Events
Fourteen Again : Exhibition – May 7-June 19, 2010
Fourteen Again : Opening – May 6 2010
Fourteen Again – May 7-June 19, 2010
Featured Artists:
Justin Berry, Slater Bradley, Nancy Drew, Anthony Goicolea, Wilfredo Ortega, Tony Oursler, Karen Tam
Opening Reception:
Public Programs:
CAM Family Days
Workshops with artist Wilfredo Ortega,
Saturday May 22nd
11:00am-12:30pm
Workshops with artist Justin Berry,
Saturday June 5 th
11:00am-12:30pm
The Chelsea Art Museum and More Art are pleased to present Fourteen Again. The exhibition brings together seven artists who, through More Art, partnered with local schools on a series of collaborative art projects. Each artist conducted tailored workshops with students of Chelsea’s Clinton Middle School and Liberty High School, sharing the nature of their artistic practice while creating original works of art together. These collaborations encompassed a wide range of media, involving students on many different levels. The resulting array of works touched upon the themes of adolescence, examining language, place, and the fleeting reality of meaning.
Artist Slater Bradley asked teenagers how the concept of “place” might reflect who they were and who they wanted to become. Answers varied from a swimming pool, seminary or movie theater to Washington Square Park or photographer’s studio. The final photographs were shot with different cameras, emphasizing individual identities. The resulting installation Soundless Pounding of Accelerating Dreams (2007-2010) displayed over a long vitrine, allows visitors to scrutinize the photographs as archival material, underlining the fleeting nature of dreams and aspirations of young people on the cusp of change.
Bridging old and new is a central theme in Anthony Goicolea’s series of black and white turn-of-the-century style portraiture that explores how people shed their sense of individuality to become part of a larger homogenized group. Goicolea digitally composited images of Chelsea neighborhood teens and substituted them for the inhabitants depicted in vintage photos from the archives of Columbia University, and now exhibits them in a poster-like installation that mimics the effect of time.
Tony Oursler’s video project focuses on the hermetic nature of teen’s language, based on acronyms and shortforms, compulsive and frenetic online games, and the improvisational nature of YouTube videos. All these multiform realities, however, live just for the space of a breath; they are strong, poignant, aggressive, and then they are gone.
Challenges of language, translation and how music sheds barriers is addressed in Karen Tam’s videos. NYC teenagers who recently emigrated from a variety of countries translate and then perform the song The Girl from Ipanema in their home languages of Polish, French, Spanish, Indian and Arabic. The shared musical experience becomes a meeting point for the different cultures.
In Justin Berry’s project, students re-created their own spaces – part real, part virtual, part pure fantasy – inspired by their idea of what an art exhibition could be. Visitors are encouraged to explore and wander through the interior of an imaginary art gallery.
Artist Wilfredo Ortega opens a dialogue between students and the Hudson Guild Community Center in Chelsea through a mixed media wall drawing, temporarily enlivening the housing project space. This performative undertaking empowers the kids and shows them how art can also represent a life-changing experience.
Finally, Nancy Drew’s painting addresses what is possibly the strongest and most characteristic emotion of adolescence: love. Love is the most discussed, emotional and dramatic aspect of adolescence, yet it proves to be as transient and short-lived as everything else.
Marina Abramović’s Dinner – February 9, 2010
On Tuesday night, More Art organized a small, private dinner in the beautiful Chelsea loft of board member Laura Michaels. Hosted by artist Marina Abramovic, whose highly anticipated retrospective at MOMA opens 3/14, it was the first in a series of private fundraisers that reflect More ART’s desire to create intimate a…rt experiences as a means of promoting creative efforts.
Guests (who consisted of curators, collectors, writers and artists) were asked to wear white lab coats, and feasted on a sumptuous menu of food prepared by Chef Keil Borrman, accompanied by exceptional wines and champagne generously donated by Perrier-Jouet Champagnes, Jacob’s Creek Wines, and Brancott and Sandeman Ports.
Energy transference was the theme of the evening. Before dessert, Marina had everyone drink 24 carat gold water from vintage glassware and meditate for 3 minutes, to summon each one’s inner energy. Each guest also received a special, pre-edition copy of Marina Abromovic’s Energy Blanket. Made in collaboration with More Art, the Energy Blanket is a unique art object that depicts the artist’s body and energy lines and contains magnets carefully situated to improve circulation. It is designed to instill a profound feeling of wellness, and judging from how well we all slept last night, it succeeds in doing just that.
2010 promises to be an exciting year for More ART. Upcoming projects include collaborations by Kimsooja with the Hudson Guild Senior Center, Paul Pfeiffer with Liberty HS, Andrea Galvani with NYC welders, and Joan Jonas with Clinton MS. Plus, the new moreart.org web site will be launching in the next few weeks designed by Fusebox.
Michael Joo’s exhibition at Chelsea Art Museum – January 10/February 7, 2009
Michael Joo’s work is represented by a multi-media installation with video projection, mirrors and sound. For Bodhi Obfuscatus (Allegiance), a video helmet, devised by the artist as the equivalent of 48 live surveillance cameras, examines every detail of a group of New York teenagers’ faces as they tell stories about …their lives and attempt to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance.” In the video installation, the close-up portraits, at once representational and abstract, are presented as a dense matrix of recorded projection and reflected video imagery.
Benefits – October 27, 2008
The Chelsea Project – October 2, 2008
The Chelsea Project showcases a series of unique public installations in Chelsea that are designed to enliven the area and involve its residents. The works are inspired by the neighborhood’s past and present, as well as its future prospects. In particular, they examine the complex, heterogeneous architectural history and the diverse social and economic conditions of the neighborhood.
The aim of the Chelsea Project is to foster a connection between the Chelsea art gallery district and its neighboring residential communities by allowing residents to see their neighborhood in a new light and discover treasures that had previously been neglected or overlooked.
Show at Miami Art Space – December 6, 2007
Jay Davis, Michael Joo, and Michael Rakowitz for More Art: When Art Goes Back to the Community.
Exhibition features innovative collaborations between contemporary artists and New York City teens.
Opening: December 6th, 6 to 8 PM
Beginning December 4th, More Art will commandeer the Miami Art Space in the Wynwood Art District (Miami) to showcase new projects by Jay Davis, Michael Joo, and Michael Rakowitz.
Jay Davis, Michael Joo, and Michael Rakowitz for More Art: When Art Goes Back to the Community, curated by Micaela Martegani, is on view through Sunday, December 9, 2007 at this newly-opened non-profit gallery located at 244 NW 35th Street, around the corner from the Scope Art Fair.
Michael Joo’s work is represented by a multi-media installation with video projection, mirrors and sound. For Bodhi Obfuscatus (Allegiance), a video helmet, devised by the artist as the equivalent of 48 live surveillance cameras, examines every detail of a group of New York teenagers’ faces as they tell stories about their lives and attempt to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance.” In the video installation, the close-up portraits, at once representational and abstract, are presented as a dense matrix of recorded projection and reflected video imagery.
Joo’s video helmet is part of an ongoing project which has been used to record sculptures in the examination of the relationship of science, technology and religion within institutional spaces. In this new work, the static icon has been replaced by living beings, themselves icons of adolescence, for a meditation on the uneasy balance between uncertainty and conviction that signals change.
Jay Davis’s project, entitled Untitled (Inside); Untitled (Outside), 2006-07, assembles mobiles constructed from a group of collages created as part of a group process by the artist with 13 teenagers from the Clinton Middle school in Chelsea.
Davis initiated the process by asking the students to take photographs of their living spaces, focusing on what they saw when looking out from those spaces and had them select one image from these many views and make a contour drawing of several objects in that photograph.
All the drawings were converted into adhesive vinyl facsimiles. Students were asked to select one to keep and then each young artist made a collage of the 13 other vinyl drawings onto his or her own. “In the end, instead of each creating something solely from their own memory, and aesthetic, the students ended up with something involving a part of each, taking their personal effects and memories into a larger conversation with each others,” Jay Davis recalls.
Collaborating with his Iraqi-Jewish mother, Michael Rakowitz compiled Baghdadi recipes and taught them to different audiences, including youths at the Hudson Guild Community Center in Chelsea, New York City (organized by More Art). The project is intended to continue as a pilot for a cooking show featuring Rakowitz and the students from Hudson Guild, to be broadcast on public access television and the Internet. The project also plans to incorporate a series of lessons for chefs in New York City Public School cafeterias, for serving Iraqi food as part of their everyday menus.
“For the first incarnation, I cooked with a group of middle school and high school students who live in Chelsea and participate in after-school and summer programs at the Hudson Guild Community Center. Some had relatives in the US Army stationed in Iraq. Preparing and then consuming the food opened up a topic through which the word ‘Iraq’ could be discussed—in this case, attached to food, as a representative of culture and not as a stream of green-tinted images shown on CNN of a place with which we have been constantly at war,” the artist states.
For this exhibition, Michael Rakowitz presents the history and documentation of the project titled Enemy Kitchen; Iraqi food is served at opening night. The project also includes the publication of a group of Iraqi recipe cards telling the story of the project, which will be available to the public.
Benefits – April 26, 2006
Show at Bohen Foundation – May 19, 2005
Benefits – February 15, 2005
