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Mar 12

Soft Territories

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Upcoming Exhibition Events

June 23, 5:00pm – 8:00pm | Closing Reception
with jazz by the Rodrigo Recabarren trio
More details here

About the Exhibition

Knockdown Center is pleased to present Soft Territories, 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.

The questions of memory, identity, and borders are central to Zapata’s symbiotic practice of textile making and writing. Manganiello uses hand-spun yarn and mixed natural and synthetic color dyes to create hand-woven textiles that explore intersections between materiality, technology, geography, and storytelling. Sepúlveda mixes digital and organic elements to create tapestries –a historical artifact for narrating epic tales– that reflect on experiences of migration.

Past Exhibition Events

May 4, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm | Opening Reception
May 4, 6:30 pm | Curator Tour
Curator Carolina Arévalo will lead visitors on a tour of the exhibition
May 5, 5:00 pm | Devotional with Sarah Zapata
More details here

About the Artists

Victoria Manganiello is an installation and mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited throughout the USA and internationally including at the Queens Museum, Tang Museum, Pioneer Works, and the Museum of Art and Design. Victoria was recently named one of Forbes list 30 under 30 artists for 2019. She is an adjunct professor at both NYU and Parson’s The New School. Exploring the intersections between materiality, technology, geography and storytelling, Victoria’s installation work, abstract paintings, and kinetic sculptures are made meticulously with hand-woven textiles using hand-spun yarn and hand-mixed natural and synthetic color dyes.

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.

Simón Sepúlveda works on textile mixing bold graphics, with social and personal issues, like migration and identity. His work is a hyper-awareness of the precarious nature in trying to find a personal balance and also worldwide balance across migration, economics, and human rights issues. This worldwide perspective and artist direction within textiles has led him to fulfill a sense of purpose with his work. Sepúlveda’s work has been exhibited at the Chilean Museum of Contemporary Art (Chile), Museum of Fine Arts (Chile), Visual Arts Museum (Chile), and Aqui Gallery (Chile). Sepúlveda is currently living and working at San Francisco as a designer for Apple. Previously he has worked as a Designer at Sagmeister&Walsh (New York), Javier Jaén Studio (Barcelona) and Felicidad (Santiago).

About the Curator

Carolina Arévalo is a researcher and curator. Her approach towards the idea of image as a mental state is center in the fundamental concepts of forms: the reinterpretation and representation of societies explained through historical styles, as they occur in art, design, and architecture. All objects and images communicate and can be recognized as texts; artifacts weave the public and private aspects, social and cultural conventions and the way in which people and position themselves in a context. Currently, Arévalo is also curating Sheila Hicks: Reencuentros at the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (2019), which aims to establish dialogues between contemporary textile art and pre-Columbian textile art. Recently, she has published in Hilos Libres: Sheila Hicks (Puebla, Mexico: 2018), Jaume Xifra: Cat. Exhibit (Girona, Spain: 2018), and the article Anni Albers: Influjos Precolombinos y Legado (Goethe Institute, Colombia: 2019-upcoming).

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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.

Mar 09

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 April 15! 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.

Mar 05

FiftyTwo Ft: Morgan Blair

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present “27 Undoctored Photos of Betsy DeVos’ Radioactive Gingerbread Learnin’ Supercenter That Prove Camera Angle Is Everything. You Might Also Like: Transforming That Pesky White Guilt Into The Perfect Paleo Deviled Eggs, If You’re Into That Kind of Thing (Extruded Detail),” a new large-scale work by artist Morgan Blair as a part of our FiftyTwo Ft. series of long-term wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

Blair’s painting process begins online, where she collects and collages together stills from children’s claymation projects on Youtube. Seeking crudely assembled approximations of reality, she further manipulates this visual material towards and away from abstraction, making new iterations from morphed and flattened blobs of colored clay. Ultimately these compositions are transferred onto wall and canvas where the shapes are filled with hard-edged airbrushed gradients and three-dimensional texture that further obscure the subject matter. Clashing, saturated colors root the paintings in an alternate reality while rambling, stream-of-consciousness titles combine personal, political, and pop culture references suggest new contexts for the final images.

Morgan Blair is an artist based in Ridgewood, Queens. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She has shown her work at The Hole (New York), Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York), Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), Left Field (San Luis Obispo), Eighteen (Copenhagen), and the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans) and others. Blair has also painted large-scale murals at venues such as the Facebook offices in New York, Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Ma, Swanson Road Intermediate School in Auburn, MA, and Rudy’s Barbershop in Los Angeles. She also started Puzzle Time, an ongoing series of limited edition, hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring the work of select contemporary artists.

Mar 05

A Continuous Stream of Occurrence

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Exhibition Events
Sunday April 28, 6pm
Closing reception and performance by Roarke Menzies

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 will create new 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.

Luba Drozd is a site specific video and sound installation artist. Working across media, the components of her installations continuously interconnect with architecture and each other. Her synthetic spaces examine tangible and intangible structures of authority and its manifestations in a built environment. The final pieces gesture to how intangible spaces within us – such as memory, knowledge and perception of time – are controlled and regimented. Luba earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her work was exhibited at the Bronx Museum, UIMA Chicago, Apexart, LUBOV Gallery, Smack Mellon, Ukrainian Museum, Carver Center for Art and Technology and many others. She is the recipient of a MASS MoCA Artist Residency, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, Bronx Museum AIM program, Eastern State Historic Site Grant for New Work, VCCA Artist Residency Fellowship, Millay Colony residency and MacDowell Fellowship.

William Lamson is an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves working with elemental forces to create durational performative actions. Set in landscapes as varied as New York’s East River and Chile’s Atacama Desert, his projects reveal the invisible systems and forces at play within these sites. In all of his projects, Lamson’s work represents a performative gesture, a collaboration with forces outside of his control to explore systems of knowledge and belief. Lamson’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including the Brooklyn Musuem, The Moscow Biennial, P.S.1. MOMA, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition, he has produced site specific installations for the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and a number of private collections. He has been awarded grants from the Shifting Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, and is a Guggenheim Fellow. His work has appeared in ArtForum, Frieze, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Harpers, and the Village Voice. William Lamson was born Arlington, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his MFA from Bard College, and he teaches in the Parsons MFA photography program and at the School of Visual Arts.

XP is the curatorial signature of Xavier Acarín and Park C. Myers.

Xavier Acarín works at the intersection of performance, architecture, object, and exhibition-making while considering art history, social issues, and the effects of globalization. His projects and programs have been presented at Chez Bushwick, Elastic City, The New School for Social Research, CCS-Hessel Museum, Peekskill Project 6, Java Projects, ESTE, Abrons Arts Center in New York, La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires, MUU Kaapeli in Helsinki and LOOP Festival in Barcelona. His writings have been published at A-Desk, Culturas-La Vanguardia, Terremoto and BRAC (University of Barcelona). He has participated as author of the books Designing Experience (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Dear Helen (CCS Bard, 2014). Acarín holds an M.A. from the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Park C. Myers is a curator and writer from Houston, TX, formerly based in New York City and Brussels. Myers is currently The Royall Family Curator at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA. He studied Film and Video at the Maryland Institute College of Art and holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He has curated exhibitions and projects at Actual Size LA, Komplot, Brussels, the Steamboat Springs Arts Council in Steamboat, CO, the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and the Copenhagen Art Festival, among many other institutions. Publications include The Cure, published by Komplot, and Dear Helen published by CCS Bard. He is a co-founder and contributing editor of aCCeSsions an online journal for exploration in interdisciplinary curatorial praxis. Myers current research directions involve cognitive science, psychology, exhibition design, and the interaction of these fields of study with contemporary 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.

 

 

Feb 28

Fleshing Out the Ghost

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In conjunction with the exhibition Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation, the artist will give a performance lecture incorporating images and video to expand on thematics addressed within the show.

With K-beauty advertised as achieving the flesh of a Korean female subject devoid of her subjectivities, it becomes apparent that she is repurposed as technology for attaining desirable surface quality, one rendered as technically superior flesh. What skin are we seeking and looking at in K-beauty – one that emphasizes rehabilitation from war, narrative of assimilation in the U.S., and machinic visions of Asiatic femininity? Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin’s performance lecture “Fleshing Out the Ghost: the Fetish, Desire, and Master in K-beauty” investigates K-beauty as a site to unpack its racialized and gendered imaginary of Korean flesh and the fetish that congeals from it. Shin examines how the Korean woman complicates instead of clarifies the distinction between the master and the fetish object and the haunting and the following pleasures that occur from “wearing” contaminated desires of otherness as second skin.

About the exhibition
On view November 10 – December 16, 2018.
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation exhibition features a custom line of K-beauty products and a fully immersive sauna alongside new video, photo, and collage works. Visitors are invited to apply the beauty products and enter the sauna installation, absorbing small amounts of home-brewed lactic acid. For Shin, the active bacterial agent acts as a stand-in for bodily rehabilitation from the Korean War, and as an extension of the Korean “flesh” enlivened by biological matter.

Feb 28

Universal Skin Salvation: A Conversation

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Join Knockdown Center and BOMB Magazine for an evening celebrating Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin’s exhibition Universal Skin Salvation — the artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition featuring a custom line of K-beauty products and a fully immersive sauna. In the spirit of BOMB’s interviews, Knockdown Center and BOMB host a conversation with artists Valery Jung Estabrook, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin and scholar So-Rim Lee to discuss their respective practices, intersecting areas of research, and topics prompted by the works in the exhibition such as cultural possession, concepts of beauty and the cosmetic industry, and technology and management of the self.

Reception to follow in Knockdown Center’s bar, the Ready Room.

Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin explores the porousness of bodily boundaries and the ceaseless movement of living processes, like fermentation that echo the history of colonialism. Shin is interested in entangling the history of conquest and the literal digestion of material – herbs, medicine, and food – into a new system of relations that emerge from a complicated history of entanglement. Shin has exhibited at SPRING/BREAK, New York, NY (2018), Disclaimer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2018), AC Institute, New York, NY (2017), Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY (2017), Miranda Kuo Gallery, New York, NY (2017), and many others. Forthcoming shows include Phantom Limb at Cody Dock, London, England and Ghost in the Ghost at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY. Shin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Valery Jung Estabrook was born in Plantation, Florida, and grew up on an organic Asian pear farm in rural southwestern Virginia. She holds an MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Lagos, Bilbao, and Melbourne. In 2018 she received the Gold AHL-T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, an annual award recognizing artists of Korean heritage in the United States. She currently resides in New Mexico.

So-Rim Lee is the 2018-19 Center for Korean Research-Academy of Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Lee researches on contemporary popular culture’s complex embodiments of neoliberalism through performance studies and visual culture, with a focus on South Korea. Lee’s doctoral dissertation, “Performing the Self: Cosmetic Surgery and the Political Economy of Beauty in Korea,” weds historiography, cultural studies, media studies, and performance analysis to construe cosmetic surgery as a mode of performing one’s subjectivity in contemporary Korea. Lee has previously written for New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, and Theatre Survey, and is a recipient of the Ric Weiland Humanities and Sciences Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and the Charlene Porras Graduate Scholar Award from the El Centro Chicano y Latino at Stanford University.

About the exhibition
On view November 10 – December 16, 2018
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation features a custom line of K-beauty products and a fully immersive sauna alongside new video, photo, and collage works. Visitors are invited to apply the beauty products and enter the sauna installation, absorbing small amounts of home-brewed lactic acid. For Shin, the active bacterial agent acts as a stand-in for bodily rehabilitation from the Korean War, and as an extension of the Korean “flesh” enlivened by biological matter.

Feb 28

Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation, the artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition, featuring a custom line of K-beauty products and a fully immersive sauna alongside new video, photo, and collage works.

Lactic acid is a bacterial compound found in sour milk, in muscles, and in fermented foods like Kimchi. Recent studies show that lactic acid can fortify the composition of the microbes in the gut, improving the metabolization of bodily injuries and building immunity to post-traumatic stress disorder. The bacterium can also lighten the flesh by exfoliating dead skin and rejuvenating new skin cells, and is popularly used in K-beauty products as a whitening agent (K-beauty refers to the multi-billion dollar Korean cosmetic industry). Shin engages with the concept of “lactification,” a term coined by philosopher Frantz Fanon that refers to the whitening of a race or to make one “milky.”

Visitors are invited to apply Shin’s custom K-beauty products such as lotions, mist sprays, and serums, and enter the sauna, absorbing small amounts of home-brewed lactic acid. For Shin, the active bacterial agent acts as stand-in for bodily rehabilitation from the Korean War and as an extension of the Korean “flesh” enlivened by biological matter. Through this immersive exhibition Shin asks: how does K-beauty’s emphasis on achieving a “glassy” and “transparent” complexion render Korean skin exoticized and impermeable, or plasticized, following the trauma and migration of the Korean War? How does Korean subjectivity emerge through flesh that has undergone extreme processes of cultural possession?

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/311874269610873/

Programs
Thursday, November 29
7:30pm: Universal Skin Salvation: A Conversation
Conversation with artists Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Valery Jung Estabrook and scholar So-Rim Lee 
Presented with BOMB Magazine

Thursday, December 13
7:30pm: Fleshing Out the Ghost: the Fetish, Desire, and Master in K-beauty
Performance lecture

Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin explores the porousness of bodily boundaries and the ceaseless movement of living processes, like fermentation that echo the history of colonialism. Shin is interested in entangling the history of conquest and the literal digestion of material – herbs, medicine, and food – into a new system of relations that emerge from a complicated history of entanglement. Shin has exhibited at SPRING/BREAK, New York, NY (2018), Disclaimer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2018), AC Institute, New York, NY (2017), Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY (2017), Miranda Kuo Gallery, New York, NY (2017), and many others. Forthcoming shows include Phantom Limb at Cody Dock, London, England and Ghost in the Ghost at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY. Shin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

***

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.

Feb 28

Carried on Both Sides: Closing Performance by Daniel Neumann

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To Unfurl

The exhibition Carried on Both Sides: Encounter Three will close with a durational sound field composition titled To Unfurl by sound artist Daniel Neumann, created in response to the works in the exhibition. Neumann will focus on the process of unfurling; processual feedback, slow modulations and spatial distribution of sounds will be the central gestures in his aural contemplation.

Carried on Both Sides: Encounter Three is a collaborative project by artists Caroline Woolard, Helen Lee, and Lika Volkova on view August 30 – November 3, 2018. Founded in research and expressed across media, the exhibition explores the visual, political, and material lineage of the @ symbol to assert that imperial forms long outlive the empire from which they were generated.

Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and audio engineer, originally from Germany. Neumann’s focus throughout these different occupations is how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound.

Feb 25

Fifty Two Ft: Sue Havens

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present Brick and Mortar: MASSIVE, a new work by Sue Havens as a part of Knockdown Center’s FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

Sue Havens is an artist interested in the interplay between painting and ceramics. Her work is influenced by the visual world around her: glimpses of things from daily life such as buildings, pavement lines, commercial packaging, tree bark, auto body signs, and 1970’s knit sweaters are embedded in the pattern, texture, and form of her work across disciplines.

At Knockdown Center, Brick and Mortar: MASSIVE will be Havens’ largest scale painting to date. The visual language of this site-specific work will continue Havens’ practice of culling from her everyday surroundings while also incorporating gestural influences from Turkey and from kilim rugs to the ruins of Ephesus. Havens’ disparate sources mingle and surface in large brushstrokes and layered patterns producing a playful grid. As a whole, the work emerges as an integrated landscape that oscillates between flat and dimensional, sturdy and precarious, irregular and precise.

Sue Havens is an artist based in New York and Tampa. Havens received her BFA in Art from The Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art in 1995, and her MFA in painting from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. Havens is a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from The New York Foundation for the Arts and most recently a recipient of the 2017 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. She is currently an assistant Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

Havens has exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as Galerie Nord in Berlin, The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, Regina Rex, Jeff Bailey, PS 122, Postmasters, Frederich Petzel, Art in General, Momenta Art, Sara Meltzer, OK Harris, Pierogi, The Houghton Gallery at The Cooper Union, The Parlour in Bushwick, New York, and Mindy Solomon in Miami among others. Havens was a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and most recently, a recipient of the 2017 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. Havens authored, designed and illustrated the book Make Your Own Toys (2010). She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, and a MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of The Arts at Bard College. Her work was most recently featured in Warhol’s Interview Magazine.

Feb 25

Carried on Both Sides: Encounter Three

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Exhibition Events
Thursday, August 30, 6 – 8pm: Opening performance by Lika Volkova
Saturday, November 3, 5 – 8pm: Closing performance by Daniel Neumann

Knockdown Center is pleased to present Carried on Both Sides: Encounter Three, a collaborative project by artists Caroline Woolard, Helen Lee, and Lika Volkova on view August 30 – November 3, 2018. Founded in research and expressed across media, the works in the exhibition explore the visual, political, and material lineage of the @ symbol. The artists employ traditional and experimental glass techniques to engage with the history of the @ symbol, and ultimately, to speculate about its future use.

The project consists of three exhibitions over the course of a year, culminating at Knockdown Center in its final and most comprehensive presentation. For Knockdown Center, the artists incorporate sculpture, installation, fashion, and glass blowing to create new artifacts that reference what the group calls “imperial residues” of ancient Rome that are embedded in the contemporary world. These residues appear in daily life, from architectural columns on buildings and the figure of the bald eagle on the dollar bill, to the ubiquitous @ symbol. The @ symbol derives from a graphic representation of the amphora, a vessel used in ancient Rome to transport goods like olive oil or grains. The project’s title references the amphora’s original meaning – to “carry on both sides” – referring to the vessel’s two carrying handles. The works on view aim to evoke questions about what connections we may find between this ancient mode of transportation, commerce, and craft, and today’s digital communication. The artists thus have created artifacts from the future of the @ symbol in which they imagine the @ symbol unfurls in an imperative to rest, to sleep, and to dream.

The first iteration of the project was exhibited at Lesley Heller Workspace in November 2017, and the second iteration of the project showed at LMAKgallery in January 2018. For more information on this project, see: http://CarriedOnBothSides.com, and the Art21 documentary: https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/caroline-woolards-floating-possibility/

Performances
Thursday, August 30
6 – 8pm: Opening performance by Lika Volkova

During the exhibition’s opening, collaborating artist Lika Volkova brings three bodies into contact with her artwork. Wearing garments from the future, they rest under glass paperweights. With this work, Volkova asks us to consider the ways in which the @ symbol destroys sleep and takes over dreams, offering the glass paperweight as a speculative protection from the invasive @ symbol during sleep.

Saturday, November 3
5 – 8pm: Closing performance by Daniel Neumann
The exhibition will close with a durational sound field composition by sound artist Daniel Neumann made in response to the works on view.

Artists

Caroline Woolard creates sculptures using online networks, hand built objects, and immersive environments. Recent commissions include Listen, Wave Pool, Ohio (2018); WOUND, Cooper Union, New York, NY (2016); Capitoline Wolves, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2016), and Exchange Café, MoMA, New York, NY (2014). Woolard’s work has been celebrated by the National Endowment for the Arts, where she delivered the 50th Anniversary keynote (2017) and in New York Close Up, the PBS / Art21 documentary series (2017). Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in the Brooklyn Rail (2017); Artforum (2016); Art in America (2016); The New York Times (2016); and South Atlantic Quarterly (2015). Recent visiting artist lecture appointments include the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL); Williams College (Williams, MA); the University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, CA); the Malmo Art Academy (Malmo, Sweden); University of Wisconsin at Madison (Madison, WI); and the Royal Danish Academy (Copenhagen, Denmark). Woolard holds a BFA from Cooper Union (Sculpture, 2007) and is a recipient of the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund (OurGoods, 2010-2012), the Antipode Scholar-Activist Project Award (Community Economies Collective, 2016), and the Theo Westenberger Estate Fund (2015). Woolard has been named one of 11 Artists to Transform the Art World (2017), has been listed in the WIRED Smart List (2013), ArtNet’s Top 20 Female Artists (2015), and in the Top 100 Women for the Commons by the Peer to Peer Foundation (2014).

Helen Lee is an artist, designer, educator, and glassblower. She holds an MFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BSAD in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her honors include the inaugural Irwin Borowsky Prize in Glass Art in 2013 and the Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award in 2014. She was nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2015 and a USA Fellowship in 2016. Most recently, Lee received the Gold Award in the 2016 Bullseye Emerge exhibition. Her work is in the collections of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and Toyama City Insitute of Glass Art. Lee has worked as a freelance graphic designer for Chronicle Books and Celery Design Collaborative, and was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts from 2009-2011. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, California College of Art, Toyama City Institute of Glass Art, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and the MIT Glass Lab. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Head of Glass in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lika Volkova is an artist and fashion designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her sculptures and garments have been shown at the Museum of Art and Design and the Queens Museum of Art. Volkova’s label SANS was featured in Vogue, Metal, and Hint, and her work has been commissioned by PERFORMA. Her forthcoming New Economic Policy installation will be shown at The Luminary in St. Louis and at the Ross Art Museum in Ohio in 2018.

Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and audio engineer, originally from Germany. A main focus throughout these different occupations is how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound. He holds a masters degree in media art from the HGB Leipzig and also studied electronic music composition.

***

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.

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