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Tyler Myers

Sunday Service: Shawné Michaelain Holloway Presents…

By Video

ARTISTS

David Ian Bellows/Griess, Nia Nottage, xtian w

Join us for the final Sunday Service of the Spring season, curated by shawné michaelain holloway! In a round-robin style format inspired by Chicago’s DIY scene, artists David Ian Bellows/Griess, Nia Nottage, and xtian w bring an evening of video, movement, and poetry works in response to the following prompt:

“Caged. Restricted. Routinized. Disciplined. Landlocked. Bound. Promised. Abiding. For keeps, keepsakes, being kept. Domestication. Wrangling. Being a pet. Seclusion. Saving. No matter where you go, it’s there. New construction. Bauhaus. Lucid dreaming. Sleep paralysis. Barriers. Doors. What’s on the other side? Claustrophobia. Warmth. Wonder. Silence. Cushion. Bed. Returning to reflection. Alone time.”

About the Artists

David Ian Bellows/Griess (born Omaha, NE 1984) explores themes of control, labor, and sexual play through DIY surveillance to relay the physicality and the resilience of the body and what might be possible/impossible for the body to sustain.

Nia Nottage is a performance artist and founding member of performance collective Steph Christ – https://stephs.net. Recent projects include POSSESSION (2017-8) at Real Estate Fine Art, Device Controlled (2016) at Panoply Performance Lab, Gloss (2019) at Shawn Escarciga’s Inaugural Hallway Show, LOVE LETTERS//TIME ALONE (2018) at Human Trash Dump, Frances Yeoland: Circula (2018) at 959 Kent Ave, You Should Wake Up Earlier (2017) with No Total, Programs Associate at Artists Space, Dysfunctional poetry reading at MoMA PS1 (2017), and Curatorial Fellow at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2019).

xtian w is a non binary trans femme writer and performer. Their poems and essays appear in [PANK], No, Dear, VIDA, Bone Bouquet, Jaded Ibis, and Hematopoiesis Press, among others. Current creative—life interests include Medusa, hysteria, Trans sensorialities, weaving and braiding, coriander, ancestry, gut bacteria, ghazals, list poems, friendship beyond heteronormativity, boundaries, and houseplants. An Aquarius sun/ Capricorn moon/ Virgo rising, xtian is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and paints their nails in Brooklyn.

About the Curator

Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a new media artist using sound, video, and performance to shape the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), The Kitchen (NYC, NY) Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL). Currently, Holloway teaches in the New Arts Journalism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About Sunday Service

Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the exploration of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson. Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her work, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations through her multiple practices. Alexis Wilkinson is the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center.

KDC Episodes: Formal Complaint

By Video

Co-curator Dana Kopel speaks about Formal Complaint, an exhibition on view at Knockdown Center April 15 – June 4, 2017.

Craft, scrap, and architectural minimalism coincide in Formal Complaint. Featuring work by Aria Dean, Female Background, Christopher Hanrahan, Mario Navarro, and Megan Pahmier, the exhibition returns handiwork to formalism, maintaining a sense of slackness. Metal armatures lean and bend precariously; a painting on unstretched canvas drags on the floor. Discarded materials and everyday objects come to conjure an upright but ‘bereft formalism’ (as Hanrahan calls it). Tenderness and despair coalesce in objects that can only just support themselves, much less make a claim for historical or philosophical significance. The works in the exhibition undermine past minimalisms from multiple directions—in terms of material, attitude, and dependence on context—but out of a care for and maintenance of form, rather than a casting off of it. Through these mergers of vernacular minimalism and sad design, work and supporting structure, Formal Complaint creates its own ecology of exhibitionary space.

Curated by Dana Kopel and Rachael Rakes

Videography: Mehmet Salih Yildirim

KDC Episodes: Hanne Tierney: Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas

By Video

Artist and FiveMyles Director Hanne Tierney speaks about her exhibition, Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas, at the Knockdown Center April 15 – May 28, 2017.

Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas is a self-performing object theater produced by artist Hanne Tierney. Installed across the expanse of Knockdown Center’s Annex, a series of vignettes come to life as cloth figures, hula hoops, and satin configurations gesture, twirl, and sway, manipulated by a system of motors and robotic electronics, designed by engineer Oskar Strautmanis. A soundtrack further animates each semi-abstract character, composed of a drifting narrative that stages imagined arguments between Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, woven with excerpts from Stein’s early plays, and with music by Erik Satie. Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas is played on a fifteen-minute loop during gallery hours, offering viewers the possibility of an ongoing encounter with the immersive, ambulatory experience of Tierney’s enchanting work.

Videography: Mehmet Salih Yildirim

“Read My Lips” Roundtable on Queer Abstraction

By Audio

November 12, 2016

In conjunction with the exhibition Read My Lips, (on view October 28 – December 18, 2016), this round table focused on the constellation of art practices that have been termed Queer Abstraction, a moniker not without its own limitations. Queer abstraction is in no way a new turn-of-phrase, and its origins would be impossible to locate. The goal of this conversation was to wonder out loud and together, what are the offerings and limitations of this term in contemporary queer art practices?

Read My Lips is a two-person show featuring work by Kerry Downey and Loren Britton that considers queer abstraction as an investment in indeterminacy, which allows for an expansive sense of embodiment, including but not limited to, the slipperiness of gender, affect, desire, and language.

Presenters included: John Edmonds, Mark Epstein, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Glendalys Medina, Sheila Pepe
Moderated by Ashton Cooper, curator of Read My Lips

 

John Edmonds (b. 1989) is a photographer and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art and his BFA in Photography at the Corcoran School of Arts + Design. His work is in both private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, FOAM Museum Amsterdam Library and the George Eastman House, and has been shown both nationally and internationally.

Mark Joshua Epstein (b.1979) is a visual artist based in New York. Epstein received his MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in London and his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Epstein’s work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions at Biquini Wax, Mexico City, Brian Morris Gallery New York, and Illinois State University and in recent group shows at School 33 in Baltimore, Vox Populi in Philadelphia and Schema Prjects in Brooklyn. Epstein has participated in a number of residency programs including the Millay Colony, the Macdowell Colony and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. Finkelstein is a founding member of the collective responsible for Silence=Death and AIDSGATE, which was recently included in Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. He is also a founding member of the art collective, Gran Fury, with whom he collaborated on public art projects for international institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Venice Biennale, ArtForum, MOCA LA, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Creative Time, and The Public Art Fund. The collective had its first retrospective at 80 WSE in 2012, and has work in the permanent collections of The Whitney, MoMA, The New Museum and The New York Public Library. His solo work has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, The Harbor Gallery, Exit Art, Sue Scott Gallery, Monya Rowe Gallery, La MaMa La Galleria and The Leslie Lohman Museum, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The Metropolitan Museum, The New Museum, The Smithsonian, The Brooklyn Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and The New York Public Library.

Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn based artist whose drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations suggest and excavate buried narratives typically absent from official canons of history, literature, and art. Ganesh graduated from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002. She has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Smack Mellon Studios, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. Her works have been widely exhibited across the United States including at the Queens Museum, Asia Society(New York), Berkeley Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (California), and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, with solo presentations at PS1/MOMA (New York), The Andy Warhol museum (Pittsburgh) and Goteborgs Konsthalle (Sweden). International exhibition venues include MOCA (Shanghai), Fondazione Sandretto (Italy), Monte Hermoso (Spain), Kunsthalle Exnergrasse (Austria), Kunstverein Göttingen (Germany), and the Gwangju Contemporary Arts Centre (Korea).Her works are represented in prominent international collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Saatchi Collection (London), Burger Collection (Zurich) & Devi Art Foundation (New Delhi). Ganesh is the recipient numerous awards and fellowships including the Art Matters Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation for Painting and Sculpture, and a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Upcoming solo exhibitions include a site-specific commission at the Brooklyn Museum opening in December 2014.

Glendalys Medina investigates structures such as architecture, character, language, image and culture. Through drawings, sculptures, videos and performance she pulls these structures apart, pieces them together, and makes them hers. Self-improvement and habitual practices such as incantations and mediation activate her work. Medina’s artistic practice is a spiritual one in which geometry reveals creative intelligence and daily practices cultivate personal growth. Hip-Hop, abstraction, and new age thinking inform the work. Born in Puerto Rico, Medina received an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been exhibited at such notable venues as Artists Space, Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo Spain and the Bronx Museum. She has been awarded a residency at Yaddo in 2014, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts for 2012-2013 from the American Academy in Rome, a NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art in 2012, and the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace residency in 2010.

Sheila Pepe is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. Since the mid-1990s Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate received notions concerning the production of canonical artwork as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display and the art institution itself. Pepe has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions as well as collaborative projects. Venues for Pepe’s many solo exhibitions include the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina. Her work has been included in important group exhibitions such as the first Greater New York at PS1/MoMA; Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art & Craft, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Texas, and Artisterium, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. Pepe’s work was recently featured in the exhibition Queer Threads at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art in New York, and commissions for the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale,  exhibitions include a commission for the ICA/Boston’s traveling exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960-present.  Two new solo projects are scheduled for 2016 – a summer installation at Diverseworks, Houston, TX, with special event works by  CORE participant Sondra Perry. Pepe is also known as an educator who likes to trespass the boundaries of fixed disciplines in art and design. She has taught since 1995—for many years as adjunct faculty in a variety of programs and schools including Brandeis University, Bard College, RISD, VCU, and Williams College—until 2006 when she took a full-time position at Pratt Institute as the assistant chair of fine arts. Her own artistic development was a mix of academic training and non-degree granting residencies: BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, 1983; Haystack School, 1984; Skowhegan School, 1994; MFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1995; and Radcliffe Institute, 1998–99. Pepe was a resident faculty member at Skowhegan School, 2013. She is now a Core Critic in the Painting + Printmaking Department at Yale University.

Ashton Cooper is a Brooklyn-based independent writer and curator. This past summer, she curated “Mal Maison” at Maccarone in New York. Recent writing projects include an essay for a publication on artist Ellen Cantor to be released by Capricious in late 2016 as well as a catalog essay for Mira Dancy’s exhibition at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, Hyperallergic, Artinfo.com, Cultured, Art + Auction, Pelican Bomb, ASAP Journal, and Jezebel. She contributed the essay “The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument for Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion” to the exhibition catalog for “Lucid Gestures” at the McCagg Gallery at Barnard College. She is the director of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York.

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Bedford and Bowery on Creative Tech Week

By Uncategorized

“The intersection of technology and art is nothing new, that’s for sure, but as the digital world is ever-developing, so is the art made using it. This jam-paced show organized by Leaders in Software and Art with Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center features tech and media-based art, 3D scanning workshops, virtual reality, DIY tutorials, music performances, and more.”

Queens Chronicle on Sabine Meier

By Press

It’s a constant droning, heavy and reverberant. Thick and all-consuming, it can be felt in your bones; your skin feels like it’s vibrating. Guilt, and the existential dread that can accompany it, can be agonizing, even when one isn’t conscious of what one is feeling, and Sabine Meier’s “Portrait of a Man” exhibition captures these emotions beautifully in a series of photos — as well as the descent into madness that precipitated the preceding events…

Artforum on Mami

By Press

Organized by Dyani Douze and Ali Rosa-Salas, “MAMI,” an exhibition of work by five artists and one collective–all woman-identified artists of color–was an “offering” to the water deities known as Mami Wata. Often depicted as half-female, half-fish, Mami Wata were central to the precolonial matriarchal systems of West and Central Africa…

 

by Maya Harakawa

Brooklyn Rail on BEMF

By Press

November 11 – 13: Transference at the Knockdown Center. A three night mix of electronic music and the visual arts, folded inside the larger scale Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival (Nov. 4 – 13). These days the term “electronic music” usually means electronic dance music, but these three days, curated by Sam Hillmer, stretch back to the origins of the genre and point towards its future, with sets from Ben Vida and Tristan Perich. Plus there’ll be plenty to dance to.

 

Blouin Artinfo on Dreamlands

By Press

The 10 events and two and a half month long series, from October 31, 2016 through January 15, 2017, complements the exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The works in the program feature the study of complete darkness experienced through the retinas and our body. It also explores the materiality and ephemerality of the filmic image and the cinematic apparatus.

Brooklyn Vegan on BEMF

By Press
Breadwoman is the long-running experimental/art/music project of LA-based artist Anna Homler and composer Steve Moshier. They released Breadwoman and Other Tales back in 1985, a spoken-word/chanting (in an invented language) album that sounds genuinely alien. The album recently got a reissue via RVNG Intl., and Homler is still doing live Breadwoman performances with various collaborators (she also does actually wear a mask made out of bread, in case you were wondering).
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