Called the “SXSW of blockchain”, Ethereal brings together futurists, entrepreneurs, investors, artists, musicians, and humanitarians for two days of storytelling and knowledge sharing around the future we want to build using the power of transformative technologies.
For the final Sunday Service of the spring season, curated by Mariana Valencia, performance, film and sound artists explore notions of solid states. They ask whether something that’s solid is something that can be pressed into, dislocated or broken— Are solid states reliable? Through observations of shorelines, the stages of ice and wax they find sustenance in time as the symbology of open chests attune us to the other. Imagery, live performance and sound interpret these transitions that find a homes within flux.
About the Curator
Mariana Valencia, is a dance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Valencia has held residencies at Chez Bushwick (2013), New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013-14), ISSUE Project Room (2015) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2016-18). In Los Angeles, she’s held residencies at Show Box LA and Pieter Pasd (2014). Her work has been presented at Danspace Project, Roulette, the Center for Performance Research, The New Museum, The Women and Performance Journal, Lec/Dem, Ugly Duckling Presse, AUNTS and The L.A.B at The Kitchen. As a performer, Valencia has worked with musician Jules Gimbrone; video artists Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, and AK Burns and in dances by robbinschilds, Kim Brandt and MPA. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading a partner of Artists Space Books and Talks and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). Valencia holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006) with a concentration in dance and ethnography.
About the Artists
Ayano Elson is a choreographer and designer. She was born in Okinawa, Japan, and is a 2018 Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow. Her work has been presented by Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance (Work Up), Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, Roulette (lec/dem), and AUNTS at Arts@Renaissance, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New Museum. As a dancer, Ayano has had the pleasure to perform in works by artists Phoebe Berglund, Kim Brandt, Jessica Cook, devynn emory, and Glass Ghost in places like BRIC, CATCH at the Invisible Dog, the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, Lincoln Center, MoMA PS1, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, New Museum, PS122, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and SculptureCenter.
Jordan Lord is an artist, writer, and filmmaker who works primarily in video, text, and performance. His work is concerned with the relationship between framing and support, historical and emotional debts, documentary and description. Since 2012, he has been a member of No Total, a collective of performers and a reading group that has both shown work and organized a number of performances at Artists Space Books & Talks and Arika Episode 4: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. In 2017, he organized a series of screenings at the CUNY Graduate Center, entitled “‘Recording and Performing’: Apparatuses of Capture, Documentary, and Liveness in Artists’ Cinema.” He is currently working on an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.
lily bo shapiro is a performance-oriented artist born and raised in New York City. Current obsessions reside in shifting constellations of archive, elision, rejuvenation and the strangely intimate (intimately strange). bo works at an ethic of ongoingness, togethering and care, approaching circulation as an antidote to the monumentals. [also, ‘i love you’ and ‘i am proud of you’ are important things i am saying a lot right now].
Jean Carla Rodea is an interdisciplinary artist with a research based practice. She is originally from Mexico City and currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works across disciplines such as music, sound, performance, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice is informed by memory, identity, immigration, ritual, performance, and improvisation. Rodea’s work questions critical socio-political issues such as: the politics of the body, gender, and the asymmetry of human relations. She has performed and shown work at Roulette, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Judson Church, Panoply Lab, Rio ll Gallery, The Clemente, El Museo de Los Sures, to mention a few.
Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.
About Sunday Service
Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.
XHOSA will be premiering a new music video for her single “Midnight Girl” directed by Tristan Reginato.
To celebrate, XHOSA will be hosting a night of performances of artists who were directly involved in the making of the video!
On June 30th, Full Moon returns with a new rhythm.
A beautiful, intimate location located just east of Williamsburg bathed in the stars, forged by the elements.
Elevated culinary choices and collaborators. Three music stages with acts that tantalize and entice from 2pm – 4am. New York’s summer ritual of love and music will last until the moon begins to set.
The players are ready. The moon raises its curtain. Tickets on sale now: http://fullmoonfest.com/
In July, Knockdown Center will be the backdrop for the annual Ladies of Hip Hop dance battle, LADIES BATTLE! Female competitors from around the world travel to NYC for this battle.
LADIES BATTLE! is 1-on-1 Popping, Hip-Hop, Waacking, House and Dancehall. Doors open and our stellar all-female DJ line-up is spinning hip-hop, funk, house, soul, and classics. The winners will be awarded cash prizes, gift bags and one-year “bragging rights”. The winner can boost themselves as one of the world’s best female Hip- Hop dancers!
Knockdown Center is pleased to present Morir Soñando, a multimedia group exhibition on view June 22 – August 19, 2018. Artists Penn Eastburn, Valery Estabrook, Hein Koh, Joiri Minaya, Kristianne Molina, Onel Naar, Esther Ruiz, Cristina Tufiño, and Woolpunk engage with softness and vulnerability in their work addressing contemporary social and political issues.
The exhibition’s title, Morir Soñando, is borrowed from the popular Dominican beverage made of orange juice and milk. When combined with the acidity in the juice, and if not made at the proper temperature or mixed with a particular rhythm, the milk has the potential to curdle. A careful, soft choreography is necessary to infuse two unlikely ingredients in delicious harmony.
The delicate process of making morir soñando, and its resistance to easy preparation and consumption parallels the artists’ use of materials. Working across painting, sculpture, textiles, and video, each artist approaches difficult subject matter such as racial tensions, gender-based violence, neocolonial trauma, and environmental concerns, but do so in subtle, soft ways, employing care and attention to their engagement with materials. Together, the works included articulate the potential of vulnerability as a tool for liberation.
About the Artists:
Penn Eastburn is a painter, filmmaker, and digital animator. His paintings explore the accidental beauty and abstraction of ordinary, often overlooked spaces and elements found in the urban landscape, as well as the permanence of the things we create, both as artists and inhabitants of Earth.
Valery Jung Estabrook is a multidisciplinary Korean American artist whose work explores identity and technology. She seeks to push the boundaries of how we interact with and perceive new media by using unexpected approaches and materials. Often installed as themed tableaus, the work is intended to be experienced through various sensate strategies by asking the audience to not simply “view” but to also touch and feel. These multi-media presentations provide the audience with an immediacy of engagement, making complex narratives personalized and accessible.
Hein Koh is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Utilizing soft sculpture as her primary medium, Koh subverts traditional gendered expectations about sexuality, motherhood, and femininity. Her practice incorporates irreverent humor, tactile play, and a detailed attention to materials. Like the destabilizing fluidity present in gender itself, much of her work embodies “a balance between the beautiful and the grotesque”––a surrealist exploration of the inner psyche.
Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-American artist born in 1990. Living between the United States and the Dominican Republic (and having lived in Belgium for a while) has made Minaya aware of her own difference and subjectivity depending on context. Influenced by this, her work meditates on representation, identity constructions, gender roles, migration and nature from a personal place but also through larger transcultural and historical frames.
Born in Manila, Philippines, artist Kristianne Molina’s interdisciplinary practices gravitate toward deconstructing natural dyeing techniques as a painting process, textiles, embroidery, installation, stop-motion, performance and wearable arts. Kristianne’s intention in her work is to reflect the marriage of her Philippine-American experiences and to respond to current events prevalent in her generation. Her research with natural dyes stems from a rediscovery of her Philippine roots and ancestral textiles. The colors extracted from cochineal are linked to the history of Spanish and American colonization in the Philippines.
Onel Naar is an American artist of Puerto Rican and Lebanese Dominican descent born in the South Bronx of the late 70s to immigrant parents. A recurring interest in his work is the dynamics inherent to diptychs––exploring the interplay between physical and conceptual dualities. Representative of seemingly disparate themes like the mysticism recurrent in both consumer culture and religious rhetoric, Naar’s work speaks to the conflicts within diasporic currents and their respective homelands.
Esther Ruiz is an LA-based sculptor who creates objects that operate simultaneously as miniature landscapes from a distant future and actual size sculptures informed by the family of Minimalism. Inspired by space operas, pop culture, geometry, and the setting sun, her works employ color and form mimicking natural processes.
Cristina Tufiño is a visual artist inspired by consumer goods, industrial debris and autobiographical narratives and objects. She addresses her practice as an archaeologist hoarder rummaging through a broad cultural system of references, with a particular nod to artifacts and museological aesthetics. Her multimedia works arise from a process of assembling, associating and translating images and ideas inspired by seemingly oppositional languages and spaces.
Woolpunk is an American artist, born in Summit, NJ in 1971. She is inspired by an immigrant seamstress grandmother who sewed American flags. Woolpunk uses a variety of craft techniques and materials to create knitted installations, quilted sculptures, and embroidered photographs.
About the Curator:
Alex Santana is a visual arts scholar and writer, with a deep interest in politically-engaged contemporary art and curatorial studies. She earned her B.A. from NYU and her M.A. from Tulane University, focusing on Latin American & Caribbean art history. She has held positions at El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans, LA), the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA), and Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ). Originally from Newark, NJ, Alex is a child of immigrants from Spain and the Dominican Republic.
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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.
Chicken & Beer, one of the wildest parties in town is back this summer! Chicken…Beer…and you never know who might show up!
Outside in the Ruins, Knockdown Center’s backyard.
Brooklyn based independent label Fool’s Gold is New York’s Loudest; bridging musical worlds and pushing a fun, forward thinking aesthetic since 2007. Fool’s Gold’s annual DAY OFF series has become one of the world’s premier hip-hop festivals, a place where the entire creative community gathers as new stars are minted. The 2018 edition is focused more than ever on emerging talent, spotting rising talent early and putting them on a big stage before anyone else!
Tickets on sale now!
