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Oct 02

Notes from the Sidelines

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Join us for an evening with performers and scholars who will engage and unpack some of the central concepts, approaches, and artworks contained in the exhibition Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece. Through lecture, performance, and song, Amber Jamilla Musser, Amelia Bande, and Keijaun Thomas will expand upon the critical conversations that Ibarra’s dynamic work across mediums brings forward.

Scholar Amber Jamilla Musser will walk the audience through the video Untitled Fucking (2013), a collaborative work made by Xandra Ibarra and artist Amber Hawk Swanson, weaving together critical analysis and personal anecdotes of lessons learned from Ibarra’s body of work. Writer and performer Amelia Bande will present a combination of song and text based on personal anecdotes that exercise a sidepiece methodology while drawing out strategies of humor as mode of critique. The evening will conclude with performer Keijaun Thomas, who will present a work in progress that resonates with Ibarra’s engagement with embodiment, excess, and material slippages.

About the Exhibition
Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece is the first NYC solo exhibition of Oakland-based artist and performer Xandra Ibarra, who also works under the alias La Chica Boom. The exhibition is rooted in Ibarra’s performance practice, extending to sculpture, video, and photographs made between 2012 and 2019, some of which will be on view for the first time. Charged objects like Tapatío bottles, nipple tassels, and cockroaches reappear throughout her work to confront notions of racialized desire and representations of Latinidad, femininity, and queerness.

About the Presenters
Amelia Bande is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer and performer from Chile. Her work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Storm King Arts Center, Tang Museum, MoMA Library, MIX NYC, Participant, Inc and more. She has been an artist in residence The Shandaken Project, Yaddo and FIAR. Her chapbook The Clothes We Wear was published by Belladonna in 2017. Amelia teaches Spanish at CUNY and NYU.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, which was published by NYU Press in November.

Keijaun Thomas creates live performances and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials — her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within Black personhood. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has presented work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles and Palo, Alto, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Steuben, WI; Boston and Cambridge, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Kuopio, Finland, Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.

Oct 01

Jia Sung: Chaos, Whims, Lust

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Exhibition Events
Saturday, November 16, 6pm
Christina Ko, Catalina Ouyang, and Larissa Pham in Conversation

Knockdown Center is pleased to present Jia Sung: Chaos, Whims, Lust, an exhibition that examines the role of the female trickster figure. Comprised of over fifty figurative ink and gouache drawings accompanied by handwritten verse and prose poetry, the exhibition takes the form of a spatialized book that reads from right to left around the gallery space.

Mythologies of the hero’s journey are historically peppered with violence, and fables of man’s ascension into sainthood tend to be permeated with the shunning, maiming, and killing of threatening female figures. For Chaos, Whims, Lust, Sung replaces canonized patriarchal motifs present in the allegorical classic Journey to the West with narratives of sisterhood, matriarchy, and rebellion, weaving autobiographical elements throughout the epic. Sung toys with the ubiquitous character of the Trickster, a celebrated liminal figure who takes on many faces and traits – idiocy and wisdom, detachment and devotion, wit and somberness – yet rarely rendered female. Instead, clever women in mythology are admonished. Often identified as witches, irreverent women are not seen as playful, but deadly and punished for their games. In this body of work, Sung calls into question the absence of the female trickster figure and emboldens representations of women in mythology by recasting male monks, disciples, and the trickster character of the Monkey King, into monstrous, hybridized femme creatures.

Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn, and received a BFA from RISD in 2015. She was a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and is currently an art director at Guernica and Teaching Artist in Residence at the Hudson River Museum. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1, and in publications including Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, Asian American Writers Workshop, and The Guardian. She has taught workshops at organizations like the AC Institute, Abrons Arts Center, Children’s Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Chinese in America.

Sep 30

James Allister Sprang: Fragment Scapes

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present James Allister Sprang: Fragment Scapes, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition comprises two corresponding bodies of work: a selection of floor-based photo-sculptures made from both physical and photographed concrete infused with pigment, and a new series of cyanotypes that capture the imprints of intimate notes and memorabilia. Informed by Sprang’s ongoing excavation of the intersections of recorded sound, photographic processes, and language, these bodies of work simultaneously serve as memorials and tributaries, and call into question limiting modes by which blackness is seen, perceived, and surveilled.

Employing processes of transmission and translation, strategies of abstraction, and materials that allude to urban space, Sprang’s Concrete Color Arrangements point to the ways in which Black bodies are surveilled and rendered flat. To create this body of photo-sculptures, the artist infuses cement with superabundant amounts of pigment that cause large slabs of concrete to become structurally unsound. Once cured, Sprang stands on the brittle slabs and they crack under his feet, creating fragments from which he builds stacked mounds that resemble modest, temporary, monuments or cairns. The artist then photographs the concrete arrangements from above using surveillance optics that evacuate the mounds of vertical dimension, rendering them flat. The photographs are presented horizontally on low concrete slabs in various stages of physical decay that recall the ones documented, evoking sites of memorial.

The artist will also present a new body of cyanotypes which extend the material analogy that Concrete Color Arrangements elicit. Implementing a photographic method that is a technical inverse to the surveillance lens, the cameraless cyanotype process inherently renders objects flat. Here, the lens, camera, and enlarger are absent. Instead, notes and citations from Sprang’s musings on ancestry and generational trauma are placed onto a photosensitive surface and exposed to direct sunlight. The cyanotype documents the degrees of transparency and opacity of these intimate items against a brilliant blue background. This body of work, in part a dedication to the poetry of blue, propose opacity as a strategy to eschew the limitations of capture, and signal the abundance contained within the things that go unseen.

 James Allister Sprang is a first-generation Caribbean-American and creates work that exists in gallery spaces, theater spaces and the space generally found between the ears. Working across mediums—photography, sound, performance, installation—Sprang’s work is best understood as an investigation of poetics, performance, gesture and their documentation. This work is informed by the black radical tradition. 

Sprang has completed residencies both domestically and internationally. He has read/shown/performed at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Apollo Theater, Dixon Place, Abrons Arts Center, the Brooklyn Museum, The Public Theater, David Nolan Gallery, AUTOMAT Gallery, Vox Populi, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Emerson-Dorsch Gallery, FringeArts, MONOM, Knockdown Center and The Kitchen.

Aug 07

FiftyTwo Ft: Ander Mikalson

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present a new work, titled Scores for a Corridor, by Ander Mikalson as a part of the FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

Mikalson’s work often uses imaginative scores to incite performance, collaboration, and exploration as a way to discover new forms of knowledge. This will be the artist’s largest- scale visual work to date. For FiftyTwo Ft., Mikalson engages deeply and directly with Knockdown Center’s East Corridor space in a large-text based collection of scores that imagine the space in a myriad ways: alternately as a hallway, runway, tunnel, bridge, wormhole, salad bar, road, tightrope, aisle, plank, horizon, and more. Arranged in bands, the text pulls the viewer along the length of the hallway and around the corner as they read, creating a formal relationship between the architecture of the space and the wall drawing, propelled by a movement-driven encounter. The actions described in the text drawings may either be left as potential or performed with invited guests and audience members at some point while the work is on view. Some scores, like “A WOMAN RUSHES DOWN A CORRIDOR,” describe activities that routinely take place in the space, creating the possibility for the piece to be unintentionally performed by visitors to the space or activated by the internal movements of Knockdown Center staff. While the text is legible as language when viewed close up, from a distance it shifts into an abstracted graphic pattern, placing Scores for a Corridor in the nexus of a formal gesture, conceptual artwork, poem, and score-based performance.

About the Artist
Ander Mikalson is a Brooklyn-based artist playing across performance, sound, installation and drawing. Select solo exhibitions and performances include Art in General (New York, NY), The Kitchen (New York, NY), The High Line (New York, NY), Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY), The Art, Design & Architecture Museum (Santa Barbara, CA), Kate Werble Gallery (New York, NY), Queens Museum (Queens, NY), Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia, PA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, ME) and Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm, Sweden). Her projects have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2016), the Art Matters Foundation Grant (2013), College Art Association Professional-Development Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2012) and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship (2011). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2012), Queens Museum (2015-18), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space (2016) and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2018). She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is currently a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow in Washington, DC and an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center in New York.
Aug 06

Open Call: Exhibitions + Main Spaces

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We are currently seeking proposals for Group Exhibitions in our gallery space, Solo Projects + Installations in our gallery space, and short-term Main Spaces Projects!

Review the guidelines for open calls for gallery exhibitions and projects in our main spaces, and apply by October 21, 2019! We are also accepting proposals on a rolling basis for Open Capacity – our space support program for artists and organizers.

Take a look at our proposal page for full details and guidelines.

Submit your proposal here.

Jul 25

Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece

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Exhibition Events
Sunday, October 20, 6pm
Notes from the Sidelines with Amber Jamilla Musser, Amelia Bande, and Keijaun Thomas

Knockdown Center is pleased to present Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece, the first NYC solo exhibition of Oakland-based artist and performer Xandra Ibarra, who also works under the alias La Chica Boom. The exhibition is rooted in Ibarra’s performance practice, extending to sculpture, video, and photographs made between 2012 and 2019, some of which will be on view for the first time. Charged objects like Tapatío bottles, nipple tassels, and cockroaches reappear throughout her work to confront notions of racialized desire and representations of Latinidad, femininity, and queerness.

Ibarra deploys a sharp-witted humor in her work to explore and exploit the condition of the “sidepiece”– a term for a woman whose relationships privilege the physical and take place on the periphery. For Ibarra, however, the sidepiece’s position in the margins enables her to sidestep grand narratives, and she claims the sidepiece as a charged position from which to act.

Performing a spectrum of affects, Ibarra uses her own body and associative objects to destabilize limiting identitarian tropes. In early works, she performs burlesque parodies called “Spictacles,” uses a custom Tapatío strap-on, and sheds a cockroach costume. For later video works, she moves in cyclical and fragmented states to challenge and exceed the gaze. A new body of sculptures combine things like mold, nipple tassels, stripper heels, fluorescent lights, and car parts in order to enliven the bodily attributes of objects, extending the thrust of her performance-based work to sculptural form.

Coursing through this multifaceted body of work is a nuanced conversation that employs humor to address race, sex, and gender, that create pathways for the radical and not-yet-known potentials that are waiting on the sidelines.

About the Artist

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based per- formance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to explore abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subject.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (LA, USA), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), Anderson Collection (Stanford) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF) to name a few. She has been awarded the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally. Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books by Juana Maria Rodriguez, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Leticia Alvarado.

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist immigrant, anti-rape and pris- on abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses. Adjunct, full, and part-time teaching posts have included: San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University.

This exhibition is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center Director of Exhibitions and Live Art. Exhibition and text support by Daniella Brito, Programs Assistant.

Jul 24

Temporary Allegiance

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Knockdown Center hosts Philip von Zweck’s project Temporary Allegiance, an ongoing open call for artist-made flags to be featured temporarily on our prominent 40 foot flagpole at the building’s entrance.

The project originated in Chicago as a platform for the freedom of expression on a public college campus. Although typically a stable institutional fixture, this flagpole offers anyone the opportunity for monumental visibility for a limited time only.

A flag can bear national or military emblems, mascots, warning signals, or propaganda, among others. In many countries desecration of the national flag is a punishable crime. Patriotic love or rage, fandom, competition, festivity, spirituality, mourning—these are some of the array of reactions a flag can engender. The term “temporary allegiance” legally refers to the duty of a non-citizen to obey all laws so long as he remains in that country. Implied is the notion of flux, that loyalty and identity can be reconsidered as the flag is hoisted and lowered.

Philip von Zweck would like to thank Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago for previously hosting this project.

Submission information:

– Each flag will fly for ~2 weeks

– Unconventional shapes, sizes, and materials are acceptable so long as safety considerations are met (weight, fastening, and wind durability)

–  Maximum flag size is 8 by 12 feet

– Flags should be attachable at a minimum of 2 points, 3 feet apart

– A sign within the building’s lobby will include information about the artist and flag design.

– Flag drop off times: Thursdays and Fridays 2pm – 6pm, Saturdays and Sundays 2pm – 7pm

Apr 25

Devotional

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In conjunction with the exhibition Soft Territories, Sarah Zapata will perform a reading of recent texts that explore the limits and porousness of the body, and the interrelation between feet and femininity. Acting as a sort of guided meditation, Devotional will be a performance that engages the mind and body.

 

About the Exhibition
Soft Territories is a group exhibition presenting works by Victoria Manganiello, Simón Sepúlveda, and Sarah Zapata exploring the ways in which notions of movement, migration, and locality are expressed in contemporary textile practices. The warp and weft of the loom – the basic structure of textiles being composed of longitudinal and transverse components – echoes current critical thinking about verticality and horizontality in social and economic structures. In the artworks included, the intersection of the two planes of woven thread express ideas about politics, territories, technologies, and interactions, while enabling spaces of softness, warmth, and shelter.

Sarah Zapata makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical means, her current work deals with the multiple facets of her complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as an evangelical Christian, a first generation American of Latin American descent, a contemporary artist inspired by ancient civilizations, an artist challenging the history of craft as “women’s work” within the realm of art. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum (NY), El Museo del Barrio (NY), Museum of Art and Design (NY), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Boston University (MA), LAXART (CA), Deli Gallery (NY), Arsenal Contemporary (NY), and Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center (NY). Zapata has also completed recent residencies at MASS MoCA (MA), A-Z West (CA), and Wave Hill (NY), and is the recent recipient of an NFA Project Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Zapata was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2016.

Apr 24

Pigeonhole: The Life and Work of Bobby Alam

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Performance Schedule

June 29, 7:30pm – 9:00pm | DJ Black Helmet Performance
July 7, 6:00pm | Zaid Islam Performance
August 18, 5:00pm – 8:00pm | The Modern School Jazz Trio Performance
See below for performance info 

About the Exhibition

Knockdown Center is pleased to present Pigeonhole: The Life and Work of Bobby Alam, a new exhibition by Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall. Pigeonhole is a multidisciplinary portrait of Bahauddin “Bobby” Alam, a Bengali peddler and sailor and who arrived in the United States in 1918 and lived as a Black jazz musician in New York and New Orleans. The exhibition memorializes Alam’s career and explores his personal navigation of an especially precarious period in American history, prompting a reflection on the complexities of racial passing as a means for marginalized people to circumvent violence.

Alam is a composite of historical realities and imagined truths. His identity is inspired by the history of Bengalis passing as black in the United States, settling into communities of color in order to circumvent anti-Asian immigration laws, as recorded in Vivek Bald’s book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. The artists deploy these histories to bring to light the ways in which passing can function as a strategy for survival.

The installation portrays Alam’s dressing room, rehearsal space, and performance stage in the kind of juke joint where he would have spent his evenings constructing and performing his adopted identity. Objects within the installation highlight Alam’s life and career as a musician: a zoot suit embellished with Indian kantha style embroidery, old handbills and concert posters, musical compositions, video documentation from Alam’s rehearsals, and private recordings. Clues within each of these objects reveal, upon close reading, the staged and dual nature of Alam’s identity, which subtly trespasses the lines between reality and fiction.

Over the course of the exhibition, contemporary musicians inspired by Alam will take the stage and perform live, enabling the past evoked by the installation to live once again, while resonating with Knockdown Center’s function as a music venue. Additional elements of the exhibition will extend into Knockdown Center’s outdoor spaces, restrooms, and bar.

Pigeonhole: The Life and Work of Bobby Alam is realized through collaborations with Elias Meister and Hammarsing Kharhmar, celebrated through performances by Azikiwe Mohammed, Zaid Islam, Christopher Hall, Michael Howell and Leroy Willams and additional musicians. The exhibition supported in part by Knockdown Center, Smack Mellon, Materials for the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

About the Performances

DJ Black Helmet Performance
Saturday, June 29 | 7:30 – 9:00pm

Artist Azikiwe Mohammed will perform as DJ Black Helmet at the opening reception to kick off a series of performances over the course of the exhibition inspired by Alam’s musical career. DJ Black Helmet will play a DJ set infused with Alam’s influences, including the sounds of New Orleans Dixieland jazz, blues, and Baul music from West Bengal and Bangladesh. The set is inspired by Alam’s roots as well as his musical career in the United States in the 1920s through the 1950s, and also includes original compositions by contemporary musicians whose journeys and influences resonate with Alam’s complex history and hybrid identity.

Zaid Islam Performance
Sunday, July 7 | 6:00pm

Zaid Islam will perform selection of Bengali Baul songs on the performance stage, transporting the audience to these mystic sounds from the east that were an early influence on Bobby’s life and music, and which he carried with him through his time in the United States.  Zaid is a Bangladeshi artist based in New York, who has spent considerable amount of time and has strong bonds with Bauls and Fakirs from Kushtia (Lalon Fakir’s home) and other regions of Bangladesh, and India. Zaid is not a musician or an expert on the subject, but someone whose views and lifestyle have been greatly influenced by the philosophy and music of these mystic people.

The Modern School Performance
Sunday August 18 | 5 – 8pm

For the closing of Pigeonhole: The Life and Work of Bobby Alam, the jazz trio “The Modern School” will perform a selection of music on the performance stage in the installation, comprised of Dixieland Jazz and Dixieland inspired compositions, drawing on Alam’s career as a Jazz musician.

“The Modern School” is comprised of Christopher Hall (bass), Michael Howell (guitar), and Kahlil Kwame Bell (drums).  “The Modern School” is named after the elementary school that inspired bassist Christopher Hall’s initial interest in jazz. Hall has been performing on the stage of the New Amsterdam Musical Association in New York City since 2003, and has been a fixture in the Harlem Jazz scene for over a decade. He has also performed on contrabass with the New Beginnings and Westchester Brassmen Drum, and Bugle Corps. Committed to teaching through music, Hall has worked with myriad cultural organizations including the National Council of Negro Women, the American Museum of Natural History, Concrete Timbre Performance Collective, and the 1st Stage Theatre.

An innovative and skillful guitarist from Kansas City, Michael Howell was inspired and taught by his father, noted guitarist, Herley Dennis. Howell has recorded three solo albums: “Alone” on Catalyst Records, and “Looking Glass” and “In The Silence” on Mile Stone Records. He also performed with musicians including Bobby Hutchenson, Hampton Hawes, Art Blakey, George Duke, Gene Ammons and Woody Shaw. Howell has also worked closely, and toured with one of the great bebop inventors – the music genius and master entertainer – Dizzy Gillespie.

Kahlil Kwame Bell, having made numerous recordings with musical icons and legends as well as with his own talented band, has been called “one of the most prolific musicians in the industry today.” Bell plays over numerous percussion instruments and has experimented with wood and clay flutes. His musical output varies from jazz to rock to hip hop; from European classical to world music; from spirituals to spoken word accompaniments. His layering of sounds and instruments, sometimes blended with unique rhythms, reflects his view of the unity of cultures through music.

About the Artists

Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall began collaborating in 2015. Their work is located in the gaps between history and story-telling, and draws from archival texts, sociological conventions, oral histories, postmodern theory and postcolonial studies, to examine power and privilege in the United States, and its relationship with image, and appearance. Exhibitions of their collaborative work include Pigeonhole, Dodd Galleries, University of Georgia (2019), Sunroom Project Space: Paradise, at Wave Hill, New York (2018), How to see in the dark, at Cuchifritos Gallery, New York (2018), Not an edge but a hinge, at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2018), In Practice: Another Echo at Sculpture Center, New York (2018), Loving Blackness and A More Perfect Union at the Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia (2017), Ornate Activate at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Milwaukee (2017) and Shirin Gallery, New York (2015). Residencies include the Artist Studio Program at Smack Mellon (2018) and AIRspace at Abrons Arts Center (2018).

This exhibition is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.

Apr 08

Closing Reception for A Continuous Stream of Occurrence

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Join us for the closing of A Continuous Stream of Occurrence, with a sound intervention by Roarke Menzies, who will be engaging Luba Drozd’s installation.

Roarke Menzies is a New York City-based artist and musician who incorporates his voice, mouth and body with audio tools and toys to create electronic and electroacoustic works. His music has been described by The New Yorkeras “a layered electronic throb, coming and going, always enhancing but never overpowering.”

Menzies’s work has been presented at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City, the Spring Break Art Show in New York City, the Untitled Art Fair in Miami, VOLUME in Los Angeles, Quiet City in Vancouver, CHANNEL in Toronto, and many other venues. His music has also been presented on KCHUNG Radio, KFFP Freeform Portland, WNYU’s Bentwave FM, and on BBC Radio 3 as part of the series “New Year New Music: exploring iconic masterpieces, avant-garde experiments and the next generation of talent.”

About the exhibition
A Continuous Stream of Occurrence is an exhibition that brings together the works of Luba Drozd and William Lamson to explore how time manifests in natural and physical phenomena. The artists have created site-specific, time-based works that modify Knockdown Center’s gallery space into an uncertain laboratory, where architecture, light, piano cords, copper, salts, and glass create an ever-evolving environment that unveils time as materially constructed. By focusing on sound and vibration, or on crystallization and geological transformation, the exhibition invites visitors to experience the sensory elements that make up these living systems.

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