Janna Dyk / curatorial

SELECT CURATORIAL PROJECTS

Adam Golfer in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Keren Benbenisty, film still, from "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, 2019.

Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,&rdquo; exhibition,&nbsp; SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018

Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018

Shahrzad Changalvaee, Better Never Than Late#1 // Archival Color Print on Paper, Mixed Media, Ink // 3&rsquo; x 6&rsquo; x 3&rdquo; // 2018, SOHO20 +/- Project Space

Shahrzad Changalvaee, Better Never Than Late#1 // Archival Color Print on Paper, Mixed Media, Ink // 3’ x 6’ x 3” // 2018, SOHO20 +/- Project Space

Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018

Lulu Meng, film still, from "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, 2019.

Yto Barrada, film still, from "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, 2019.

Shahrzad Changalvaee, "Everything In Its Place
(Release them NOW)," performance in "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, Bushwick, NY, July 2019

Zalika Azim's "Totems," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019

Katy McCarthy's (P)residency: Green Room, SOHO20 +/- Project Space Residency, 2018

Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019

Katie Giritlian's "Captions from and Towards Correspondence" program at SOHO20, organized as part of the Rethinking Feminism series by Curatorial Fellow Mira Dayal, under my direction, 2019.

Golnar Adili installation in "Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Evening of films and performances,

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Golnar Adili and Adam Golfer in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Adam Golfer and Asuka Goto in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Gabriela Vainsencher in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Asuka Goto in "Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.

Gabriela Vainsencher, performative talk, NURTUREart, 2018

Rafael Kelman, performance, NURTUREart, 2018

Qiana Mestrich, "Hard to Place," Booklyn Gallery, 2016

Adam Golfer's trilingual book, A House Without a Roof, Booklyn Press, 2016

Sara Shaoul's "Strange Labor," 2015, Booklyn Gallery.

Golnar Adili, "Perhaps the Sky Cannot Contain All This Darkness of the Heart," Booklyn Gallery, 2016

Abelardo Cruz Santiago, "Shared Location (Family Portraits)," Booklyn Gallery, 2016

"Postcards from Berlin," Abelardo Cruz Santiago, Booklyn Gallery, 2016

Cottage Industry, Zine, with male anti-fertility herbs,
Mary Walling Blackburn
Rafael Kelman, Booklyn Gallery, 2017

Seed Bags: Papaya, with Zine, with male anti-fertility herbs, from
Cottage Industry, Mary Walling Blackburn
Rafael Kelman, Booklyn Gallery, 2017

"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012

"Chromatic Presence," a collaborative installation for John Lennon's grand piano. Artists: Margaret Schedel, Joshua Clayton, and Jeanette Yew, from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS, 2012.

JUNG AH KIM&ldquo;Kyoto and Naoshima,&rdquo; from the series Photograph, 2012pen, scratched on photography15&rdquo; x 20&rdquo; from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.

JUNG AH KIM
“Kyoto and Naoshima,” from the series Photograph, 2012
pen, scratched on photography
15” x 20” from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.

DEAN EBBEN&ldquo;Fault,&rdquo; 20107:51 minutes from [SILENCE], at NYCAMS, 2012.

DEAN EBBEN
“Fault,” 2010
7:51 minutes from [SILENCE], at NYCAMS, 2012.

JOSHUA CLAYTON&ldquo;Interface for Translated Text: Silence&rdquo;Lasercut Plexiclass, LCD screen, microcontroller.12 x 10&rdquo; from group exhibition [SILENCE], 2012.

JOSHUA CLAYTON
“Interface for Translated Text: Silence”
Lasercut Plexiclass, LCD screen, microcontroller.
12 x 10” from group exhibition [SILENCE], 2012.

ELIZABETH TUBERGEN
Exposure (December - February 2009), November 2009 - 2012
Installation from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.

Chelsea Music Festival family programming during [SILENCE], 2012.

SHIMPEI TAKEDA
Salt Terrain #26
Unique gelatin silver photogram
27x37" 2012 Installation from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.

Photographs represent exposure in the darkroom to damaged soil surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan.

JOSHUA CAVE
"Fear," 2012
Cement, glass, and oil paint.
4.5"x7"x3.5" from [SILENCE], 2012.

"Yoink," Brent Everett Dickinson, DJ Spooky, Rubin Museum, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012

"Reverse," interdisciplinary collaborative performance, NYCAMS Gallery, 2012

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Adam Golfer in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Keren Benbenisty, film still, from "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, 2019.
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Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
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Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
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Shahrzad Changalvaee, Better Never Than Late#1 // Archival Color Print on Paper, Mixed Media, Ink // 3’ x 6’ x 3” // 2018, SOHO20 +/- Project Space
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Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
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Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
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Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
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Shahrzad Changalvaee: The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away,” exhibition, SOHO20 +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
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Lulu Meng, film still, from "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, 2019.
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Yto Barrada, film still, from "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, 2019.
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Shahrzad Changalvaee, "Everything In Its Place
(Release them NOW)," performance in "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, Bushwick, NY, July 2019
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Shahrzad Changalvaee, "Everything In Its Place
(Release them NOW)," performance in "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, Bushwick, NY, July 2019
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Shahrzad Changalvaee, "Everything In Its Place
(Release them NOW)," performance in "Talking Objects," NURTUREart, Bushwick, NY, July 2019
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Zalika Azim's "Totems," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Zalika Azim's "Totems," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Zalika Azim's "Totems," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Zalika Azim's "Totems," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Katy McCarthy's (P)residency: Green Room, SOHO20 +/- Project Space Residency, 2018
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Katy McCarthy's (P)residency: Green Room, SOHO20 +/- Project Space Residency, 2018
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Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Cansu Korkmaz's "Quite a While," SOHO20 +/- Project Space, 2019
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Katie Giritlian's "Captions from and Towards Correspondence" program at SOHO20, organized as part of the Rethinking Feminism series by Curatorial Fellow Mira Dayal, under my direction, 2019.
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Golnar Adili installation in "Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Evening of films and performances,

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Golnar Adili and Adam Golfer in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Adam Golfer and Asuka Goto in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Gabriela Vainsencher in

"Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Asuka Goto in "Relative Material," group exhibition, NURTUREart, 2017-2018.
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Gabriela Vainsencher, performative talk, NURTUREart, 2018
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Rafael Kelman, performance, NURTUREart, 2018
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Rafael Kelman, performance, NURTUREart, 2018
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Qiana Mestrich, "Hard to Place," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Qiana Mestrich, "Hard to Place," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Qiana Mestrich, "Hard to Place," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Qiana Mestrich, "Hard to Place," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Adam Golfer's trilingual book, A House Without a Roof, Booklyn Press, 2016
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Sara Shaoul's "Strange Labor," 2015, Booklyn Gallery.
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Sara Shaoul's "Strange Labor," 2015, Booklyn Gallery.
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Sara Shaoul's "Strange Labor," 2015, Booklyn Gallery.
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Golnar Adili, "Perhaps the Sky Cannot Contain All This Darkness of the Heart," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Golnar Adili, "Perhaps the Sky Cannot Contain All This Darkness of the Heart," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Abelardo Cruz Santiago, "Shared Location (Family Portraits)," Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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"Postcards from Berlin," Abelardo Cruz Santiago, Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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"Postcards from Berlin," Abelardo Cruz Santiago, Booklyn Gallery, 2016
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Cottage Industry, Zine, with male anti-fertility herbs,
Mary Walling Blackburn
Rafael Kelman, Booklyn Gallery, 2017
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Cottage Industry, Zine, with male anti-fertility herbs,
Mary Walling Blackburn
Rafael Kelman, Booklyn Gallery, 2017
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Seed Bags: Papaya, with Zine, with male anti-fertility herbs, from
Cottage Industry, Mary Walling Blackburn
Rafael Kelman, Booklyn Gallery, 2017
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"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK," 75 person performance, with Morgan O'Hara, Eyebeam, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"Chromatic Presence," a collaborative installation for John Lennon's grand piano. Artists: Margaret Schedel, Joshua Clayton, and Jeanette Yew, from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS, 2012.
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JUNG AH KIM
“Kyoto and Naoshima,” from the series Photograph, 2012
pen, scratched on photography
15” x 20” from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.
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DEAN EBBEN
“Fault,” 2010
7:51 minutes from [SILENCE], at NYCAMS, 2012.
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JOSHUA CLAYTON
“Interface for Translated Text: Silence”
Lasercut Plexiclass, LCD screen, microcontroller.
12 x 10” from group exhibition [SILENCE], 2012.
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ELIZABETH TUBERGEN
Exposure (December - February 2009), November 2009 - 2012
Installation from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.
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ELIZABETH TUBERGEN
Exposure (December - February 2009), November 2009 - 2012
Installation from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.
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Chelsea Music Festival family programming during [SILENCE], 2012.
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SHIMPEI TAKEDA
Salt Terrain #26
Unique gelatin silver photogram
27x37" 2012 Installation from [SILENCE] at NYCAMS.

Photographs represent exposure in the darkroom to damaged soil surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan.
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JOSHUA CAVE
"Fear," 2012
Cement, glass, and oil paint.
4.5"x7"x3.5" from [SILENCE], 2012.
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"Yoink," Brent Everett Dickinson, DJ Spooky, Rubin Museum, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"Yoink," Brent Everett Dickinson, DJ Spooky, Rubin Museum, Chelsea Music Festival, 2012
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"Reverse," interdisciplinary collaborative performance, NYCAMS Gallery, 2012
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"Reverse," interdisciplinary collaborative performance, NYCAMS Gallery, 2012

Conversations

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Artists: Mirna Bamieh, Gabo Cambnitzer, Lux Eterna, Bang Geul Han, Adam Golfer, Kyoung eun Kang, Elizabeth Tannie Lewin ("E. Betsy Lewin"), Ellie Lobovits, Katy McCarthy, Helina Metaferia, Mujero, Sunita Prasad, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Katz Tepper, and Gabriela Vainsencher.

Silber Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, Spring 2024.

Conversations is a group exhibition featuring the work of 15 artists working in video, film, installation, drawing, and sculpture.

Utilizing a wide range of formats—casual verbal exchange, interview, monologue, letters, redacted or reconstructed words, formal presentation—Conversations is a group exhibition that engages the notion of dialogue in contemporary art. While many artists use human discourse as the centerpiece of their work, others explore conversation more abstractly, engaging an imagined viewer, inanimate object, historical archive, person, or legacy, internet-fueled data, or philosophical entity.

At its core, Conversations asks, in a post-AI, post-social media era of multiplicities, where each individual seeks to hold and own their stories and conversations across and in front of many histories and cultures, where do verbal exchanges exist?

Placed together, the works examine a range of emotions—the power, catharsis, empathy, messiness, discomfort, failure, or vulnerability, to name a few—of engaging complex, nostalgic, or even mundane subjects through language.

This exhibition is curated by Janna Dyk, Goucher’s Director and Curator of Exhibitions. Additional assistance was provided by Jared Paolini, Digital Arts & Technology Specialist, Goucher College, and William Demaria.

Image (above): Rachelle Mozman Solano, All These Things I Carry With Me, 2020, single-channel video, 24 minutes.

“Portraits (Contact)”

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Artist: Rebecca Marimutu. Curated by Janna Dyk.

Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College (Baltimore, MD), Spring 2024

Rebecca Marimutu: Portraits (Contact), the artist’s first solo exhibition in Baltimore, consists of photographs and collages from her 2022 - 2023 series.

Marimutu explores the notions of self, identity, and portraiture through combinations of digital and analogue photography, which she intercepts manually through drawing, painting, collage, and sculptural and photographic processes.

After Marimutu first worked in analogue photography, utilizing more traditional forms and concepts as an undergraduate student at the University at Albany (SUNY), during the pandemic she began exploring digital photography, creating images of cropped parts of her body and face, and recollaging them. More than a catalog of the pieces, in an era in which selfies are ubiquitous, they slow down and offer an exegetical encounter with what constitutes a portrayal of not just her particular face, but of a more universal question, of the relationship to one’s face, and to identities in general.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“With my ongoing self-examination series, Portrait(s), I treat the photographic image of myself as a landscape for abstraction and deconstruction. I investigate the practice of portraiture while subverting the white gaze by concealing, obscuring, and protecting the image of myself within the frame.

In Portrait(s), Contact 2022, I directly impart my hand in a physical sense onto the pictorial plane. I employ nontraditional photographic methods, emphasizing the tactile nature of the photographic object and blurring the line between photography and sculpture. Through these material interventions, I explore the possibilities of representation, inviting viewers to question their assumptions and engage with the complexities of identity formation.

With Portraits(s) Contact, I seek to subvert the traditional gaze of photography, reclaiming agency over her representation. I work to address the objectification inherent in the medium by taking self-portraits and challenging power dynamics. The fragmentation and abstraction in the series distance the viewer from the traditional gaze, encouraging them to critically examine their preconceived notions and narratives.

“My artistic practice is rooted in concepts surrounding art as "the Other." In a society that juxtaposes and pushes ideas of morality, intelligence, and the like onto racial divides, it has manufactured the contemporary and historical image-viewing experience not without its predetermined narrative manufactured to adhere in part to white supremacist ideology. Black womanists, such as bell hooks, spoke of this and art as “the Other” in Black Look, Race, and Representation. I refer to this as a foundational framework for my artistic research.

bell hooks writes, in Black Look:
"When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups and the bodies of individuals can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, and sexual practices affirm their power over intimate relations with the Other."

In this context, pleasure, to me, refers to artistic visual pleasure. As the dissemination of the image of Black womanhood is consumed more than ever, I question how I can have authorship over my image. Portrait(s) attempts to answer this question by exploring abstraction, obstruction, and concealment. I use these actions to protest, directly addressing how I am often allowed to see myself in art spaces. With my self-portraiture and my exploration of the photograph's objecthood, I look to confront the public image of me, the image of us, and to revisit the ideas around Black representation in contemporary art.”

Earth Bound

Artist: Christopher Lin. Curated by Janna Dyk.

Bond Window, Goucher College, 2024

Goucher is pleased to present a site-specific interdisciplinary installation by Baltimore-born, New York based artist Christopher Lin with live plants, moss, books, and medical devices.

Making work in response to his long-standing scientific research, Lin creates artworks about human and interspecies experiences of climate change.

Lin’s Earth Bound is the first in a new experimental, interdisciplinary series exploring the intersections between art and climate change. The series engages the Bond Window, which is surrounded on three sides by floor to ceiling glass panels and is thus subject to a wide range of temperature variations, as a greenhouse environment.

Artist Statement:

“My practice envisions the ecologies we shape and inhabit in our current geologic era, the Anthropocene, in which human activity has profoundly impacted the planet and its biodiversity. Through collaborations and choreographed interactions with both living and non-living systems, I combine elements of scientific investigation and material exploration to construct performative sculptures and installations that incorporate familiar objects interacting in unfamiliar ways to encourage viewers to question the framework of our everyday world. Reflecting on my background in scientific research, my work animates concepts from biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental ecology with the poetics of artistic assemblage. Experimental play transforms into thoughtful contemplation as I embed organic materials, such as teeth, brain coral, and sensitive plants, within a synthetic world of hand sanitizers, polystyrene, and the magenta glow of LED grow lamps to render the science-fiction nature of our reality. More interested in the poetics of re-contextualization than representation, I collect, deconstruct, and recombine materials to create chimeras that reflect on the existential trauma of today's persistent environmental anxiety. These ephemeral constructions allude to their impermanence and, by proxy, our own.

In Earth Bound at Goucher Art Galleries, I imagined the unique gallery space of the Rosalie Bond Window through a science fiction lens. Inspired by the NASA Clean Air Study and collective dreams of space colonization, this installation envisions the duality of being bound to Earth, our home, while simultaneously searching for an Earth elsewhere in the cosmos. In the installation forms reach for sustenance in various ways finding themselves uprooted, surviving through highly artificial conditions.

Vasculature (2022-24) visualizes an organism reaching for the means to sustain itself. A double-walled vessel contains Sphagnum moss and a reservoir of water, separated by a barrier of glass. Coiled and twisted tubing connects the two sides allowing humid air and condensed water droplets to travel from one end to the other performing a circulatory system.

Cairn (2024) builds a waystone from research texts. A mossy rock sits at the top of the structure, sweating profusely within a helmet-like apparatus as it balances precariously on its accumulated knowledge.

What do you call the world? (2018) suspends five plants in gravity, forcing them to grow in highly artificial conditions toward the magenta glow of modern grow lights. As the sun sets, natural light gives way to harsh fluorescence.”

In the Dark: An Exploration of Chronic Illness

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Artist: DanaidX. Curated by Janna Dyk.

Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, 2023

In the Dark: An Exploration of Chronic Illness is an exhibition of new handmade cyanotype photographs by Baltimore-based artist duo DanaidX.

DanaidX, whose name culls from a Greek myth about women cursed by the gods to endlessly fill a cistern riddled with holes, is the collaborative formed by writer/data engineer-cum photographer Hope Brooks and artist Angela Yarian.

With a wide-range of archetypal visual references from art history to punk-rock, to science-fiction, Brooks and Yarian’s images of the female body in everyday domestic life explore the space between creativity and pain in quotidian experience. In so doing, the works invite viewers to question their own understanding of such concepts as rest, wellness, work/life balance, vulnerability, and the passage of time.

Artist Statement:

“The experience of chronic illness and pain is often one of voicelessness, powerlessness, and invisibility. The way we understand each other as human beings is through connecting our own embodied experience with that of someone else. If we do not share a common experience, then cultural narratives and stories enable us to build empathetic bridges to cross that gap. Most people experience pain, exhaustion, and illness as one chapter of their life with a beginning and an end. Disclosure of pain, struggle, or vulnerability are usually met with shame. When faced with physical limitations, we learn that the moral choice is to push through. Not pushing through is unacceptable. There is no familiar non-linear story for those whose bodies struggle in an endless loop of suffering; for those who cannot push through. The gap between acceptable embodied experiences and that of chronic illness widens into a nearly unbridgeable chasm.

This work emerged from a friendship that grew from a common experience of pain. We have chosen to work in cyanotype partially because we are working out of chronic illness. This is a process that can be achieved in small “time boxed” segments, with body doubling, and mutual support at every step. We are committed to building a sustainable practice that views our bodily limitations as fertile ground for the moments of surprising encounter that creativity brings. Working with digital photography enables us to explore the human figure without the strain that drawing and painting place upon the artist’s body. We use cyanotype—a 170-year-old non-toxic photographic printing process—because of the visceral physicality of the experience. Two liquids are measured, mixed, and brushed. The coated paper must wait in darkness, and then be exposed to light. Each unique print is agitated separately in water baths, and no matter how precisely the process is followed every print emerges slightly different. Through the playful call and response of photoshoots, through the rhythmic repetition of editing and printing, we slowly discover images that resonate with our experiences.

When confronted with other people’s pain, the instinct is to remove that discomfort by either looking away, or trying to fix it. In sharing this work we are asking the viewer to enter uncomfortable spaces with a different posture. The vulnerability of these images is an invitation to join in that vulnerability through the work of stretching the imagination beyond pity, beyond judgment, beyond fear. Pain is always difficult but isolation and shame need not compound it. Chronic illness does not have to be in the dark.”

Artist Bio:

The collaborative Baltimore-based duo comprising DanaidX, Hope Brooks and Angela Yarian, formed through discovering their shared experiences of pain. Yarian spent 10 years unable to make work because of a debilitating illness, despite holding a degree in art. Likewise, Brooks, a longtime writer and data engineer, also wrestles with her own chronic pain issues. Emerging from a quest to make art from a place that acknowledges present realities, their collaboration resists trying to be different, more abled-bodies than they are. Through an attentive, slow-moving method of making cyanotypes, they embrace limitations as a fertile ground for creative work, and as a possibility for expanding the dialogue on what constitutes a successful art practice and life. DanaidX’s name comes from the Greek myth about the danaid sisters, cursed by the gods to endlessly fill a cistern riddled with holes. Chronic illness makes simple tasks into broken cisterns. DanaidX asks: what if we were able to plug those holes for each other?

Talking Objects

Photography courtesy the artist

A Performa 17 Commission for Afroglossia, curated by Adrienne Edwards.

Photography courtesy the artist

A Performa 17 Commission for Afroglossia, curated by Adrienne Edwards.

Keren Benbenisty, "Light, Skin," 2017, 15 mins, film still.

Shahrzad Changalvaee, from "As Long as it Casts," 2016

Lulu Meng, "Practice to Be," 2013, 5 min. excerpt, film still.

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© Yto Barrada, courtesy Pace Gallery; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Beirut; and Galerie Polaris, Paris

Photography courtesy the artist

A Performa 17 Commission for Afroglossia, curated by Adrienne Edwards.
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© Yto Barrada, courtesy Pace Gallery; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Beirut; and Galerie Polaris, Paris

Photography courtesy the artist

A Performa 17 Commission for Afroglossia, curated by Adrienne Edwards.
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Keren Benbenisty, "Light, Skin," 2017, 15 mins, film still.
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Shahrzad Changalvaee, from "As Long as it Casts," 2016
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Lulu Meng, "Practice to Be," 2013, 5 min. excerpt, film still.

Artists: Yto Barrada, Keren Benbenisty, LuLu Meng, Shahrzad Changalvaee. Curated by: Janna Dyk and Mira Dayal.

NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY), July 25th, 2019

In conjunction with a farewell reception for NURTUREart (Bushwick), Talking Objects, a selection of short films by Yto Barrada, Keren Benbenisty, and LuLu Meng, and a performance with Shahrzad Changalvaee, curated by Mira Dayal and Janna Dyk. Each artist presents work that shifts the expected relationships between language, material, and recorded histories.

In order of appearance, Talking Objects includes:

Shahrzad Changalvaee, “Everything In Its Place” (2017-ongoing), 12 mins.
Changalvaee places then chews clay in her mouth while attempting to speak historically, politically, and emotionally challenging phrases, and recounting her ongoing perceptions of life in the U.S. Upon removal, the clay, visually in the form of a dental imprint, transforms into tokens, retaining the spoken words.

Keren Benbenisty, “Light, Skin” (2018), 15 mins.

Benbenisty’s work serves as a metaphorical lens onto contemporary migration. The video shows different processes of creating prints from the skin of dead fish, specifically those species that came to live between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean after the construction of the Suez Canal.

LuLu Meng, “Practice to Be” (2013), excerpt, 4 mins.

Meng negotiates the limitations of language as observed in the perfectionism of learning to write a character from the Mandarin alphabet.

Yto Barrada, “Tree Identification for Beginners” (2017), 36 mins.

Amidst the jitter of animated Montessori toys and grammatical symbols, Barrada’s mother’s account of a 1966 trip to the U.S. through a program sponsored by the State Department is intercut with the organizers’ commentaries on African customs and culture.

Bios:

Yto Barrada (Moroccan, French, b.1971, Paris) studied history and political science at the Sorbonne and photography in New York. Her work — including photography, film, sculpture, prints and installations, — began by exploring the peculiar situation of her hometown Tangier. Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and the 2007 and 2011 Venice Biennale. She was the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year for 2011, after which her exhibit RIFFS toured widely. Barrada is also the founding director of Cinémathèque de Tanger. A comprehensive monograph was published by JRP Ringier in 2013. She is a recipient of the 2013-2014 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography (Peabody Museum at Harvard University) and was awarded the 2015 Abraaj Prize. Barrada is represented by Pace Gallery (London), Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Beirut-Hamburg), and Galerie Polaris (Paris).

LuLu Meng is a New York-based artist born in Taipei, Taiwan. Experience of growing up in Taiwan, living briefly in Australia and Netherlands, and now working and living in the United States, impels her to explore the difference and similarity among cultures and people. Her multidisciplinary practice, including installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and video, investigates the formation and fluctuation of individual identity in a society. Her exhibitions include Bronx Calling: The fourth AIM Biennial, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2017); Delicate Failure, Flux Factory, Long Island City, NY (2017); Collective Memory, Cloud Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2017); Rewoven, QCC Art Gallery, Oakland Gardens, NY (2017) ; Roaming Realities, William Harris Gallery, Rochester, NY (2016); Being Here, Cuchifritos Gallery&Project Space, New York, NY (2015); The Moments, Hall of Science Museum, Queens, NY (2015); Picture Books, Power Plant Gallery, Durham, NC (2014). Her residencies and awards include Artist in the Marketplace Residency, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2016); Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, New York Foundation for the Arts (2016); Experimental Film Virginia, Cape Charles, VA (2016); NY Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY (2015); Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2015); Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA (2015); DordtYart Residency, Dordrecht, Netherlands (2014); Waasland Artistic Projects, Sint-Niklass, Belgium (2013). Meng holds a B.A. in Drama and Theater from National Taiwan University and a M.F.A. in Photography, video and related media from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Keren Benbenisty’s multi-disciplinary practice explores notions of loss, displacement and communication through historical narratives and myths. Her work focuses on micro-events and their long-term ramifications within the disciplines of archeology, biology and linguistics. In her recent projects, she examined subject matters related to migration, colonialism and exile in her homeland, Israel, a territory charged with continuous conflicts that fuel the perpetual geographical, political and social crisis. Keren Benbenisty (b. Israel) moved to Paris in 1998, graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2004 and attended California Institute of the Arts (Cal’Arts) as an international exchange scholar. Benbenisty has been artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2009); ISCP – The International Studio & Curatorial Program (2011); Residency Unlimited, New York (2016); Arts Maebashi, Japan (2017). She is currently a participant artist at the Open Sessions Program at the Drawing Center, New York. Recent exhibitions include A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn; Soloway Gallery Brooklyn; Mishkan Ein Harod, Israel; Petach Tikva Museum, Israel: Ulterior Gallery, NY; The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center for Humanities in New York City; Tel-Aviv Museum of Art; Genia Schreiber University Gallery, Tel Aviv; The Artist House in Jerusalem; Francesca Antonini Gallery in Rome and Human Resources in Los Angeles.

Shahrzad Changalvaee's practice responds to sculpture in a vast field of media, including installation, video, photography, text, and performance. She constructs unities of prints and multiple elements in a non-hierarchical rhizomatic connection system. Her recent photographs of accumulation of studio tools and material manifest resistance to organizational structures and patriarchal grid. Shahrzad was featured in Shanghai Biennial (2012), was the artist in residence in the Delfina Foundation in London (2012), and currently was a co-director of Bon-Gah collective in Tehran. She received a B.A. in Graphic Design from Faculty of Fine Arts, Tehran University (2006) and her M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University (2015).

A special thanks to Interim Managing Director, Ivan Blake Gilbert, Education Director Grace McDonald, and to the NURTUREart Board of Directors. An archive of past NURTUREart events is available here.

Image credits: 1-2: Yto Barrada, courtesy Pace Gallery; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Beirut; and Galerie Polaris, Paris. Photography courtesy the artist. A Performa 17 Commission for Afroglossia, curated by Adrienne Edwards. 3: Keren Benbenisty, "Light, Skin," 2017, 15 mins, film still. 4: Shahrzad Changalvaee, from "As Long as it Casts," 2016. 5: Lulu Meng, "Practice to Be," 2013, 5 min. excerpt, film still.

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Artist: Shahrzad Changalvaee. Work: “Everything In Its Place (Release them NOW),” performance and deconstructed clay sculpture. Venue: NURTUREart, Brooklyn, NY, 2019.

In this lecture/performance, Iranian artist Shahrzad Changalvaee begins with a familiar visual icon in the context of the Iranian diaspora: a sculpture inspired by a widely circulated religious image of the crossed hands of the Ayatollah, the Iranian regime's highest political and religious authority. As the performance begins, Changalvaee takes pieces of clay from the sculpture, places them in her mouth, and begins to chew. As she chews, she attempts to speak what she calls “unutterable words,” or concepts that have been forbidden from public or private discourse in Iran and on Persian iterations of the internet. After chewing and uttering words muffled and distorted by the sticky clay, she spits the pieces out onto the floor. They land with emotional resonance: embodying the somatic and linguistic remnants of a political regime that stifles free speech and restricts fundamental daily activities. These include conversations about important events or beliefs with friends—or, as the performance viscerally demonstrates, basic life impulses like eating, digesting, and breathing normally. Ultimately, the artist is compelled to continually 'vomit' the clay, marked by the dental imprints of her attempted words.

Quite a While

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Artist: Cansu Corkmaz. Curated by Janna Dyk. 2019.

SOHO20 is pleased to present Quite a While, an installation of photographs by Brooklyn-based Turkish artist Cansu Korkmaz. The works explore the artist and her partner’s relationship as it adapts to their shifting terrains while living in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and eventually New York.

In this a NY debut of her work, Korkmaz presents the emotional gesture of ripping down the center of a sizable stack of photographs as a space for philosophy. Torn into a handful of piles by her partner after an exasperated exchange, the photographs trace a consistent line of breakage down their centers, allowing Korkmaz to repair the images by conjoining new halves together in myriad pairings. The process of mending speaks to the perseverance of their relationship as well as to an urge to re-contextualize frustrated memories, embracing the irreversible yet formative impact of wounds.

“My idea was to live with those broken pieces in heart and mind. After the photographs were ripped, I had to find forgiveness for what happened. I decided to bring the pieces together as new memories,” explains Korkmaz. The resulting reassembled pictures index these intricate moments of loss and resolve.

One of many such juxtapositions combines a plate of luscious peaches left in the couples’ bedroom in Buenos Aires, with a view of their kitchen in Uruguay, the most prominent feature of which is a welcome sign in Spanish, “Bienvenidos a esta casa.” Other images alternate between interior and exterior scenes, with equity to fragments of the couples’ bodies, as to a stuccoed wall with a bursting splash of graffiti.

Unifying the images, salon style, the artist alternates the final printing sizes according to the space that each occupied in her memory, allowing photographs that loomed more largely in her recollection to occupy more of the viewer’s space as well. In so doing, Korkmaz speaks to the complexity of love and attachment, and to the mind’s resilient capacity to also reassemble, arrange, and mend.

Turkish-born artist Cansu Korkmaz (1989, Istanbul) lives and works in Brooklyn. She graduated from Bahcesehir University in 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in Photography and Video. Korkmaz was a School of Visual Arts’ Photography and Video-Artist Resident in 2018. Recent exhibitions include “Becoming Cure As Care,” at Daire Gallery (Turkey) and the SVA Residency exhibition at Gramercy Gallery. Other exhibitions include “Mini Çarşı-Mini Market” at Poligon in 2016, and “The lives of others,” for the International Photography Festival in 2015. She was selected for a personal documentary workshop with an artist at SALT. Korkmaz has made two books, including SILENCE (2015) and G arip Bir Enerjin Var (2013). Her work has been featured frequently in Turkish by Voice of America, VATAN, Artful Living, Culture Limited, The Guide Istanbul, Orta Format, KEINmag, XOXO Mag, Bantmag, and Elele, among others.

Press:

"Lovers’ Discourse: Cansu Korkmaz at SOHO20," Sharmistha Ray for Art Critical, April 9, 2019

Totems

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Artist: Zalika Azim. Curated by Janna Dyk

SOHO20 Gallery, +/- Space, May 24 – June 23, 2019.

Investigating the complexities of memory, time, and narrative, Totems features a selection of photographic works that elegantly merge totemic juxtapositions of analogue photography and wallpaper. In this exhibition, motifs offer and transmit visual codes while conjuring the history of oral storytelling, floriography, and quilting within the American South.

Through creating abstract environments that act as repositories, Azim projects multiple occurrences to simultaneously reference ancestral knowledges. Joining a community of artists that explore existential questions through familial archives, she incorporates a collection of double-exposed photographs taken by her late grandmother, Mary E. Lemons.

Considering photography’s function, Azim asks: How might double-exposure call into consideration our understandings of space and history, while informing memory? In this reflection, double exposure complicates linear narratives, underscoring how images become charged and embedded with intelligence beyond what is immediately apparent. The multiple visages initiate an investigation into broader considerations of how stories are told, recontextualized, and perceived.

As offerings the works in Totems exist in an attentive transitional state, mining spatial, temporal, and ancestral realities.

Zalika Azim (b.1990) is a New York-based artist conceptualizing her practice through photography, installation, performance, collage and sound. Exploring the complexities of personal and collective narratives, her work investigates the ways in which notions of memory, migration, and the body are negotiated in relation to nationhood and the American landscape. Azim’s work has been exhibited within the United States and abroad, including the International Center of Photography, Pfizer, 8th Floor Gallery, Diego Rivera Gallery, the Instituto Superior de Arte, The Dean Collection. Her first solo exhibition “in case you should forget to sweep before sunset” (2019), was recently presented at the Baxter Street Camera Club of New York. Zalika holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from the Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University.

SOHO20’s Project Space exhibitions are generally supported in part by the NY Department of Cultural Affairs, and by Lagunitas Brewing Company.

Image: Totem (to bend in strange winds, and perhaps to bloom), 2019, courtesy of the artist.

Installation images available here

The Understandables Always Arrive from Far Away

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Artist: Shahrzad Changalvaee. Curated by Janna Dyk.

SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), September 6 – October 7, 2018.

The +/- Space is pleased to present The Understandables Always Arrive from Far Away, new work by Brooklyn-based Iranian artist Shahrzad Changalvaee.

For the +/- Project Space Changalvaee installed plaster-encased tablets, and a new iteration of You Cannot the Same River Twice (2016).

Between the space of unutterable words, partial pictures, and visual and mental imagery, with the sculptural photographic accumulations Changalvaee (whose practice in general responds to the materiality of sculpture through a variety of media) “crops, shatters, and relinks” partial referents. She explains:

“I re-link and cure internet fluxes, personal experiences, local stories, and present material to alienate established narratives and create landscapes. As an immigrant finding place in a new home, bringing together shattered narratives, left-out visions, and marginalized details is an urge for me in performing coherency, to reclaim the fragmentations of memory and information, and address issues of agency, power, and control.”

Within them, found images offer glimpses of hands in various gestures: passive, submissive, listening to authorities in meetings, demanding, claiming, or lingering in streets. These reside alongside chaotic scenes or abandoned views, bricks, sunset skies, tools, and leftover detritus/refuse/remnants/scraps as might accumulate in a studio. Acknowledging at once particular indexes (hands joined to politicians, protesters, workers, lecturers, or artists – protagonists within power structures), “by demolishing and minimizing referential signs in pictures,” Changalvaee also seeks to provoke within the viewer a potentially “generic understanding of the unexplainable on an un-verbal level.”

Aspects of this nonverbal intuitiveness also exist in Changalvaee’s other works at SOHO20. In addition to the tablets, running diagonally from one portion of the ceiling to the opposing corner is the installed sculpture, You Cannot the Same River Twice, which Changalvaee created for the first time for an exhibition in Tehran, and here again as a site-specific installation. This New York iteration consists of an ostensibly precarious bucket, with a small hole in its side, which reveals a stream of clay running down a wooden structure, and gradually amassing as the clay lands. A deliberating balance hovers within the piece in that while gradual change may demonstrate its aliveness, clay is also an element of mourning in Changalvaee’s cultural background.

A selection of Changalvaee’s photographic series, This Tool Shall Pass (2017) hang in the gallery’s office. As with her other works, these at once interrogate both the act of making, as well as how meaning is itself derived from a ubiquity of images, found in a studio, or on the internet.

This is the first +/- Project Space work curated at SOHO20 by its new Director, Janna Dyk.

*Title is taken from a line by the poet Yadollah Royaee (b. 1932, Iran)

Installation images available here.

(P)residency - The Green Room

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“(P)residency – The Green Room,” and “Sociodrama Sessions, Exhibition, residency, + programming. ” Artist: Katy McCarthy. +/- Space, SOHO20 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. 2018

(P)residency – The Green Room is an iteration of Katy McCarthy’s ongoing work, which blends American history with the psychotherapeutic modality of Sociodrama to create a participatory form of theater. Sociodrama involves the spontaneous enactment of issues chosen by a group, employing 'Action Methods' such as mirroring, doubling, and role reversal to deepen the experience. During her "(P)residency," McCarthy reconstructed elements of the White House’s Green Drawing Room—a historic space for tea and diplomatic meetings—using primarily found objects and furniture.

In collaboration with psychotherapist/psychodramatist Dr. Seif, who specializes in family dynamics across socio political differences, McCarthy invited participants to live Sociodrama sessions to explore participants’ experiences of the current presidency. McCarthy later assembled and edited recordings of the live performance session into a sculptural installation, with a live teleprompter of the recorded dialogue, reperformed for a public gallery audience.

Relative Material

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Artists: Golnar Adili, Jesse Chun, Adam Golfer, Asuka Goto, Rafael Kelman, Qiana Mestrich, Gabriela Vainsencher. Curated by Janna Dyk.

NURTUREart (Bushwick, Brookyln), November 18 - December 17, 2017.

“I wonder, parenthetically, whether I too deal thus in autobiography and call it fiction?”
–Virginia Woolf

Relative Material examines a spectrum of gestures by seven artists who—through engaging with family mythologies, exchanges, and ephemera—recognize and question broader issues of sociopolitical, historical, and philosophical concern.

Golnar Adili’s work predominantly investigates the extensive personal archive of letters and family documents that she inherited upon the death of her father, a member of the Iranian intelligentsia who was forced to flee in the wake of the post-1979 revolution. She feels your absence deeply (2017), a set of simultaneously playful and puzzling wooden blocks imprinted with a childhood photo of the artist and her mother, culls its title from a letter that her mother wrote to her father following the latter’s departure. Another letter, Ye Harvest from the Eleven-Page Letter(2016), which her father sent to a lover, reconstructs longing by omitting all but the vowels. Through deconstructing and reassembling family documents, Adili forms a personal linguistics via which to discuss identity, memory, displacement, and translation; bedmates of an unconquerable longing to understand one’s history.

In select photographs from A House Without a Roof (2016), Adam Golfer arranges and recontextualizes artifacts (photographs, telegrams, letters, text messages, and remembered or fictionalized narratives) of his personal and familial engagement with the waves of history extending from WWII to present day Israel/Palestine. Golfer’s work questions the multiple, simultaneous narratives and perceptions surrounding the region’s ongoing conflict. Likewise intertwined in commentary with these images is a portrait from a foretoken project, Router (2015).

Qiana Mestrich questions motherhood, belonging, family, race, heritage, self-authorship, and identity with a selection of conceptual poems, photographs, and ephemeral objects from Hard to Place (2016). Reassembled clippings of phrases and vintage photographs emerge from the redacted file of adoption documents that her husband received as a legal memento of his childhood in the British foster care system. Adding to these redactions, Mestrich places photographs of the couple’s son, who emblematically inhabits the histories and identities that her work addresses.

Conceptual poetry from the immigration documents of multiple countries in which Jesse Chun, her family, and friends have lived informs prints from Valid From Until (2016). Within the semantics of minimalism she forms a new iconography that questions “the meanings embedded within the bureaucracy of place and identity.” Chun notes that “the first ten years of my life [in Korea] were spent as a singular identity, and then everything became fragmented into different codes.” Such codes accumulate multilingually among the forms, creating an often intimate poetry from the material of relocation and displacement.

In Negative Capability (2016), Gabriela Vainsencher interviews her Uruguayan mother, a psychoanalyst who lives in Israel, which results in a poetic video work that floats between Spanish and Hebrew. A pair of hands grapple with abstract ceramic objects as the artist’s mother discusses what it is to know and intuit meaning, and how this process complicates our relationships. The work’s title references Keats’s philosophical concept about the necessity to embrace uncertainty “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”

A bizarre family history involving a bomb plot, found wooden puppets crafted by an uncle, and a father’s instructions in the techniques of mime and puppetry serve as “inappropriate” means to consider the tributaries of history related to the contemporary war on terror in Rafael Kelman’s Gigantomachy (2015–). Kelman notes that “excerpts from primary documents serve as script and subtitle; objects physically touched by the histories in question become props and set pieces.” As a wobbling, wincing face covered in foam grins and jerks haltingly, the father’s voice behind the camera interjects the video’s poetic subtitles.

Asuka Goto’s nearly three-year project, Lost in Translation (2014–2017), is a line of questioning in order to better understand her father, a Japanese writer. While also learning Japanese, Goto attempts to translate his 278-page novel into English. Her resulting drawings include collaged elements: printed screenshots from phone conversations with her parents that inform the translations, clippings of current news stories that extend political and historical narratives within his text, and her own personal annotations. Insofar as the meticulous endeavor becomes emotional as much as it is linguistic, Goto notes that “the areas of mistranslation, which certainly exist (as embodiments of our mutual misunderstanding), are an integral part of the piece.”

Janna Dyk is an artist, writer, and curator based in New York. Her curatorial projects span a range of considerations, from photography and poetry to the relationship between the personal and political. Past projects include Cottage Industry and Strange Labor, among eight exhibitions while a curatorial fellow at Booklyn, in Greenpoint, and [On Silence], at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, in conjunction with large-scale performances OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK at Eyebeam, and SILENCE at the Rubin Museum for the Chelsea Music Festival. In 2017 she held a curatorial residency at the Marble House Project (Vermont). Her curatorial projects have appeared in such publications as ArtForum, Art in America, the New York Times, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and Photography Magazine. She is a MFA graduate of Hunter College (2015). Her writing has appeared in 1000 Words Magazine (London), and SftPwr, among others, and she has been the editor of several artist books, including Adam Golfer’s trilingual A House Without a Roof, which was shortlisted in 2016 for such prizes as Paris Photo and MACK. She has participated in residencies at AIR (Beijing), and NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), and has been a recipient of the Rema Hort Foundation ACE Grant, among others. Her art has appeared in the New York Times, ArtSlant, Curator Magazine, SEEN, and L’Orient du Jour, among others. A recent exhibition includes Unravelledat the Beirut Art Museum.

A special thanks to NURTUREart, Director Will Penrose, and Programming Manager, Ivan Gilbert.

View installation images from NURTUREart's archive here.

Press:

"A Review: Relative Material at Nurture Art," Huffington Post, Christian Hendricks, November 20, 2017

perhaps all the sky is unable to turn a page of this tightness of the heart

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Artist: Golnar Adili. Curated by Janna Dyk.

Booklyn (Greenpoint, NY), December 2, 2016 - January 6, 2017

Booklyn is pleased to present “perhaps all the sky is unable to turn a page of this tightness of the heart,” an exhibition of prints, collages, and a new artist book by Golnar Adili.

Since 2009, the bulk of Adili’s work deals directly with the extensive personal archive of family letters and documents that she found upon the death of her father, a member of the Iranian intelligentsia who was forced to flee in the wake of the post-1979 revolution. Adili negotiates these textures of her personal history as one might a quilt formed from the clothing of many garments. Glimpses from literature, Persian poetry, and Iranian cultural and political history coexist amidst a palpable emotional subterrain.

“There is so much here that my father clearly knew I would eventually see.”

The exhibition at Booklyn focus on two series formed from this material. One is a selection of large hand-made prints redacted from an impassioned set of letters that Adili’s father wrote to a lover: the writings exist as a repeating set of the Persian vowel “yeh,” which resembles the upcurve of an ocean wave. Assembled in a visually similar shape are a set of epigrammatic collaged drawings that Adili has culled from family photographs of hands. A new artist book arranges these works together into an attentive, notational visual language, contextualized by Adili’s own writing.

Endless gestural repetitions of hands, fingers, and the occasional forearm are mitigated by a constellation of threads of graphite and the patterning formed of aligned images. Adili examines such visual movements as might a scientist studying the habits and patterns of a species. So too the collages nod back to the photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge. The obsessiveness is devotional: endearing, affectionate. A psychological and physiological portrait study of the father. Through this emergence, it is at once a specific father; her father, and yet one who figuratively approaches an archetype, existing simply as a person whose presence remains only in words and papers, in the memory and investigative imaginings of another generation.

In this way the work exudes a resilient universality, bringing with it questions of identity, memory, loss, place, and translation; seeming bedfellows of an unconquerable longing to understand one’s history.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

booklyn.org/event/golnar-adili-perhaps-all-the-sky-is-unable-to-turn-a-page-of-this-tightness-of-the-heart

Hard To Place

Artist: Qiana Mestrich. Curated by Janna Dyk.
Booklyn (Greenpoint, NY), February 5 - March 15, 2016.

Introductory essay by Paula Kupfer.

Hard to Place is Qiana Mestrich’s first body of work focused on someone else’s life, and also the first time she’s taken a man’s history as a subject. But as her husband, this man’s history is intricately bound up with her own, and thus represents an important continuation of Mestrich’s explorations of family and ancestry. Conceived both as a book and as a collection of photographs, texts, and objects, Hard to Place traces the journey of Joseph, a mixed-race foster child growing up in London in the 1960s and 1970s. Born to a married Nigerian father and a single Irish woman who was deemed mentally unstable, Joseph, like many other mixed-race children, was categorized as a “half-cast(e)” and described as “hard to place.”

Mestrich learned of this in 2013, when Joseph received photocopied documents from the London Borough of Camden that chronicled his itinerant childhood years. Before receiving these files, Joseph’s story included large gaps—the absence of a family, for one, but also the lack of a personal history during the years that he was “in care.” This resonated with Mestrich, as she, too, had experienced a complicated family situation, identifying as mixed-race and having been raised by a single mother who immigrated to a big city. She had read about, and become interested in similar cases in 1960s and ’70s London even before Joseph received the files. “Back then, many young, unwed women were forced to give birth in convents and give their mixed-race babies up for adoption,” she says. “Just the act of exiling women to give birth in secret is evidence enough of this denial and erasure.”

The body of work that’s resulted from discovering Joseph’s tucked-away childhood story loosely emulates the form of a file or archive: Hard To Place includes vintage photographs of Joseph’s parents and of him as a child, new photographs taken by Mestrich of their son, as well as fragments of the official documents from the Camden file, and single words extricated from their context. The loose elements string together a new narrative, one of a history reclaimed, at least partially, and of care and family unity paid forward to the couple’s son. In the form of a book, Hard to Place records a history heretofore untold, allows for a contextualization of the documents and their vocabulary, while also serving as a family album of sorts. Important to Mestrich is also recognizing the “huge void of books by photographers of color in the photo-book world… For me it’s important to publish my work as a way of sharing and archiving it,” she says.

The different visual elements in Hard to Place convey that it is a difficult and deeply personal story to tell and understand, one that will inevitably have some gaps. The vintage photographs return humanity to Joseph’s parents, particularly to his mother, Maureen, who was described in the documents as having an “unstable Irish temperament,” and being “not very intelligent.” In one picture, she is lying on a bed next to a bright, curtained window, her face relaxed in a seeming state of bliss, revealing youthful elation and innocence. Another shows her standing on a busy street corner, her eyes closed, with one hand loosely holding a white stroller, Joseph sleeping soundly inside. The hat-clad shadow of the man taking the picture is a poignant reminder of the absence of a father figure in Joseph’s early life, while Maureen’s expression—her closed eyes, her forlorn look, her one loose hand—can read as if she’s already partially let go. The humanity of the photographs tempers the coldness of the language in the legal documents, and this is nowhere as true as in Mestrich’s photographs of her son. They contribute to the work her voice as an image-maker and mother, and propose a different narrative for the “half-caste” boy of the text. “We have many photos of Joe as a child but for me it was important to visualize a mixed-race body without any personal identity, which is why you don’t ever see my son’s face,” she says. In the exhibition, the documents and photographs are complemented by some of Joseph’s mother’s personal objects, further coloring her as a character, and countering “the dominant, fictitious narrative(s) of the orphan child as someone who comes from nothing and no one.”

With Hard to Place, Mestrich has peeled back the layers of Joseph’s early history, opening up the ways we can read and understand a person’s trajectory and forcing a sharp look at the outcome of xenophobia and racism. Despite the London setting of this particular narrative, it stands in for countless other stories in other cities that may remain untold. But Mestrich is careful to avoid a sentimental eye: “Nostalgia and photography are inextricably linked,” she recognizes, “but to me this work is not sentimental because it is not dishonest and does not try to romanticize what happened.” Despite the stark reality it showcases, Mestrich is convinced that with Hard to Place “there are other emotions that the viewer can experience … like humor, bliss, happiness, and uncertainty.” In addition to unveiling a hidden narrative, and prompting questions about the inseparable links between race, ancestry, and culture, Mestrich adds new layers to Joseph’s story: she contradicts the notion that denied histories are self-perpetuating, and makes a case for taking control of one’s own.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the New York State Legislature and additionally, in part, by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Bio
Qiana Mestrich is a photographer, writer, digital marketeer, and mother in Brooklyn, NY. In 2007, she founded the blog Dodge & Burn: Diversity in Photography History. With interviews and profiles of photographers of color, the blog aims to provide a more inclusive version of photography history, featuring contributions to the medium by underrepresented cultures. Mestrich is currently writing a book based on the blog scheduled for publication in early 2017.

Mestrich is also co-editor of the book How We Do Both: Art and Motherhood (Secretary Press), a diverse collection of honesty responses from contemporary artists who have walked – and are still walking – the tenuous tightrope of motherhood and making art. Now in its second edition, How We Do Both is available on Amazon.

A graduate of the ICP-Bard College MFA in Advanced Photographic Practice, Mestrich received her B.A. with a concentration in photography from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently the Associate Director of Digital Content and Engagement at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

booklyn.org/event/qiana-mestrich-hard-to-place/

Shared Location (Family Portraits)

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Artist: Abelardo Cruz Santiago. Curated by Janna Dyk.
Booklyn (Greenpoint, NY), April 15- June 3, 2016.

Booklyn is pleased to present Shared Location (Family Portraits), a compilation of over twenty collage works that Abelardo Cruz Santiago began in 2008.

The collages assume cleverly bizarre, playful hybrids of vintage Spanish, German, French, English, and Aztec illustrative book-pages and educational images of maps, political figures, and cultural relics, which Cruz-Santiago moderates with hand-drawn symbols, words, and other drawings that exist among a constellation of personal imagery. Influenced by fusing and negotiating with multiple cultural and linguistic experiences, in Mexico, the United States, and during studies in Germany, collectively these drawn interventions exist interchangingly as iconic cultural hybrids, critical subtext, and at times flippant notations.

Baseball caps, cowboy hats, masks referencing those worn during festivals such as in Cruz-Santiago’s birthplace of San Juan Mixtepec, and other created symbols exist atop and within Aztec carvings nearly as often as they cover the busts of American presidents (as in works such as “Miner’s Symbols,” “As Cowboys,” “George’s Hat Collection, or “American Tourist,” all from 2013).

Although Shared Location is the fifth in a series at Booklyn following artists whose work negotiates concerns that are at once personal and sociopolitical in nature, Abelardo is the first to note that his work is not (political), per se. “I like to just let the work happen… I don’t want to treat myself as the local, because then I’m disrupting it. I want to live within the jurisdiction, but not toggle with it. I want to learn the idiosyncratic language that exists; absorb versus disrupt it.”

As noted by the artist, this cultural toggling occurs like a child ethnographer, more curious than precarious, moving with ease and falling in sync with the social surroundings. When explaining the work, Cruz-Santiago notes the importance of early family memories growing up in Mixtepec, Mexico, and of later moving to Northern California, negotiating elements of each and both cultures.

The artist’s stint in Germany proffered further sources of cultural fusion and linguistic slippage, as in the varied meanings with the letters “ICE,” whether in rap culture, German, American slang, or the US customs (in an untitled work from 2014). Also included in the exhibition is Berlin Winter, in the form of a tourist postcard book of works made during this time.

Works such as “American Me,” from 2011, are painted atop Homeland Security Forms in such a way so as to leave textual indicators that note the paper’s history.

“Holy Wings” (2013) pairs images of eagles, nationalistic symbols of strength and individualism for several countries, with a cryptic, icon-like arch inside of which exists an eagle visually bred with the depiction of a dove.

Collectively, as in other works such as “White on White,” “Nike’s China Football,” “Jesus Chain,” “Capitals,” or “Orange Decoration,” “Hat Dreams,” or “Latin Fatherland,” references both appropriate and at times seemingly abolish their affiliatory concerns.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

booklyn.org/event/family-portraits-abelardo-cruz-santiago

A House Without a Roof

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Artist: Adam Golfer. Curated by Janna Dyk.
Booklyn (Greenpoint, NY), July 11 - September 6, 2015.

Golfer’s family history - its memories, objects, and mythologies - becomes material for taking stock in the divergent iterations of global narratives.

A House Without a Roof concerns the strands of history connecting the Jewish Diaspora out of Europe and forced massmigrationsfromPalestinefollowingWWIIwiththecreationoftheStateofIsrael. Thebookassociatedwiththe exhibition loosely traces the triangular relationship between Golfer’s grandfather - a survivor of Dachau, his father - who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, and the artist - caught between the membrane of histories that turned the oppressed into oppressors and residents into refugees. AHouse Without a Roof negotiates the splintered narratives of war and displacement between Europe, Israel/Palestine, and the United States.

The exhibition also includes the video piece, Router (2014), a work that epitomizes Golfer’s hybrid approach to art and filmmaking. Router shifts between the actions of two subjects; a New York performance artist, and a German WWII reenactor, creating a distinctly separate dialogue by way of the space between them.

A House Without a Roof was begun in 2011. Its sense of “rooflessness”, of disjointed familiarity, - architecturally, historically, and politically questioning one’s sense of being planted - hovers throughout Golfer's book, use of imagery, and in the uncertainty of the space between the two characters in Router. As in the reading of the book’s text, one memory is often redirected by the addition of another. One’s ability to locate era, subject, or speaker (third and first person voices diverge and overlap) is complicated by a perpetual relocation of literary devices.

booklyn.org/event/adam-golfer-a-house-without-a-roof

Strange Labor

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Artist: Sara Shaoul. Curated by Janna Dyk.
Booklyn (Greenpoint, NY), September 17 - October 31, 2015.

Booklyn is pleased to present a soloexhibition of artist Sara Shaoul’s multidisciplinary work that exploresthe connection between the female body and socioeconomic forces.

Regarding her new works in the exhibition, which include images, text and sculpture, Shaoul writes the following:

“Strange Labor is an exploration of how bodies move in and out of commodity states within the scaffold of global capitalism in general, and American culture in particular. The starting point of the work was a discovery of the visual and ideological convergence of the female reproductive cycle with certain stock market cycles, in particular the pattern of a market “bubble,” in which the market value of an asset deviates considerably from its “intrinsic value,” ultimately resulting in a crash. In addition to studying general reproductive patterns, I charted my own cycle by measuring my basal body temperature, a practice that visually tracks the stages of a monthly cycle, as well as the potential existence or loss of a pregnancy. It seemed both revelatory and sinister that financial charting and analyses should mirror so closely the emotional language and details of reproduction.

Through an examination of the personal, economic, and cultural forces that influence reproductive decisions, particularly the complex ways in which the value of the female body is linked to its capacity or incapacity to create new consumers, I also consider how many bodies shift in and out of value states, by what means a body is assigned a monetary, social, or ideological value, and how assigned value intersects with other forms of stratification as well as changing socioeconomic forces. The basic patterns of capitalism are forced upon, embedded in, and expressed by bodies. The shape of profit and the pattern of loss are ingrained in our consciousness as a measure of both institutional and personal successes or failures. The title is a nod to Marx’s essay about the alienation of the worker, Estranged Labor.”

Also included in the exhibition is the work, “Erin Mahoney (Friend, Organizer, Activist)”, a 15 minute video from 2014 in which the artist’s friend, a union organizer, describes her experience of Occupy Wall Street while brushing out Shaoul’s tangled hair. The piece explores how ideology is expressed through intimate connection. As with much of Shaoul’s work, the video occupies the space between personal experience, research, “information,” lyrical moment, and perception, returning what can be distant politics into the space of personal and communal re/cognition.

Sara Shaoul is a Brooklynbased conceptual artist. Her work examines the structures and scaffolds of human interaction, from bureaucracy to the family, exploring how personal narratives intersect with social history. She has a BA in Art History from Cornell University, an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Book Arts, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, White Box Gallery, Present Company, the Scope Art Fair in New York and the Aqua Art Fair in Miami, among other venues. In 2014 she was awarded the Artslant Georgia Fee Residency in Paris France, and was chosen as an AICAD ArtistinResidence in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times and Huffington Post.

The exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Strange Labor is the second in a series of exhibitions considering artists whose work addresses socio political concerns in a manner that is decidedly personal.

booklyn.org/event/sara-shaoul-strange-labor

Press:

“Synchronizing the Cycles of Capitalism and the Female Body,” Hyperallergic, Sept. 2015

The Reprocessed Image

abdusml, 2013, Chajana denHarder

Artists: Sarah Crofts, Chajana Den Harder, Jennifer Grimyser, Johanna Jaeger, Ofra Lapid, Wayne Salazar, Jenna Westra. Curated by Janna Dyk.

205 Hudson Project Space (New York, NY), September - October, 2013.

Image: Chajana Den Harder.

[ON SILENCE]

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Exhibition. Artists: Jenna Bauer, David Brown, J Carpenter, Joshua Cave, Lia Chavez, Joshua Clayton, Dean Ebben, Jung Ah Kim, Karine Laval, Thomas Martin, Morgan O'Hara, Ned Shalanski, Kristen Studioso, Karen L. Schiff, Elizabeth Tubergen, and Shimpei Takeda. Curated by Janna Dyk.

NYCAMS (New York Center for Art & Media Studies), (New York, NY), June 2012.

The Chelsea Music Festival is pleased to present [ON SILENCE], a group exhibi- tion of New York-based artists whose work addresses the concept of silence in visual art, using the peculiar juxtaposition of two distinctly diverse texts on si- lence: Silence, by premier Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, and the compilation of lectures by the late American composer and theorist John Cage of the same title. Via such modes as erasure, negative space, covering, absence, pause, and the like, the works, which include analog and digital photography, painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and mixed media, and many of which were realized specifically for this exhibition, address the psychological, spiritual, and spatial implications of silence. In remaining true to the festival’s mission statement, artists include a crucial combination of both “seasoned professionals, and exciting newcomers on the New York scene.”

While these two texts represent seemingly incongruous, at times arguably dichoto- mous, perspectives on silence (that of the spiritual and psychological, alongside that of the material or chance-based) the works in [ON SILENCE] address three elements which are prevalent in both texts: the noisy and sonorous aspect of silence, the subtleties of the visceral and the natural in noting the presence of si- lence within a space, and the aspect of containment, and implicitly, potent longing, present in silence.

As Cage notes in the section in Silence entitled “THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: A CRE- DO,” “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.” The works in this exhibition lie in the spectrum between this “try as we may” and the resolve to rest in the subtleties within the “something to see” through the various means of:

subtle folds in a paper,
to “organize,” “improvise,” a

a transmission
observed of
movement, recorded
by graphite,6 the traces
of salt water to
photo-negative,c the granularity: a degrading analogue

photograph
subjected
to the digital, a “surrender

to the

weight
of the ocean.d
the grueling wait for the fly

to embody its name,b

jittering lines -
pen and
lapice, a response to
“visceral emotion,” “prolonged searching,”5 gathering changes,

brief interactions of
“light and surface”
via photographic lens,4 time’s passage - a remnant image of
iceland, a “residual landscape through light.” 3

we’ll process endo via code;2
“examine the nature of textuality” through matzah.g

shreds of bread to converge a fault,e edible concrete registers fear.f a domestic scene, absent of figural presencez the wide span of “blank” canvas in tossed flowersw

an “exploration of heavenly bodies and earthly ones,”x

a meditative glance, held up by a grid.y

“beware of
that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment the telephone may ring or the airplane
come down in a vacant lot. A piece of string
or a sunset, possessing neither,
each acts and the continuity happens...” *

“Just as before, the cicada kept on singing their song, dry and hoarse. There was not a breath of wind. Just as before, a fly kept buzzing around the priest’s face. In the world outside there was no change.” ^
________________________

a Thomas Martin 6 Morgan O’Hara c Shimpei Takeda d Karine Laval
b Kristen Studioso
5 Ned Shalanski
4 David Brown
3 Elizabeth Tubergen
2 Joshua Clayton
g Karen L. Schiff
e Dean Ebben
f Joshua Cave
z J Carpenter
w Jenna Bauer
x Lia Chavez
y Jung ah Kim

This exhibition is in conjunction with an evening of performances, which includes five newly created music-based compositions, at the Rubin Museum of Art, on June 18, 2012.

Special thanks to interns and installation assistants: Mea Adams, Taj Alexander, Jonathan Dyk, Brian Jobe, Thomas Martin, Diane Nelson Walker, and Meaghan Kathleen Ritchey.

* John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence. ^ Shusako Endo, Silence, page 119.

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Artists: Margaret Schedel, sound artist; Joshua Clayton, visual artist; Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, lighting artist. Work: "Chromatic Presence," a collaborative site-specific installation for the John Lennon Peace piano.

NYCAMS Performance Space (New York, NY), June 2012.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

"Chromatic Presence is a responsive lighting installation for grand piano. Invoked by the performance of a pianist, we seek to augment musical phrases with a lyrical play of light and color."

ON SILENCE

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Performance event. Artists: Joshua Clayton, Brent Everrett Dickinson, James Hall and Aaron Kruziki. Additional Performers: Adam Hopkins, bass; Evan Mazunik, piano & keyboard; Jacob Teichroew, saxophones; Ziv Ravitz, drums & percussion; Zach Lane, bass; Travis Reuter, guitar; Jon Wert, drums; Christopher Koch, sound engineer; Kyle Olson; DJ Spooky. Curated by Janna Dyk.

The Rubin Museum of Art (New York, NY), June 18, 2012.

On Silence, a collaborative event featuring musical and visual components, is a dialogue on the concept of silence in visual art and music, a nod to the 2012 centennial of composer and theorist John Cage. The evening’s series of performances, curated by Janna Dyk, will feature music by CMF 2012 Composer-in-Residence Somei Satoh as well as original compositions by Joshua Clayton, Brent Everrett Dickinson, James Hall and Aaron Kruziki, which derive from a thoughtful engagement with the topic, instigated by the reading of Silence, written by premier Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, and in consideration of excerpts from John Cage’s book of lectures by the same title. The two texts create a diverse and uncanny conversation, one whose language here spans genres from classical to progressive jazz, ambient, experimental, and the avant garde, on the nature of silence, its effects, and implications.

The event at the Rubin Museum of Art is in conjunction with an art exhibition of over 20 New York artists' works, which will be exhibited at the NYCAMS Gallery in Chelsea, June 14-25, 2012, with an opening reception on Thursday, June 14, from 6-8pm. The reception is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are 10am-4pm, or by appointment.

Press:

"Music, Meeting at the Crossroads," New York Times, Anthony Tomasini, June 18, 2012

"Select Upcoming," TIME OUT NY, June 2012

"Summer Festivals," New York Times, May 17, 2012

Image: DJ Spoky, Rubin Museum, photo courtesy of Chelsea Music Festival.

OPEN CAGE : NEW YORK

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A 100 minute performance honoring the centenniel of John Cage. Artist: Morgan O'Hara, with 75 musicians, readers, dancers, scholars, and artists performing individual actions. Curated by Janna Dyk, Chelsea Music Festival Collaborative Visual Arts Curator. Ken David Masur and Melinda Lee Masur, Chelsea Music Festival Artistic Directors.

Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology (New York, NY), June 17, 2012.

OPEN CAGE : NEW YORK - a one hundred minute performative work honoring John Cage in 2012, the centennial of his birth. In 1992, OPEN CAGE: BRATISLAVA was created and directed by artist Morgan O'Hara as a celebration of John Cage's 80th birthday, and performed in the Slovak Philharmony Hall in Bratislava. The original 80 minute score (which was to include John Cage, who unexpectedly passed away prior to its completion) has now been expanded to encompass details of Cage's music, instructions, texts, and stories for the performance in New York in 2012. On Sunday, the 17th of June, from 7:30PM-9:10PM O'Hara presents the work once more at Eyebeam in conjunction with the Chelsea Music Festival.

Simultaneous activities will take place in and around an installation of cages with their doors open. Actions will be performed by members of the New York art, poetry, and music communities, Cage enthusiasts, musicians participating in the Chelsea Music Festival, and interested audience members, under the direction of O'Hara. The one hundred minute performative work will involve recorded music and music performed live, texts from Cage's writings, stories written by Cage collected in his books, objects and instruments for which he composed music, a complete chronology of his works read aloud by a musicologist, texts describing his methodology with chance operations, and his studies of Zen Buddhism.

eyebeam.org/events/open-cage

JANNA DYK