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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.

Bushwig NYC 2019

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BUSHWIG NYC 2019
SHAKE. THE. HOUSE.
September 7th and 8th at the Knockdown Center.

This year Bushwig will be even more legendary than ever before with over 300 iconic performers.

Featuring live music from Slayyyter, Mykki Blanco, AJA, Christeene.

Drag shows from Nina West, Bubble T, Charlene, Tammie Brown, Lady Bunny, Horrorchata and all of your Brooklyn favorites.

Join us for 23 hours of drag, dancing, live music, shopping with over 30 vendors and more.

♥ Dance to sets by Iconic DJs like Jasmine Infiniti & Justin Cudmore.
♥ Carry at the Ketel One Bar.
♥ Over indulge with our food vendors.
♥ Get your desserts in the dark room. 😉

Ride our FREE SHUTTLE from Jefferson L Train Station (Jefferson St. and Wyckoff Ave.) to the venue or alternatively use our code “WIGRIDE19” on LYFT for a 20% discount.

Bushwig is a safer space with LGBTQ friendly security, wheelchair access, and designated space near the stage for guests with disabilities. For reservation please email: Simon@Bushwig.com

Final tickets on sale now!

Bushwig NYC is an adults only 21+ event.
#shakethehouse #bushwig2019

Sunday Service: Shawné Michaelain Holloway Presents…

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Join us for the final Sunday Service of the Spring season, curated by shawné michaelain holloway! In a round-robin style format inspired by Chicago’s DIY scene, artists David Ian Bellows/Griess, Nia Nottage, and xtian w bring an evening of video, movement, and poetry works in response to the following prompt:
 
“Caged. Restricted. Routinized. Disciplined. Landlocked. Bound. Promised. Abiding. For keeps, keepsakes, being kept. Domestication. Wrangling. Being a pet. Seclusion. Saving. No matter where you go, it’s there. New construction. Bauhaus. Lucid dreaming. Sleep paralysis. Barriers. Doors. What’s on the other side? Claustrophobia. Warmth. Wonder. Silence. Cushion. Bed. Returning to reflection. Alone time.”

About the Artists

David Ian Bellows/Griess (born Omaha, NE 1984) explores themes of control, labor, and sexual play through diy surveillance to relay the physicality and the resilience of the body and what might be possible/impossible for the body to sustain.

Nia Nottage is a performance artist and founding member of performance collective Steph Christ – https://stephs.net. Recent projects include POSSESSION (2017-8) at Real Estate Fine Art, Device Controlled (2016) at Panoply Performance Lab, Gloss (2019) at Shawn Escarciga’s Inaugural Hallway Show, LOVE LETTERS//TIME ALONE (2018) at Human Trash Dump, Frances Yeoland: Circula (2018) at 959 Kent Ave, You Should Wake Up Earlier (2017) with No Total, Programs Associate at Artists Space, Dysfunctional poetry reading at MoMA PS1 (2017), and Curatorial Fellow at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2019).

xtian w is a non binary trans femme writer and performer. Their poems and essays appear in [PANK], No, Dear, VIDA, Bone Bouquet, Jaded Ibis, and Hematopoiesis Press, among others. Current creative—life interests include Medusa, hysteria, Trans sensorialities, weaving and braiding, coriander, ancestry, gut bacteria, ghazals, list poems, friendship beyond heteronormativity, boundaries, and houseplants. An Aquarius sun/ Capricorn moon/ Virgo rising, xtian is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and paints their nails in Brooklyn.

About the Curator

Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a new media artist using sound, video, and performance to shape the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), The Kitchen (NYC, NY) Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL). Currently, Holloway teaches in the New Arts Journalism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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 exploration of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis WilkinsonStephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her work, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations through her multiple practices. Alexis Wilkinson is the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center.

Full Season Calendar and Details

Sunday Service: Yanira Castro Presents…

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Join us for Sunday Service curated by Yanira Castro, who brings together Martita Abril, Rosana Cabán, Cori Olinghouse, Alexis Ruiseco-Lombera, Tara Sheena to explore communing, commingling, and being together in performance.

To commune is the essential action in performance. Bodies converge in time and space. A word close to commune is to commingle. Commingling makes me think of fluids and also of immersion and dinners without agenda: the ebb of them, the constant shifts of center–who is speaking, laughing, cooking, dancing, yelling, crying? Fred Moten in The Undercommons: “We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.” How does your practice commune? How does it commingle (or not)? Shift the center? Pour out of “boundaries”? How do you think about the complications of being together in performance?

About the Artists
Martita Abril is a performer, choreographer, and teaching artist from the border city of Tijuana, México. She earned her BFA from San Diego State University and works with dance artists and companies throughout México and the US, including projects and performances with Lux Boreal Danza Contemporánea, Allyson Green, Yanira Castro / a canary torsi, Mina Nishimura, Rebecca Davis, Daria Fain and Rober Kocik, Cori Olinghouse, and Will Rawls. She recently was a performer in Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions at the Museum of Modern Art. She’s been named a PECDA Scholar as a “Young Creator”, a FONCA fellow, and Fresh Tracks Resident at NYLA. She’s also served as a mentor for the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program in 2015, 2016, & 2018. In 2014 she was named Outstanding Alumna by SDSU. www.martita-abril.org

Rosana Cabán is a Puerto Rican born, Florida raised and Brooklyn based audio engineer, producer, and sound artist. She has performed at the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMa ps1, National Sawdust, the Fillmore, Webster Hall, and over 80 rock venues across the US and Canada. She was an assistant to Mindy Abovitz’s The Oral History of the Female Drummer where she helped coordinate and allocate positioning 20 drummers throughout the Brooklyn Museum. Cabán also composed one of four movements for 19 drummers titled Roto Hotel which was performed at the lobby of the Ace Hotel in New York and produced by Tom Tom Magazine. Currently, she is a Sound Art MFA candidate at Columbia University where she is experimenting with sculptural sound works inspired by vintage technology, nostalgia, and tech noir.

Cori Olinghouse is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and curator. Her works have been commissioned by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, BRIC Arts Media, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Movement Research, and Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her practice explores gender as the shape-shifting of multiple perspectives—drawing from Lauren Berlant’s ideas of humor as a space for transformation. She is the founder and director of The Portal Project, a living archives initiative dedicated to the transmission of performance through archival and curatorial frameworks. Olinghouse holds an MA in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University and serves as visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Alexis Ruiseco-Lombera is a Cuban visual artist, performance artist, and writer prompted by the intersection between being non-binary and Cubanidad. Investigating the ontological labour of queer and trans bodies, Ruiseco-Lombera makes performance, video, and photographs responding to their entanglements with trauma, violence, contact, and intimacy.

Tara Sheena is a dancer, writer, and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. As a performer, she is engaged on upcoming projects with choreographers Ivy Baldwin, Ursula Eagly, Leyya Mona Tawil and Nadia Tykulsker. Recently, she has been involved in the work of Stormy Budwig, Catherine Galasso, Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Beth Graczyk, and the feature film Shirley with choreography by Faye Driscoll. As a writer, she has been obsessed with the ways capitalism, race, and performance intersect in dance spaces, what she refers to as “Capital-D Dance.” Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, Fjord Review, DIY Dancer, the Huffington Post, Culturebot and Critical Correspondence. Originally from Michigan, she graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 with a BFA in Dance and BA in English.

About the Curator

Puerto Rican choreographer Yanira Castro is a Bessie-award-winning artist. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi. Castro’s work borrows from dance, performance, and visual art often utilizing interactive technology to form hybrid works. With her collaborators she has developed over ten projects for the stage, gallery and non-traditional sites ranging from video installations, performances and text-based computer games. The work was been presented most recently in NYC at The Chocolate Factory, The Invisible Dog, Abrons, and Danspace Project. Currently, she is a 2018/19 New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Artist, 2018 Yaddo Fellow and Marble House Project Artist-in-Residence. She has received various awards including NYFA’s Choreography Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project, and a 2019 NYSCA Theater Commission

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 exploration of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis WilkinsonStephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her work, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations through her multiple practices. Alexis Wilkinson is the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center.

Full Season Calendar and Details

Sunday Service: ray ferreira Presents…

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Join us for Sunday Service hosted by ray ferreira who has gathered artists KT Pe Benito, Lindsay “Londs” Reuter, Aldrin Valdez, and Nicki Wong to share works across forms in response to the following prompt:

Moving through the city, a slow blink gives way to blur gives way. To a discontinuity, bodies shifting, slipping through each other. The bass moves through fleshy fluid —vesicles on vesicles on vesicles. Histories spiral though. Crests and throughs distorts them chemical laced semipermeable membranes. Bodies of water, heavenly ones, the monstrous no place from island to island. A body is only neat when bleached by white light. Sharp, the street lamp provides a pain without pleasure, safety —a static condition. Separateness and particularity —a discontinuity to not make. I try and return to blur, but it is not a state.

About the Artists

KT Pe Benito is a nonbinary queer Filipinx, a Filipino man, and a white woman. Their work in writing and interdisciplinary art making is diaristic, but concerns larger systems and complexes at work around them in their daily life such as politicizing their late Filipino grandmother’s hypothesized existence, sustaining victim.survivor Filipinx futurity, and recognizing U.S. colonization onto a queer hapa body. They’re interested in the interpolation of the somatic shape they were born into and how it continues to stereotype (read: determine) their labor, their lovers, their online personas, and real life’s path.
Website: ktpebenito.com

Lindsay “Londs” Reuter makes performances that question materiality, family, and bravery. Londs has received support from New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks 2014-2015), Danspace Project (Food for Thought), and Movement Research at the Judson Church. She has been in residence at Ponderosa (Queeries Residency), the Space on Ryder Farm, and will be in residence at Snug Harbor Cultural Center this May. Londs is an M.A. candidate in Disability Studies at the City University of New York.

Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren’t Here (Nightboat Books, 2018). Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship & Poets House. They’ve co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.

Born in Hong Kong and based in New York, Nicki Wong is an interdisciplinary artist who works in performance, sculpture and social practice. Wong’s movement-based and improvisational works examine the play of language and its meaning and the construction of power dynamics between people and objects. These embodied gestures probe the networks between human subjects and the materiality of objects. Wong is currently a BFA candidate at Hunter College.
Website:

About the Curator

ray ferreira w h e n a m i blaqlatinx from occupied Lenape lands called New York, N Y: the illegitimate EEUU. An o the r Corona, Queens a spacetimemattering a materialdiscusive (dis) continuity: [the Caribbean, the Greater Antilles, Hispañola, the Dominican Republic —> Corona, Queens] : history.
w h e n a m i a performer of sorts aka multidisciplinary artist aka polymath. She stays playin : the dance between materiality<->language through her body w h e n a m i where histories are made and remade. She plays with iridescence, text, rhythms (aka systems), to cruise a quantum poetics. Englishes, Spanishes, and other body languages spiral, dance, and twirl to create a banj criticality: that turnup w/the grls; that swerve past white cishet patriarchy. wh e n ami

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 exploration of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis WilkinsonStephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her work, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations through her multiple practices. Alexis Wilkinson is the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center.

Full Season Calendar and Details

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.

Kuldeep Singh: THROUGH THE KALI-EROS

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Kuldeep Singh: THROUGH THE KĀLI-EROS, an evening of immersive performance.

Kali, the often misunderstood goddess of time, terror, destruction and protection is visualized here as a system of performative and sonic tropes equated to Eros.

Weaving together visual art elements with Indian classical dance gestures and theatre, multidisciplinary artist Kuldeep Singh and his collaborators present THROUGH THE KĀLI-EROS, an installation based performance project where meanings and boundaries are blurred through pathos and eros.

Against a hypnotic score drawn from Hindustani classical music layered with tones of prolonged echoed narrations in gibberish and live instrumental music, the work interlaces a myriad of haunting gestures and fluctuating movements as acts, interspersed with a film projected on suspended painted surfaces. These performance acts are fragmented in nature and unfold on cracked mud and dirt ground within Knockdown Centers large industrial space. Reflecting on a chapter in the 12th century Sanskrit tome Manasollasà that addresses the nature of dance, the work attends to realities of the post-colonial world through a relationship between abstraction and representation.

THROUGH THE KĀLI-EROS presents the viewer with a concocted world of its own, where hybrid meanings lead to an inner cleansing mechanism.

Collaborators include Jeffrey Grunthaner on guitar, Harsh Shah on sitar and vocals, and Russell Cole in movement.

About the artists
Kuldeep Singh is a multi-disciplinary artist with a compound artistic practice, comprising a system of non-linear narratives in visual art and multi-media performance. Through inventing situations in theatrical installations and hybrid myths, he surveys hiatuses in post-colonial histories. With his intensive, decade long training in the Indian classical dance form of Odissi (with critically acclaimed dancer Madhavi Mudgal, in New Delhi) he deconstructs components in movement and acting, sound/percussion mnemonics and spatial arrangements – all as re-arranged fragments in layers, engaging in body politics and social anthropology. The content transpires from eclectic stories across timelines, classic Sanskrit texts, and is layered to contemporary human situations – re emphasizing contemporary relevances.

Kuldeep is the recipient of some of the prestigious art residencies including: the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME (2014), Yaddo, NY (2015) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, NE (2016); and has recently been artist in residence at Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn (2018) and at HH Art Spaces, Goa (2018) – on an award from Inlaks Foundation, Mumbai. He recently has been awarded the highly competitive New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2018), in interdisciplinary arts category. Kuldeep holds the National Freedom of Expression Award, Mumbai (2009, Infinity Films). His selected solo performances include at the Kolkata International Performance Festival (2014), Yaddo (2015) and Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival in Chicago (2016), La Mama Theater (2016), and most recently at Asia Society, NYC (2018) to name a few. His selected lectures & demonstrations include at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art – New Delhi, Queens Museum – NYC, Delhi University, University College London, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska-Omaha and Hunter College, NYC.

Russell Cole is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. His works are often collaborative and improvisatory and explore the intersection of poetry, music, circus and dance. He holds an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College and has performed with The Commons Choir,Tori Lawrence & amp; Co., and recently at Triskelion’s Never Before, Never Again festival with Luther Bangert. He is co-founder of the art/literature magazine 叵CLIP.

Jeffrey Grunthaner is a writer, artist, musician, and curator based in Brooklyn. Their articles, reviews, poems, and essays have appeared via Drag City Books, BOMB, American Art Catalogues, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet News, Hyperallergic, and other venues. Recent curatorial projects include the reading and discussion series Conversations in Contemporary Poetics at Hauser & Wirth, New York City, and Daniel Turner; Drawings and Sculpture, at Spoonbill Studio, Brooklyn.

Harsh Shah is a pursuing a full fledge career as a Construction Manager in NYC. But his passion and yearning for instrumental sitar and Indian classical vocal music has pulled him for diversified collaborating experience with many other instrumentalists – including Indian flute, Violin and Veena and dancers. He is in training, past 4 years under the guidance of Indrojit Roy Chowdhury – one of the most talented young exponents of Rampur Senia Gharana. And also learning Hindustani vocal music. His recent most collaboration was at Queens Museum, NY.

About Residency Unlimited (RU)
Residency Unlimited (RU) supports the creative process and promotes exchange through its unique residency program and year-round public programs. Moving beyond the traditional studio model, RU forges strategic partnerships with collaborating institutions to offer flexible and customized residencies designed to meet the individual goals, needs and visions of local and international artists and curators. RU is particularly committed to promoting multidisciplinary practices and building lasting connections between residents and the broader arts community.

 

Photos courtesy of Zhiyuan Yang

Sunday Service Spring 2019 Season

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Join us this spring for Sunday Service, a free monthly series of live work across mediums. This season’s curators include: Sarah Zapata, ray ferreira, Yanira Castro, and Shawné Michaelain Holloway.

Sunday Service Spring 2019 Schedule:

March 10, 7pm: Curated by Sarah Zapata
April 14, 7pm: Curated by ray ferreira
May 5, 7pm: Curated by Yanira Castro
June 2, 7pm: Curated by Shawné Michaelain Holloway

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 exploration of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

About the Curators

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.

rayferreira w h e n a m i blaqlatinx from occupied Lenape lands called New York, N Y: the illegitimate EEUU. An o the r Corona, Queens a spacetimemattering a materialdiscusive (dis) continuity: [the Caribbean, the Greater Antilles, Hispañola, the Dominican Republic —> Corona, Queens] : history.
w h e n a m i a performer of sorts aka multidisciplinary artist aka polymath. She stays playin : the dance between materiality<->language through her body w h e n a m i where histories are made and remade. She plays with iridescence, text, rhythms (aka systems), to cruise a quantum poetics. Englishes, Spanishes, and other body languages spiral, dance, and twirl to create a banj criticality: that turnup w/the grls; that swerve past white cishet patriarchy. wh e n ami

Puerto Rican choreographer Yanira Castro is a Bessie-award-winning artist. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi. Castro’s work borrows from dance, performance, and visual art often utilizing interactive technology to form hybrid works. With her collaborators she has developed over ten projects for the stage, gallery and non-traditional sites ranging from video installations, performances and text-based computer games. The work was been presented most recently in NYC at The Chocolate Factory, The Invisible Dog, Abrons, and Danspace Project. Currently, she is a 2018/19 New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Artist, 2018 Yaddo Fellow and Marble House Project Artist-in-Residence. She has received various awards including NYFA’s Choreography Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project, and a 2019 NYSCA Theater Commission

Shawné Michaelain Holloway s a new media artist using sound, video, and performance to shape the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), The Kitchen (NYC, NY) Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL). Currently, Holloway teaches in the New Arts Journalism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis WilkinsonStephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her work, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations through her multiple practices. Alexis Wilkinson is the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center.

Sunday Service: Sarah Zapata Presents….

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Better Pleasures

“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

For the opening event of the Spring 2019 season, Sarah Zapata brings together four artists who explore identity and geopolitical space, to present an imagined future through the understanding of one’s own position. It is through the examination of past and place that helps transport the ideals of the future to decay current tribulations. We strive for a better society, deeper intimacy, greater understanding, and ultimately a new world.

About the Curator
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.

About the Artists
Ignacio Torres was born in the US/Mexico border in El Paso, Texas and received a B.F.A. magna cum laude from the University of North Texas. Currently, Torres lives and works in New York City and is known for his cyanotype portraiture of Latinxs, which have a distinctly cyan blue color. Torres attributes his practice to his border upbringing and the Chicano culture he grew up in. His work involves the use of alternative photographic processes that require extensive manual work. The principal concern of his work investigates identity, othering, migration and the physical or invisible borders that we vacillate between. Torres’s use of botany serves as a symbol to the threat of plant life created by man made borders and references the historical use the cyanotype process. His work was recently exhibited as part of a group show held by JW Anderson in London.

Athena Torri is an Ecuadorian Italian artist. Born in Milan, Torri grew up in Quito, Ecuador before immigrating to the United States. Torri has a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design, and a General Studies Certificate from the International Center of Photography. Her solo show, titled “Land of Opportunities”, was exhibited at Deli Gallery in New York. Conveyor Editions in New Jersey published Torri’s first monograph, The Outsider. Torri’s group shows include exhibitions at the International Center of Photography Triennial in New York, Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Re: Art Show 21 in Brooklyn, NY, Serpentine Galleries in London, and Stitching Electron in the Netherlands.

Leslie Martinez is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised between The Rio Grande Valley of the Texas-Mexican border and Dallas, Texas. They received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 2018 and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City in 2008. In the decade between, they worked as a full-time graphic designer in New York City’s apparel industry where computer-aided design and garment construction profoundly transformed their image/object construction methodology paving the way for a radically transformed approach to painting. Martinez is currently developing these emerging forms as an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. Recent group shows include Independence at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Texas, Heads/Tails at Next to Nothing Gallery in New York City, Way Out Now at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, California, Kaleidoscope at Kravetz | Wehby Gallery in New York City, and Life and Living presented by Deli Gallery at Hudson Valley LGBTQ Center in Kingston, NY.

María Fernanda (Chamorro) is an early-career poet whose poems and translations appear in The Wide Shore, Kweli Journal, Pa’lante a la luz, and elsewhere. A recipient of Callaloo, CantoMundo, and VONA/Voices fellowships, María Fernanda featured her work at The Brooklyn Museum, MoMaPS1, The Ecuadorian American Cultural Center, The New York Aquarium, and more. She is also a founder of Candela Writers Workshop, a literary arts organization offering programming designed to support Black-Latinx poets through the preservation and the advancement of Black-Latinx literary work. Candela launches in Spring 2019. María Fernanda is a Black Ecuadorian American and Washington, D.C. native.

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.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

Ballroom Throwbacks X

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Come and celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Ballroom Throwbacks. What started as an idea progressed into a Youtube Channel, then a brand and a business. With well over 100 million views and counting BrtbTV is one of the fundamental windows into the underground culture.

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