LOY LUO /Homeless

12.04.2020–01.02.2021

Gallery Hours: Thur /Fri /Sat /Sun, 1–7pm

Notice: Each visitor will receive a unique calligraphy piece from an artist, Loy Luo.

How long, and to what degree, must a being imprint itself upon the geometries of our lived architecture before imparting suggestions of a warm body? In the ten paintings that comprise Homeless, Loy Luo's solo exhibition with Undercurrent, the artist portrays a faded landscape that reveals an indeterminate existence within and between hegemonic structures. With an unquiet, almost compulsive painterly hand, Luo creates paintings whose medium seems to molder onto the panels, recording our complicity in the peripheralization of living beings. Disintegration comes to its visual crescendo where the delineation between body and locale seems to muddy and blur, having us witness the dissolution of human bodies. In pieces such as Entanglement, and The Troubadour, we see all supportive infrastructure fall away, leaving the figure in a constant flux of disintegration, the anonymity of the individual reflecting the formal breakdown of the environment. Stacked upon wooden blocks, Luo’s paintings refute their status as mere aesthetic depiction of a scene, instead becoming intrinsically linked with the gallery’s scaffolding and thus insisting upon our participation both within and around these stories of isolation. In these heavy cityscapes, Luo tenderly surfaces figures who have been overlooked and inserts them in corporeality we cannot help but face.

Many things can be said about the city of New York but the most applicable here would be an allegiance to the unceasing restructuring of its buildings and the lives within them: as De Certeau describes it, a constant verticality in which those deemed unfit are swiftly discarded. As the city performs relentless alterations, its inhabitants strain to survive inside fragile micro-diasporas. Those who inhabit the chasm between public and private space embody an indeterminacy that, at best, defies co-option and, at worst, is testament to political failure. Luo’s metaphysical preoccupations with human existence and her quiet, agile handling of the medium elicit a needling dis-ease in her viewer. Faceless and solitary, the boundaries between person and infrastructure becomes indissoluble, causing the figure to recede into the grid of the city. We know these solitary figures from our daily movements around the city and recognize our disengagement from them. As the artist centralizes faceless histories in her impersonal cityscapes; we grapple with a choice: do we intervene in the inevitable disintegration of these figures into their encroaching backgrounds or simply watch from afar? Luo's figures, often in stasis, stand outside of both the demands and rewards of conditioned human behavior, pushing us to question our accession to this system.

Adriana Furlong

/Homeless Press Release PDF

/IMAGE I: Quasimodo. Oil on canvas, 36“X48”, 2020.

Image description: In the middle of a rust-colored background a lonely figure bends reaching down with his arm.

/IMAGE II: Dumbledore. Oil on canvas, 36“X48”, 2020.

Image description: Dark human figure stands bent over in a purple-colored street, that extends into the horizon touching a yellow wall.

/GALLERY MAP

/Loy Luo's Homeless Exhibition Gallery Map. Image description: a diagram that indicates where all 12 paintings are located in a gallery space.

《无家可归》新闻稿

Adriana Furlong

一个生命在我们居住的建筑几何图形上留下印记，要多久，要到什么程度，才能给我们留下温暖的躯体的印象? 在暗流画廊举办的羅一个展《无家可归》的十幅作品中，艺术家描绘了一幅揭示等级结构内部和之间不确定存在的褪色的风景。羅一用一种不安的、近乎强迫性的绘画手法所创作的作品，其媒介似乎在画板上模压成型，它们记录着我们在生命边缘化过程中的共谋。在画作近乎崩解的视觉高潮中，身体和场所的边界模糊让我们见证了人体的消解。在《纠缠》和《游吟诗人》这些作品中，我们看到所有的支撑性基础设施都消失了，只留下一个不断变化并正消融的人影，而个体的匿名性也反映了环境的正式崩溃。羅一的作品如同堆叠在僵硬的块面上，因此显然并非是对一个场景的审美描绘，相反，它们与美术馆的脚手架有着内在联系，从而力邀我们参与到这些孤立故事之中或周围。在这些沉甸甸的城市景观中，羅一将被忽视的人物形象浮现出来，并将其植入我们不得不面对的现实中。

关于纽约这座城市，可以有很多说法，但最适用于此的是对其建筑及其内部生活的不断重组的忠诚: 正如德塞托所描述的，一种持续的，被认为不合适的东西迅速被抛弃的垂直性。随着这座城市所进行的无情的变革，它的居民在脆弱的微散居住状态中疲于生存。那些居住在公共空间和私人空间裂隙中的人，表现出了一种不确定性，往好了说，这种不确定性是对“共同选择”的挑战，往坏了说，是政治失败的证明。羅一对人类存在的形而上学的关注，以及她对媒介的安静而敏捷的处理，让她的观众感到刺痛不安。人与基础设施之间的边界变得不可分割，无面且孤独的身影隐退于城市网格中。我们在城市的日常活动中遭遇这些孤独的身影，并认识到我们与他们的脱离。当这位艺术家把无面者的历史集中在没有人情味的城市风景中时，我们不得不做出选择:我们是要介入这些人物不可避免的解体，让他们消解在自己的背景中，还是只是远远旁观?羅一笔下那些常常处于停滞状态的人物，站在有条件的人类行为的需求与奖赏之外，促使我们质疑自己对这个体系的加入。

10.23–11.21 /2020

Opening reception: October 23, 6–9pm

Gallery Hours: Thur /Fri /Sat /Sun, 1–7pm

Undercurrent is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Patricija Gilytė entitled Solo Circuit. Drawing on the universal concepts of the body, space, and time— as well as their limitations— Gilytė’s transformation of minimal and lo-tech processes ignite infinite connections inviting us to revisit memory and experience.

An indistinct sound and darkness cloak the gallery’s entrance and gradual staircase. As we descend, our senses immediately begin attempting to explain what our mind cannot. Three ceiling to floor projections shower our vision with thousands of flickering lights. The hypnotic acoustic and visual immersion impact our psyche with the sublime. Sound becomes vision and light sound - vibration. Reveling in the physiological experience, our mind waffles and bends from a cosmic phenomenon to an aerial view of what could be a sprawling metropolis or a candlelight vigil.

This celebration of light takes on new meaning as heat, pixels, or dots on our screen, emphasizing the individual interpretation of our attempts to navigate this new age of virtual distance. Our mind yearns for answers and comprehension yet we must sacrifice knowledge to fully embrace the moment. The mysticism of the piece conjures images and questions about the individual and the universal; the concrete and the ephemeral; analog and the digital. We ask ourselves, “what is light?”, connecting us deeper to spiritual concerns and the laws of energy.

These illusive experiences contrast with the fact that Gilytė’s process is a purely analog, mode of stop motion animation using real candles. The orchestration of aerial photography, candles, and time seem to demystify process, while simultaneously leaving us residual memories. The process is choreographed. Lighting each candle, Gilytė’s movements are intentional but limited by her own body and its distance to the tea light. Each candle’s life cycle is a brief four hours, mirroring the duration of the entire process which extends over three to four days. After all the candles have burnt out, the void experienced seems tangible, and strongly impressed by the lingering scent of black soot. The reminders of that energy transfer connect us back to the external, to the space outside of this installation, to the shore, the East River, where through an undercurrent we connect back to the Baltic Sea’s coastline where the installation originated, a conduit of space, time, and perception.

Daina Mattis /Co-director

/ patricija-gilyte /

/ donis / donis /

/VIDEO I: Patricija Gilytė EQUINOX K-7392, 2019

/VIDEO II: Patricija Gilytė EQUINOX K-7392, 2019

/VIDEO III: Patricija Gilytė EQUINOX K-7392, 2019

Patricija Gilytė is a Lithuanian born, German based artist whose work intersects installation, performance, video, and time. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the Vilnius Art Academy / Kaunas Art Institute in 2000, and moved to Germany to continue at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where she was awarded with her final diploma in 2005. Patricija Gilytė is represented by Meno Parkas Gallery in Kaunas, Lithuania, and in Düsseldorf, Germany.

This work was made possible by the generous support of the Klaipeda Cultural Communication Center KKKC and generously supported by Klaipeda Municipality, the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and Western Shipyard Group in 2019. The sound was created by Lithuanian composer and sound artist, Donatas Bielkauskas-Donis.

This exhibition was generously made possible by Meno Parkas, the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and the Lithuanian Culture Institute.

CARL LEE /Last House

9.02–9.04 /2020 /Project Zone 4.08

11th International Contemporary Art Fair Exhibition and

Congress Centre LITEXPO

OPENING HOURS

9/2 /Friday 14.00–20.00 /2–8pm

9/3 /Saturday 11.30–19.00 /11.30–7pm

9/4 /Sunday 11.30–18.00 /11.30–6pm

Undercurrent is excited to be a part of the ArtVilnius’20 art fair. ArtVilnius’20 is the largest event of visual arts in Eastern Europe.

The 11th edition of the art fair ArtVilnius will host 50 galleries and 200 artists from 10 countries. 

The international contemporary art fair features private international art collections, an exhibition of installations, sculptures, and performances “Takas”, meetings with art stars, discussions, conferences, and an educational program. An extensive photography program will be presented at the fair. In the special ArtVilnius’20 project area, Undercurrent will stand along with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow MOCAK, the Lewben Art Foundation, the Contemporary Art Center, and the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center.

This year Undercurrent is delighted to introduce to ArtVilnius’s audience a significant work of a Buffalo-based American artist, Carl Lee. His three-channel video installation, Last House portrays the demolition, or to be more specific, the last 16 minutes of the demolition, of a hundred-year-old single-family house in Buffalo, NY. The demolition is interspersed with shots of the peaceful, dreamy interiors from Carl Lee’s own house. Last House is an abstract structure that recalls tragedies like Macbeth. Reality at some point becomes memory if it can achieve this kind of transformation, as memories have a greater chance to survive. Last House is a real-time vanitas installation where time slips by, surrendering our memory to change. Lee appropriately shows that with every end is a rebirth, which he leaves to our imagination. Lee’s piece reflects and comments upon the world’s current situation of uncertainty and drama. It additionally symbolically encapsulates what the American Dream–family, stability, values, home, work, and change–can mean. 

When I first moved to Buffalo I was struck by the everyday beauty of the many single-family homes that make up a large part of the city. The iconic image of the house seemed to have endless variation, each a unique instance with its histories. If houses are containers for our memories, the structures within which so many minor and major domestic events take place, then each week in this city a collective amnesia grows block by block, a city disappearing before our eyes. The demolition of these structures  - by design or accident - and the speed, indifference, and violence with which it takes place; the transmutations of the scale, space, and even one’s sense of time - is breathtaking and tragic, and full of contradictions. Last House is an inquiry, part document, part memorial, to this changing built environment. -Carl Lee

/carljlee.com /myoptic

We would like to express our appreciation to ArtVilnius for its tireless work and support of our art program and the arts in general. Thank you!

CARL LEE /Paskutinis Namas

9.2–9.4 /2020 /Projektų Zona 4.08

11-oji tarptautinė šiuolaikinio meno mugė „ArtVilnius’20” Lietuvos parodų ir kongresų centras LITEXPO

Šiais metais ArtVilnius’20 mugėje Undercurrent pristato Niujorko menininko Carl Lee video projektą Paskutinis Namas (Last House) sukurtą 2010 metais. 16 min video susidedantis iš trijų, dokumentuoja tipiško vienos amerikiečių šeimos šimtamečio namo nugriovimą. Brutalus griovimo procesas pertraukiamas idiliškais paties menininko namų interjero vaizdais. Interjero ramybė kontrastuoja su griovimo mechanišku triukšmu ir futuristiniu-dadaistiniu vizualiniu žavesiu.

Man persikėlus gyventi į Buffalo, likau sužavėtas vienai šeimai statytų senų namų architektūros paprastumu bei jos grožiu. Tokia architektūra yra tipiška didžiajai šio miesto daliai. Nors tradicinė, ši namo forma išsivystė į begalę variacijų ir kieviena jų yra paženklinta unikaliomis istorijomis. Namai yra tarsi mūsų prisiminimų talpyklos, struktūros kuriose įvyko begalė svarbių ir nesvarbių nutikimų. Diena dienon, miestui nykstant, kvartalas po kvartalo neišvengiamai grimztama į kolektyvinę amneziją, mums to net nepastebint. Šių struktūrų griovimas -- suplanuotas ar atsitiktinis -- pasižymi greičiu, prievarta ir žiauriu abejingumu. Mąstelio, erdvės, ir net paties laiko sąvokos, jo tėkmės mutacija atima žadą, yra tragiška bei kupina prieštaravimų. "Paskutinis namas" yra tarsi tyrimas, dokumentas bei paminklas mūsų kuriamos aplinkos kaitai.  - Carl'as Lee

/carljlee.com/

/myoptic/

Videos: Carl Lee Last House, 2010 (16:30 loop, 3-channel projection, stereo audio, dimensions variable)

Nuoširdus ačiū visam ArtVilnius kolektyvui už jūsų nenuilstamas pastangas kultūros labui!

08.29–10.10 /2020

OPENING: Saturday, August 29, 1–8 pm

Gallery Hours: Thur–Sun, 1–7 pm

!IMPORTANT! Visitors are encouraged to bring their own personal protective equipment. Undercurrent will be disinfecting the space frequently and will have disinfectant and some PPE available for visitors. We hope we’ll be able to avoid a waiting period at the entrance, but please be prepared to wait outside the gallery for 10–15 minutes as we will be rotating visitors: one out, one in.

Before the first case of COVID-19 had ever been recorded, Daniel Jodocy welcomed us to his studio in Midtown, a tiny space filled with ephemera related to percussion instruments, building materials, and mechanical geegaws purchased by the case in Chinatown. As the pandemic washed across the globe, however, Jodocy took to the hills, rather literally, relocating to just outside the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, past Storm King but well before Albany. Atop a mountain, he rebuilt his studio and was forced to reconceive his practice, fitting together his mechanical skills with his interest in sound in a way better attuned to the new environment.

Undercurrent is delighted to exhibit the result of this reconsideration with Daniel Jodocy’s inaugural show, Soundboxgarden, opening August 29 and running until October 10. Soundboxgarden is the first show back onsite at Undercurrent’s space in Brooklyn, and just as Jodocy reimagined his own art within his new surroundings, so, too, does Soundboxgarden enable a gallery visit in the time of COVID, sketching new plans for how we feel and belong in space and place.

Growing up in his father’s mechanic’s shop in Belgium, Jodocy left to pursue a music career in New York. But both pasts merged into building for sound. He threw himself in constructing hand-built percussion instruments of all sorts, like a PVC pipe cuíca or an accordion mounted on a frame with a crank that mechanically manipulates its bellows. Anything from updated versions of hurdy-gurdys, reeded instruments resembling giant kazoos, or èrhús with beer can resonators would appear onstage when it was time for Jodocy to play musical performer, often as one half of the group Dizzy Ventilators, where contact mics competed with Korg Volcas to shape the group’s improvised, DIY dance sound.

With Soundboxgarden, however, Jodocy removes the presence of the hand in the process. The instruments play themselves, revealing their sensual nature without calling for handling. The tactile, mechanical processes are limited to the parts of the instruments interacting with each other, allowing the visitor to passively admire them, like watching a bird warble in the park. In fact, the park—the garden in the city—is an apt metaphor for Jodocy’s efforts in Soundboxgarden. Interactivity is limited to that old camper’s adage: take only memories, leave only footprints. 

In lieu of the oppressive noise and cacophony of pre-quarantine New York, Jodocy invites us in for a sonic massage, to a space of contemplation much like his mountaintop. Soundboxgarden is uncrowded in every sense of the term, allowing the visitor to immerse themselves without overwhelming themselves. To let go of the decision trees and gardens of forking paths that defined New York life before COVID-19: Do I get pizza or kebabs? Do I take the A or the 1? Do I tip 20% or 25%? Do I read on the train or just stare ahead? The structured environment of Soundboxgarden offers, instead, a garden of a single, unforked path. The anxiety of choice is pushed aside by the calm of belonging.

We asked Jodocy whether Soundboxgarden would be a show about being in utero. No… no… he assured us. There is no connection when inside the space. There are no umbilical cords to limit movement, just the path Jodocy has painted on the floor. The space is detached and elevated.  

We wonder, then, about competing visions of the garden in the city. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s terrifying Central Park with its Romanticist pedigree competes against the Vauxhall Gardens of Hamilton-era New York, where the Baroque pathways made it easy for imminent sexual conspirators to eye each other from across the lawns. Soundboxgarden aligns with neither tradition, opting for a more affective response without the affected manipulations of creating a faux natural setting. The instruments that make up Soundboxgarden come from the land, come from Upstate New York, but they still employ their artifice to draw in the viewer.

For Soundboxgarden, Jodocy builds drums that look and sound like water. “Urban materials dressed in nature,” he describes them, erasing the distinctions between town and country. Importantly, however, Jodocy is not rebuilding Minnewaska in our 300 cubic meters of space in DUMBO in Brooklyn, a Disneyland ride of chestnut oak forests and animatronic bobcats. Perhaps instead of forcing an urban/natural binary, then, it benefits the visitor to think of Soundboxgarden as anti-urban, as allowing the visitor to escape the urban within the urban. Some of us fled the country to the town, for a place where we could be nobody. And now we flee the town into the anti-town of Soundboxgarden. Here, we flee the daily routine, even if (or perhaps especially if) that routine is staying in our apartment under shelter-in-place orders.

/ Written by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira

/ Daniel Jodocy

/ VIDEO 1: Daniel Jodocy experimenting at Undercurrent in March, before quarantine. Property of the artist.

/ VIDEO 2: Daniel Jodocy at his Manhattan, NY studio, summer 2019. Filmed by Laura Zavecka

/ Downloadable press release PDF available HERE

08.05–09.12 /2020

Undercurrent is excited to announce “10001,” a collaborative virtual project that launches on August 5 at 10001.undercurrent.nyc and continues through September 12. This project is co-organized by the European Union National Institutes of Culture’s New York Cluster. Borrowing the zip code from both the Empire State Building and New York City’s Central Post Office, “10001” focuses on the collaboration of strangers and the narrative of their collective creative process using New York City as the linchpin. Coming from a variety of disciplines, twelve European Union artists who have never met each other will be randomly paired, making up a total of six teams. Through a series of Zoom sessions, each team will spend a six-week period developing a single project that will reimagine NYC post March 20, 2020. 

New York City has long been a blueprint for pop culture and fiction, a metropolis amongst vertical cities, and a plinth for diversity, culture, and the arts. It has weathered and survived many unforeseen catastrophes, and even now struggles on a variety of fronts after having been the world epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the most densely populated city in the United States, we will need to adapt and evolve as families, neighborhoods, communities, and boroughs. With shelter-in-place orders, social distancing, closed country borders, and global protests for justice and racial equality, communication, exchange, and collaboration are needed more than ever. This project imagines rehabilitating NYC through collaboration. As strangers, how do we work together with what we do not know for a hopeful and better tomorrow?  

As a gathering space for plural nations, cultures, languages, and beliefs, New York’s internationalist energy has flowed into the makeup of the artists in “10001.” Their practices range from moving and still visual and performing arts to music composition and film. Participating artists include: Anna Bera (Poland), Alex Camilleri (Malta), Mariella Cassar-Cordina (Malta), Saddie Choua (Flanders, Belgium), Nicola Ginzel (Austria), Justyna Górowska (Poland), Ada Van Hoorebeke (Flanders, Belgium), Ieva Mediodia (Lithuania), Luisa Muhr (Austria), Kira Nova (Lithuania), Jonas Tarm (Estonia), and Terttu Uibopuu (Estonia).  

This project was initiated by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Consulate General of Estonia in New York and co-organized by Undercurrent and Arts Council Malta in New York, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the USA, and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

/ 10001.undercurrent.nyc /

02.13–03.14 /2020

OPENING RECEPTION:

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 6–9PM

A conversation with Tom McGlynn & Gelah

Penn: March 7, 2pm

GALLERY HOURS: THUR /FRI /SAT 1–7PM

Undercurrent is pleased to present Uneasy Terms, a solo show by mid-career artist Gelah Penn. The exhibition will feature a 33-foot-long site-responsive installation, as well as monumental constructed drawings and small collages from two of the artist’s ongoing series, Stele and Notes on Clarissa (Volume I).

Throughout her career, Gelah Penn has challenged artistic conventions and the traditional concept of drawing by utilizing synthetic, lightweight materials such as Mylar, lenticular plastic, plastic garbage bags and mosquito netting. Her subtle and sophisticated wall works and installations stand out for both their unusual fragmentation and formal intelligence.

Working at the intersection of drawing, painting and sculpture, Penn’s process reflects an optical and surface-oriented sensibility, favoring the visual language of modularity and materiality over narrative composition. Her analytical approach to abstraction is heavily informed by physicality and form, with an emphasis on the visual dynamics of the configuration rather than a literal narrative resulting from those shapes and structures.

Penn’s work is also informed by her interest in film and fiction. In Notes on Clarissa (Volume I), presented as a 21-foot-long installation in the Undercurrent’s main space, Penn has created a series of 99 collages derived from 4 x 6-inch exhibition cards of her recent installation, Ebb Tide, at ODETTA/Chelsea earlier this year. Notes on Clarissa is an ongoing project based on the 18th-century epistolary novel Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. The story is told primarily through the correspondence between four principal characters, and details the drama of a young woman's seduction, betrayal, violation and death. Each collage corresponds to one of the letters in the four-volume novel. This considered manipulation of exhibition ephemera highlights Penn’s interplay between materials used in her work and the photographic representation of that work. 

The artist’s large-scale drawings, the Stele series, further exemplify this concise yet nuanced dialogue between materiality and abstraction. These works are constructed from synthetic materials chosen for their malleability as well as their ability to activate light, creating a rich variety of shadows evocative of the low-key lighting characteristic of film noir. 

Prologue is a site-responsive installation along Undercurrent’s dramatic entry stairway wall. Penn’s installations are developed off-site, then readjusted in situ. They deftly adapt, rather than execute, a plan, responding to the architectural parameters and curveballs of a particular space.

Penn’s phenomenological approach to her work emphasizes atmosphere, form, and visual experience. In this exhibition, her lifelong examination of these issues yields a rich and exhilarating perceptual dialogue between material and space. 

Press Release PDF HERE

Exhibition map PDF HERE

More about Gelah Penn HERE

For press inquiries please contact: Kristin Sancken

/IMAGE I: Stele #9, 2019. 90 x 49 x 30 inches. Polyester mesh, lenticular plastic, plastic garbage bags, plastic mesh, silicone tubing, staples, Styrofoam ball, Velcro, eyelets, T-pins.

/IMAGE II: Notes on Clarissa (Volume 1): I/XLIII, 2019. Various dimensions. Installation of 99 collages. Exhibition cards, various synthetic materials.

/IMAGE III: Limited edition exhibition’s maps designed by Laura Zaveckaite. 3 color process screenprint.