Exhibitions | The Knockdown Center

Aug 15

großer Lauscher Closing Reception

By Tyler Myers

Please join us for a final opportunity to experience the immersive spatialized sound installation großer Lauscher with artist Alyssa Miserendino.

About großer Lauscher
großer Lauscher (“big Eavesdropper” in German) is a spatial sound installation created by interdisciplinary artist Alyssa Miserendino. The piece was recorded in the main radar dome at the Field Station Berlin, a listening station built during the Cold War by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Exhibited in the darkness, the piece is comprised of five narrators from five different continents reciting the story of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while the protracted echos created by the architecture allow visitors to visualize the space of the Field Station.

Jul 27

Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime

By Tyler Myers

This fall at Knockdown Center, artist Azikiwe Mohammed stages a performative installation of his fictional thrift store, Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime. New Davonhaime – a location conceived by Mohammed – is an amalgamation of the names of the five most densely populated Black cities in America: New Orleans, Detroit, Jackson, Birmingham, and Savannah. Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime was created to serve as a safe space for Black and Brown people living in America. Knockdown Center’s galleries will be fully transformed into a thrift store that contains objects both created and found by Mohammed including tapestries, records, postcards, paintings, lamps, and books.

Mohammed will be on site daily performing as the thrift store owner, Jimmy, accepting donations from the public in the form of photographs to be added to Mohammed’s Black Community Family Albums, or audio-recorded memories that detail the first time participants realized they were Black. These recordings, called My First Time stories, will be compiled and turned into 12” records that are then added to the installation’s growing collection. Both living archives offer an intimate and nuanced portrait of Black lives both contemporary and past.

Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime also contains a music library that invites visitors to exchange music using Mohammed’s custom New Davonhaime flash drives with an emphasis on visitors dropping off their original compositions to be shared with other visitors.

Previous versions of Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime have shown at Spring/Break and No Longer Empty in 2016, and Knockdown Center’s culminating presentation of Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime will be its most extensive iteration yet.

Related Programs:
September 24: Josep Maynou and Alison Kuo
October 1: Grady Owens and GDFX
October 7: Documenting the Nameplate
October 27: DJ Susan Z Anthony

Azikiwe Mohammed graduated from Bard College in 2005 where he studied photography and fine arts. Since then he has shown these things in galleries both nationally and internationally. In 2015 he received the Art Matters Grant, and in 2016 was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emmerging Artist Grant. He lives in New York and currently works at Mana Fine Arts as part of their mana BSMT program.

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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.

Jul 04

Intended Trajectories Conversation

By Tyler Myers

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Intended Trajectories at Knockdown Center, join artists Lourdes Correa-Carlo and Alan Ruiz for a public conversation moderated by curator Christian Camacho-Light. In their work, both Correa-Carlo and Ruiz investigate how the formal and spatial organization of architectural environments in turn structure social relations. In this event, each artist will introduce their recent projects, followed by a discussion that will draw out themes present in the exhibition, including: the visual politics of city space; systems of alienation and enclosure; and issues of access.

Lourdes Correa-Carlo is an artist who works across drawing, photography, collage, video, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and a BFA in Sculpture from Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY (2015-2017) and has previously held residencies at Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2013); Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX (2010-2012); and Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY (2011). Her work has been exhibited with institutions that include the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL; Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; and Art Center South Florida, Miami, FL.

Alan Ruiz is a visual artist whose work explores the way space is produced as both material and ideology. His architectural interventions have been shown in exhibitions at the Queens Museum, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Wave Hill, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Ruiz has contributed writing to Archinect, TDR, BOMB Magazine, InVisible Culture, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. He has presented work at the Storefront for Art & Architecture, MoMA PS1, and PSi Hamburg. Ruiz received an MFA from Yale University and was a 2015 – 2016 fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is a current artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center.

Christian Camacho-Light is a curator and writer based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Stage 6: Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Down-Below, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY (2016) and Standard Forms, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2016). They are currently at work on an exhibition to be shown at the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts, Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ (November 2017). They hold an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and a BA in Art History from Vassar College.

Jun 29

“Wall < Enter" Interactive Art Installation

By wpengine

Join us for the closing reception of “Wall < Enter,” an interactive immersive art installation produced by diverse New York City youth and families in collaboration with the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services Arts and Literacy Program, artist/AED Laura Paris, and teaching artist/art therapist planning team Tomas Manon, Frank Mena, Jenn Perez, and Rocko Seymour. Featuring music provided by 8 Ball Radio DJs and refreshments!

“Wall < Enter” offers an important opportunity to reflect upon the current climate of fear and intimidation faced by immigrant populations in our communities through an interactive collaborative art project made by those most affected by this climate and their allies.

For “Wall < Enter”, the 1,300 young people who attend the Arts and Literacy Program and their families were invited to reflect upon President Donald Trump’s proposed wall between the US and Mexico and then reimagine what borders between countries should look like. The result is a projected montage of images , writing, dance, music and monologues about borders, personal stories, inter-culturation and the impact of immigration policy. The project offers visitors an opportunity to hear from those most affected by the anti-immigrant sentiment fostered by the Trump administration, and, simultaneously, provides participants with an opportunity to imagine alternatives to the anti-immigration plans and policies laid out by our president.

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On the Fourth of July, we unveiled an interactive station in the form of a voting booth that visitors can use to contribute their own stories through writing, drawing, audio and video content. These contributions will be added to the final installation. The opening of the voting booth coincided with “The Real Fireworks,” a benefit concert for Make the Road NY featuring Marc Ribot and M.A.K.U. Soundsystem.

These contributions will be on view along with the work by Coalition for Hispanic Family Services Arts and Literacy Program participants.

Jun 15

Amie Cunat: The Clock is Taking a Nap.

By wpengine

Knockdown Center is pleased to present The Clock is Taking a Nap., a mural by Amie Cunat as a part of FiftyTwo Ft, a series of long-term wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

The imagery within the mural is sourced from drawings of churches and other buildings in New York City. The work depicts building-like structures tightly packed across the wall as if they had been extracted from a dense urban neighborhood where houses, commercial buildings, and places of worship respond and form to their adjacent architecture. In some areas, the structures’ contours bend as if their frames have been pulled out, leaving behind the suggestion of a jelly-like skin sagging from its own weight. In others, the forms maintain a sense of buoyancy, appearing to float or sway against the colloidal skyline, all in service of a larger atmospheric force that pushes this imagined landscape into contorted positions.

Exhibition Events

Sunday August 6, 2017, 5:00pm
Artist Talk
Sunday, August 6, 2017, 6:00-8:00pm
Opening Reception

Amie Cunat is a Japanese-American artist raised in McHenry, IL. Her paintings and installations, characterized by biomorphic forms and comedic hues, investigate parallels between abstraction and perception. She earned a BA in Visual Art and Art History from Fordham University, a Post-Baccalaureate Degree in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Cornell University. Her recent exhibitions include Curtains at This Friday or Next Friday (NY), C+C: Kat Chamberlin and Amie Cunat at SPRING/BREAK Art Show (Curated by Nicholas Cueva, NY), Hideout at The Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill (NY), Moon Nets, Alphabet Letters at Outside (MA), Clue, Cue at Foley Gallery Window Installation (NY), and Blood and Sand at Mountain (NY). She has participated in the Studios at MASS MoCA Residency (MA), Guttenberg Arts Space and Time Artist Residency (NJ), The Artist-Teacher Residency at Cooper Union (NY), and AIRY Yamanashi (Kofu, Japan). Cunat is Adjunct Faculty of Painting and Drawing at Fordham University. She lives and works in New York, NY.

Jun 15

großer Lauscher

By wpengine

großer Lauscher (“big Eavesdropper” in German) is a spatial sound installation created by interdisciplinary artist Alyssa Miserendino. The piece was recorded in the main radar dome at the Field Station Berlin, a listening station built during the Cold War by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Exhibited in the darkness, the piece is comprised of five narrators from five different continents reciting the story of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while the protracted echos created by the architecture allow visitors to visualize the space of the Field Station.

Exhibition Events

July 22, 2017, 6:00-9:00pm
Opening reception with artist talk
August 27, 2017, 6:00 -8:00pm
Closing reception

This project is made possible by an Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council with support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources + a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. This project is sponsored by Arup and Genelec.

About Arup
In order to curate an experience driven solely by sound, the unique acoustic signature of the main radar dome at the Field Station Berlin called for a playful interpretation and immersive implementation through sound design. The performance was recorded in a multichannel audio format in Berlin by Alyssa Miserendino with technical support from Arup. In close collaboration with the artist the audio was then processed, spatialized, and rendered into the final piece by Arup acoustic designers using the proprietary 3D audio technology of the Arup SoundLab®. Arup concurrently designed a spatial sound system to render the piece and provided acoustic consulting expertise for the exhibition space, optimizing the patron aural experience. http://www.arup.com

Executive producer: Ryan Biziorek, Arup

Experience design, audiovisual systems design, sound design, programming and production: Léonard Roussel, Arup

About Genelec
Genelec is a sponsor of the project großer Lauscher, providing studio monitors and mounting accessories for the installation at Knockdown Center. Genelec’s design philosophy is based on sustainable development and environmental values, using industrial design to serve their products’ acoustical performance. Genelec aims to deliver performance-driven, tonally neutral speaker and subwoofer systems for audio professionals and enthusiasts. https://www.genelec.com/

About the artist
Alyssa Miserendino is an interdisciplinary artist & educator, working in photography, sculpture, video, sound, performance & installation. She creates artwork driven by her interest in paradox & connection. Since her undergraduate fellowship award, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her work has since been supported by organizations such as the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and ARUP. She completed her Masters in Fine Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is currently teaching at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Driven by synchronicity, Alyssa meets collaborative artists and strangers on planes, through daily routine encounters, & through the stories we share with one another. Her eye is informed by the study of architecture, traveling to France to study at Vitra’s Boisbuchet & to Santa Barbara, California to study with a residential green architect. Her childhood study of music fosters a rhythm of comfort while working with collaborative teams, during project productions. In addition, she worked as an interior designer & commercial photographer for over a decade, while pursuing an artistic career late at night. This experience and her 5th grade paper on black holes have informed her artistic practice to date.

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May 24

Yeah, That’s What She Said! Presents: MOTHERLAND

By wpengine

Yeah, That’s What She Said! (YTWSS) holds their annual pop-up event featuring art, performances, and workshops by working class and poor women, women of color, immigrant women, trans women, and queer women. YTWSS*2017’s theme is MOTHERLAND. What does home mean to you? What does lineage mean to you? What does connection and intimacy with your past, present, and future mean to you?

This weekend-long event at Knockdown Center will include work selected from an open call related to environmental justice, places of origin, family and chosen family, reproductive justice and bodily autonomy, borders, ancestry and lineage, and borders, nationalism, and colonialism.

This is an 18+ event

Full Schedule of Events

Friday, July 7

7 – 10 pm
Opening Event, YTWSS artwork on view

7:30 – 8:30pm
Open mic
(Sign-Up Link Here)

Saturday, July 8

2pm
Shuttle from L Train Jefferson stop begins

2 – 10pm
Gallery open

3:30 – 6pm
Women and Femmes only Workshops

3:30 – 4:30pm: Solidifying Foundations: Organizing and Self/Collective Care as Descendants of our Mothers
5 – 6pm: Femme In Public: Using Art & Fashion as Political Disruption

7 – 10pm
Music, dance, and poetry performances with Candice Iloh, Zoe map, STEFA*, Mikeala Xochitl, Cheroya Davenport, Deborah Conton, NECIA, Linda La Sarabi, Anesha.

Sunday, July 9

2 – 10pm
Gallery open

5 – 6pm
Women and Femmes only Workshop
Following Our Inner Compass: Honing & Honoring Our Intuition

7 – 8:30pm
MOTHERLAND Film Screening and Q & A

ABOUT

Yeah, That’s What She Said! is a series of women-lead events that build relationships and experiences through the arts and activism centering working class and poor women, women of color, immigrant women, trans women and queer women. We are collectively self-organized and largely funded by community support. From 2014-2016, we held weekend-long pop-ups that brought together hundreds of women from across New York City.

May 17

Formal Complaint: Artists in Conversation

By wpengine

Join artists Female Background, Aria Dean (via Skype), Christopher Hanrahan, and Mario Navarro in a reading and conversation with Formal Complaint co–curator Dana Kopel. For this event each artist will read a brief passage (from a text of their own, or one that they admire) that connects to their work and ideas. Following the reading, Kopel will moderate a discussion on the exhibition’s themes of sad formalism, tender objects, and domestic and vernacular architecture.

About Formal Complaint
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.

May 12

The Dream Wanderer

By wpengine

In June, The Dream Wanderer arrives at Knockdown Center! This transformed shuttle bus now houses an immersive and interactive virtual reality installation currently on a nationwide tour, exhibiting an original VR work created by Flatsitter Media Arts Collective.

The VR experience is suitable for children ages 8+.

Schedule:
Thursday, June 15, 5:00pm – 9:00pm
Friday, June 16, 5:00pm – 9:00pm
Saturday, June 17, 2:00pm-8:00pm

ABOUT THE DREAM WANDERER

This has never been done before…

The Dream Wanderer was once a forgotten Ford Econoline transit shuttle parked in the back lot at a used car dealership in Olean, NY. After being gutted and wrapped and retrofitted, the Dream Wanderer has a third life as a touring virtual reality gallery showcasing all-original virtual reality artworks by Buffalo-based arts collective Flatsitter. So far, tour stops have included Miami Beach (Satellite Art Fair during Art Basel), Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in Central Florida, SOUP Experimental Space (Tallahassee), The Music Box Village (New Orleans), The French Quarter (New Orleans), Cheer Up Charlie’s (Austin, TX), Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX), Pump Project (Austin, TX), Convivio (Oaxaca), Material Art Fair (Mexico City), and Lawn Gnome Books (Phoenix), NOMAD (Los Angeles), Marfa Myths (Marfa), SXSW (Austin), Castillo Blanc0 (New Orleans), Ace Hotel (Pittsburgh), and Elephant Gallery (Nashville). Upcoming stops include Moogfest in May.

ABOUT LILY DALE

The original VR work being exhibited is titled “Lily Dale” and is a virtual reality exploration of spiritualism and the afterlife. This experience features a custom-drawn tarot deck and 20 different VR vignettes for multiple viewings. More info: http://lilydale.flatsitter.com

Lily Dale was founded in 1879 as a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers. Residents of this small town in Western New York claim to communicate with the dead. The ‘Guidelines for Spiritualism’ are posted on the wall of the Assembly Hall in downtown Lily Dale.

Guideline #4 reads: “We Never Die”

The virtual reality experience incorporates interviews with Lily Dale resident mediums, motion capture from movement artist Ginger Wagg, and a deck of hand-drawn tarot cards by artist Bobby Griffiths.

ABOUT FLATSITTER

FLATSITTER is an interdisciplinary collaborative that incorporates video, film, software programming, performance and installation. The artistic works nurture a perception of society, community and environment as interlocking parts of a creative experience and are exhibited in an array of formats, such as ephemeral web collections, live performances, site-specific installations, short films, and live virtual reality experiences.

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The bus was funded with generous donations from kind people. Major contributors include: Rick Smith from Silo City and the VRTC Foundation.

The interior of the bus was built with generous assistance from carpenter Robert Sturm.

The Subpac haptic feedback vests were provided with support from Subpac.

Apr 25

Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories

By wpengine

For her solo exhibition at Knockdown Center, Lourdes Correa-Carlo has produced seven new works in dialogue with urban embodiment and the visual politics of city space. Through sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and installation, Intended Trajectories reflects the artist’s ongoing engagement with her material surroundings, as well as her interest in the relationship between the body and the built environment.

While navigating public space in New York City, Correa-Carlo has been taking photographs of architectural facades, construction sites, objects discarded on the street. With these images, she employs a range of materials—often industrial or salvaged—in order to examine the more abstract aspects of physical structures, drawing out the social and psychological effects of architecture and urban planning.

Within the exhibition, a series of site-specific installations engage the architectural specificities of Knockdown Center, referencing the building’s former use as a glass factory, and later as the site of a frame and door company. These works—creeping across walls and embedding themselves in doorways—mimic, augment, or conceal the gallery’s vestigial industrial features, unsettling the exhibition’s frame. Other sculptural and drawing-based works introduce outside architectural elements into the gallery, yielding a constellation of cityscapes that alter the viewer’s sense of location and scale. The remaining works, a series of vinyl prints on glass and a two-channel video, embrace the familiar sights of the city’s public transportation systems, the interstitial and subterranean spaces of waiting and watching.

Together, the works in the exhibition look inward and outward at once, mapping a psychogeography of encounter between artist and city, body and building.

Exhibition Events

Saturday June 10, 6 – 9pm
Opening Reception with artist-led tour
Thursday July 13, 7:30pm
Lourdes Correa-Carlo and Alan Ruiz in Conversation

Lourdes Correa-Carlo (b. 1970, San Juan) is an artist who works across drawing, photography, collage, video, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and a BFA in Sculpture from Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY (2015-2017) and has previously held residencies at Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2013); Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX (2010-2012); and Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY (2011). Her work has been exhibited with institutions that include the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL; Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; and Art Center South Florida, Miami, FL.

Christian Camacho-Light is a curator and writer based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Stage 6: Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Down-Below, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY (2016) and Standard Forms, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2016). They are currently at work on an exhibition to be shown at the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts, Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ (November 2017). They hold an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and a BA in Art History from Vassar College.

Lourdes Correa-Carlo: Intended Trajectories is presented with the generous support of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Special thanks to Ece Gürleyik, Drew Lichtenstein, Kristine Servia, and Elena Yelamos.

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