Knockdown Center kicks off a month-long series of DJ nights in the Ready Room bar! We’re not ready for summer to end! Come get down with a killer line-up of acts every night in our bar!
with Druid Underground Film Festival Horror Sundays series:
Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
A macabre story of two motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, shiv-shaving, eye-gouging, arm-twisting, chain-lashing, scalpel-flashing, acid-throwing, gun-shooting, bone-breaking, pathological nuts and their pal the undertaker.
Road of Death (1973)
Sleazy swingers, marauding motorheads, and so many continuity errors that to make a drinking game out of it would mean an almost certain death. This shot-in-Florida biker revenge epic starring Thora Birch’s porn star parents is “so cheap and sleazy and amazingly godawful that it’s a sick delight from beginning to end” – Luther Heggs, SWV
All films provided by Something Weird Video
Join us for a conversation on the intersection of poetry and visual art and a reading with contributors Ken Chen and Elaine Equi. Hosted by Paolo Javier and Fred Sasaki.
Ken Chen is the Executive Director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the 2009 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his poetry collection Juvenilia. A founding contributor to Arts & Letters Daily, he is one of the founders of CultureStrike, a national organization seeking to bring artists into the migrant justice movement.
Elaine Equi is the author of many collections of poetry including, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; Click and Clone; and most recently, Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry, The New Yorker, and several editions of The Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA program at The New School.
ABOUT THE HOSTS:
Paolo Javier is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, including Court of the Dragon (2015), which Publisher’s Weekly calls “a linguistic time machine.” A featured artist in MoMA PS1’s 2015 Greater NY Show, he has received grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, and completed residencies at the Millay Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the ACA Galleries. His recent collaboration with Listening Center (David Mason) appears as a limited edition book/cassette, Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis, published by Texte und Töne in fall of 2016.
Fred Sasaki is the art director for Poetry and gallery curator for Poetry Foundation. He is also a host of Homeroom’s School Night lecture series.
ABOUT THE CO-PRESENTERS:
For over a century, Poetry has been famous for discovering the poets and poems we now remember. And now, the voices to be discovered in Poetry are more diverse then ever—voices that speak to our own time, our own moment.
Founded in October 2000, the Brooklyn Rail is an independent forum for arts, culture and politics throughout New York City and beyond. Printed ten times annually, and featuring criticism of visual art, music, dance, film, theater and literature, as well as original fiction, poetry and political commentary, the Rail is distributed free of charge both in print and online.IN THE GALLERY:
Knockdown Center presents Cold Open Verse featuring Constance DeJong, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ian Hatcher.
For over a century, Poetry has been famous for discovering the poets and poems we now remember. And now, the voices to be discovered in Poetry are more diverse then ever—voices that speak to our own time, our own moment.
Founded in October 2000, the Brooklyn Rail is an independent forum for arts, culture and politics throughout New York City and beyond. Printed ten times annually, and featuring criticism of visual art, music, dance, film, theater and literature, as well as original fiction, poetry and political commentary, the Rail is distributed free of charge both in print and online.IN THE GALLERY:
Knockdown Center presents Cold Open Verse featuring Constance DeJong, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ian Hatcher.
Blonde Art Books has teamed up with Poet Transmit to present a book preview reel and live studio featuring theatrical trailers for publications, self-produced commercials, and live broadcast performance relating to the concept of the book and an expanded notion of transmission and poetry.
At 3:30pm, join curators Victoria Keddie and Cat Tyc for a guided tour of the exhibit.
This is an official 2016 Brooklyn Book Festival event.
Knockdown Center hosts 2MF’s September 2016 meeting:
“I’ve fallen in love for the last time/You’ve got to know you a chicken”
My intimate relationship with with post-industrial bohemia
How did I end up here? Was this a mistake?
New York is a hard place for an artist. Many of us could live elsewhere and afford larger work studios, larger homes, better food and weather. The internet allows us to collaborate through the internet. We can share ideas, images and sound in mere moments. Why do we stay in a city that clearly goes out of its way to make things difficult?
Eric Ramos Guerrero discusses coping and navigating the trappings of freedom, examining how 19th and 20th century bohemia informs how we see ourselves in the studio. Questions about how one should navigate New York’s bohemian art world that are unanswerable by those in attendance will be directed to a spirit that we will communicate through a glass and lettered board.
Is it all worth it?
Pre-meeting listening and viewing:
Music playlist via YouTube
1. The Boho Dance Joni Mitchell
2. The India Song Big Star
3. I Want to Break Free Queen
4. Walk on the Wildside Lou Reed
5. Samson and Delilah (aria) Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix Klaus Nomi
6. Caravan Van Morrison 14. Know Your Chicken Cibo Motto
7. Frankly, Mr. Shankly The Smiths 15. Downtown The b-52’s
8. All the Young Dudes David Bowie 16. Wasn’t Born to Follow The Byrds
9. Don’t Kiss Me Goodbye Ultra Orange & Emmanuelle
10. Into My Own Thing Sly & the Family Stone
11. The Way We Get By Spoon
12. Tu Davilla 666
13. Fame and Fortune Graham Coxon
14. Know Your Chicken Cibo Motto
15. Downtown The b-52’s
16. Wasn’t Born to Follow The Byrds
Divination playlist via You Tube
1. Fortune Teller The Hollies
2. Troubles of My Own Fats Domino
3. Deja Vu Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
4. Ouija Board Morrissey
5. Crystal Ball Styx
6. Close Encounters Bats for Lashes
7. Cool Song No.2 mgmt
8. Magic Olivia Newton John
9. Blue Eyed Here Pixies
Spirit of the glass. so scary don’t do it. (Via You Tube)
About the Artist:
Eric Ramos Guerrero is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. He was born in the Philippines and moved to California where he received a BA from San Diego State University. He then attend The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he received his BFA in 2006. The following year he moved to New York where Ramos Guerrero completed his MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Ramos Guerrero has shown his work in New York at The Drawing Center, El Museo Del Barrio, White Box, The Ise Cultural Foundation, The Fisher Landau Center for Art, The Knockdown Center and internationally at the Inside-Out Museum, Beijing, China, Pongnoi Art Space, Chiang Mai, Thailand, The Centro Cultural De La Raza in Mexico and Chelsea College in London.
About 2MF:
2MF, co-run by artists Sonya Derman and Maria Stabio, is a practice that encourages pro-emotive and ante-academic conversation among artists in New York City. Collaborating each month with selected facilitating thinkers, 2MF organizes monthly community meetings – open and participatory experiences – alongside post-meeting discussion aired and archived at Clocktower Radio. More information is available at 2manyfeelings.com.
Chicago drill rapper Sasha Go Hard, with NYC’s own Salomon Faye, Psychoegyptian (Mykki Blanco’s Dogfood Music Group), HAK (formerly of Ratking) plus DJ AHARAW (Doom Dab), Joey Desktop, and Gregory Free, with extra live performance guests!! Presented by Caesar Caeser Records and NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance).
Come party in the Ready Room with Beathaus!
“Offering” is the latest one-on-one interactive piece created by Aya Rodriguez-Izumi. In it, the participant is lead through a ritual with the artist where a story from their personal history is transformed into an offering within the performance. It deals with the idea of sacrifice and the concept of being initiated into a created community whether it be a religious group, a counter culture revolution or a secret society. By giving a personal tale from the participant’s life, they are taken on a journey that explores the experience of loss.
Please join us for the second iteration of this performance. RSVP to dnahere@gmail.com. Please arrive at Knockdown Center at 6:30pm to be assigned a time slot. The first 25 RSVP’s will get guaranteed entrance to the performance so sign up early!
Presented as part of the exhibition MAMI, curated by Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze
Poet Transmit and Blonde Art Books present an exhibition with a dynamic program consisting of theatrical trailers, self-produced commercials and live broadcast performances with a focus on art and poetry publications.
Cold Open Verse examines the construct of the ‘trailer’, reconfigured by artists, poets, and publishers interested in an expanded form of communicating their work. The exhibition presents the works of artists, Constance DeJong, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ian Hatcher within three tableau “sets” that will be activated in a real-time broadcast event. Each artist highlights a unique aspect of production within their respective sets, exploiting the structure and structural errors of broadcast with time latency (Hatcher), using an instrument for dissemination as the principal artist (DeJong), or recreating the tv sitcom set (Le Fraga). An adjacent room becomes the movie theater interior for the playback of an hour long reel of artist made trailers for forthcoming publications or book-related events. For one weekend, the gallery transforms into a live tv studio to produce new commercials by selected participants. These spots combined with an open call submission leading up to the exhibition culminate in a new book trailer preview reel that will be screened as a special preview event as part of the Printed Matter’s New York Book Fair at MoMA PS1.
The focus on the ‘book trailer’ initially began with the exhibition, This Summer…, curated by Blonde Art Books at Interstate Projects in 2014. This Summer… centered on a preview reel consisting of 11 videos by artists and publishers of independent art and poetry books. Poet Transmit approached Blonde Art Books with the idea to expand on this project with emphasis on exposing the processes of production. Together, Poet Transmit and Blonde Art Books create a multi variate exhibition investigating the structural and theoretical framework surrounding the artist-made advertisement, while nurturing the fantasy of televisual production.
FULL PROGRAM:
Sep 8:
Opening event with live readings by artists making commercials for upcoming reel
7pm Exhibition Viewing
8pm Readings: William Lessard, Claire Donato, LA Warman, Emmalea Russo & Michael Newtown, Masha Tupitsyn, and Devin Morris
9pm Afterparty – DJ set by Scott Kiernan
Sep 9:
Gallery open and exhibition on view
Sep 10:
3 – 7pm TV studio activated with live performances:
Max Steele, Cathy De La Cruz, Celina Su, Ariel Goldberg
Sep 11:
4 – 7pm TV studio activated with live performances:
Jesse Harrod, Joni Murphy & Xeňa Stanislavovna Semjonová
Sep 15:
Printed Matter Book Fair Preview Night screening event
(at MoMA PS1)
Sep 16:
8pm, live broadcast event with
Constance DeJong, Sophia La Fraga, and Ian Hatcher
Sep 17:
Gallery open and exhibition on view, 3pm tour by the curators for Poetry on Art, a Brooklyn Book Fest panel
Sep 18:
8pm: Evening screening and closing reception
Fiona Banner:
‘Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead’, 2014 and ‘Phantom’, 2015 – two films produced for the publication, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. A work by Fiona Banner. Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin.
Moyra Davey:
‘My Saints’, 2014. “Burn the Diaries” published by Dancing Foxes.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman:
‘Working Title’ for the book “James Brown is Dead” published by Future Plan and Program, 2011
Gerardo Madera:
‘Untitled Printer for Xavier Antin (test video)’, 2014, book and video by Gerardo Madera. “Printed at Home” published by Common Satisfactory Standard.
BLOODY GRINDHOUSE DOUBLE FEATURE
Horror Sundays with Druid Underground Film Festival
Blood Feast (1963)
Although Blood Feast is a film about an eccentric catering company that collects body parts for a cannibalistic ritual, the manner in which the film conducts itself is totally unique. John Waters sites Herchell Gordon Lewis as one of his main influences (alongside names like Kenneth Anger, Bergman and Fellini) and it’s easy to see why. Cartoonishly evil plots, over-the-top character actors in theatrical make-up, tacky costumes and creatively executed scenes of show-stopping violence make Blood Feast an outer-worldly viewing experience.
Carnival of Blood (1970)
Join us on a spooky ride through old Coney Island as a twisted maniac stalks and slashes through the carny-infested midway. Starring a hunchback named Gimpy (Burt Young who played Paulie in the Rocky movies). This one’s real weird.
Open House creates compellingly strange pop songs that sprawl into sonic landscapes through the use of movement, choreography, and staging. The band’s new piece Rememberer uses amplified eight-foot-long sheets of Styrofoam wall insulation, erected into teetering structures that vibrate, hum, squeak, and seem destined to collapse. Architecture doubles as instrument in this collage of music and live construction directed by Steven Reker, which will be performed at the BAM Next Wave Festival in October. Their mini-residency at Knockdown Center culminates with a short open rehearsal performance.