Performance by Every House Has A Door featuring Joan of Arc, Stephen Fiehn, Bryan Saner
Read More
MAMI is an exhibition as offering to Mami Wata, a pantheon of water deities that originates from West and Central African matriarchal spiritual systems. Most commonly portrayed as part-woman/part-aquatic creature, Mami Wata is called upon by those pursuing wealth, wisdom, emotional guidance, and sexual liberation. However, contrary to monolithic representations, Mami Wata is the embodiment of hybridity. Informed by Mami Wata’s mystifying multiplicity, the work of Salome Asega, Nona Faustine, Doreen Garner, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, MALAXA, and Rodan Tekle reflects on the process of discovering the Others within ourselves.
Curated by Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze.
Programming:
August 6: Opening reception, 7 – 12am
Join us for the show’s opening reception, with live performance by Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, a flag raising for MALAXA, music by SHYB0I, hosted by KUNQ
August 13: MAMI Market 12 – 7pm
Local designers and artists take residence at Knockdown Center for day-long market place, along with DJ sets, performances, workshops
August 20: P2P 7pm
Performance collaboration between sound artist Dyani Douze, new media artist Salome Asega, and world champion Floyd Little Double Dutch Team
September 3: FAKE ACCENT Presents: RUDE GYAL 8pm
MAMI’s closing party will be a Labor day weekend Caribbean fete hosted by arts collective FAKE ACCENT
LAST DAY TO SEE THE EXHIBITION!
About the artists:
Salome Asega is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher whose practice celebrates multivocality and welcomes dissensus, using interactive installation and odd wearables. She is assistant director of POWRPLNT digital art collaboratory, co-host of Hyperopia: 20/30 radio, and one half of CandyFloss, a duo of creative technologists. Asega received her MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons and her BA in Social Practice from NYU.
Nona Faustine is a photographer, visual artist, and Brooklyn native. She graduated from the SVA and received her MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College. Faustine’s photography explores the intersection of race, identity, womanhood, and representation in the 21st century. She gained widespread acclaim for her photo series “White Shoes,” in which she photographs herself in New York City sites which were central to the slave trade, nude except for a pair of white shoes. Faustine recently exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, participated in a residency at the Baxter Street Camera Club and was awarded a Director’s Fellowship at the International Center for Photography.
Doreen Garner is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Philadelphia, PA. Her current research project centers on the history of the black female body in medicine, and dynamics of race, sexuality, pathology, and fetishism. Garner is co-host of #trashDAY on Clocktower Radio and was recently a studio resident at Abrons Art Center and Pioneer Works. She holds two degrees in glass sculpture: a BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Aya Rodriguez-Izumi is an artist living and working in Harlem via Okinawa, Japan whose practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture and music using satire and whimsy to examine how our environments shape us. She is currently an MFA candidate at SVA and has presented work at MoCADA, Skylight Gallery, Free Candy, and FLUX Fair.
MALAXA is a Johannesburg (occupied Azania) and Tel Aviv (occupied Palestine) based collective spearheaded by new media artists Tabita Rezaire and Alicia Mersy, whose work explores decolonial aesthetics and political resistance through digital culture, art, documentary and fashion.
Rodan Tekle is a digital artist, animator, video editor, and art director living and working in NYC via Sweden and Eritrea. Her work examines the screen environment within the African diaspora through motion and graphic design, 3-D rendering, and game engine based design. She received her BA in Performance Art Production from Malmö University and her MFA in Computer Art from SVA.
About the curators:
Ali Rosa-Salas is an independent curator from Brooklyn, NY. She has curated exhibitions and produced public programs for AFROPUNK, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Danspace Project, MoCADA, TOP RANK Magazine, and Weeksville Heritage Center. Her collaborations with Salome Asega, Chrybaby Cozie and Dyani Douze have been supported by AUNTS with residencies at the New Museum and Mount Tremper Arts. Her writing on dance and performance has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, The Dance Enthusiast, New York Live Arts Context Notes, among others. Ali is currently an MA candidate at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.
Dyani Douze is a Brooklyn-based DJ and multimedia artist working in sound art, music production, film editing, directing and curatorial projects. She has presented her work at AFROPUNK AFTER DARK, ALL GOLD Listening Room at MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, and Performa 15 among other venues. As a member of the New Negress Film Society, Dyani has most recently presented her films at Indiana University Cinema, Made in NY Media Center, South Dallas Cultural Center and Cooper Union as part of a series presented by Black Radical Imagination.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed; rather, it changes form…
This curatorial experiment will present 23 artists’ personal artifacts exposing small natural take-aways from a creative’s beloved landscape.
The suspended installation will showcase small physical remnants of a single journey, or moment in time, which an artist wanted to remember and take away, as opposed to the carefully crafted work they usually complete to show the public. Through these remnants, the artists willingly share their inspiration, intention and momentum with participants.
Viewers will be invited to explore and bask, if you will, in the echoing auras that these talismans cast. There is a recreating of sacred space for each object, which ultimately has an intimate value to the artist, alongside their manufactured conception.
Just as chest x-rays of Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly’s glasses, Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels or Andy Warhol’s wig were sold at auction for a significant price tag, could these talismans of established artists become a valuable collector’s item? Or are these geographical remnants truly priceless? We invite you to discover the energy transactions.
Organized by Elijah Wheat Showroom (Liz Nielsen and Carolina Wheat)
An evening of performances by Morton Subotnick and Joan La Barbara, presented by Harvestworks and Knockdown Center.
CYCLONE (1977)
7pm
Joan La Barbara’s CYCLONE is a quadraphonic sound performance/installation of the newly restored multichannel work scored for multiple voices, percussion and Arp 2600 synthesizer sounds, for “semi-live” performance on multiple speakers with the original light panning device custom designed by Ralph Jones. The work was last performed in 1977 at PS1 in NYC (Queens) and was an award-winning sound sculpture installation/performance work (independent artist submission) at ISCM World Music Days (Weltmusiktage) in Bonn, Germany. Both installation/performances were done with analog audio tape (mixed to mono) and moved in the space using light-panning device and penlight.
This installation will be on view before and after the performances.
SONG (2016)
8pm
Commissioned by Harvestworks, Morton Subotnick will present Song, an evening-length, site-specific composition for the Knockdown Center. The work features live electronics by the composer diffused in the space by 3D speaker arrays created by acoustic engineer Paul Geluso and performed by Ne(x)tworks, a collaborative ensemble of seven musicians.
Knockdown Center and Harvestworks, in association with CT:SWaM, will present two audio-visual performance works that were commissioned and produced by the Harvestworks’ Artist in Residence Program.
All the more my thoughts multiply
by Jane Rigler and Elizabeth Hoffman with video by Anna Weisling
All the more my thoughts multiply is a work for flute, electroacoustic sound, and interactive video that explores the psychology of a lone character from the Noh play “Aoinoue”, taken from the massive and influential 11th c. Japanese epic “Tale of Genji.” Possessiveness is a challenge to overcome. Spirits and Shamanic exorcism evoke opportunities to explore the elements of such possessions. In this mono-drama the gestural significance of both the spatialized sound and the movements of the flutist weave together textures of light and music through an ancient Japanese folk story.
The Audio Visual Matrix
diNMachine (Michael Schumacher and Nisi Jacobs)
The Audio Visual Matrix (AVM) is an interdisciplinary performance system commissioned by the Harvestworks Artist-in-Residence TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music) Lab. The system enables fast and flexible interconnections of audio and video data streams to modulate content. The inspiration comes from the “pin” type matrices found on synthesizers like the EMS Synthi, where players patch any modulation source to any destination. The AVM uses a similar grid system to create paths between elements (instruments, computers, cameras, etc.) and allows for feedback loops as well as typical modulation. See: http://avm-dinmachine.tumblr.
diNMachine will perform in eight-channel sound. It will be the first performance with the Audio Visual Matrix software diNMachine developed with Tommy Martinez in residency at Harvestworks. A short Q&A will follow.
An Art in General New Commission presented in collaboration with Knockdown Center. “Room Tone” refers to the moment on a film set when crew and actors pause in order for the sound mixer and boom operator to record room tone, the subtle location-specific sound present in every space. Weaving narrative between film segments and object-making, O’Daniel will create a layered and immersive installation. Based on collaborations with three contemporary composers, Steve Roden, Christine Sun Kim, and Ethan Frederick Greene, O’Daniel builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary through varying levels of access to information such as color, sound, and storyline.
O’Daniel’s engagement with different mediums is a type of call-and-response, building upon and transforming the specific language of one onto another. Experimental and documentary film collapse and coincide with sculpture and installation, in a collaborative process that highlights the inevitable loss or re-creation of information as it passes through various channels. The presentation purposefully disables audience members’ normative perception of events and materials in order to present new modes of listening and seeing. Emphasizing subjects’ relationship to silence or unavailable sonic elements, Room Tone draws on O’Daniel’s own experience as a hard-of-hearing artist. The project’s form of exploded storytelling results in a performative arc that is less reliant on traditional script structure and more on physical choreography and collaboration. The audience is guided through narrative holes, unknowns, and missing parts in order to engage in a process of deep listening that aims to extend far beyond the aural realm.
Click here for the full press release and to learn more about Art in General.
Performance: The Deaf Club featuring Future Punx,
Wall, and ASL storytellers. Thursday, April 28, 7:30-11pm
Knockdown Center presents sculptural work by Anna Mikhailovskaia alongside works on paper by John Schacht. The pairing starts an unlikely dialogue where shared sensibilities and visual energies become apparent despite contrasts in the artists’ backgrounds.
This exhibition is the posthumous debut of John Schacht, a relatively unknown self-taught artist working primarily in Chicago until 1981 when he relocated to rural Iowa until his death in 2009. Schacht participated in the Chicago art scene during the 60’s and 70’s alongside the Chicago Imagists and the Hairy Who. On the periphery of that scene, Schacht’s work is similarly committed to a fantastical, vibrant, vulgar, and personal aesthetic. Like many of the Chicago Imagists, Schacht’s work was inspired by a home filled with trinkets and antiques.
Mikhailovskaia was born in Kiev, Ukraine, raised in Brooklyn, and has been working in Brooklyn since her 2007 MFA at RISD. In a different era of art-making than Schacht, Mikhailovskaia investigates sculpture and its relationship to installation, performance, painting and architecture. Her work is inspired by the sculptural work of Cy Twombly, the artist James Lee Byers, the Japanese movement Mono-ha as well as Brutalist Architecture. An artist, writer and curator, Mikhailovskaia has produced public sculpture at Fidelity Investment’s Certified Wildlife Habitat in Smithfield, RI and exhibits regularly around New York City.
Where Schacht’s intimate works on paper are flowing and organic, rawly emotional and indulgent, Mikhailovskaia’s sculptural works are concise and geometric, exuding efficiency and restraint. Schacht’s works are diaristic and explore sexuality. Mikhailovskaia’s works appear as architectural fragments or found objects, but reveal themselves as carefully crafted to challenge the viewer’s perception of weight and surface.
Both artists manifest a similar mystical quality through pattern and contrast. Schacht mixes abstract and representational imagery using decorative patterns and rich, saturated colors in a stream-of-consciousness style. Mikhailovskaia’s minimal color relationships are paired with intense and uneven textures, bold patterns, and extreme material experimentations.
This exhibition is a rare chance to see work by two under-recognized artists, one from a few decades ago and the other contemporary. In this odd juxtaposition, the viewer can wander between intimate and large-scale works to find unexpected similarities between two artists making sincere work.
Our annual all ages workshop!
The word pysanka is derived from the Ukrainian verb pysaty ‘to write’; we ‘write’ designs on the eggs. Nearly all Slavic peoples and those in the eastern Mediterranean area practiced this art in ancient times using beeswax and dyes to create tiny masterpieces of art but Ukrainian Easter Eggs from the more modern Christian era seem to be the ones best known. The symbols used in pysanka design are a blend of ancient pagan motifs with Christian elements.
A special tool called a kistka is used to melt the beeswax and write on the eggs. The kistka is the pen and the beeswax is the ink. Each successive color is waxed and dyed until the entire design is created on the surface of the egg. The wax is then removed, and your masterpiece is revealed!
Artist Michael Neff brings Suspended Forest, a forest-filled room of discarded Christmas trees collected from the streets of Brooklyn, to Knockdown Center for the month of January.
Suspended Forest has been shown twice previously shown in an unauthorized, unused space under the BQE along Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. Those installations were removed by the city within days. The exhibition at Knockdown Center, on view for a month and configured in a grid, allows for a much different experience, most importantly time for the trees to shed their needles into halos on the smooth concrete floor below. The subtle pine fragrance of the trees and the changing nature of the exhibition over time gives visitors an opportunity for quiet contemplation throughout the month.
Artist and architectural designer Katie Shima brings Threaded Trajectory to J McDonald’s mobile art project A Way From Home.
This installation is a model of an urban machine – a sprawling mechanical landscape laced together with networks of transportation. Made from interwoven layers of packing materials, the piece is inspired by the traces and trajectories of urbanization in the Anthropocene Era.
extended through January 10, weekends 2-6pm