Socrates Sculpture Park's 2015 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition

EAF15: 2015 EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP EXHIBITION

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP EXHIBITION SEPTEMBER 27, 2015 - MARCH 13, 2016

Kenseth Armstead Charlotte Becket & Roger Sayre José Carlos Casado Torkwase Dyson Carla Edwards Davey Hawkins Lena Henke David Horvitz Charlotte Hyzy Melanie McLain Kristen Nelson Freya Powell Leah Raintree Aaron Suggs Noa Younse Socrates Sculpture Park P.O. Box 6259, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard Long Island City, NY 11106 USA Socrates Publishing 2015

CONTENTS

06 Introduction 12 The Artists 14 Kenseth Armstead 18 Charlotte Becket &

Roger Sayre 22 JosĂŠ Carlos Casado 26 Torkwase Dyson 30 Carla Edwards 34 Davey Hawkins 38 Lena Henke 42 David Horvitz 46 Charlotte Hyzy 50 Melanie McLain 54 Kristen Nelson 58 Freya Powell 62 Leah Raintree 66 Aaron Suggs 70 Noa Younse 74 About EAF15 84 Support & Thanks

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Fifteen years ago Socrates Sculpture Park inaugurated the Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF) Exhibition and launched what would become an annual exhibition of “artists to watch.” By providing an open studio along with financial, administrative, and technical support, the EAF program offers a rare opportunity for the realization of original, large-scale outdoor work.

From May through September, EAF artists work onsite, to create site-specific works in full view of the public. This unique transparency enables visitors to see the creative process first-hand and inspires the park’s arts education and social programming.

This year’s Emerging Artist Fellows were selected through a highly competitive process that attracted more than 350 applications – a record number for the 7

INTRODUCTION

program – by the park’s 2015 Curatorial Advisors, Gary Carrion-Murayari (Curator, New Museum) and Nora Lawrence (Curator, Storm King Art Center). The EAF15 artists are: Kenseth Armstead, Charlotte Becket & Roger Sayre, José Carlos Casado, Torkwase Dyson, Carla Edwards, Davey Hawkins, Lena Henke, David Horvitz, Charlotte Hyzy, Melanie McLain, Kirsten Nelson, Freya Powell, Leah Raintree, Aaron Suggs, and Noa Younse.

As the culmination of an internationally renowned fellowship program, the EAF Exhibition is distinct in its commitment to emphasize individual artist projects. Rather than present an overarching theme, the exhibition highlights the singularity of each artist’s vision and subject matter, while providing critical consideration on diverse subjects, processes, and complexities of the site.

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INTRODUCTION

THE ARTISTS

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

KENSETH ARMSTEAD Master Work: Astoria Houses Building 24, 2015 Stainless steel, tar, feathers 15’ x 36’ x 36’ Kenseth Armstead’s Master Work: Astoria Houses, Building 24 maps the footprint of a single tower of NYCHA’s Astoria Houses.

The public housing complex, home to over 3,100 individuals, is located just north of Socrates Sculpture Park. Composed of stainless steel tubing and mixed media, the installation marks the outline of the building’s form at roughly two-fifths scale. Unlike an imposing tower of solid brick and mortar, Armstead’s idealized Building 24 is minimal and porous, allowing light, visitors, and the landscape to filter through the structure in an active, inviting manner. Master Work is the most recent work from Armstead’s series Farther Land. The works are puzzles, persistently enigmatic objects, that reflect on

the legacy of the nations founders’ high ideals and the penalty for deviation from them. The series responds to the American Revolution and the slave owning founders’ declaration that “all men are created equal” with matching irony and suggestive material content.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

CHARLOTTE BECKET & ROGER SAYRE Full Tilt, 2015 Lumber, metal, plastic, paint, concrete, dirt 5’ x 15’ x 15’ Charlotte Becket and Roger Sayre work collaboratively on public projects that explore and reframe environmental materials and contexts. Their project for Socrates Sculpture Park, Full Tilt, depicts a neighborhood bodega seemingly fallen as its façade is tilted on its axis and embedded in the ground. The work speaks to the demise of the area’s local businesses while positing a playful altered reality, one in which the small neighborhood deli is relocated and operating in a parallel, horizontal universe. Full Tilt is the artists’ reflection on the rapid development surrounding the park. The title suggests the literal collapse of a structure and the impact of socio-economic shifts on a community.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

JOSÉ CARLOS CASADO Trade, 2015 Archival printed aluminum, cattle panels, chicken wire Dimensions variable José Carlos Casado’s EAF15 installation, Trade, is inspired by the artist’s 2014 expedition in the archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. While there, he witnessed how the effects of extreme climate change have uncovered new routes for polar exploration, opening the floodgates to conflicts over natural resources. Casado identifies this transformation of natural resources into objects-for-trade as an act of violence against nature – a terrorism of sorts. His brightly hued metal skins, each a unique texture created through a 3D digital investigation of human flesh, simultaneously represent precious stones and parts of the body, linking the exploration of natural EAF15

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resources with human brutality while creating uncomfortable parallels between global warming, terrorism, commerce, and war.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

TORKWASE DYSON Site on Sight: 2 (The Door of No Return), 2015 Rough cut yellow Alaskan red cedar, found wood, zinc 3’ x 20’ x 34’ Site on Sight: 2 (The Door of No Return) addresses the intersection of identity, architecture, liminality, and the body through a site-specific installation along the waterfront at Socrates. Site on Sight reimagines the architecture of the Door of No Return, which is sited in Elmina Slave Castle in the West African country of Ghana.

It is the place where innumerable Africans were held before transport to slavery in the Americas between 1637 and 1814. Dyson’s Site on Sight remakes Ghana’s Door into a new form that integrates sky, ground, air, and water, allowing for an ethereal sensory experience. By interpreting and redesigning this historic space, Dyson seeks to reshape EAF15

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not only the physical architecture, but also the emotional narrative around this historic period. By providing a new context for this history, Site on Sight builds on the personal relationship between the artist and the site, and their shared history.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

CARLA EDWARDS Gain and Cost, 2015 Concrete, wood, steel, pigment Dimensions variable Carla Edwards’ work examines how dominant culture and its artifacts shape our sense of identity and self. Through appropriation, manipulation, and reconfiguration, the artist’s material interventions alter the meaning of an original subject. At Socrates Sculpture Park, Edwards cast a cluster of concrete grottos to create a sacred, seemingly religious space. The area surrounding this statuary is landscaped in detail, but the grottos have been left empty, creating a void for the public to envision – and possibly offer – their own devotional objects. Drawing from the grotto as a space for personal ritual, Gain and Cost examines the relationship between personal identity, closely held belief, and artifact.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

DAVEY HAWKINS Inclusions, 2015 Marine grade Styrofoam, concrete Dimensions variable Davey Hawkins’ Inclusions is a low-lying, stepped installation that follows the topography of the park with an arrangement of cast cement blocks, each formed and broken apart by Hawkins’ collection of marine Styrofoam – synthetic blue foam that never degrades and is often found as litter in waterways, washing onto shorelines. Sited at Socrates Sculpture Park, a former illegal dumpsite and landfill, these cement blocks suggest that the impact of human intervention on the natural world may be insoluble, and possibly endless.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

LENA HENKE Stand Back, 2015 Golden niobe weeping willow, sand, steel Dimensions variable Lena Henke’s installation Stand Back integrates animate and inanimate objects to create a whimsical tableau, featuring a metal and sand sculpture sited beneath a weeping willow tree. The iconography of the melancholy willow – a stand-in for classic depictions of death and nature by poets and artists as early as the Renaissance – contrasts with the presence of unsentimental materials of industrial sand and metal. Sited together at the park’s river’s edge, these components reference and undermine many historical depictions of the natural.

For Henke, long-standing symbolic use of the willow tree, such as the moment in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when doomed Ophelia EAF15

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breaks willow branches in the foretelling of her death, furthers the emotional play of the sculptural intervention.

The title, Stand Back, refers to a 1983 Stevie Nicks song of the same name, which acknowledges the adaptability of the willow tree with the lyrics, “like a willow I can bend....” With similar adaptability, Henke’s work Stand Back will morph and evolve over time, as wind and weather reshape the tree and surrounding sand, washing away historical references with a contemporary sensibility. After the exhibition, the willow tree will remain installed permanently at Socrates Sculpture Park.

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DAVID HORVITZ lullaby for a landscape (All the Pretty Horses) 2015 Fifty-four tempered aluminum alloy chimes tuned to the notes of the folk lullaby “All The Pretty Little Horses” Dimensions variable

David Horvitz’s lullaby for a landscape breaks down the melody of a folk lullaby into individual notes that play from large chimes installed within the grove of trees at Socrates Sculpture Park. Individually, each chime is a fragment of a completed song that only exists within a singular moment of time; collectively, the chimes complete the lullaby melody and progress temporally to evoke a surreal dream-state.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

CHARLOTTE HYZY Dessert Babes: Queer Fat Decadence, 2015 Local wood variaties, concrete, steel, foam, paint Dimensions variable Charlotte Hyzy’s three carved wood sculptures, Dessert Babes, playfully depict voluptuous or “plus-size” nude forms as delicious confections. The artist’s works are an attractive melding of idealized sugary sweets and the sensuous physiques that are traditionally associated with indulging in them. Hyzy’s sculptures serve as an examination of societal perceptions of the female body and its preoccupation with an “ideal” weight and form. By referencing classical figurative sculpture, Hyzy provokes a contemporary dialogue about gender and beauty.

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MELANIE MCLAIN Tactile Formation, 2015 Porcelain tile, high-density polythylene, stainless steel, wood, vinyl fabric, acrylic, cement 9’ x 15’ x 16’ Tactile Formation is a participatory architectural sculpture and performance series that combines the interior design and functionality of health clinics, spas, and medical centers. By bringing the institutionalized health aesthetic outdoors, Tactile Formation blurs the separation between interior and exterior spaces and the divide between private and public action.

This hybridized environment invites viewers to interact with McLain’s work by walking on, lying under, and grabbing onto various elements of her piece. To guide and prompt these interactions the artist organized EAF15

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accompanying performances, in which acrobats and masseurs perform a series of choreographed movements that engage the sculpture and audience directly.

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EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

KIRSTEN NELSON Displaced Corner, 2015 CMU blocks, cast concrete, mortar, color pigments, wood, orange safety netting 12’ x 10’ x 8’ Displaced Corner evokes a recognizable moment of new building during midconstruction. Like the construction it mimics, the sculpture is assembled from cinder blocks, concrete, rebar, and orange safety netting. Together these materials display the structural elements that are normally hidden from view, exposed only for a short time during the construction period. Each wall contains a window opening, posing as an architectural show model, or sample corner.

While the exposed minimal structure remains raw and reductive, ornate concrete patterns decorate the surfaces like a faded façade, visually conflating the acts of ornament and decay.

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FREYA POWELL Active Turn, 2015 Steel, digital prints, styrene 5’ 7” x 4’ 5” x 4’ 5”

Freya Powell’s Active Turn creates an intimate and illusionist experience along the park’s waterfront. Looking into Powell’s steel zoetrope reveals a transition from representations of the existing cityscape to images of the ocean’s open horizon. A zoetrope is a 19th Century optical device that creates the illusion of motion by spinning a progressive set of still images. For the artist, the horizon is a symbol not only of the limits of our knowledge, but also the potential of our imagination to explore beyond sensory experience. The animation of Active Turn is subtle, initially echoing the skyline behind it, and eventually blurring into a vision of an empty skyline that contemplates the unfamiliar.

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LEAH RAINTREE Another Land, 2015 Direct print on aluminum 10’ x 10’

Leah Raintree’s Another Land is a twodimensional black and white photograph inlaid in the park’s landscape and which reads as both an archaeological discovery and a sculptural intervention.

Another Land is part of the artist’s ongoing series of photographic and sculptural works that take their point of departure and inspiration from Isamu Noguchi’s carved stone sculptures. Noguchi was a distinguished Japanese-American sculptor, designer, and landscape architect whose renowned museum and foundation is only one block away from Socrates. Raintree’s work alludes to Noguchi’s manipulated stone “landscape tables,” the physical geologic markings EAF15

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of glacial retreat, and the photographic documentation of cosmic bodies to form a new, otherworldly image.

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AARON SUGGS Untitled (Dazzle Dinghy), 2015 Plywood, fiberglass, epoxy resin, inkjet on fiberglass and sailcloth, rope, stainless steel 12’ x 4’6” x 10’ l”

In Aaron Suggs’ fourth installment of his floating watercraft series, a sea-worthy boat is patterned – from hull to sail – with a digital collage of images sourced from within Socrates Sculpture Park. For his previous iterations, Suggs built a monochromatic white boat, a trompe l’oeil camouflage boat, and a fully transparent boat. His latest vessel, adorned in dazzle camouflage and titled Untitled (Dazzle Dinghy), floats in the East River near the park’s shoreline, extending the landscape of the park out into the water.

Dazzle camouflage first appeared on World War I warships as a tactic to disorient enemy perceptions with a confusing array of shapes and colors of the surrounding environment.

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NOA YOUNSE The Ant Ensemble, 2015 Wood, acrylic paint, Arduino, XBee, NeoPixels 8” x 96” x 2,214”

Noa Younse’s The Ant Ensemble is a physical demarcation that slices through the landscape of Socrates Sculpture Park. Younse positioned unique wooden stakes, to mark the directional line of New York City’s North-toSouth avenues, along a spatial and volumetric boundary that is further emphasized by illuminated points on each unit. The static order of the minimalist line contrasts with the pulsing illumination of the components. The computational technique the artist employs to program this sequential animation is based on the speed of migrating animals. The installation pivots between night and day, visible and invisible, and constructed order and nature.

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ABOUT

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SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK

Socrates Sculpture Park is located on the East River waterfront of an industrial area of Queens, New York – the most culturally diverse county in the United States. The park is surrounded by three of the nation’s largest public housing complexes (Astoria, Ravenswood, and Queensbridge Houses), and our local community has been a park stakeholder since its creation: Socrates was once an abandoned landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a group of artists and community members, under the leadership of visionary sculptor Mark di Suvero, transformed its 4.7 acres into an open studio and exhibition space for artists, and a neighborhood park for local residents.

The park was created by the community for the community – a founding principle that continues as we strive to welcome the broadest spectrum of the public possible: 75

ABOUT

Socrates is open from morning till dusk, 365 days per year. There is no admission, and every program is free.

From its inception, Socrates has been committed to giving promising and talented artists opportunities to create large-scale artworks and to have their work experienced by diverse audiences, local to international.

Since most exhibiting artists create their work in our open studio facilities on park grounds, both the creative process and finished artworks are accessible to visitors – a transparency that differentiates Socrates from many other arts organizations, and shapes our public programming, philosophy, and goals.

EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

The Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF) exhibition and program is one of the most important visual arts initiatives at Socrates Sculpture Park and reflects our founding commitment to give artists a platform to take creative risks, expand the scale of their work, and realize ambitious, thoughtful projects in the public realm.

2015 is the fifteenth anniversary of dedicating an annual park-wide exhibition to the EAF Program. Our longest standing program, EAF has become the park’s designated forum for emerging artists to learn first-hand about presenting sculpture in a public space; have their work seen by diverse audiences, local to international; and engage a community that is supportive and curious.

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Fifteen artists are selected annually through an open competition, and more than 300 artists have completed the EAF program to date.

Each EAF15 artist was awarded a grant, a four-month residency in the park’s outdoor studio, and access to the space, facilities, equipment, and on-site staff expertise.

Because our studio facilities are readily accessible within the park, Socrates is also one of the only places where visitors can freely interact with artists as they are working.

Many people return daily to see the projects evolve and develop bonds with the artists.

Above: Leah Raintree’s drilling process for Another Land Below: Installation of The Ant Ensemble by Noa Younse

Installation of Gain and Cost by Carla Edwards

Melanie McClain installing Tactile Formation

Above: Charlotte Becket and Roger Sayre creating the faรงade of Full Tilt Below: Drying patterns on concrete blocks for Displaced Corner, Kirsten Nelson

SUPPORT & THANKS

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EAF15 is made possible by the generosity and commitment of the Jerome Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and The New York Community Trust.

Additional major exhibition support is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charina Endowment Fund, Mark di Suvero, Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, Agnes Gund, Lambent Foundation, Ronay and Richard Menschel, Ivana Mestrovic, Shelley and Donald Rubin, Silvercup Studios, and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Smith.

Socrates Sculpture Park’s Exhibition Program is funded, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the NYS Legislature, and the New York 85

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City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Special thanks to the City of New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Queens Borough President Melinda R. Katz, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, City Council Members Jimmy Van Bramer and Costa Constantinides, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, Commissioner Mitchell Silver, and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl.

Socrates is incredibly grateful for the materials and manpower donated by our longstanding partners: Build It Green! NYC, R & R General Supply Co, Materials for the Arts, Plant Specialists, and Spacetime C.C.

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Socrates Sculpture Park is grateful for the support of its generous and dedicated Board of Directors and Staff: Board of Directors Mark di Suvero, Chair Stuart Match Suna, President Ivana Mestrovic, Secretary and Treasurer Lisa K. Erf Maxine Frankel Richard Gluckman, FAIA Brooke Kamin Rapaport Ursula von Rydingsvard Joel Shapiro Thomas W. Smith Kimberly Strong Mitchell Silver, Ex-Officio NYC Parks Commissioner

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THANKS

Staff John Hatfield, Executive Director Pasqualina Azzarello Elissa Goldstone Max Gottlieb Katie Denny Horowitz Nora Webb Chris Zirbes Photography Images are provided by the park’s photographer, Nate Dorr, the artists, and Socrates Sculpture Park.

EAF15 Catalog prepared by Elissa Goldstone and Max Gottlieb.

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Open daily from 10 am until sunset Free Admission Web: socratessculpturepark.org Facebook: SocratesSculpturePark Instagram: socratespark Twitter: socratespark Socrates Sculpture Park 32-01 Vernon Blvd at Broadway Long Island City, NY 11106 718 956 1819

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THANKS

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