SOMETHING I CAN FEEL

CU RATE D SE CTION B Y D E R R IC K ADAM S

C UR AT ED S EC TI O N | VO LTA NY 2016

SOMETHING I CAN FEEL

S O ME T HING I C A N FE E L C U R AT E D SEC T I O N

Something I Can Feel is an exhibition of eight contemporary artists who explore the idea of the body as a site of reckoning, transformation and departure. Each artist creates forms which reference the body as transitional and ambiguous in its ties to cultures, and histories as well as forms of longing, intuition and sensation. Another way of saying this is that bodies perform responses to experience. The artwork here examines those visceral dispatches.

This exhibition is not intended to tell a single story nor is it tied to a singular idea of truth, to history, to a body, a particular system of knowledge or way of being known. Instead, curator DERRICK ADAMS is facilitating an important conversation between eight contemporary artists exploring the idea that bodies are sites of tension and provocation. The essential proposition here is that bodies are artifacts of the exchange between memory and flesh. And the artwork at the intersection of this crossing, this evocation, suggests the idea that we, as the performers of experience, can be felt, broken-down, built-up, (mis)understood, lived with, around and in, and, most importantly, made new. — Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks Curator and art consultant for The Bronx Council on the Arts, and Contributing and Advisory Editor for Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters

DERRICK ADAMS (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland) is an interdisciplinary New York-based artist and former Curatorial Director of Rush Arts Gallery (New York, 1999 – 2009) who explores self-image and its forward project with a focus on the fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface. Adams received a BFA from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn) and an MFA from Columbia University (New York). He is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alumni and a recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the 2014 S.J. Weiler Award. Adams has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at MoMA PS1, New York; CAMH, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; on numerous occasions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; as well as at Performa 05, 13, and 15. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art; and can be seen at Tilton Gallery, New York; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris; and online at derrickadams.com.

EV ENTS Wednesday, March 2 Vernissage Andria Morales: Beatpacks

Sunday, March 6, 11 am Mini B.A.R. NYC: Artist Talks, brunch and discussion featuring Torkwase Dyson and Duron Jackson, produced by Darwin F. Brown, Valerie Piraino, and other artist collaborators.

Friday, March 4, 5 pm Shaun Leonardo: I Can’t Breathe Workshop and Performance

FLOOR PL A N II

VI

I

IV

VIII

I V VII

I III

I

DOREEN GARNER Cindy Rucker Gallery

V

Cindy Rucker, info@cindyruckergallery.com

II

HUGH HAYDEN Postmasters Gallery

Oshun Layne, olayne@rushphilanthropic.org

VI

Paulina Bębecka, paulina@postmastersart.com

III

BALINT ZSAKO The Proposition KATE CLARK Dexter Wimberly Projects

LEONARDO BENZANT Dexter Wimberly Projects Dexter Wimberly, dexter.wimberly@gmail.com

VII IBRAHIM AHMED Gallery Nosco

Ronald Sosinski, info@theproposition.com

IV

BRANDON COLEY COX Rush Arts Gallery

Cyril Moumen, contact@gallerynosco.com

VIII SHAUN LEONARDO BRIC & Mighty Tanaka

Dexter Wimberly, dexter.wimberly@gmail.com

For sales inquiries, please contact representing galleries or institutions

Elizabeth Ferrer, contemporaryart@bricartsmedia.org Alex Emmart, alex@mightytanaka.com

S O ME T HING I C A N FE E L C U R AT E D SEC T I O N KATE CLARK

SHAUN LEONARDO deconstructs the performance of masculine hyper-identity in popular cultures. The performance of manhood is the performance of prescribed actions. Leonardo isolates these actions within contexts in which their performance can be seen as such.

The artist challenges normative behavior as it is lived through the body as a matter of social ritual and routine. In his ANDRIA MORALES multimedia practice, the artist isolates specific moments within performances of the male body in states of competition and bravado to examine the ways identity is a constructed through social activities. In this way, Leonardo turns normalized activity (competitive wrestling, for example) into strange actions by creating intersections within these performances of “manhood.” The idea of how a man performs heteronormativity no longer has authority but is instead the performance of a socially constructed idea.

Where Leonardo explores the facade of masculinity, KAT E C L AR K’s zoomorphic figures examine the pretense of mankind as a species without ties to the possibilities of emotional realities shared with other species. If the creation of hyper-masculine cultures is a response to social anxiety then the vulnerability expressed by Clark’s hybrid creatures is itself the kind of felt response to the shared anxieties that join humans to the natural as animals. In the work of each, bodies become catalysts for strange and unfamiliar worlds of possibility and feeling.

Like Clark, H U G H H AY D E N ’s mixedmedia sculptures reveal the tensions between civilization and nature. His different uses of natural elements (such as agricultural products, feathers and fur) places these materials in states of integration and contention with commercial products and cultural trends.

This integration is never seamless and often suggests the end of the taming of the natural world as such. The question of change is also evident in the work of A ND RIA M O R AL ES . Morales is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has dealt with the documentation of gender transitioning, and specifically, the notion of gender identity as something that can be easily interpreted and

consumed by the viewer’s assumptive gaze. However, her subjects are the protagonists of their own stories no one should assume to know.

Bodies can also be the sum of desires: the desire to own, the desire to harm, the desire to be felt as well as the desire to deny objectification. D O R E E N G A R N E R ’s sculptures, videos, and HUGH HAYDEN performances, position the black female body as a site of troubling histories where themes of condemnation, deviance, fetishization, and beauty intersect. The artist’s work suggests that the black body’s relationship to Western history is an uncomfortable one. The work is raw. The materials are abundant with loaded meaning. The artist uses a range of materials — such as glass, polyester fiber, Swarovski crystals, condoms, hair weave, pearls, glitter, beads and petroleum jelly — to suggest that bodies can be comprised of what they consume and be undone by the urge to be desired. The effect is a grotesque beauty informed by material cultures and subsumed by the psyche. The work defies objectification, seeking to own the viewer instead.

Similarly, B RA ND O N CO L EY C O X’s multimedia sculptures challenge the viewer’s assumption that he or she knows what they’re looking at. Cox makes use of the tensions between the historical meaning and mystical associations of materials, from street posters, to crystals SHAUN LEONARDO

DOREEN GARNER

S O ME T HING I C A N FE E L C U R AT E D SEC T I O N BALINT ZSAKO

and steel. The artist transforms these materials — steel sheets into shavings, crystals into powder — to ultimately form objects that are so curious they defy the viewer’s expectations of those materials. The result is artwork that is paradoxical as it questions man’s relationship to the cosmos; the cosmos’ connection to the Earth, and the assumption that racial, cultural and gender identities are also social constructions.

IBRAHIM AHMED I B R A H I M A H M E D ’s mixed-media sculptures express the feeling of losing a nation as well as one’s identity and culture. Before immigrating to Freehold, New Jersey, the artist had lived in the Kingdom of Bahrain, Egypt and Kuwait. The feeling of being between nations carries with it the uneasy pressures of being between cultures and histories. Through his work, Ahmed makes deft uses of cultural symbols and forms of language. The resulting work is of curious objects loaded within deep cultural meanings between translations of languages and political circumstances. Liminality does not mean status. The feeling of the work is of dislocation and change. This is to say that his work is as unsettling and dynamic as anything that is successively in motion.

LEONARDO BENZANT

BRANDON COLEY COX

And lastly, both L E O NA RD O BE N ZA NT and B AL I N T Z SAKO make work that suggests states of shamanistic ecstasy. Where Benzant’s sculptures communicate very personal interpretations of ancestral histories, systems of beliefs and ritualistic practices from the African diaspora, Zsako’s vibrant paintings explore a deeply personal netherworld between mind and spirit. Both artists express simultaneous states of sensation, making use of visionary characters and symbols that resonate with emotional energy, color and a vibrant eccentricity. In this way, Something I Can Feel is a collective re-imagining of the body as a vital spaces of radiant activity and activism with radical potential.

I MAG ES Andria Morales, Untitled profile pic (on all fours with red Beatpack), 2015, digital image, Beatpacks – modified hard shell backpack, custom speaker components, paracord. Image courtesy of the artist.

Doreen Garner, Not only had Sims to close the natural openings in the ravaged vaginal tissues; he had to make the edges of these openings knit together.

He opted to abrade or “scarify” the edges of the vaginal tears every time he attempted to repair an opening. He then closed them with sutures and saw them become infected and reopen, painfully, every time (detail, in progress), 2016, Mixed media, Image courtesy of the artist Hugh Hayden, Toga, 2016, Successivesized American Apparel t-shirts laminated with Aquaresin, 26 × 16 × 37 in Balint Zsako, Series 2 (#25 and #28), 2015, Watercolor and ink on paper, 12 × 18 in total (12 × 9 in each) Shaun Leonardo, Champ (Mike Tyson), 2014, Charcoal on paper, 25.5 × 66 in, Image courtesy of the artist

Leonardo Benzant, Paraphernalia Of The Urban Shaman M:5 (installation view, detail), 2012 – 2014, Clothes/textiles, cardboard tubes, leather, caucasian baby doll, chicken bone, brown barbie doll, horse hair, glitter, coins, powderedcharcoal, saliva, earth, cigar-ash, coffeegrinds, vija/ashiote, powdered-egg-shell, string, wire, monofilament, various plantbundles, matte-medium, acrylic-ink, rabbit-skin-glue, rice glue, glass seed beads, rum, and miscellaneous, variable dimensions Brandon Coley Cox, M-B (G)riot or If Y’all Really Knew, 2014, Handmade paper, string, glitter, acrylic, mica flakes, brown glittery mesh fabric, flashe, acrylic dispersions and powdered tires on goldcoated black linen, 53 × 55 in Kate Clark, Charmed (detail), 2015, Springbok hide, horns, clay, foam, thread, pins, rubber eyes, steel and wood base, printed canvas, 72 × 40 × 23 in Ibrahim Ahmed, Are El Lewa #10, 2015, mixed media, 4 × 4 feet (approx)

Continuing a working collaboration, New York-based design firms Eskayel x Dane Co. introduce the Flat-Found Stool (Limited Edition) for Something I Can Feel.

Description: Half-round Profiles / Eskayel Patterned Leather Seat Tops / Exposed Joinery | Wood: American Hard Maple with a tobacco, hand-rubbed oil and wax finish | Leather: Premium, upholstery-grade leather with a plum, blemish-free and buffed finish, featuring printed art by Eskayel | Price: $1,275 For sales inquiries, please contact danecocollab@eskayel.com