black divorced woman raising three kids in the suburbs. But she was also an investigative journalist for a local radio station, as well as the host of a political show called Strictly Black, so when I heard her voice on the airwaves, through that box on our kitchen counter, the phrase took on larger implications. She was, even in the world, a voice of authority. I’m not sure whether having such a personal relationship to a voice of authority is what makes me want to both inhabit and subvert them in a lot of work that I do as an artist.
Perhaps knowing that even the most seemingly neutral, authoritative voices originate with individual human beings makes me want to expose the man behind the curtain, as the phrase goes, if only to humanize him. And when, unlike my mother, voices of authority promote values that are absurd—violent, oppressive, irrational, greedy—this incongruity makes it imperative for me to oppose them by exposing the nature of power, which is both nonsensical and malevolent. But what makes power real is the faith of majorities. As Yoko Ono once said, “a dream we dream alone is only a dream; a dream we dream together is reality.” But by the same lights, a delusion we have alone is only a delusion; a delusion shared by a critical mass of people becomes a frightening reality. In the case of such figments of the imagination as racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, mob
justice, obedience to authoritarianism, and others, the myths of the majority can be lethal, and what’s more, they can be internalized by their ostensible victims. While many artifacts of past fallacies disappear or are destroyed, sometimes deliberately, words are tenacious, especially in media like books and signage. It can feel like a strange triumph to rifle through a pile of random old books and unearth evidence of some horrible psychosis of yesteryear—
etchings of witch dunkings, racist memorabilia, textbooks on eugenics, unselfconscious tales of voyages to conquer “primitive” peoples. Aha, I sometimes find myself saying, proof of how much worse it was back then. But I’m not complacent about this; I don’t believe that, no matter who we are, we’re any better than those misguided idiots just because we have figured out that the earth revolves around the sun. Time has already proven some of that in my lifetime. Same-sex marriage seemed a pipe dream almost until it became
legal in the US; in many other countries, it remains that way. Signs, especially the handmade variety, disintegrate faster than books, so only in museums and photographs have I ever encountered posters and placards from the Jim Crow Era, the early years of my parents’ generation. DeLora migrated north with the family from rural Georgia in the early 1940s; it’s partially because of that migration that I’m so outraged to see actual hand-painted signs declaring segregation’s rules in such a matterof-fact way. To see things made so plain still appalls me; to think that some individual felt so empowered to exclude and denigrate others that he’d deem it a rule as basic as “Stop” or “One Way.” The derangement of a society that has condoned that kind of prejudice created psychological and physical scars, but those disappear all too quickly. Artifacts, live on, evidence that at no point did the past ever qualify as “a simpler time.” It’s always shocking for someone like me, raised in the Free to Be You and Me 70s, to encounter that olde tyme casual racism made real by a no colored allowed sign, as I did in 2018 at the National Museum of
African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Worse yet, I could see the same mentality front and center every day in the midst of the Trump administration’s circus of bigotry. To my knowledge, nobody started putting up signs in restaurants and train stations again, but plenty of signs appeared at marches, and some media has changed. The signs had become posts on Facebook and Twitter, defending injustice, acting as if protesting the status quo actually hurt them. Unlike my parents’ generation, who primarily fought discrimination by leaving the South, I felt that I could respond directly to both the Jim Crow signs of the past and today’s lunatics without the same of fear of retaliation they would have expected. I would probably not get lynched for my sarcastic retorts to the disgusting values of both history and recent history. To me the notion of creating an exhibit of signage opposing Jim Crow and distressed to seem antique seemed very simple and flowed out of a practice I had been honing over the years. In 2014 and 15, I had created questionable exhibits including Mistaken Identities, which,
among other things, lampooned the phenomenon of the “black painting,” among white male painters that occurred possibly not coincidentally during the Civil Rights Era, and The Revelation of the Self-Evident, a show consisting of items I referred to as “functional readymades,” found objects and signs that, while contextualized as gallery art, could still be used and understood for their original purposes, including No Smoking and Piece of Shit Vacuum Cleaner.
The faux antiquities that became Jim Crow Hell No represent my sincere desire to reach into the past and slap it upside its head for the pain and humiliation it caused my ancestors. But I also meant to do so with biting humor that let nobody living in our current racist society off the hook, either. Voices of authority that misuse their power deserve to be mocked, their messages ignored, disrespected. My mother, on the other hand, did not deserve that kind of treatment.
D O M IN IK A K SEL (S E A)N C E INSERT:
KIRAN CHANDRA
notes on attunement Since a one can degrees dynamic stop
thing cannot be known directly or totally, only attune to it with greater or lesser of intimacy…attunement is a living, relation with another being-it doesn’t
When we study attunement we study something that has always been there: ecological intimacy, which is to say, intimacy between humans and nonhumans, violently repressed with violent results. Coexisting with these nonhumans is ecological thought, art, ethics, and politics Timothy Morton
How do you write about a show you haven’t actually seen, or been in the presence of the work? In this new relationship we have to zoom meetings, virtual exhibitions, online walkthroughs, often with our computer cameras switched off-- there is another sensibility I have found myself relying on, and trusting, more than the visual. It is that of listening.
that make up the Excess is Excrement mosaic I am touched by the light that cuts through the darkness in the words of Ursila Le Guin- Excess is excrement (excrement retained in the body is a poison) and I find myself listening within for the rest of the sentence that Dominika has left in silence hanging in the air, like bobbing spirits, like messages in and of bottles.
Dominka’s work is a full body experience: best experienced with your mind quietened, and your heart on. Everything she does, makes, orchestrates is to be heard or heard-felt. If it’s not aural, it is about the quality, texture and materiality of sound. How sound affects the body, how it shifts our sensibilities, and recently in this precise little gem of a show at Open Source Gallery, she just invites us to listen in.
It is the piece that proclaims Denial ain’t just (a river in Egypt) a clever quip by Mark Twain that now in the wake of The United States being forced to be woke, is all the more resonant. It recognizes the undercurrent of our collective rage that has emboldened people in the midst of a global pandemic, to take to the streets.
A deep purple space full of collaged glass pieces arranged to be read in easel sized painterly rectangles – ‘no one is an island’, ‘denial ain’t just…’, ‘lock the door’, ‘excess is excrement’,’ devil’s road is paved’, ‘breathe...’ These punk stained-glass collages are made of sea glass, hewed and polished by the ocean waters at the rockaways, where Dominika has been surfing for all the years she’s lived in NYC; where Dominika helped out for months after the devastation of Sandy; where Dominika has made her home since the pandemic. Her work and working method are informed by collecting, composing and collaboration. It is also about care and caring. Driftwood, sea glass, micro plastics, rocks - all shaped by the waters and the shores of the Rockaways are the materials of this show. I imagine her at home, after a day surfing and collecting sea glass, sitting down to make these pieces, listening to a podcast or a piece of music, seeking out that perfect wave-beveled shape or amber color, completely immersed, a half smile on her face as she lets her hands ponder the shape of a sentence. As I read the phrase No Man is an Island I am brought to the compassionate meditations of John Donne- No man is an island (entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main). On looking at the shards
Dominika’s accompanying 45 RPM vinyl album is also a gathering of sounds - an ambient, atmospheric, subtle layering of lapping waves, human voices, seagulls calling, bells, drums, gongs and water drums. The songs feel like the sonic equivalent of the times of day. The calm optimism of an early morning, the hum of an afternoon lull and the quiet contentment of a day lived in attention and attunement to the world. The track “Sink or Swim” begins with a lead meditation that first invites the listener gently into the depths of an ocean, the primal womb of life on earth, it calms the nervous system and slowly brings our attention to the amount of plastics and toxic debris floating in the oceans. Perfectly paced- inviting us to consider, in this state of attunementthe waters, to listen to the ocean, so that in communion with her and without a sense of separation from her, we may really understand our place deep inside this world. For like this planet our human bodies are more water than flesh. This album sings the body (of waters) electric. If the images of the islands of floating trash in the oceans have been nothing but a source of anxiety and hopelessness to you, this aural invitation to dive into the ocean of consciousness if you will, is a beautiful antidote to the dismay that accompanies living on this planet as a human being. It is an embrace of joy through the process of non- separation and a refusal of the malaise of life in the capitalistocean/ocene.
M E D ITAT I N G O N E M E RGE N T S E A S Meditating on Emergent Seas was an evening communing with the non-living via vibrations, hypnosis and sonic meditations. In collaboration with Kiran Chandra (Shanghai), Patricia Dominguez (Chile) and Betsy LeFae (New York,) Dominika Ksel brought attention and intention into reimagining our relationships and communications with the refuse around us and the non-human and non-living beings with whom we share our ecologies.
S A R A H E . BR OOK M a r k (c on ) Me In (s e c ) T h i s M om e n t (rate ) W hol e
ALICIA MOUNTAIN TWO-CAR GARAGE
When I came two weeks ago to visit Sarah and this installation here in the gallery, I parked across the street. The doors of the gallery were open and Sarah was trying to sweep leaves out of the show. It was windy and there was no way to win—the leaves kept coming in. The wind tangled the dangling specimen bags, too, sending them into kite loops, tying them up in one another. There is a part of me that wants to say that the wind activated the space, but I kind of hate that impulse. It comes from the part of me anxious about belonging in an art discourse. I don’t even want to say discourse. And of course, the space is already activated by the work itself— the spritely green that evaporates upward, the leaning objects full of potential energy and the weight of rest, the language tumbling into thought. It’s activated by the bent wood like a bow pulled taught and by the silver spray paint that transfigures that same wood into metal, the plastic into glass. Transfiguration is all over this
place. I especially appreciate the chemical reaction that rusts the rebar orange—a specific kind of painting. The act of installation, the verb of it, also transfigures. Alignment is important here—one thing becoming the next thing, a shift or pivot from one material to the next. And in installation, the found material becomes art object. Or perhaps it is not a becoming, but a revelation of what it always was. Recently I told Sarah that a god-type of thing has been coming to me, kind of talking to me, making herself known. In the past when I’ve felt this, I’ve ignored it or turned away from it and walked in the other direction. Now I’m trying to just stay with it. The god-voice sounds like my voice. My best understanding so far is that she’s just the wisest version of me, able to access knowledge and wisdom and understanding that are a little out of my own reach. I used to think that god was something separate from me, and then I didn’t think about god at all.
And then I thought about the whole earth and all of time and god as that and me as some tiny fraction of that. And then more years of not thinking of god at all. For now, it feels like there is no difference, hardly any difference, between god and me. Something changed when I started using my own pronouns for her, her being god. And I let her look like me and sound like me. Sarah’s work became clear to me when she said she was trying to show the light and song trapped in materials. I can think of no better way to describe “MARK (CON) ME IN (SEC) THIS MOMENT (RATE) WHOLE.” Materials glowing their light, humming their songs. And the highway sings its song too, like the rushing ocean. The wind plays a song, the leaves. This god thing I’m experiencing, is, I think, me allowing the light and song trapped in me to come out. The wisest part of myself. The other day on WNYC, a biographer was discussing the life of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass isn’t really thought of as a preacher, but when he lived in New Bedford he would speak from the pulpit of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. “He started to preach,” the biographer, David W. Blight, says, “and the congregation
decided to ordain him. In the AME Zion church at that point you could be ordained as a preacher just by the congregation getting together with its elders and declaring you a preacher. You didn’t have to go to divinity school. He was actually technically ordained by them. And that’s where he learned, to a certain extent, the principles of homiletics.” It’s been a week and I can’t stop thinking about this. The congregation itself ordained him. The lay people saying, this is good and right and holy, let us make it so. The congregation ordained him. My god sounds and looks like me. The two-car garage is a gallery, is a site of ordination and incarnation. I am a poet and so perhaps it goes without saying that, since I learned about it, I have been transfixed by the concept of logos— speaking the thing into being. Language as literal creation. BRINGER / BOUNTY / BOUND. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t into destruction, too. I don’t want to be all good. A part of me imagines tipping the antique early-dynasty vase from it’s museum column, decisively stepping on this thin wood until it snaps under my weight. I hope you feel this impulse, too, just every once in a while. It’s okay. It’s part of being whole. Whole meaning holy.
I keep thinking of the wind, that breath blowing into the gallery, the leaves, the sweeping, the little kites, the tangled string. I keep thinking about how inspire (like respire), means to breathe into. A god thing. The breath came in and couldn’t be swept out. Look around. The gallery, the city, your world. What of this is has not been ordained for you? What of this does not ordain you? If not you, the god of you, the found and consecrated object of you—who, then?
R E G IN IG L O R I A H E AV Y LIFT TEXT BY
D ENN E M IC H E L E N ORRIS
Need a van? Here is your van. It is white with orange and green. It has five doors. It says “Drive now! Pay later!”. It says “$19.95 an hour!”. In a corner inside the van is a blanket. The blanket is blue. It has white stitching along the edges. On top of the blanket are framed pictures. The frames are all white. One of them is a collage of SKU codes. The others are pictures of a man in motion. Here he is bundled up and climbing a mountain. He has a snowboard strapped to his back. Here he is on the road, pulling a rickshaw behind him. In another corner is a blue plastic milk crate. The crate holds hundreds of sketches. The sketches depict things the man in the pictures has built, things the man in the pictures will build. The man in the pictures is an artist. He builds and moves, and like the rest of the world, he buys. He disposes of. Here is a dumpster. It was built by the man in the pictures. It is made from wood and nails. It is brown and blue. It is huge because it is a dumpster. Inside it is a small pile of white shredded paper. It came all the way from Chicago in that van with the man in the pictures, the man who walks and climbs and snowboards. The man who builds and moves and buys and disposes of. He drove the van and the dumpster and the white shredded paper halfway across a country full of people who built and moved and bought and disposed of.
Need a van here is your van it is white with orange and green it has five doors it says Drive now! Pay later! it says $19.95 an hour! in a corner inside the van is a blanket the blanket is blue it has white stitching along the edges on top of the blanket are framed pictures the frames are all white one of them is a collage of SKU codes the others are pictures of a man in motion here he is bundled up and climbing a mountain he has a snowboard strapped to his back here he is on the road pulling a rickshaw behind him in another corner is a blue plastic milk crate the crate holds hundreds of sketches the sketches depict things the man in the pictures has built things the man in the pictures will build the man in the pictures is an artist he builds and moves and like the rest of the world he buys he disposes of here is a dumpster it was built by the man in the pictures it is made from wood and nails it is brown and blue it is huge because it is a dumpster inside it is a small pile of white shredded paper it came all the way from Chicago in that van with the man in the pictures the man who walks and climbs and snowboards the man who builds and moves and buys and disposes of he drove the van and the dumpster and the white shredded paper halfway across a country full of people who built and moved and bought and disposed of Needavanhereisyourvanitiswhitewithorangeandgreenithasfivedoorsitsay drivenow!paylater!itsays$19.95anhour!inacornerinsidethevanisablanket theblanketisblueithaswhitestitchingalongtheedgesontopoftheblanketar framedpicturestheframesareallwhiteoneofthemisacollageofSKUcodes theothersarepicturesofamaninmotionhereheisbundledupandclimbingamo untainhehasasnowboardstrappedtohisbackhereheisontheroadpullingarick shawbehindhiminanothercornerisablueplasticmilkcratethecrateholdshun dredsofsketchesthesketchesdepictthingsthemaninthepictureshasbuilt thingsthemaninthepictureswillbuildthemaninthepicturesisanartisthebuil dsandmovesandliketherestoftheworldhebuyshedisposesofhereisadumps teritwasbuiltbythemaninthepicturesitismadefromwoodandnailsitisbrown andblueitishugebecauseitisadumpsterinsideitisasmallpileofwhiteshredded paperitcameallthewayfromChicagointhatvanwiththemaninthepicturesthe manwhowalksandclimbsandsnowboardsthemanwhobuildsandmovesand buysanddisposesofhedrovethevanandthedumpsterandthewhiteshredded paperhalfwayacrossacountryfullofpeoplewhobuiltandmovedandbought anddisposedof
S O Y O U N G SH I N AN D A NT H O N Y BO D L O VI Ć h ol d p l e as e
S TA C I E E VAN S Shin and Bodlović have crafted interactive sculptures of their hands, by their hands. The sculptures are imbued with the artists’ memories – memories that serve as lessons, cautionary tales, and opportunities for connection. As visitors are greeted by a legend of personal moments, they are invited to reflect on moments of their own lives and to participate in a ritual of holding on, and letting go.
Let us create a matrix of support. Let us place the power back into our own hands. Let us create community and hold space together.
*** I was introduced to Soyoung and Anthony as storytellers … or maybe story sharers is a better term. In the spring of 2020, just as everyone was trying to find their way through the early stage of the pandemic, instead of installing the show they had planned for Open Source, they were home, isolated, sharing a night of stories for an Open Source Zoom event. From their separate spaces, they used artwork and various props to tell stories they had collected from the public. More than my interest in the stories themselves – all of which were excellent – I was interested in the way the artists played off of one another, the ways they chose to create the story for the audience. When I spoke with them this past October, we talked about Tales Your Mother Told You, that early-Covid story event. And we talked about the loneliness of that time, the ways the pandemic impacted their close relationships. One of the things that moved me as we talked was learning that they lived close enough to one another that Soyoung had brought Anthony cake after the Open Source show. Thinking of them stepping out of their individual quarantine bubbles to create a shared cake bubble pleased me, seemed fitting for the ways they create together, the ways they think and see together as they develop their shows. Anthony described Monika’s call inviting them to show in 2021 as
an invitation back to art … after making masks, after the summer uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. He was ready to engage again. Soyoung, while dealing with the stressors of isolation, had begun taking classes in another discipline, focusing on a different kind of creativity. They didn’t focus backward and develop the show they had planned for 2020. They wanted the new show to be about what they could give, a space in which people would feel as if something was being offered to them. And that’s definitely how I felt when I walked into the gallery to experience Hold/Please. I felt drawn into the stories they were telling with the pieces displayed, the memories they illustrated. The day I saw the show, I’d had an unsettling experience in the morning, one that had dredged a series of difficult memories to my surface. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make room to take in what I was going to see in the gallery. But the moment I walked into Open Source, I was pulled into each tiny world, each bit of history and life. Add to that the invitation to bring myself into the work and share something that I wanted to hold or release, to make the physical gesture of writing that down and wrapping it in Anthony or Soyoung’s surrogate hand and adding it to the crucible … I couldn’t have seen the show on a more perfect day. When we spoke in October, Soyoung and Anthony talked about holding space for each other to acknowledge how rough this time has been. They described their process of working on this show as sitting with their own stories, offering themselves more personally, and creating a space for people to give of themselves. I felt welcomed in during our conversation, and embraced as I experienced the show. As they said in their gallery guide, “the matrix of connection has been initiated.”
2021 Open Source Gallery 306 17th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215 opensourcegallery.org
Artwork © James Hannaham, Dominika Ksel, Sarah E. Brook, Regin Igloria, Soyoung Shin & Anthony Bodlović Essays © Denne Michele Norris, James Hannaham, Kiran Chandra, Alicia Mountain, Stacie Evans Cover © James Hannaham Photographs: Stefan Hagen Design: Monika Wuhrer Printer: ATC Images, 101 Allen Street, New York, NY, 10002 Edition of 100 /100 2021 programs at Open Source Gallery were made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Joseph Robert Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED