“What’s in the bottle?” asked a security guard suspiciously as he patted down my pockets for drugs or weapons, taking a sniff of my bottle of flavored seltzer. “Um, water,” I replied. Getting interrogated by security wasn’t part of the show, but it was a fitting start to “Authority Figure,” Monica Mirabile and Sarah Kinlaw’s supremely ambitious performance art piece about obedience and authority, which took place on May 20-22.
The Knockdown Center, Maspeth’s art and events venue located in a century-old factory building, has unveiled its two newest additions, an event bar and the Ready Room bar and dining area.
The event bar will focus on serving visitors of their various art shows and events that take place throughout the year, while the Ready Room will have a small bar and dining area where visitors who may not want to take part in the events going on can relax and have a good time.
At its best, punk rock relies on an admixture of velocity, attitude and volume — which is exactly what made last night’s Deaf Club event a smash success. The show, held at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, a former door factory turned interdisciplinary arts space, was curated by the Los Angeles-based artist Alison O’Daniel who, herself, is hard of hearing. The event was a live extension of O’Daniel’s “The Tuba Thieves” (currently a part of her “Room Tone” exhibition) — a film that explores the events surrounding an unlikely series of tuba thefts in Los Angeles schools.
A sharp winter sun filtered into the Knockdown Center, a former factory turned art space in Maspeth, Queens, on a recent afternoon as Skylar Astin and Morgan Hernandez enacted the bridal shop mock-wedding scene from “West Side Story.”
“Make of our hands one hand,” the young actors sang as they stood on the narrow stage. In “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, “One Hand, One Heart” is a hymnlike duet of arresting tenderness, an expression of a hope that will ultimately be dashed by racial tension and cultural mistrust. But as Mr. Astin (“Pitch Perfect”) and Ms. Hernandez (a freshman at the Boston Conservatory) continued to hold hands, dozens of teenagers solemnly flooded the stage. As they joined in, singing “Make of our hearts one heart,” what had begun as a duet about a personal connection became a choral affirmation of collective healing.
From a cardboard box mosh pit to projects made using oil heaters, cotton balls, and ac-motors, Swiss artist Zimoun turns mundane materials into mind-bending installations which question our sensory perceptions. For the artist’s latest project [KE]3, a triad of works, we decided to take to the field (also known as Queens) to experience the energy of his largest site-specific installation in the US to date.
You might think you know what you’re doing this Halloween, but unless it involves a candy maze and an edible meat sculpture, you may want to head to our favorite century-old factory building in Maspeth, Queens, instead. Friday, the Knockdown Center is hosting the opening of “Maybe I’m Amazed,” an installation that, true to its name, will involve an actual maze made out of giant wooden planters loaded with Circus Peanut candies in lieu of soil. The maze (a tribute to Batty Langley, a Gothic landscape designer) is just the start of it. The real kicker is the séance involving a shape-shifting, globe-trotting tree trunk.
I spent most of Saturday smiling so hard my face hurt thanks to the Internet Yami-Ichi. The day long flea market hosted more 140 internet-savvy vendors inside Maspeth’s Knockdown Center, a refurbished factory complete with brick walls, wooden support beams and 40 feet high ceilings. The space proved a fitting contrast to vendors wares which were new, disposable and typically useless. I felt a little like I’d landed in the 150th wing of Internet and discovered a very strange party.
It started as a fun idea: Invite some artists to make sculpture that can be used in a drone obstacle course. Because, secretly, who doesn’t want to navigate a buzzy, remote-controlled flying craft around an art installation set in a beautiful restored factory space?
But the more organizers at the Knockdown Center, a three-year-old arts space on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, thought about it, an intriguing question arose: How do these increasingly popular “eyes in the sky” change our perception of art?
For those looking to realize some long-quashed archaeology dreams, or just aching to literalize some metaphors, you should probably swing by Maspeth’s Knockdown Center tomorrow night for the opening of Sorry Archive’s “And The Villagers Never Liked You Anyway.” Predicated on the idea that “exhibitions are historical sites,” according to its press release, the show consists of a 10-by-10-foot dirt plot, divided into 10 sections, each of which boasts a different curator — including Brooklyn’s SIGNAL and 99¢ Plus galleries. Though the set-up alone is enough to pique our interest and then some, the further details remain a bit difficult to glean — behold the following description and excavate what meaning you can:
“Hardcore Activity in Progress,” a one-night, 15-act concert Friday at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, represented an idea. The idea was the sound of extremes — going for it, boundary-testing, hardness — across musical languages. So, for instance, there was the noise band Wolf Eyes, the cello improviser Okkyung Lee, the grindcore group Napalm Death, the rapper Gunplay, the post-minimal piano rhapsodist Lubomyr Melnyk, the free-jazz trio the Thing, and the electronic musician Tim Hecker, presented in overlapping sets, in three different parts of a 50,000-square-foot former door-frame factory.
