Habitat (Some Pleasures and Discomforts of Domestic Life), New York

Habitat
(Some Pleasures and Discomforts of Domestic Life)
June 10 - July 17, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday June 10, 6-9 p.m.


Twenty First/Twenty First Gallery is pleased to present Habitat (Some Pleasures
and Discomforts of Domestic Life), a group exhibition gathering works by Davide
Balula, Marcelline Delbecq, Jeanne Detallante, Ellie Ga, Ines Lechleitner, Justin
Matherly, Christine Rebet, Slavs and Tatars, and Amy Yao.

Following a collaboration with Cumulus Studio in 2009, presenting a selection of
outdoor functional objects designed by artists Liam Gillick, John Bock and Aaron
Young, among others, the design and limited edition furniture gallery pursues its
interest in contemporary art and invites Béatrice Gross, independent curator, to
organize its next exhibition.

Concerned topically with the representation of domesticity, Habitat reflects on
the decorative mission of a design gallery, while examining, en abîme, the
intimate commodification and institutionalization of private interiors. With the
ambivalence of a family reunion, the exhibition conjures up various orders and
disorders of the domestic apparatus: from daily rituals of bliss and labor to
religious narcissism; from visionary corners to staged domestication; from
diminished bodies to literary heroes; from polar confinements to the Gates of
Hell…

A Temporary Library complements Habitat’s visual investigation: each artist lends
three items from her/his personal library, to constitute a transitory corpus of
printed matters dedicated to domesticity.

Special event:
Thursday June 24, 7 p.m., Ellie Ga, The Fortunetellers: Arctic Circles (10:10), 2010,
in conjunction with the launching of Ga's latest artist’s book: Three Arctic Booklets
(Ugly Duckling Press, NY, 2010).

Furniture: courtesy Twenty First/Twenty First Gallery Collection
Many thanks to Jérome D’Almeida and Nicolas Sarthou for their generous assistance.

Twenty First/Twenty First Gallery
551 West 21st Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10011, T. (212) 206 1967, www.21st21st.com

MUDDY, New York

EMMELINE DE MOOIJ
MUDDY
The era of the unexplainable growth of gravity has come. With it an increasing number of sinkholes, cases of arthritis, high blood pressure and an overall mood of pressure. The rocket digs itself and it is here I define my excavation site.

March 6, 2010 - April 16, 2010
Opening & Book Launch: Saturday, March 6th, 7pm - 10pm

Capricious Space proudly presents Dutch artist Emmeline de Mooij’s first solo show in the United States. The exhibition will consist of site-specific sculptural installations, photos, collage and screen printing. She will also be launching her new book, co-published by Capricious, also titled Muddy.
“Gravity grows and my overweight forces me to descend into the ground - behind the skin, beyond daylight. I have signed up for the course 'Cave Diving Inside the Brain'. When I sink up to my knees into the brown substance, I find myself face to face with a troll. She introduces herself as Muddy and tells me about the ultimate wish for weightlessness. I say, 'Yes, I see, but, just these heavy clothes I bought myself'...” –Emmeline de Mooij


About Emmeline de Mooij
Born in Delft, The Netherlands, in 1978, she now lives and works in both New York and Amsterdam. de Mooij's work consists of installations, photographs and performances. She has had solo shows in Villa Nouailles (Hyeres, France), Steinsland/Berliner (Stockholm), Salone del Mobile (Milan), Tsumori Chisato (Paris), and Motive (Amsterdam). Group shows have included: the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Robert Berman (Los Angeles), Art Cologne (Germany), YK3 (Melbourne). Honors de Mooij has been awarded: Scholarship Award Photo Global Program School of Visual Arts New York, shortlist Hyeres photography Competition (France), Kunsthuis SYB residency (The Netherlands), First Prize Selfware Competition (Austria). Her work has been published in the New York Times, Museum Paper, Purple Magazine, Dazed&Confused, GLU magazine, Dagens Nyheter, YKKY, Volkskrant. In 2009 she published the book Bush Compulsion in collaboration with artist Melanie Bonajo.


About Capricious Space
Capricious Space is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Our mission is to be a sanctuary away from the city’s clamor and strife. Capricious Space invites emerging artists and curators to transform the space according to their own visions and dreams, thus bringing the Capricious generation together. Please visit our website for information on upcoming exhibitions.

Capricious Space

Independent, New York

Part consortium, part collective, INDEPENDENT lies somewhere between a collective exhibition and a reexamination of the art fair model, reflecting the changing attitudes and growing challenges for artists, galleries, curators and collectors.

March 4, 2010
548 West 22nd Street

Participants include:

ANCIENT & MODERN (LONDON)
THE APPROACH (LONDON)
ARTISTS SPACE (NEW YORK)
GALERIE BALICEHERTLING (PARIS)
LAURA BARTLETT (LONDON)
BOLTELANG (ZÜRICH)
BORTOLAMI GALLERY (NEW YORK)
GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI (BERLIN)
ELIZABETH DEE (NEW YORK)
DISPATCH (NEW YORK)
FARIMANI
GAVLAK GALLERY (PALM BEACH)
GB AGENCY (PARIS)
HARD HAT (GENEVA)
HOTEL (LONDON)
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL (NEW YORK)
GALERIE BEN KAUFMANN (BERLIN)
JOHANN KÖNIG (BERLIN)
ANDREW KREPS GALLERY (NEW YORK)
LUBOK
KATE MACGARRY (LONDON)
MCCAFFREY FINE ART (NEW YORK)
MESTRE PROJECTS (BARCELONA/NEW YORK)
MITTERRAND + SANZ (ZÜRICH)
MOSS/WESTREICH-WAGNER (NEW YORK)
NEW GALERIE (PARIS)
OCTOBER
MAUREEN PALEY (LONDON)
RENWICK GALLERY (NEW YORK)
RESERVED FOR LEO CASTELLI
RODEO (ISTANBUL)
SABOT (CLUJ-NAPOCA)
STUART SHAVE/MODERN ART (LONDON)
SUTTON LANE (LONDON/PARIS)
VW (VENEKLASEN/WERNER)/
MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY (BERLIN/NEW YORK)
WHITE COLUMNS (NEW YORK)
WINKLEMAN GALLERY (NEW YORK)
GALERIE JOCELYN WOLFF (PARIS)
ZERO (MILAN)


Special artists projects by:

THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION
CLAIRE FONTAINE
DEXTER SINISTER
ALEX WATERMAN

Slavs & Tatars, New York

The Bruce High Quality Foundation University is pleased to announce Slavs and Tatars’ 79.89.09 lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York on Friday February 26th at 7pm as an offsite event in the BHQFU’s Edifying performance series. An intimate visual, oral, and written study of two key years (1979 and 1989), 79.89.09 looks at the Iranian Revolution, monobrows, modernity, the fall of communism, the Beach Boys, and mysticism to better understand the world in which we live.

A collaboration with Berlin-based culture bi-annual 032c, 79.89.09 was first presented at Moscow’s Triumph Gallery during the Cycles and Seasons festival in April 2009 before making its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the opening lecture of the 2009-2010 Studium Generale at Amsterdam’s Rietveld Academy.

Friday, February 26th, 7 PM
At SVA, 209 E. 23rd Street
(3rd floor amphitheater)

Limited capacity. RSVP to bhqfu.edifying@gmail.com

More info: Edifying, Slavsandtatars/79.89.09

________

Printed Matter is pleased to announce a double-book presentation for Kidnapping Mountains and Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names, two titles by the collective Slavs and Tatars.
Recently published by Onestar Press as part of their ongoing artists’ book series, Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names uses textual diagrams to investigate the nominal tug-of-wars enacted over cities throughout the Eurasian region. As different political entities exercised control over the cities, naming enacts dominion in a way that the artists describe as "entire metropolises caught like children in the spiteful back and forth of a custody battle." Love Me, Love Me Not is part of a group show The Past is a Foreign Country at the Centre of Contemporary Art ’Znaki Czasu’ in Torun, Poland.

Published by Book Works, Kidnapping Mountains is a playful exploration of the muscular stories, wills, and defeat inhabiting the Caucasus region. Comprising two parts: an eponymous section addressing the complexity of languages and identities on the fault line of Eurasia, and Steppe by Steppe Romantics, a restoration of the region’s seemingly reactionary approaches to romance.

Thursday, February 25th, 5-7 PM
at Printed Matter
195 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10011

More info: Printed Matter

EDIFYING, Christine Rebet, Poison Lecture, New York

EDIFYING
Christine Rebet, Poison Lecture
Wednesday, January 13th, 7 p.m.
At X INITIATIVE, 548 W 22nd Street


The Bruce High Quality Foundation University is pleased to announce its fourth Edifying evening.
In the lineage of John Cage's Lecture on Nothing (1950), or Robert Morris’s 1964 performance 21.3 where the artist lip-synched a film of art historian Erwin Panofsky reading his Studies On Iconology (1939), Edifying, a series of performance-lectures curated by Beatrice Gross, presents a selection of contemporary performative events concerned with the dramatization of knowledge and its dissemination.

Installation view, "Modern Magician by Jonathan Mulholland," 2009.

Christine Rebet's Poison Lecture, originally commissioned by Future Art Research (F.A.R.) at Arizona State University, re-stages the first formal lecture ever dedicated to the art of magic, delivered in Boston in 1927 by renowned conjuror John Mulholland.

The re-created text, derived from Mulholland's numerous, now-declassified reports and manuals (Quicker than the Eyes, The Art of Illusion or Magic in the Making), carries hidden references to his later career during the Cold War, teaching secrets of the trade to Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) operative agents. Lending his unusual abilities to the service of his country's safety and leadership, Mulholland revealed himself a valuable master of patriotic trickery and deception to American spies in the 1950s.

While Mulholland (Zach Rockhill) delivers an authoritative expose about the history and mechanisms of magic, his assistant, a young professional magician (Josh Rand), demonstrates, with the help of makeshift props, tricks inspired by legendary conjurors such as Robert Houdin, Dai Vernon or Harry Lorayne,complementing live the slide-projection of found images culled from textbooks, catalogues and newspapers. Unraveling a dazzling polyphony of text, still and moving illustrations, Rebet's performative piece combines the secretive worlds of magic and espionnage, entertainment and geopolitics, mass captivation and government, to wittily expose their kindred spirit.

With a background in painting and scenography, Christine Rebet has mainly developed in the past ten years animated films and performances. Her work has been shown internationally, among others locations, at Le Magasin, Grenoble; Musée d’Art contemporain, Lyon (France); Ittinger Kunst Museum, Switzerland; Parasol-unit, London; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Moore Space, Miami; Guild and Greyskhul Gallery, and The Kings County Biennial/James Fuentes & Kidd Yellin, New York. Rebet's work will be included in the next SITE/Santa Fe Biennial.

Christine Rebet is represented by Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris.

For further information, visit:

Christine Rebet

Capricious, P.P.O.W Gallery New York

Capricious @ P.P.O.W. Gallery
Looking Forward, Feeling Backwards
Curated by Capricious & Tammy Rae Carland

Arists: Becca Albee / Arielle Falk / Jason Hanasik / K8 Hardy / Desiree Holman / Whitney Hubbs / Ace Lehner Stephanie Leibowitz / Elizabeth Moy

October 29 – December 5, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 29, 6-8pm
@ P.P.O.W. Gallery
511 West 25th Street, Room 301, NY, NY 10001

P•P•O•W Gallery, in conjunction with Dotty Attie's exhibition, will present Looking Forward, Feeling Backwards in Gallery 2 curated by Capricious and artist Tammy Rae Carland. This exhibition is inspired by the forthcoming "Feminist Issue" of Capricious Magazine based on an open call for work about feminist feelings.

Empathetic vision, relentless loss, identity melancholia, compulsive hope, political depression, retooling trauma, femme euphoria, shameless shame, and feelings that have no names are all contending with one another in this issue of the magazine. The selection gives the personal, political, social and emotional equal weight and emphasizes a generational lens on hope, humor and limitless self-invention.

For complete press release visit www.ppowgallery.com

Image by Whitney Hubbs.

EDIFYING, New York

EDIFYING
a series of performative lectures

Launch: 8pm Thursday October 22, 2009
at BHQFU: 225 West Broadway

The Bruce High Quality Foundation University is pleased to announce the launch of Edifying, a series of performative lectures. This event is free and open to the public.

In the lineage of John Cage's Lecture on Nothing (1950), or Robert Morris’s 1964 performance 21.3 where the artist lip-synched a film of art historian Erwin Panofsky reading hisStudies On Iconology (1939), this series will present a selection of contemporary performative events concerned with the dramatization of knowledge and its dissemination.

Beatrice Gross, curator of the series, along with a very special guest, will discuss the history and meaning of performative lectures, and present the first installment of Edifying with Pablo Helguera'sEnneatype Conference(November 19), Ellie Ga's Fortunetellers (December 10), and Christine Rebet's Poison Lecture (January 14).

The event will also feature a conversation with artist and educator Pablo Helguera, in conjunction with the release of his latest book Theatrum Anatomicum (And Other performance lectures)published by Jorge Pinto Books, NY. A book signing will follow.
"Helguera presents in this volume a multi-faceted collection of performance texts that cover a wide variety of subjects, ranging from political history to modern art. Working with actors to present scripted symposiums without the audience’s knowledge, presenting dueling lectures on topics as diverse as Mexican soap operas and 16th century Anatomical Theaters, or constructing a five-theme presentation in the form of a baroque fugue, the texts in this anthology reflect Helguera’s perennial quest to critique and reinvigorate the lecture format."

www.thebrucehighqualityfoundation.com

A Rose Parade Follower Brooklyn

Follower (Bunny Rabbit and Amber Ibarreche, new band) and Rose Parade (Shannon Funchess and Gerard Smith of T.V. on the Radio's new project) are performing on October 7, at Union Pool, in Brooklyn.

Follower

Shannon Funchess

DON'T BECOME THE THINGS YOU HATE

Seasick Mama presents
DON'T BECOME THE THINGS YOU HATE

September 19th + 20th, 2009
129 N. 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY


a “canvas to clothing” project by SEASICK MAMA.

When: September 19th + 20th 12:00pm-8:00pm daily.
Where: 129 N. 6th Street between Bedford Ave. and Berry Ave. right outside the Artists & Fleas Designers Market. (Trains: L, JMZ).
Price: The exhibit is free!
Bill: [Writers]: Seasick Mama, Peru Ana Ana Peru, L Magazine, Article Magazine, Impose Magazine, Michael Fenster of Brooklyn Queens Roach Motel, Design for Mankind, Ins & Outs, and The Worlds Best Ever. [Designer]: Ian McGillivray and Seasick Mama.

Seasick Mama, a Brooklyn-based canvas to clothing apparel company, will be presenting an exhibit called, Don’t Become The Things You Hate. In today’s contemporary recession, an industry that is struggling to survive is the print and magazine world. To reach out, Seasick Mama has asked almost a dozen magazines, bloggers, and other local favorites to express “how they survive” during this difficult time..but in only six words.

"I Can't Pay My Phone Bill" was created as an example of the everyday objects and luxuries we take for granted... until they're taken away from us. Of course, when one can't pay his/her phone bill, their link to the outside world is cut off, creating a void between their loved ones. Could that mean the economy is killing our relationships? Perhaps. I hope we never find out." -Erin Loechner of Design for Mankind.

These poetic proclamations (some comical, some foul) will be beautifully printed on large-scale canvases, but also onto a limited edition series to t-shirts, just in time for fashion week! Proceeds from the public’s support will benefit the pockets of the writers.

"Sell More Art, Eat More Tacos" by Peru Ana Ana Peru.

The presentation of the exhibit is extremely special, because Seasick Mama has teamed up with The Stand Alone Gallery and The Artists & Fleas Designers Market.

The Stand Alone Gallery is owned and directed by mastermind Daniel Quinn, who has given life to this mobile space. The Stand Alone Gallery can take any shape or form to create a space for any creative endeavor, some of which include: a roof top exhibit with the Gawker Artists and a solo show for Erik Braun in the Chelsea area.

The Artists & Fleas Market is a melting pot of artists, designers, vintage collectors, and handmade crafters. It’s a home to a community of artists, one of which is Seasick Mama. They will be hosting the exhibit and we could not be happier.

The exhibit is bringing the community together to celebrate the creativity that springs when people work together—but also the release of Seasick Mama new tee collection.

MySixWords

©2009 Seasick Mama | 129 N. 6th Street / Brooklyn NY/ 11211

Captive Lives Western Spectacle, by Melanie Bonajo, NY

CAPTIVE LIVES WESTERN SPECTACLE
Melanie Bonajo
September 11 - October 31, 2009
Opening reception: Friday, September 11th, 7pm until 10pm

Capricious Space
103 Broadway (btw Bedford and Berry)
www.becapricious.com


In this exhibition, Melanie Bonajo explores the inhuman characteristics of relationships and prejudices among humans and animals. She investigates the affinity and association between the human and animal worlds - the proximity and expanse between their realms, and potential outcomes of a great imbalance of power.

Deeply concerned with their state, Bonajo takes photographs of depressed animals. She explores the notion that the way we confiscate animals from their local landscapes and move them around – treating them solely as inanimate forms, instead of living beings - is an act of violence.

Through these acts, Bonajo believes captured animals become more human than we typically think. That is, these (manmade) violent processes illustrate the oppression that is innate in humans in order to suppress some sort of Other within them. Bonajo holds that we are we living in the twilight of the mammalian era, with zoos as keepers of relics of the past. We may wonder: will this end include the death of humanity or only a small part of it?

In Bonajo’s forecast, animals will start to re-appear in people's lives as ghosts. Their spirits will be revived at night in dreams. Due to an increased sense of loss, people will sanctify animals in the future like that of pre-modern animistic believers. Through technological means of instant and invisible communication through space and time, humans will try to cross ancient animal territories to heal the past.

For this presentation, Bonajo’s images (all produced without digital manipulation), video and installations depict vignettes of human attempts at animal healing and the merging of man and machine. Captive Lives Western Spectacle warns of a future in which mammals no longer exist and have permanently moved their existence into the sphere of archetypes.

image:Horse, 2009, by Melanie Bonajo

From Blue to Blue by Martien Mulder

MartienMulder.com

"X" W GLEN CUMMINGS + ADAM MICHAELS

"X"
W/ GLEN CUMMINGS + ADAM MICHAELS

June 26–29, 2009
Friday: 6–9
Saturday: 12–8
Sunday: 12–5
Monday: 6–9

Opening reception/
XOXOXO
Saturday, June 27
5–8 PM

W/————
141 Division Street
New York NY 10002

www.jiminie.org/WITH
www.x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x.org

We Belong Together : Yale MFA Photography 2009

CAPRICIOUS SPACE PRESENTS:
WE BELONG TOGETHER : YALE PHOTOGRAPHY MFA 2009
May 29, 2009 – July 5, 2009
Opening: Friday, May 29th, 7pm to 10pm

Capricious Space is proud to present WE BELONG TOGETHER : YALE MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2009. Participants are George Awde, Dru Donovan, David La Spina, Justin Leonard, Catharine Maloney, Caitlin Price, Colin Smith, Elaine Stocki and Ka-Man Tse. With the artists approaching their work from starkly different backgrounds and points of view, the result is a mélange of subjects and perspectives. The common denominator, however, is a refreshingly fundamental one: the artists' love of photography. Nine images, one by each artist, will be presented at Capricious Space and three other exhibitions of the class’ work will be shown over the coming months at locations in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

www.capriciousspace.com

Capricious Space is located at 103 Broadway, Brooklyn, New York 11211

Capricious Things

Capricious Art Artket
Artists selling their wares
Sat May 16th: 10 am-6pm Sun May 17th 11am-6pm
103 Broadway, Williamsburg, Brooklyn


Capricious Magazine NEW website - by Shim Co.

I Have a Room With Everything

Book Launch for Melanie Bonajo's
"I Have A Room With Everything"
at Capricious Space on Sunday, May 10, 2009 from 4-7pm
103 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.becapricious.com

Sol del Moon, NY

Let's Meet in Real Life, NY

Opening this Saturday, March 7th: "In Real Life" featuring Art Fag City, ASDF, Club Internet, Ffffound, The Highlights, Humble Arts Foundation, I Heart Photograph, Loshadka, Netmares/Netdreams, Platform For Pedagogy, Private Circulation, UbuWeb , VVORK, Why + Wherefore.

An exhibition that invites innovative and independent online art initiatives to each come do a 4-hour residency inside the space of a gallery—attempting to explore how the distribution, production, analysis, and consumption of culture are rapidly evolving in an online context. In particular the exhibition aims to render the labor of these online practices transparent, providing “real life” access to these cultural producers, and overall inspiring public dialogue around their practices. Full details at: www.letsmeetinreallife.com.

Exhibition is organized by Laurel Ptak. Website and exhibition catalogue design by Konst & Teknik.

March 7th, Saturday's SCHEDULE:
12-4 pm: Residency by VVORK
4-8 pm: Residency by FFFFOUND
8-10 pm: Opening Reception

At Capricious Space
103 Broadway Brooklyn, NY 11211
(between Bedford and Berry)

Gallery hours (from March 7–March 28 only):
Saturday noon–8pm
Sunday noon–8pm

Plus special events:
Opening and Roundtable Discussion "Browser As Exhibition Space" / Saturday March 7 from 8-10pm
"Docent Tour of Art on the Internet" performed by Tyler Coburn / Friday March 13 from 8-10pm
Closing Party / Saturday March 28 from 8-10pm

American Wall Nut

DAVIDE BALULA
AMERICAN WALL NUT

FEBRUARY 26TH - APRIL 4TH, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION
FEBRUARY 26TH, 6 - 8PM

Fake Estate and independent curator Béatrice Gross are pleased to announce the opening on February 26, 2009 of American Wall Nut, an anarchitectural installation by French artist Davide Balula.

Emptied of its usual markers of labor and display, the interstitial space of the transfigured, hardly150 square foot exhibition venue evokes, with its parqueted floor and bare walls, an abandoned domestic space. In the back of the room, as though the perpendicular planes of the floor and the wall had folded onto each other and left a trace of their unlikely encounter, fragments of walnut lumber encrusted in the dry wall and strips of plaster inlayed in the parquet floor mirror each other in a strict inversion of matter.

The reflective motif reveals itself as inherently site-specific, as it is determined by the modular relationship between the wood paneling and the general structure of the ground it covers. Paradoxically, despite its three-dimensional embodiment, Balula’s geometric intarsio prevails as an essentially bi-dimensional delineation: the artist draws here with space, like others draw with ink or graphite.

If, not unlike the ornamental art of marquetry in the Italian Renaissance, the artist’s environment relates ultimately to sculpture, architecture, and pictorial composition at once, its purpose exceeds merely formal explorations: suggesting, with a tremendous economy of means, a magical phenomenon, Balula investigates the structure of space, giving life, through a delicate conjuring trick, to the inanimate.

Davide Balula is represented by Galerie Frank Elbaz (Paris). He has shown internationally, in numerous venues such as Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museums Quartier, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art of Kyoto; Museum of Contemporary Art of North Miami; Total Museum, Seoul. He is currently a member of the LMCC Residency Program.
Fake Estate was launched in 2007 by Julia Trotta. The unusually small space, a former utility closet in the West Chelsea Arts Building, houses a series of focused, experimental projects. While some will call for intimate inspection, others will restrict viewers from entering the space. Fake Estate serves as an alternative to the traditional art venue, challenging both the artist and the viewer to think within the very small box.

Fake Estate is open Thursday - Saturday, 12-6PM and by appointment.

FAKE ESTATE
526 W. 26th St. #502A
New York, NY 10001
Fake Estate.Us

Poortraits & Landscrapes Closing Party, NY

The Longest Train I Ever Saw, NY

The Longest Train I Ever Saw
Becket Bowes, Barb Choit, Sam Moyer, Kaveri Nair, Lesley Vance, Amy Yao

February 14 - March 22, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 14, 6-8 PM
Rachel Uffner Gallery
47 Orchard St
New York NY 10002
Wednesday–-Sunday, 11–6pm or by appointment

I sometimes listen to music by Smog and in the song, (In the Pines) The Longest Train I Ever Saw, Bill Callahan sings “The Longest train I ever saw went down that Georgia Line. The engine went by at six o’ clock and the cab went by at nine. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines and we shiver when the north wind blows. Well I asked the captain for the time of day he said he threw his watch away.” and the lyrics are filled with the stuff of loneliness, sex, and death. As it turns out, the lyrics of (In the Pines) The Longest Train I Ever Saw, resonate on a universal level: it’s a traditional folk tune rooted in the late 19th century with themes durable enough for multiple generations of covers and reconstructions by artists as disparate as Lead Belly, Nirvana, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, and R.Crumb, to name a few.

As an exhibition, The Longest Train I Ever Saw, is a way to give a collective (if diverse) vision to some of the ideas within the song by bringing together several artists whose work, whether through concept, imagery, or materials, is related to isolation and loneliness. It is meant to be a moody show, a show for February, and coincidentally, a show opening on Valentine’s Day.

Furthermore, and probably most importantly, the exhibition is an opportunity to fill this new, still-forming gallery space with the energy and surprise that a group show of several exciting artists can bring. In its first year the gallery is comprised mostly of solo shows and with this group show, I want to relinquish a certain amount of control and context and bring together a diverse group of voices to see what kind of new noise they might produce.

Rachel Uffner Gallery