Becky Brown, Julia Dzwonkoski, Kyla Kegler

MEET ON THE LEDGE

09.9–10.1/22

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Kyla Kegler's Mountains performance

October 1, 7:30 pm

Opening reception: September 9, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

After three years of programming, it is with both celebration and sweet sorrow that Undercurrent presents our final exhibition - Meet On the Ledge. Becky Brown, Julia Dzwonkoski, and Kyla Kegler will exhibit works from their individual practices of painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance along with collaborative elements that fuse into a humorous and colorful dialogue of existence, presence, and identity in an anxiety-fueled world.

Amidst endless and confusing ecosystems of labels, tech interfaces, disorders, data sorting, cataloging, and our consumer culture, Meet On the Ledge wittingly and profoundly mines the question “Who am I?” Daily systems used to organize and simplify our lives deceivingly and counterproductively complicate and homogenize us and our experiences in the world, numbing us to question our relationship to it, as well as one another. Control, destiny, human consciousness, and mortality are meta questions that arise from below the surface further complicating and spiraling our connections.

In the magical and whimsical world of Kyla Kegler’s Mountains we are confronted with large, bright, papier-mâché creature heads which are worn by the various archetypes she has developed within her ethos. Appearing mythical, minotaur-like, the remainder of the costume is all human, creating an alienating yet quirky, familiar feeling. Mountains is an ongoing episodic series of performances with an iteration to debut on October 1st, 7:30 pm at Undercurrent. Yellow-Beaked-Bird, Horse, Uni-Meta-Verse, Cat-Dog, and Monster Society Gemini are a few of the characters Kegler has invented, each with their own nick-name, pronoun, theme song, family dynamic, and astrological sign. The artist herself dons her own archetype, the Dictator, who narrates for all of the other personas. Employing untrained performers, and directing their every action, questions of improvisation, reality, and free-will emerge. The clumsy portrayal of part human and part something else coupled with cosplay is loaded with psychological weight leaving us wondering where we fit into Kegler’s world as well as our own.

Contrasting to Kegler’s colorful characters are Julia Dzwonkoski’s minimal 8.5 x 11 inch acrylic gouache drawings of ghosts garbed in the stereotypical bedsheet. In her drawings, we witness ghosts sharing private thoughts, performing absurd actions, and sharing awkward moments with other ghosts. If death is the “great equalizer” then Dzwonkoski’s drawings are the sequel tinged with Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Camus influence. Referencing Theater of the Absurd, Dzwonkoski sardonically outsources the iconic spirit to haunt us with questions of nihilism and existentialism. The dilemma of repetition and purpose dominates the drawing Shampoo Conditioner depicting ghost with the almost-empty shampoo bottle and somewhat-full conditioner bottle. Lather, rinse, and repeat are more than simply empirical observations and further relate to conflicts of morale— “Is the glass half empty?”— all while playing on language with the word “spirit”. These random ghost acts are given order through their installation in a grid, underscoring the Funny Pages while simultaneously backhanding the art market and questioning affluence. Her comical approach to taboo and challenging topics forms a seamless space where even I question the afterlife of our gallery, Undercurrent. Do we become a giant Christo piece, covered with an oversized white sheet spooking the next tenants or will we quietly and gracefully fade into the background?

As living beings, we are incessantly consenting to AI algorithms to prove we are human while endlessly hitting “I Agree” to be able to progress. We find ourselves in an endless trap of broken systems of physical and digital accumulation. Computer and tech-rage is subject in the entirely analog paintings and sculptures of Becky Brown. In Data Clouds, oversized Post-it notes, intended for ephemeral reminders and tasks become permanent and monumental not only in scale but with text referring back to our desktop interfaces. The calculatedly haphazard installation is a reflection of our frantic relationship with technology and is a meta-experience to pop-up blockers and push notifications we can’t seem to escape. Far more tangible and invading our physical space is Brown’s sculpture series Safe Keeping. Jam-packed with found objects, these monochromatic assemblage sculptures short-circuit our expectations just from the sheer quantity of accumulated objects. The sporting equipment, medical supplies, cords and other found objects busting out from an ATM machine question value hierarchies and how we accredit accumulation to wealth. The content overload we experience in Brown’s work is akin to the frozen spinning wheel on a desktop, implying that our frustration is as much about rage, shame, and guilt as it is our need to stop and disconnect.

Collectively within the exhibition, silver linings emerge amongst the anxiety and hopelessness, reminding us within our faults, quirks, phobias, disruptions, and clutter, that we are all human and laughter is healing. On behalf of all the Co-directors of Undercurrent, Julius Ludavicius, Laura Zaveckaite, and myself, we’d like to thank all of our artists, collaborators, and supporters over the years and hope you continue to take that leap to support your local arts communities.

Daina Mattis / Co-Director

Animated GIF-I: Kyla Kegler’s, Julia Dzwonkoski’s, Becky Brown’s artwork carousel

Animated GIF-II: Kyla Kegler Mountains 1 and 2, 2022 Performance and installation

Animated GIF-III: Julia Dzwonkoski Ghosts series

Animated GIF-IV: Becky Brown's paintings and assemblage sculptures

Jillian McDonald + Kate Teale /HOLE

07.29–08.21/22

Opening reception: July 29, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

In 2020, Jillian McDonald and Kate Teale, friends since graduate school and sometimes collaborators, discovered that they were both drawing holes - intensely. The coincidence seemed related to the combined pressures of Covid isolation, climate crises, and desperate politics, yet the holes are also personal and psychological, and oddly compatible, despite being so entirely different. The concept of the hole seems timely on multiple fronts, and perfectly suited to Undercurrent’s gallery space, into which we descend underground. 

This two-person exhibition features site-specific and grouped wall drawings, with a video projected on the wall. 

Teale started meditating during lockdown in 2020, and visualized a series of hard-edged apertures that she thought of as “escape hatches”. Made initially as small sketches of minimalistic dark openings, she scaled them up as large wall drawings that interact with the architecture and lure the viewer into seductive but sinister places. McDonald’s dark and crumbly root-filled holes in earth and ice are sometimes harmless fissures found in nature, but at other times they are portents of ecological disaster. Removed from their context, they float on white paper like otherworldly passages or traps, burrows or tunnels, portals or entryways.

Teale’s drawing process is highly physical, with the works made in graphite or charcoal dust either directly onto the wall, or on Tyvek which is later pasted flush with the wall or floor. They create illusions of interruptions in the architecture, revealing a hole stretching from the floor through the wall, and uneasy watery spaces into which we might fall or jump. McDonald’s realistically rendered hole drawings are hung in groups. Her root drawings, depicted flatly to emphasize the soil around them as a hole and negative space, hang loosely near the ceiling. A video combines hole drawings with Google’s AR-3D animated animals (described online as the perfect pandemic activity); the animals appear tentative at the edge of, swimming in, or trapped in digital versions of the drawn holes. 

GALLERY MAP —> click on the image to navigate

Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn and Troy, NY. Most recent exhibitions were held at The Art Gallery of Regina in Canada - in collaboration with Linda Duvall, FiveMyles in Brooklyn, and Philip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art in Denver, Colorado. She participated in The Arctic Circle Residency in Norway, the LMCC Workspace in New York, and Glenfiddich International Residency in Scotland. She has received a NYFA fellowship, media arts grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, and research support from Pace University, where she teaches.

Kate Teale is a dual UK/US artist, also living in Brooklyn. She has received a NYFA Arts Fellowship in Painting, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist’s Grant, and is currently a recipient of a Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy studio around the corner from Undercurrent. Most recent exhibitions include two-person shows at John Molloy Gallery, and Studio10, Bushwick. She teaches at Parsons School of Design. 

Image I: Jillian McDonald, an excerpt from Animals On The Verge video, 2021

Image II: Jillian McDonald, Deep Breath, 2020. 30 x 22 inches. Coloured pencil on paper

Image III: Kate Teale, Plunge, 2020. 30 x 46 inches. Graphite on wall

Image IV: Gallery Map designed by Laura Zaveckaite

SIMONE KEARNEY /Criers

06.24–07.17/22

Opening reception: June 24, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

During the opening, the musician Jacob Bills and the

artist will give a brief performance of text and sound ♫♪♪

First it is pressed down, it is pressed into being. Then something emanates like a substance from this pressure. It is more like a substance than a pressure—a sap that oozes out of a collision—a sap that is a line, a very thin, but also still, line. And the line is a stillness. A stillness that abuts what can’t be harnessed, what turns into a secret closed in on itself, like water inside of something, sloshing around. The water sloshes inside the inside of the line, giving the line a center, a middle, so the line becomes a ball, an orb, a vessel. One can hear it inside the thinness of the line, barely perceptible, like water folded into itself, pressing and pressing inwards.

Criers is a sequence of mostly unglazed ceramic sculptures depicting crying heads. Sometimes the clay of the sculptures is unfired, ready to dissolve back into unshaped materiality; sometimes it is fired, where expression has become petrified; sometimes a face or tear is tangible with stone; sometimes transformed into a glazed shard. Clay, as the primary material for these sculptures, emphasizes crying as radically elemental and acutely physical. In crying, the body is laying claim to the event. Sometimes, the clay serves as a means to express and represent an emotion, where a discernible face emerges from the material. At other times, the expression is subsumed by the very material used to convey it. And so here we see a wrestle between material and language, between sense and raw fact, between what we can decipher as something namable (a tear, a face, etc.), and what is otherwise simply churned, thumbed stuff. Crying itself also often marks a moment of such points of confluence and rupture, where the interior, and all the intangible, invisible, immaterial “stuff” of emotion, breaks through onto the surface of the body. Crying can be the manifestation of surplus: just as an emotion seems at times to surpasses the confines of the subjectivity that houses it, the body too exceeds itself with tears.

Criers tracks the ways in which emotions that give way to crying might renew themselves repeatedly (many heads for many moments), while also showing how certain emotions blow the individual open. Emotion surges beyond the perimeters of self. One crier is always many criers. And so here, there is not one individual crier evoking an individual crier. This is a chorus, perhaps even one might call them an army, of criers. Not limited in their expression of a singular emotion – they can contain multitudes. Moreover, they transcend any one individual experience, including that of the artist. Particularly in this time of global pandemic, war, and ecological catastrophe, they gather to mourn or howl or sing as company. In a world so often characterized by capitalist demands of efficiency and good performance, emotions such as grief, surprise, or even wonder can be disruptive. These criers thus stall that which is otherwise run of the mill. They are as rocks that block the cogs in the wheel. They repel the smooth. They are lumps in the throat. They are coughed out. They are not well made. They rise up, under us, like an undercurrent of raw substance. Muddying. Roiling. Disturbing, even. They are an upset of ground we thought was there, unmaking and remaking that ground. The “o” of their mouths is the o of the navel, of the mouth, the heart, the eye, the lung, the void, the hole, the aperture, the rupture, the sphere, the whole, the nothing, the full, the empty, the stone, the sun, the moon, the wound, the world, the breath, the whoosh.

To further examine the relationship between language, emotion, and materiality, a wall of painted language serves as counterpoint to and for the crying sculptures. Words can be kinds of tears. While these ink-composed writings insist on language’s own materiality, they also gesture at how words might proliferate around a wound, around the gape of this or that sensation or feeling. The text is entitled The Loquela, in reference to a passage in Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: “This word…designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound…” Any wound that the sculptures make manifest here, however, is not reducible to the lover’s wound, though it absorbs it. The words flock around the ontological wound of being, around the excess of experience.

-Simone Kearney

/Criers navigation map HERE

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Simone Kearney is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions include Annex Gallery at Lighthouse Works (NY) and Artshack Gallery (NYC). Select group exhibitions include Olympia Gallery (NYC), Olga Korper Gallery (Toronto, CA), Klaus Von Nichtssagend (NYC), Boston College (MA), La MaMa (NYC), NURTUREart (NYC), and Anytime Dept (OH). Her debut collection of poetry, DAYS (Belladonna*), was published in 2021. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons School for Design.

Image I: Crier-XXV, 2022. 18 x 12 x 11 inches. Unglazed and glazed ceramic.

Image II: Crier XXII, 2022. 11 x 10 x 12 inches. Unglazed ceramics and stone

Image III: The Loquela, 2022. 117 texts, framed ink on paper, 9 x 12 inches

DOMINIK HALMER /Shields

05.27–06.19/22

Opening reception: May 27, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

Undercurrent is pleased to present Dominik Halmer's solo exhibition Shields. The Berlin based artist is known for his image-objects, expanding painting into physical space.

At Undercurrent he is showing nine new shaped-canvas works. The recurring question at the center of Dominik Halmer‘s practice is: what makes us see the world, or respectively the pictorial space, as a unity rather than an assemblage of individual, scattered elements? What does the mind need to construct an impression of coherent reality?

Combining all sorts of painting techniques – gestural painting, spraying, creating hand marks, using stencils – sometimes enhanced by everyday objects (like fringes in the case of KULP-shield or MUN-shield), Halmer creates closed entities. Those entities consist of loose gestures, defined geometric shapes and visual analogies that suggest a coherence and kinship between the individual works through repetition: the recurring hand marks which remind us of the first painterly gestures of cavemen, the glitter circles, the thin streaks connecting the different image parts – adding up to a wide range of formal diversity. Despite their diversity, the pictorial elements on the respective Shield works develop their own pictorial logic and ultimately define the form the canvases are shaped.

The exhibition title Shields pays reference to the Dutch word for painting “schilderen“. In German the word “Schild“ means both a shield (to protect oneself) as well as a sign as in traffic sign. Halmer plays with this etymology and creates his own pictorial signs by inventing very specific shapes and references. Some of the works (like ZUM-shield or EX-shield) evoke associations of open books spilling out their narratives, while the fringe works make us think of domestic functional objects like carpets or the head-profile work (KULP-shield) becomes its own character once we connect the respective elements to its facial expression.

Following the different traces, Halmer‘s paintings show us how pictures are being built – in fact: how our notion of reality and continuum is always constructed by our perceptive filters.

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Dominik Halmer (*1978 in Munich, Germany) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf Germany with Albert Oehlen. Halmer's work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among them are major institutional venues such as the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (Exhibition Space of the Federal Republic of Germany), the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museum of Arts Wiesbaden, Marta Herford, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art Newark. Next to numerous private collections, his work is part of permanent public collections, such as the Collection for Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundeskunstsammlung), the collections of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Museum Wiesbaden and CCA Andratx. Since 2022 he holds a professorship for abstract painting at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Bonn, Germany.

/Shields navigation map HERE

/Image I: KULP-shield, 2022. 78 x 50 cm / 30.7 x 19.7 inches. Acrylic, oil, glitter on canvas on wood, fringes

/Image II: MUN-shield, 2022. 88 x 54,5 cm / 34.6 x 21. 4 inches. Acrylic, oil, glitter, iron powder on canvas on wood, fringes

/Image III: EX-shield, 2022. 70,5 x 59 cm / 27.75 x 23.2 inches. Acrylic, oil, glitter, iron powder on canvas on wood

/Image IV: Shields navigation map

/Images V–VI: Installation shots at Undercurrent, 2022

MATT KENYON /Cloud Machine Performance +

Artist Talk + Tour

May 21, 2.30–5.00 pm + May 22, 1.30–2.30 pm

Saturday, May 21, 2.30-5.00 pm Kenyon will be performing Cloud as part of DUMBO Drop. 

Following the performance of Cloud, Kenyon will give a short tour of the exhibition Wolf at the Door and answer questions from gallery visitors. 

Cloud: In Cloud, house-shaped forms are produced out of helium foam. They shrink and grow in response to real time housing and climate data, then rise to form a “neighborhood” floating for miles in the sky. Cloud demonstrates the cyclic nature of real estate speculation that prospers even in the wake of the most recent housing bubble. The houses, and the home ownership aspirations that are inflated with them, rise only to eventually fall.  

In the continual reconstitution of the house-cloud’s form, Cloud also acknowledges the connection between the home and its neighborhood, one that persists, and is always in flux.

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Sunday, May 22, 1.30-2.30 pm Kenyon will be joined by FICTILIS (​​Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau) curators of the Museum of Capitalism for a discussion of the exhibition and its themes. Their book Museum of Capitalism: Expanded Second Edition will also be available for sale.

Following the discussion, Kenyon will lead a community letter writing activity using one of the artworks from the exhibition Alternate Rule in order to demand Action to End Gun Violence. 

Alternative Rule: Though it might look like the paper you use to learn penmanship, in Alternative Rule, the lines on the paper are made up of micro-printed names and dates of children who have been victims of gun violence in America. People of all ages are invited to take a sheet of paper and write a letter to members of government to advocate for gun control in America. Alternative Rule is a memorial and a protest tool, created for the activists of the next generation, many of whom are already organizing in their own schools and on the national level.

/IMAGES: Animated GIF from Matt’s Cloud performance at Undercurrent, DUMBO. Captured by Jolie O’Brien.

MATT KENYON /Wolf at the Door

04.22–05.22/22

Gallery hours: Thursday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

WARNING: Strobe lighting and any other intense lighting will be used during this exhibition. It will not be safe for those with epilepsy and other conditions with sensitivity to light.

Undercurrent is pleased to present Matt Kenyon's solo exhibition Wolf at the Door. This show is the artist's continuation of SWAMP (Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) art practice. SWAMP focuses on critical themes addressing the effects of global corporate operations, mass media and communication, military-media-industrial complexes, and general meditations on the liminal area between life and artificial life. Since 1999, SWAMP has been making work in this vein using a wide range of media, including custom software, electronics, mechanical devices, and sometimes working with living organisms.

His style is elegant and subtle with the twists of wonder, surprise, and unexpected paradox. Each of Kenyon's work has built in individual content and visual metaphor / narrative similar to poetry, short story, or film. The idea and content are where the work begins and determines formal solutions for these machines of thoughts. These are exquisite objects, not only created for contemplative meditation, they are commemorative monuments holding the quality required to inspire action to change social structure.

Wolf at the Door consists of six kinetic, or mentally shifting objects / structures / constructs addressing specific global issues of climate change, housing crisis, mass shootings, health and mental health. They complement each other, by creating cohesion of vastly different subjects with an overarching sense of tension, trauma, and premonition of things to come. Wolf at the Door asks what euphemisms like a debt waterfall, an untapped resource, or a key investment would look like if they reflected the human stories they have unleashed.

/Printable press release PDF HERE

For gallery navigation MAP CLICK HERE or click the image below ↓

CLOUD /2020

Cart, helium, foam, custom electronics

Cloud demonstrates the cyclic nature of real estate speculation that prospers even in the water of the 2008 housing crash. The cloud houses, and the aspirations they represent, rise to form a subdivision on the ceiling of the gallery. Over time the foam breaks down and the houses eventually collapse. House clouds are released based on housing value trends from the area to return these complex systems back to a human scale. Cloud can also be wheeled into a neighborhood as a form of community protest or an SOS signal.

/Video: Cloud performance at Undercurrent, Dumbo, 2022.

TIDE /2022

Champagne glass pyramid, casts of houses,

custom electronics

By contrasting the opulent image of a champagne glass pyramid with the crisis of climate change and rising flood risk, Tide creates a visual metaphor for the fragility hidden within the current housing market. This crisis is already part of the lexicon—when someone owes more than the house is worth, people say the mortgage is "underwater". Over the course of the show, the slow drip will gradually fill the pyramid flooding the interconnected glasses and making the houses invisible. Through the fluctuating visibility of these houses, Tide calls attention to the way climate change continues to create uncertainty in neighborhoods, long after the news cycle has moved on from each individual extreme weather event.

/Image: Tide installation shot, 2022. Courtesy of the artist

ALTERNATIVE RULE /2020

Micro-printed alternate-rule paper

Though it might look like the paper you use to learn penmanship, in Alternative Rule, the lines on the paper are made up of micro-printed names and dates of children who have been victims of gun violence since the Columbine High School shooting. People of all ages are invited to take a sheet of paper and write a letter to members of the government to advocate for gun control in America. Alternative Rule is a memorial and a protest tool created for the activists of the next generation, many of whom are already organizing in their own schools on the national level.

/Image: A video still from Alternative Rule, 2020. Video length: 2:17

LOCKSET /2020

Custom cut keys

When houses change hands, so do keys. In Lockset, the keys are also portraits of housing activists, people who have been evicted and have gone public to protest, and homeowners in neighborhoods with high rates of foreclosure. These keys allow a portrait of the previous owner to covertly remain inside the lock of their home, even if the property has changed hands. These portraits also allow locks to be rekeyed to match the key portrait, acknowledging the ownership history of a house.

/Image: Lockset, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

SUPERMAJOR /2013

Vintage oil cans,  custom electronics

A rock of vintage oil cans sits innocuously on the gallery floor. A punctured can, located somewhere mid-stack, has Sprung a leak. The oil flows out in a steady trickle, cascading onto the pedestal below; a golden-brown pool forms at its base. Upon closer inspection, however, the oil is not originating from the can. Instead, its stream is reversed. Drop-by-drop the oil flows upwards, defying gravity. At times, droplets even appear to hover in mid-air. Returning to its source, the upward ascent of oil continues uninterrupted as if neither the can's reserves nor the puddle can ether be depleted.

/Image: Supermajor installation shot, 2013. Courtesy of the artist

TAP /2020

Reclaimed kitchen sink, audio interviews,

custom electronics

The water is on fire. The image of a contemporary kitchen sink spouting forth has become synonymous with fracking. Across America, residents have experienced a slew of chronic health problems that can be traced back to contamination of their air, water wells, or surface water resulting from nearby oil and gas fracking. In Tap, the flame itself functions as a plasma speaker–voicing a shifting collection of media coverage and individual stories from people whose lives have been affected by fracking. The flow of the frame and personal narratives seeks to fuse the complexities of iconic imagery, exploitation, and domestic space.

/Image: Video still from Tap, 2020. Video length: 05:07

/Top Promo: Matt Kenyon installingTide at Undercurrent, 2022

MEGAN STROECH /Fully Furnished

03.25–04.17/22

Opening: March 25, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

Undercurrent is pleased to present Fully Furnished, a solo show of large wall pieces and works on paper by Megan Stroech. Stroech’s skillful integration of printmaking on found fabrics and felts contrasted against hand-painted passages on canvas explore the crosshairs of craft and luxury, realness and artificiality, and our relationship to domestic space. 

The meaning of “home” has evolved with the pandemic, taking on both a versatility and irony; abject of privacy, new negotiations of space and safety, the public and private compounded. This physical verisimilitude impacts our daily movements, altering our experiences and therefore our future memories of home. In Stroech’s work, mundane elements that unconsciously influence our perception of our space collide: the direction of fiber in a carpet, the reflection in a polished surface, or the coffee ring stain lassoing the grain of wood on a table. From an illogical convergence of profile and aerial views, these fragments are sandwiched to implode larger systems of patriarchy, consumerism, and class.

Stroech injects feminine stereotypes into her work, empowering their function. Petals, scallops, and curves dominate Well Traveled and Woven, both works on paper, offsetting the plaid and checkered structures below. In Hat Trick, the decorative element of a bow is magnified to frame the work and transmute adornment to structure and utility through use of scale. Literally and metaphorically tying everything together, Hat Trick teeters on a purple, plastic mylar pedestal/column/cake-plate, incorporating the gallery floor in order to question space, representation, and craft clichés. 

Uniquely straddling mixed media, Stroech defies the hierarchy of high-brow fine art materials versus low-brow art-and-craft supplies. Throughout much of the 20th century and up through today, modern art history has turned “craft” into a pejorative term associated with femininity, polarizing gender and practice, and creating a misogynistic dichotomy which Stroech consciously engages and amplifies. Split Decision, for instance, integrates hand-silkscreened elements on felt, store bought gingham, discarded fabrics from fashion students, and painting. It’s soft and malleable fringe and pleat shapes coalesce to bandage broken railings and fragmented ladders, while works on paper such as Accordion and Fat Column weave lattices and checkers to disrupt grid systems and form alternate pathways. 

Stroech works with a knowledge of hierarchal and patriarchal paradigms, pushing the boundaries of her materials and methods to resist them. Her intentional integration of mis-registration is an ironic nod to deskilling printmaking— especially alongside her use of controlled brush strokes— while combining hand-printed and mass-produced patterns push authenticity, luxury, and accessibility into dialogue. The results are charmingly performative, a presentation that reconstitutes a fully-furnished experience where we have everything we could ever need within the home to precarious excess.

Daina Mattis

/Downloadable press release PDF

/Gallery navigation MAP HERE

/Promo Image I: Flower Mouth, 2018, 5 x 6 feet, fabric, felt, vinyl, collage, latex paint

/Image II: Split Decision, 2022, 59 x 47 inches, collage, screen print and acrylic on fabric.

/Image III: Hat Trick, 2021 Screen print, acrylic, vinyl, felt and found fabric 48 x 60 inches.

/Image IV: Navigation map designed by Laura Zaveckaite

WASTELAND

01.18–01.23/22

Visiting hours: January 18–23, 1–7 pm

Greek artist’s Michalis Argyrou interactive ice installation and Rafika Chawishe’s long durational performance explores identity themes of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

On the closing date of “Wasteland,” January 23, from 11 am-7 pm, Greek actress and performance artist Rafika Chawishe will present an 8-hour long-durational performance.

PERFORMANCE: Chawishe replaces the figure trapped in the ice with a live, naked human body, searching for meaning through multifold transformations and exploring the ever-changing nature of politics, society, and identity inspired by figures in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. While digging through the soil and icy remains, Chawishe unmasks false stereotypes and patterns humans use as a cloak to conceal fears conform to societal norms. Chawishe enacts the roles people portray in a lifetime through colorful costumes and makeup, only to discover the only one that matters is the true self. Preoccupied with ideas about transformation and ridicule, she tests the audience’s acceptance of the incongruous and unfamiliar to the limit.

Undercurrent and Greece in USA present Wasteland, a performance-based interactive installation by visual artist Michalis Argyrou and performance artist Rafika Chawishe.

The art installation and participatory event begins 2022 with a powerful piece to launch Greece in USA's new program Greece NOW, focusing on Greek artists who experiment with the politics of "nowness" and reflect upon the ubiquity and social ramifications of “nowness” in the digital age.

Wasteland echoes themes from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land on the 100th anniversary of one of the most iconic poems of the 20th century. The poem examines the decline of outdated certainties that held society together and what occurs when they break. There is no turning back, only transformation of those broken cultural fragments into something new.

The audience is invited to explore the latent meanings of Eliot’s writings by experiencing the transitions and transformative life of a human figure encapsulated in a 3.5-ton ice installation created by Michalis Argyrou. The viewers are invited to participate by lighting a candle and placing it inside the holes of the sculpture. Then, as it melts, the ice figure is transformed, and the artistic vision of a collective reawakening is revealed.

As the new identity of the melted figure emerges, actress and performance artist Rafika Chawishe enacts notions of transition for eight hours in an intensive, long-form durational performance that symbolizes the human trapped inside the ice capsule. The piece alludes to Eliot's out-of-court settlement against the Canadian professor John Peter who argued that the “Waste Land” is an elegy dedicated to his beloved deceased Jean Verdenal.

The participatory installation Wasteland challenges notions of what is being wasted, calls attention to the temporal inertia and urges for renewal and regeneration. The figure’s entrapment in the interactive installation by Michalis Argyrou alludes to our collective “wastelands” and the mundane.

My friend, blood shaking in my heart/ The awful daring of a moment’s surrender/ Which an age of prudence can never retreat/ By this and this only we have existed/ A secret which is not to be found in our obituaries/ Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider/ Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor/ In our empty rooms--Excerpt from What the Thunder Said from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Interactive Installation: Michalis Argyrou
Long-durational Performance: Rafika Chawishe
Curation: Dr. Sozita Goudouna for GREECE in USA
Coordination: Vangelis Zacharatos

For all press-related inquiries please contact publicist Cindy Sibilsky
Photo credit: Lingfei Ren
Download Press Release HERE

Wasteland is the inaugural project of the new program Greece NOW by the non-profit organization Greece in USA. Greece NOW showcases Greek artists who explore themes of "nowness" in their oeuvre, how it relates to social ramifications in the digital age, and how “nowness” relates to “newness” of aesthetic forms, modes of production, discourse, performance, technology, ecology, economy, and politics. The selected artists of Greece NOW utilize their artistic practice to envision new social actions, forms of community and imagine new worlds to overcome global concerns.

Michalis Argyrou (born 1968) is a visual artist, creative director and set designer. He received a scholarship to study at the National School of Fine Arts in Athens, graduating with honors. He holds degrees from the Open Photography Studio, Focus and the Royal College of Art in London. Michalis is the founder of the event production company "Sambo Events" and the Architectural office "Create New Ideas Architects." He has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has curated and designed performances, exhibitions and cultural events, and design projects. From 2006-2008 he was the General Director of the international art fair of Athens, "Art Athina." In 2009 Michalis founded the Art and Culture Center, Beton 7, a venue for new ideas and trends in contemporary art and culture. In 2011 he founded Beton7artradio, "We Speak Art," a radio station covering art and culture issues, highlighting recent creation nationally and internationally. Michalis has also been Greece's director of the Art Film Festival, Hellas Filmbox Berlin. The Art Film Festival was created by a collective of activists in 2015, aiming to break the media bashing against Greece and introduce the Greek visual arts and cinema scene to the German audience. He is also the co-director of the Platforms Project International Independent Art Exhibition that presented platforms and artists’ collectives from over 26 countries with more than 2,400 artists from the five continents from 2013-2017 and opened a productive dialogue on culture and art. . He has also been the deputy director of Athens Biennale from 2016 to 2019. And recently, in 2020 he is the co-founder of the Metaphor Athens Creative Hub Art Space in Athens.

Rafika Chawishe is an award-winning actress, performer, and theater maker whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism. She uses various formats to express herself, ranging from theater, multimedia and spoken text to scenic reading and performance (performing knowledge). Rafika combines academic and lyrical narrative, and as a dynamic children’s rights activist, she has worked extensively with unaccompanied refugee minors at the first reception center in Lesvos, Greece. In 2014 she created together with Antonis Volanakis a daydreaming platform for refugee, local and international artists, titled THE BLIND PLATFORM. Her works have been presented in Athens, Oslo, Berlin, New York, Mexico City and Puerto Rico. She has collaborated with prominent theatres and organizations, including the National Theatre of Oslo, the International Ibsen Festival, the Herbtsalon Festival (Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin), the National Theatre of Greece, the Greek National Opera, the Greek Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been awarded the Ibsen scholarship by the Ibsen Awards and has received a Grant from Neon Foundation. She is a member of the Lincoln Theatre Director’s Lab 2019 and the Young Curator’s Academy of the Maxim Gorki Theatre.

This project is made possible under the auspices and financial support of the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, with support from GREECE in USA, Undercurrent, Metaphor Athens, Lab for Arts and Daydreams.

Exhibition featuring new collaborative works by 28

artists from 10 countries to debut at the Austrian

Cultural Forum New York and Undercurrent.

Co-curated by Daina Mattis and Melinda Wang

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York and Undercurrent are pleased to present un/mute, an international group exhibition of collaborative works by 28 artists across multiple disciplines. On view at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York and Undercurrent, the exhibition is the culmination of an 18-month-long project that was launched in 2020 to provide European and NYC-based artists an opportunity for critical exchange and collaboration during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

What do communication and collaboration mean in a time of uncertainty and isolation? How is the artistic process impacted by going “fully remote”? In un/mute, artists from 10 countries were paired to explore these questions. We recognize that effective communication requires active engagement of all the senses and an openness to diversity, interpretation and digitalization. But what does that look like in practice? The project challenged teams to overcome the limitations of lockdowns as they connected across artistic mediums, language, culture, generations and time zones to find new forms of expression and meaning within art.

un/mute is the physical manifestation of online conversations among strangers who became collaborators. What began as abstract, ephemeral and digital are now 14 tactile, analog and concrete artworks presented across two locations. The artists confronted the parameters imposed by the lockdowns and each team found creative solutions that we might all learn from. The common thread that runs through the sculptures, installations, films, drawings, photographs and performances is the importance of language.  

 Ever-evolving, language encapsulates an innate power dynamic that is renegotiated, redistributed and reimagined in uncertain times. While words like “screenshare,” “Zoom-bombing” and “unmute” enter a universal lexicon, and “#relatable” memes are shared across cultures, we also face the limits of language as we work to avoid miscommunication and misunderstanding. Cultures and countries apart, the artists endeavored to find a bridge across two points in (virtual) space through the ephemeral Zoom link. What they also discovered were empathy from a fellow artist, discussions that sparked new ideas, a shared language around the creative process and a rethinking of the power of art.  

 With cities re-opening, a recontextualized focus on systemic racism and xenophobia, and our collective experience of 18 months of self-reflection, un/mute observes the transition into a new epoch – one that imagines an inclusive and diverse ecosystem. Differences may surface in times of cooperation and compromise, but synergy can be forged through friction. We trip, we regain our balance, we shift, we reconsider. What is crucial is that when we do have the chance to rise to meet the moment, we seize the opportunity and “click unmute.”

/Photo credit: Vytenis Jankunas

EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Eren Aksu (Germany), Anna Bera (Poland), Aaron Bezzina (Malta), Alex Camilleri (Malta), Mariella Cassar-Cordina (Malta), Saddie Choua (Flanders, Belgium), Sanne De Wilde (Flanders, Belgium), FOQL (Poland), Gabrielė Gervickaitė (Lithuania), Nicola Ginzel (Austria), Justyna Górowska (Poland), Kris Grey (NYC), Kyle Hittmeier (NYC), Ada Van Hoorebeke (Flanders, Belgium), Olesja Katšanovskaja–Münd (Estonia), Mo Kong (NYC), Yi Hsuan Lai (NYC), H. Lan Thao Lam (NYC), Marie Lukáčová (Czech Republic), Sheila Maldonado (NYC), Ieva Mediodia (Lithuania), Emmanuel Massillon (NYC), Alex Mirutziu (Romania), Luisa Muhr (Austria), Barbara Maria Neu (Austria), Emily Shanahan (NYC), Sydney Shavers (NYC) and Terttu Uibopuu (Estonia).

un/mute is a project by Undercurrent and the following members of EUNIC NY - European Union National Institutes for Culture: Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Czech Center New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Delegation of Flanders to the USA, Goethe-Institut New York, Lithuanian Culture Institute, Arts Council Malta in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York and Romanian Cultural Institute. un/mute is also supported by EUNIC Global, the European Union Delegation to the United Nations, Hope Recycling Station and Jindřich Chalupecký Society.

For media inquiries please contact:

MaryKat Hoeser
ACFNY Head of Communications
mary-katerina.hoeser@bmeia.gv.at
(212) 319-5300 ext.78

Dalia Stonienė
dalia@studiostripe.nyc
(718) 316-5509

CREDITS:

/Co-Curators: Daina Mattis + Melinda Wang

/Exhibition Executive Producer and Exhibition Coordinator/ACFNY: Nina Monschein

/Exhibition Coordinator/Undercurrent: Daina Mattis

/Assistant to Exhibition Coordinator/ACFNY: Anouk Weber

/Assistant to Exhibition Coordinator/Undercurrent: Patricia Geyerhahn

/Exhibition Design: Laura Zaveckaitė

/Installation Architect/Design: Julius Ludavičius

/Publicist: Dalia Stonienė

/Head of Communications/ACFNY: Mary-Katerina Hoeser

/Photographer: David Plakke

/Project coordinator and Chair/EUNIC Representative: Christian Ebner

/Web Development: Moacir P. de Sá Pereira

IMPORTANT: TO VISIT EXHIBITION CLICK ON ANY OF “THE RIGHT TO BREATHE” TITLES. To navigate between the eight galleries for this exhibition please find the + (plus sign) within the left menu. This is found after the exhibition introduction, after you enter the gallery, and after the controls are introduced. You can explore any of the galleries within this drop down menu.

Greece in USA launches the second iteration of its program for the internationalization of Greek Culture in the USA. The group exhibition The Right to Breathe takes as a starting point the “shortness of breath” derived from the experience of political pressure, social injustice, and economic austerity, exploring its connection with poetics, live art, and embodied politics. The concerns driving the “I Can’t Breathe” debates around race, discrimination, and violence have been left unconfronted for far too long. At the same time, the countless social injustices, and the politics of disposability that the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare expose the delusions of a post-racial society, as well as the deprivation of the universal right to breathe (see Achille Mbembe). The topic of breathability that the exhibition identifies and aims to historicize also provides an insight into the ongoing revaluation of criminal justice reform.

Participating Artists:

Chloe Akrithaki, Tonia Andrioti, Elaine Angelopoulos, Antonakis, Yota Argyropoulou / Michalis Konstantatos (Blindspot Theater Group), Christos Athanasiadis, Manolis Baboussis, Evangelia Basdekis, Rania Bellou, Abdelkader Benchamma, Emmanuel Bitsakis, Aggeliki Bozou, Christina Calbari, Lizzie Calligas, Rafika Chawishe, Thalia Chioti, Mat Chivers, Katerina Christidi, Dionisis Christofilogiannis, Lydia Dambassina, SeeVa Kitslis Dawne, Martha Dimitropoulou, Christophoros Doulgeris, Jessica Feldman & Steven Gertner, Dimitris Foutris, Mona Gamil, Maria Georgoula, Eleni Glinou, Nella Golanda, Kyriaki Goni, Delia Gonzalez, Efi Haliori, Zoe Hounta, The Callas (Lakis & Aris Ionas), Elias Kafouros, Eleni Kamma, Athanassios Kanakis, Nikomachi Karakostanoglou, Irini Karayiannopoulou, Ismini Karyotaki, Zoe Keramea, Aspassia Kouzoupi, Karolina Krasouli, Sia Kyriakakos, Dimitris Lamprou, James Lane, Anna Lascari, Jenny Marketou, Jannis Markopoulos, Yolanda Markopoulou (Mind the Fact), Eleanna Martinou, Despina Meimaroglou, Maro Michalakakos, Fryni Mouzakitou, Anna Muchin, Eleni Mylonas, Margarita Myrogianni, Mariela Nestora, John Newsom, Alice Palaska, Maria Papadimitriou, Nikos Papadopoulos, Natasha Papadopoulou, Euripides Papadopetrakis, Ilias Papailiakis, Elli Papakonstantinou (ODC Ensemble), Tereza Papamichali, Kostas Pappas, Eftihis Patsourakis, Helene Pavlopoulou, Anastasia Pelias, Elena Penga, Antonis Pittas, Tula Plumi, Artemis Potamianou, Marina Provatidou, Mantalina Psoma, Irene Ragusini, Nana Sachini, Georgia Sagri, Martha Sakellariou, George Sampsonidis, Katerina Sarra, Martin Sexton, Christina Sgouromiti, Vouvoula Skoura, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, Danae Stratou, Stefania Strouza, Vassiliea Stylianidou (aka Franck-Lee Alli-Tis), Maria Tsagkari, Antonis Tsakiris, Giorgos Tserionis, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Nana Varveropoulou, Alexis Vasilikos, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), Nikolas Ventourakis, Eugenia Vereli, Vassilis Vlastaras, Panagiotis Vorrias, Maro Zacharogianire, Katerina Zacharopoulou, Theodoros Zafeiropoulos, Eleni Theodora Zaharopoulos, Lilia Ziamou, and Dimitris Zouroudis.

/Video: The Right To Breathe /Gallery-1

IMPORTANT: To navigate between the eight galleries for this exhibition please find the + (plus sign) within the left menu. This is found after the exhibition introduction, after you enter the gallery, and after the controls are introduced. You can explore any of the galleries within this drop down menu.

/ / / / /

The exhibition at undercurrent.nyc is in dialogue with The Right to Silence? at Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, John Jay School of Criminal Justice (CUNY). Drawing from the 5th Amendment Right, the exhibition features pieces by visual and performing artists that attempt to uncover the profound and complex sense of silence that characterizes the prison industrial complex. The pieces investigate whether art and aesthetics can break the silence about crucial political issues such as mass incarceration and criminal justice reform.

Participating Artists:

Maria Antelman, Stephen Antonakos, Klitsa Antoniou, Kenji Aoki, Margarita Athanassiou, Bill Balaskas, Margarita Bofiliou, Veronique Bourgoin, Nicos Charalampidis, Cleopatra Charitou, Gioula Chatzigeorgiou, Despina Chatzipavlidou & Anthi Mouriadou, Tim D’Agostino, Christina Dimitriadi, Giorgos Drivas, Nayia Frangouli, Karen Finley, Alexandros Georgiou, Andrea Geyer & Sharon Hayes, Klio Gizeli,  Eva Giannakopoulou, Marion Inglessi, Dionysis Kavallieratos, Peggy Kliafa, Panos Kokkinias, Georgia Kotretsos, Aristeidis Lappas, Manolis Lemos-Daskalakis, Irini Linardaki, Aristeidis Logothetis, Olga Miliaresi – Foka & Despina Damaskou for SPAGHETTO , Giorgos Papafigos, Hara Piperidou, Vassilis Salpistis, Panos Sklavenitis, Efi Spyrou, Marilia Stagkouraki, Giorgos Stamatakis, Panos Tsagaris, Chrysanne Stathakos, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Steve C. Harvey, Ashley Hunt, Richard Kamler, Renee Magnati, Ilan Manouach, Daina Mattis, Juli Susin, Mischa Twitchin, Lydia Venieri, Vangelis Vlachos, Antonis Volanakis, and Mary Zygouri.

/ / / / /

Invocations: Retracing Seneca at Seneca Village Central Park 

Complementing the The Right to Silence? Invocations: Retracing Seneca is a participatory walk that took place on the 14th of May 2021, paying homage to Seneca Village, conceived by artists Kimiyo Bremer and Karen Finley and curated by Sozita Goudouna. Seneca Village was a community made up of some 300 people. A majority of Seneca Village was composed of African American residents, many of which owned their own homes. Seneca was also populated by Irish and German immigrants who they lived together with as neighbors. The community was prosperous housing 3 churches, a school, a garden, many streets and a center. From 1853-1857, the city used eminent domain and police force to destroy and brutally demolish Seneca Village for the development of Central Park. The planned landscape of Central Park would create some of the most expensive real estate in the world, all of which we see today. The Seneca residents were forced to disperse with little archives maintained by the city to preserve this remarkable hamlet from the pre-civil war era. In our walk we will invoke ritual and retrace steps while offering recognition of these historic New Yorkers. We welcome you to conjure remembrance and sing spirit together, offer fellowship; to proclaim and honor as our way of giving respect.

The projects take place in the context of GREECE IN USA.

GREECE IN USA is a New York City-based organization that promotes Greek culture in the U.S. Founded by Dr. Sozita Goudouna, GREECE IN USA is launched under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture, with the group exhibition The Right to Silence? on the reform of criminal justice. The first iteration is presented at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) until July 31, 2021, with the participation of 43 Greek and Cypriot artists, while the second parallel program was launched in May 14, 2021, at Seneca Village and at undercurrent.nyc  with the group exhibition The Right to Breathe with the participation of 100 Greek artists. 

/ / / / /

Curation: Dr. Sozita Goudouna

Production: GREECE IN USA

Production Associate: Eva Kostopoulou

Greece in USA Associates: Odette Kouzou & Antigoni Papadopoulou

Partnering Non-Profit: 

Out of the Box Intermedia was founded in 2008 in London and Athens and produces projects with the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Tourism, the European Cultural Foundation, the British Council, the French Institute, NEON Foundation and the Onassis Foundation.

Under the Auspices: Greek Ministry of Culture

06.11–07.25 /2021

Opening Reception: June 11, 4–8pm

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

Undercurrent is pleased to announce Nick Fagan’s first New York solo show, The Moving Spirit or An Appreciation of Labor. According to the artist, his work is a material reaction to his experiences with mental health, disability, religion, and labor. The result is wide-spanning, unexpected, serious, and funny; it creates a tornado-style penetrating path not only into the artist’s mind but also slices through contemporary obsessions such as banality, spirituality, abstraction of language and symbols, formal hermeticism, openness, playfulness, ritual and transformation, class and religion, sexuality and synthetic duality of masculinity in particular.

A unifying single physical element in this show is the used mover’s blanket. In the artist’s vision, the simple everyday object is elevated into a piece of art as in the Cinderella fairy tale, without losing its humble blue-collar origins. The blankets come in different colors and some variations can be found in their patterns, but apart from that, they are pretty much the same standardized industrial products, without individuality. However, as used moving blankets, physical traces of sweat, stain, and tears suggest spiritual transformation similar to the shroud of Turin, from trashy to the divine.

The Moving Spirit or An Appreciation of Labor consists of eleven wall pieces. The main gallery presents seven large tapestries; the definition is preferred by the artist for pictorial and spiritual reasons and allusions. European tapestries were objectified paintings, simultaneously expensive time-consuming multi-team decorative productions similar to Persian carpets, but depicting important events of the day comparable to Pixar / animated films of today. Nick Fagan’s tapestries are visually abstract, but they are not passive decorations-they are almost aggressions. They have the aura and importance of mythological grand themes of the renaissance and baroque. The feeling is eerily similar to Abstract Expressionism’s choice of existential themes interspersed with funky Dadaist echos as tiny devils gliding and viciously squirming around the artist in the inner sanctum previously occupied by myth paintings. His work is grounded in drawing practices and in sculptural processes of subtraction and addition, and fondness of found objects with already embedded spirit.   

The largest work, Vessel and Eucharist, is placed on the floor. As the title implies, it encapsulates the spirit of this show and transforms the space into the mental ritual ground. In the context of Undercurrent’s basement, the location can be an allusion to roman catacombs and invokes the mystery of cave temples. The other tapestries echo and reinforce the main theme:

Gilded Break

The Workers Dilemma

Wave

Gilded Union

Employment Data

Phallic

Fagan’s large tapestries are ambitious creations sewn from many used moving blankets and visually can appear similar to traditional quilts. But the heroic masculinity-induced contradictions don’t connect with the community and tradition-based quilt circles. The materials that Fagan uses to create his works are essentially devoid of the character prior to use, but their accrued history - evocative of heavy lifting - is evidenced through their wear and tear. 

The size and verticality of Fagan’s tapestries evoke the royal and majestic; although his work tips its hat to figurative master narratives and pattern, it upends tapestry’s grandiose manner in its use of cartoon-like flaccid shapes.

Several other pieces in the show are similar in content: 

Germs

Beyond Surface

Community Breakdown

Modernism

but they are not tapestries. They are different combinations of shaped panels; in this case, the used moving blankets are stretched in place of canvas, supplanting the art they usually protect.  

Beyond the physical boundaries, The Moving Spirit or An Appreciation of Labor creates a new world, and a common history is revealed to the larger public through the artist’s use of personal history.

Julius Ludavicius
/Co-Director

/EXHIBITION MAP -> Please click on an image to navigate the map

PROMO IMAGE: Rosary and Gilded Union. Nick Fagan’s studio in Richmond, Virginia.

IMAGE I: The Workers Dilemma, 2020. 88 x 106 x 0.5 inches. Hand sewn used moving blankets

IMAGE II: Vessel and Eucharist, 2020. 89.9 x 135 x 0.5 inches. Hand sewn used moving blankets

IMAGE III: Exhibition map by Laura Zaveckaite

04.23 –06.06 /2021

Opening reception: April 23, 4–8pm

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

Undercurrent is pleased to present Meghan Cox’s first New York solo exhibition, Hours and Hours, comprised of twenty-three small, elegant oil paintings. The work was created during 2020 to early 2021, in Cox’s meticulous representational style. As the exhibition title suggests, the work is about time and space; in this case perhaps about the complex investment of time in the process of creating a pictorial illusion. 

Each painting is a physical documentation representing the days or sometimes months of work to achieve closure for its specific visual idea. The paintings are a complex result of multiple reworked or wiped and disappeared “unconscious” layers of paint, which represent the artist’s desire to achieve a balance of image, form, line, detail, and color. Cox almost exclusively paints from life – what is in front of her – without the intervention of digital media. In a sense, the artist transfers the intimacy of the “artist’s gaze” to the viewer. When much of representational painting being made today relies on the convenient use of mechanical/digital reproductions to apprehend detail and inspiration, Cox’s practice can be seen as eerily reminiscent of the nineteenth-century movements of the Barbizon school, Impressionists, and plein air painting, which were responses to current academic and commercial aesthetics, and paradoxically forged the way for movements that morphed into abstraction.

Hours and Hours consists of two groups of paintings: a main-group and a smaller introductory-group. The smaller group consists of eight square oil paintings on wood panels. Roughly 8 to 12 inches in size; these relate more to the artist’s previous works, especially the two figurative panels. Meghan Cox’s representation of people can be seen as dreamy and immobile; dormant to time, entrapped by a moment of Déjà vu, a moment already seen and an other worldly experience. A typical example is that day i went to wawa, which is seen from above with a tote bag placed on the figure’s chest. In that day i went to school, the subject points a laser at an educational poster depicting different varieties of trees. This painting is reminiscent of Dutch genre paintings in the use of light, color, and composition, but also in how they mixed “serious moral” content with slight irony. The question arises:  is the figure a student, a teacher, or just a wanderer playing with the gadget? A viewer becomes engaged in creating their own narrative. The rest of the introductory-group is composed of still-lifes and acts as a prelude for the main-group of complementary paintings. In the center of these still-lifes is the depiction of a white porcelain cup with mushrooms or almonds nestled within a busy pattern engrossing the picture plane. This pensive moment, a white vessel, denies the noise and retains our attention, becoming a symbol of stability, a simple comfort, sustenance.

The main-group has fifteen vertical oil paintings on paper mounted on plywood, 14 by 12 inches in size. They have an unusual and important compositional element uniting them all: a 9-inch still-life square located on the white ground in the upper part of the panel. According to the artist, the inspiration for this compositional format came from large art books and how painting reproductions are represented on the page. This compositional element creates a trompe l’oeil effect: the still life can be interpreted not as the painting, but as the depiction of the reproduction of the painting. These reproductions have optical illusions contained within the optical illusion. Arabesque patterns create a dizzying mirage as in some string theorist’s imagination. Skillful play between flatness, illusion, an illusion of an illusion, and an illusion of flatness can be compared with math formulas; science and fabrication; presence and absence. These panels of still-lifes are composed in a classical triangle-pyramid style from various patterned paper cutouts on a dark background, this could be interpreted as an exercise in the formalist tradition, which makes each work abstract, and formal as a whole. The compositions feel precarious, as real and imaginary shadows are interspersed throughout the space. Among these there are three paintings, each of them representing a section of a window. Through each window, a different time of day is seen: one in the day, another at night, and one at twilight. The window images allude to the cyclical nature of time and the ephemeral qualities of light and dark.

Cox’s mastery of embracing the full spectrum of her medium amplifies our temporal experience. Her ability to portray a laser sharp moment next to the blurriness experienced after a long slumber defies time. She collapses tonal colors with her brilliant spectrum of fully saturated hues into one image, titillating time and space, turning seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, and hours to days. Reaching beyond the works Meghan chose to paint a portion of the gallery walls with color. This shift extends the small paintings into electric color fields, radiating her pensive focus beyond the picture plane of their surfaces into the skin of our daily lives. Hours and Hours is a contemplation on reality. Meghan Cox's work becomes one of ritual, repetition, and transcendence, strung together like a meditation bracelet of beads. 

Altogether, the titles flow in a rhythmic pattern, similar to that of a poem, or chant...

that day and yellow 

that late afternoon and lilac 

that early evening and orange 

that morning and grape 

that day i saw flowers at night 

that morning and purple 

that day i saw winter citrus 

that morning and peach 

that day and other painters 

that day and mint 

that morning and peach and mauve 

that late day and bluegreenyellow 

Julius Ludavicius
/Co-Director

/Press Release PDF HERE

TO NAVIGATE THE EXHIBITION, PLEASE CLICK ON THE GALLERY MAP HERE

PROMO IMAGE: Installation view at Undercurrent

IMAGE I: that early evening and orange, oil on paper over birch panel, 14"x12”

IMAGE II: that day i went to wawa, oil on paper over birch panel, 14"x12”

IMAGE III: Exhibition map by Laura Zaveckaite

IMAGE IV: Installation view at Undercurrent

03.12–04.18 /2021

Reception: March 12, 4–8pm

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

Undercurrent is pleased to present Ryan Cosbert’s New York solo debut, I Am What I Am, on view from March 12 – April 18. I Am What I Am features paintings that scaffold experience, symbolism, and the African diaspora to confront trauma, under-/misrepresented histories, and the subjugation of Black communities, forging a socio-political consciousness within abstract painting.

Cosbert’s color choices, gestures, materials, and her integration of chance become supreme signifiers within her work. A child of Black migrants from Guyana and Haiti, she pays homage to her parents' homelands with two modest circular paintings, Georgetown and Port-au-Prince. Each uses the color palette of the nation's respective flags—yellow, red, and green for Guyana and blue and red for Haiti—to honor the birthplaces of her mother and father, respectively. As circles, the works both highlight the global scope of the African diaspora while also affirming how each descendant's story remains unique, impacted by an amalgamation of time, geography, and experience. Tiling, a signature of Cosbert’s work, is seen in these round paintings; a practice of gridding the painting’s surface prior to building up a haptic material surface using a variety of sand, gesso, pigment, enamel, dye, and acrylic. While a checkered pattern has ubiquitous associations, Cosbert connects it to her childhood and her mother’s kitchen floor, referencing domestic patterns of repetition and habit, creating order and balance where chaos easily coexists. Often, the works are embedded with objects or artifacts, retired from utility and redefined within the tiling of her paintings. Examples include old newspaper clippings, emptied bullet casings, and cowrie seashells, which have been used within West African cultures as adornment, dice, and currency.

Currency of the Ocean, a large work at 120 x 52 inches, shares the historical trajectory of cowrie shells. They float, in groups of three, delicately implanted upon a tumultuous surface of tiling, smudging, and frenetic gestural marks in a horizontal line that sharply cuts across the middle of the painting, a buoyancy of perseverance. Echoed in these shells is a culture and the enslaved Africans that were traded across the Atlantic. On the other spectrum of Cosbert’s paintings is an observance of lesser known histories of civil rights leaders and the dissemination of African culture. This is seen in works such as Ode to Claudette Colvin, one of the many antecessors to Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat nine months prior to Parks.

Murder Mayhem no 1, 2, 3, is a single work in three 46 x 46 inch pieces. From left to right, each block is tiled and pigmented in red, white, and blue with physical bullets lodged within the tactile surfaces. Cosbert appropriates the same action of throwing cowrie shells, used as dice in games, to the bullet casings strewn across the surface of the paintings, leaving chance to decide where the bullet shells land. Visible in Murder Mayhem no. 1, 2, 3 is the immanent violence in America’s cultural identity of red, white and blue. The trauma marginalized people experience within the U.S. raises alternative meanings to these three colors; where many Americans identify the Stars and Stripes, today many see police sirens. Stuck to the surface, objects atypical to painting now share the same history. Although Cosbert does not regard this piece as a triptych (art historically, triptychs are traditionally seen in altarpieces) there is an innate homage to the victims of police brutality. These three color-field blocks become an overwhelming graphic representation. Engaging all of our senses, we become deaf to the sirens heard time over time, leaving us with an alternative consciousness of the colors, red, white, and blue.

Lastly, Cosbert's painting entitled, Only difference between you and me is that you were brought here by force grabs the viewer from just the title alone. Cosbert indicates that, despite centuries of whiggish fantasies of progress toward equality and justice, the exploitation, subjugation, violence, and inequality Americans have inflicted upon the African Diaspora in the U.S. remain as central to the Black experience as they have ever been. The work in I Am What I Am draws candid connections from different times and different places compounding them into the same continuum of the narratives of the African diaspora. Ryan Cosbert takes the seemingly minimal and empowers our collective unconscious to bring new sight to our old-world vision.

Daina Mattis /Co-director

/Press Release PDF HERE

To navigate the exhibition, please click on the gallery map HERE

IMAGE I: Port-au-Prince, 2021. Acrylic on canvas 23”

IMAGE II: Georgetown, 2021. Acrylic on canvas 23”

IMAGE III: Exhibition map by Laura Zaveckaite

UN/MUTE /10002

02.12 – 05.09 /2021

Join us February 12, 1pm EST to launch our project

UN/MUTE /10002 on facebook.com/undercurrent.nyc

and please follow the project at: unmute.nyc

Creating a fair and equitable space after COVID shuttered artists from residencies, travel, studio visits, exhibitions, and physical networking, UN/MUTE is an online residency that provides artists an opportunity for a critical exchange and collaboration while simultaneously connecting resources from the global cultural epicenter of New York City. This project is co-organized by Undercurrent and the European Union National Institutes for Culture’s New York Cluster. It will go live on unmute.nyc on February 12, 2021, in concurrence with the Lunar New Year, and will continue through May 9th, celebrating Europe Day. 

The online world that has emerged in response to the pandemic reshapes our definition of social contact, obscures our private and public environments, and circumscribes the evolution of communication. UN/MUTE-10002 follows the narratives of ten European artists who have never visited New York City and ten NYC-based artists, paired into  teams of two, one European with one New Yorker. Additionally, one artist is a digital immigrant, born before 1986, and the other is a digital native, born into the world of web browsers and email, after 1986. Over a series of Zoom sessions, each team’s collective creative process will unfold in a series of video recordings.

Language serves as the first cultural indicator of change. At constant risk of complete extermination, the Amazon is now more recognized as an online shopping platform than one of our planet’s richest natural resources. We stream video content into our living rooms while drinking bottled water branded with pictures of mountain springs, and our most priceless memories are hidden away in a cloud. We sit a virtual world apart from each other – far more than the recommended six feet – obscuring the socioeconomic divisions of race, color, national origin, gender identification, sexual orientation, religion, and age. The present state of being often sounds more like mythology or folklore than reality. 

As the internet conditions our lifestyle, we aim to find new normalcy amidst a shortage of vaccines, new virus strains, unsettling unemployment rates, and a Western world trying to mitigate racism and xenophobia during a delicate sociopolitical epoch. Regardless of our facility with digital technologies, how do we progress without compromising the past? How can we learn from each other’s individual histories and experiences? Embodying inclusion, multilingualism, and digitalization, UN/MUTE provides an opportunity for two transatlantic strangers to collaborate on a singular project for a sustainable future. 

Participating artists include: Eren Aksu (Germany), Aaron Bezzina (Malta), Will Calhoun (NYC), Sanne De Wilde (Flanders, Belgium), FOQL (Poland), Gabrielė Gervickaitė (Lithuania), Kris Grey (NYC), Sophie Guisset (Wallonia-Brussels, Belgium), Kyle Hittmeier (NYC), Mo Kong (NYC), Yi Hsuan Lai (NYC), H. Lan Thao Lam (NYC), Marie Lukáčová (Czech Republic), Olesja Katšanovskaja–Münd (Estonia), Sheila Maldonado (NYC), Barbara Maria Neu (Austria), Emmanuel Massillon (NYC), Alex Mirutziu (Romania), Emily Shanahan (NYC), and Sydney Shavers (NYC). 

UN/MUTE-10002 is a project by EUNIC NY and Undercurrent, realized with financial support from EUNIC — European Union National Institutes for Culture — Europe’s network of national cultural institutes and organizations, with 36 members from all EU member states. This project was initiated by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Consulate General of Estonia in New York and is co-organized by Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Wallonia-Brussels International in New York, Czech Center New York, Delegation of Flanders to the USA, Goethe-Institut New York, Arts Council Malta in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, Romanian Cultural Institute, the Hope Recycling Station, the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, and supported by the European Union Delegation to the United Nations.

/Press release PDF HERE

01.29–03.07 /2021

OPENING: Friday, January 29, 5–9 pm

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

Undercurrent is excited to launch our 2021 program with Connectivity, a solo exhibition by New York-based Icelandic artist Habby Osk. Grounded in sculpture, her work is an ideal segue from the imbalances of last year finding us a new foothold with the start of a new one. Connectivity will run from January 29 until March 7.

Osk’s post-minimalist work subtly evokes the current precarious political and unstable social situation both in this country and across the world. Introspectively, it calls attention to the ecological dangers of our planet’s existence. Growing up in Iceland, Osk experienced nature’s magnificent and severe beauty, in the presence of the powerful manifestations of natural phenomena such as sporadic weather, earthquakes, and other underground geological activity. Iceland’s relative proximity to the North Pole more acutely displays Earth’s cyclic relationship with the Sun, as the amount of sunlight throughout the seasons varies more than in most other parts of the world. For the last two decades, Osk echoed her connection to location and its gravitas beyond GPS coordinates. The forces of nature and civilization collide; they impact our lives.

Osk’s sculptural compositions use gravity as an invisible force. Her chosen medium provides content and meaning which goes beyond merely dictating the shape, size, choice of materials, and appearance of the work. The gravity philosophically anchors the sculptures. The connection between gravity and time provides the artist with the possibility of a theatrical ruse, a suspended element, the moment of hope and expectation, impermanence, surprise, inevitable collapse and destruction—all of these simultaneously.

At Undercurrent, Habby Osk presents eight works. In the entryway, Fracture spreads six pink-toned chromogenic prints documenting the process of a cement ball slowly crushing a blood-colored gelatin cube. The work appears less like a piece of art and more like the frame-by-frame documentation of a science experiment. Following it is Interconnection, a nine-foot-tall wall piece with three wax and hydrocal rectangular blocks hanging from a cylinder-shaped support. The semi-heavy blocks balancing each other are tethered by a bright yellow rope. Similar in spirit to Interconnection are three wall sculptures from Osk’s Anchor series: Anchor X, Anchor VII, and Anchor I. Part of a group of ten works, these precarious compositions are finely balanced cement casts on independent shelves. Inspired by DNA sequencing, Osk appropriates basic geometric shapes including a sphere, cube, rectangle, cylinder, triangle, and a line. A physical line is drawn between these shapes and their shelf using an ultramarine, violet-colored polypropylene cord. The line connects shapes, balances the composition, and creates tension.

The Anchor works, like most of the other artist’s sculptures, are always under stress. Each piece has the characteristic of a mechanical balancing point, a fulcrum, in contrast to an optical point, as in painting or traditional sculpture. If we look through a mathematical lens, we can interpret the point symbolically, representing either zero or infinity. Suspend, the largest piece in the show, is a free-standing, V-shaped composition made from two boards—one black, another bright blue. These boards are fastened by a yellow string and balanced by approximately 100 pounds of cement cast into a sphere. The brightly colored lines of cord parallel a colorfield painting and a clarity associated with hard-edge painting. The last two sculptures, Clasp I and Clasp II, are cast wax cubes and rectangles, shackled together by aluminum suspension springs, such as those most commonly used for self-closing heavy doors. Directly placed on the gallery floor, these relatively small works serve an important function in the show by creating spatial complexity between spectra: large and small, chromatic and achromatic, weight and balance. With so much gravity and tension loaded within each individual work, their totality creates a continuum, complementing one another and providing an experience of open space within the gallery.

Habby Osk teeters between the aesthetics of poetry and industrial machines, dear to minimalist sculpture, as almost romantically she creates a serenity centered on the axle of nature. Each work stands as a singular, independent work yet when seen as a whole, they create an ecosystem reliant on their inherent paradigm within Earth’s gravity well and the importance of our environmental balance.

Julius Ludavicius /Co-director

Press release PDF HERE

To navigate the exhibition, please click on the gallery map HERE

/IMAGE I: Anchor I, 2018. Concrete, Wood, Rope. 64 x 12 x 10 Inches

Image description: This precarious composition is a finely balanced cement cast suspended on an independent shelve. Triangle shaped cast is wrapped by a purple cord that at one end has a smaller cement anchor, which keep the shape in a 45 degree suspension.

/IMAGE II: Suspend, 2018. Wood, Concrete, Rope. 96 x 118 x 12 Inches

Image description: A free-standing, V-shaped composition made from two boards—one black, another bright blue. These boards are fastened by a yellow string and balanced by approximately 100 pounds of cement cast into a sphere.

/IMAGE III: Exhibition’s map by Laura Zaveckaite

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!