WEDNESDAY 10TH
2 – 5 pm
New York City
Best Value Lemonade Stand
Christina Freeman
Subverting the long tradition of the “Lemonade Stand” and its connection to youth entrepreneurship and promotion of capitalist values, the artist proposes a lemonade stand where they trade lemonade for interviews about value.
Christina Freeman is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her work takes on various forms including photography, video, artists’ books, multimedia installation, collaborative performance, and curatorial projects. She received her MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2012 and her BA in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Haverford College in 2005.
9:15 – 10:15 pm
New York / London
Cloud Conversations : Exposure
Anne Murray / Joshua Dylan Rubin / Sylvia Arthur
Cloud Conversations is a project bringing together the voices, thoughts, and artistic manifestations of artists, writers, and performers from around the world and is curated by Anne Murray.
As a Cloud Conversation, Murray proposes a connected event between artist, Joshua Dylan Rubin and writer, Sylvia Arthur, entitled, Exposure.
In this provocative collaborative exchange, New York-based visual artist, Joshua Dylan Rubin, and London- based writer, Sylvia Arthur will explore what it means to be at the receiving end of concealed/revealed hate, while the curator, Anne Murray, will make commentary on the importance of artistic dialogue in the development of public awareness in relation to these themes and will moderate discussion. Exposure is an interrogation of the private and public selves, of what lies just beneath the surface and whatʼs hidden deep within from the perspectives of those who express their private thoughts in a public forum (Rubin) versus those who are impacted by those publicly expressed thoughts in a private way (Arthur).
Reading and Art / Installation
In this interactive exchange, Arthur will read, live from Tomʼs Etching Studio in London, three five minute pieces from her book in progress, African, & Other Curse Words and writing specially commissioned for this Cloud Conversation in direct response to Rubinʼs work.
Conversation
Following the reading / installation exchange, the artists will engage in conversation about their work, their process, and the issues raised while the curator, Anne Murray, will moderate the discussion as well as comment on the curatorial relationships in these works and the importance of dialogue in the artistic process explaining how this has led to their current collaborative project, Cloud Conversations.
Anne Murray is an artist and curator with an MFA and MS in Art History from Pratt Institute and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in Paris. She has exhibited her work in London, Paris, Shanghai, Istanbul, Los Angeles, New York, Belgrade, and Budapest. She had the idea to create this collaboration after meeting many artists as an artist in residence in many different countries including: Turkey, Serbia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Macedonia.
Joshua Dylan Rubin is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY with an MFA from Pratt Institute and the recipient of the distinguished Giuliani Scholarship. He received a BFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts. His work is a witnessing of the contemporary history of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and general discrimination that has occurred in New York City since the time of the 9/11 bombings. His work has been exhibited from across the US to as far as Seoul, Korea and is in the CLGS Incorporated Collection as well as various private collections.
Joshua Dylan Rubin’s exposes Human Attitudes, reveals the hidden human attitudes that are concealed in everyday interactions, but are revealed through graffiti in the relative privacy of construction site bathroom stalls.
Sylvia Arthur is a writer living in London, whose work explores themes of identity, diaspora, and place. Writing at the intersection of race and gender, she has freelanced for The Guardian, the BBC, and the British Journalism Review and worked as a researcher / assistant producer for ITV, Channel 4, and Sky Television. In 2010, she relocated from London to Brussels where, during the course of her work, she met diverse Europeans with compelling stories to tell and began writing a book, Fragile Continent: Two Lost Years in Europe. She was a recipient of a Mediane Media in Europe for Diversity Inclusiveness reporting fellowship and has been in residence at Jiwar Creation and Society in Barcelona, Spain and at the Santa Fe Art Institute in the USA. She holds an MA in Creative Nonfiction Writing.
Writing at the intersection of race and gender, Arthurʼs narrative nonfiction explores the questions: “How do you move through the world when you inhabit multiple identities in societies that demand conformity to one? How do you emerge as a whole?”
THURSDAY 11TH
4 – 4:30 pm & 9 – 9:30 pm
New York City
Your Words Are Colour
Felix Gottdiener & Ben Hicock
Your Words Are Color concerns itself with the issues of speech, and the various subtexts which underlie our everyday interactions. By abstracting a personʼs normal speech patterns into LED light patterns, everyday communication can be conceived of as an conceptual generator, revealing additional aesthetic dimensions in even the most prosaic of conversations.
Felix Gottdiener is a designer, musician, and researcher based in New York City. His work investigates the human response to architecture and the environment, and how environments can be constructed to more optimally meet human needs. Part of this investigation is the blending of disciplinary areas, and charting the intersections between art, science, and technology.
Benjamin Hicock is an artist, programmer, and musician working in New York City. He has taught guitar for ten years and is currently an active musician. He works as a computer programmer and manager for Dabit Industries, for which he is a partner. In the past he has worked for I Heart Engineering, on STEAM education, and has programmed motor controllers with Kate Yorke in Williamsburg.
Noriko Okaku & Nissa Nishikawa – The interpreter
The Interpreter is a live reading of the tarot performed by Noriko Okaku and Nissa Nishikawa. The two will be orientated by a set of tarot cards which were created by Okaku during a residency in Derby (2016). Each card draws on the artistʼs own insight of Derbyshire’s history and myths- spanning a myriad of symbolic imagery. Lawlessly written text by Nissa Nishikawa reveals clues to the psychophysical patterns within the spread of cards.
Born in Japan, Noriko Okaku works and lives in London. She produces work in animated video, drawing, sculpture and audio/visual live performance. Her work in various media often retains a collage art element. She borrows, adopts, copies and recycles existing images to explore the diverse avenues of perception. Her work explores the eclecticism and mystery/strangeness underlying everyday objects and actions.
Nissa Nishikawaʼs multidisciplinary practice encompasses experimental choreographies, which incorporates structures of story-telling, theatrical devices and sculptural setting. An ongoing research of dance origin, mysticism and craft is placed in relationship with performance while patterning and mythologising concepts of community and action in order to sensitise the site, audience and maker alike to the potentials of invisible/immaterial existing fields of consciousness. Nishikawa spent her formative years in Yamanashi, Japan with the organisation Dance Resources on Earth. She studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Stage Arts at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and holds an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths College.
Joelle Fleurantin – Screen
Screen is a performance piece exploring the bounds of intimacy between the body and screen. A woman will be documented—filmed—inside her New York bedroom for a day. She will perform as though she is not being watched: she will wake up, clean, dress, work. The film will be streamed to a screen in London where it will be altered and obscured through image manipulation.
Joelle Fleurantin is an artist and researcher in a committed relationship with her computer. Our often functional, sometimes dysfunctional relationship provokes her to ask questions about how weʼve changed since weʼve know each other. We’ve watched each other age, change shape, alter operating systems. Weʼve both suffered massive failures and yet here we are, still together, more entwined than I thought was possible. Her work explores this intimacy between bodies and screens, bodies and embedded systems. Within her work, she uses software and hardware to investigate her presence within these digital spaces. She has presented her work at the NYC Media Lab Summit, Facets Conference, and Mozilla Festival. She holds a Masterʼs from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and studied art history and film at Yale University and Brooklyn College respectively.
Niki Passath – Dazwischen
Dazwischen“ (between) is an autonomous, interactive installation which includes a drawing robot and a visual interpretation system of what happens on the two locations of the exhibition. The installation monitors via facial recognition the positions of visitors and artists in both venues by observing the streams and the real space here in New York and in London.
Niki Passath studied Violoncello and Architecture in Graz, Austria and made his diploma in Media Art and Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. The longterm involvement with classical music instruments lead to his interest in automatons, machines and robots. On the one hand he develops robots which draw their experiences as traces on different surfaces, on the other hand he is using the 3D-printing technology to transfer digital content back from the virtual to the reality. Niki Passath lives and works in Vienna
Claudia Edwards – Brother Prisoner
Brother Prisoner self-generates and then engages its participants in a shared re-birthday ritual. The artist enters with a cake, baked and iced, with many thin scrolls inserted like candles, and places it on a table, beside plates, forks, and a cutting instrument in the form of a mask. The artist then ties the mask onto their head, while an audience participant holds up a mirror for them. Once dressed with this mask, shoeless, wearing fishnets and a transparent dress, the artist begins cutting the cake with their head, until completion. The first slice is served up, but since the mask covers the artistʼs mouth, they do not speak, and instead non- verbally seek out a curious participant. The willing participant is tasked with unscrolling the paper and reading a short text chosen by the artist that was written by them or by somebody else. Next the artist fills each personʼs hands with a piece of the cake; they feed it to one another, and are thanked. This ritual is then re-created by new participants, until the cake is fully served. Brother Prisoner borrows words from other writers and from myself, borrows the mouths of strangers and of friends, in order to explore and embody the invisible experiences of ʻothernessʼ and ʻerotic spaceʼ between peoples.
The five intersecting arcs that meet in Claudia Edwardʼs intentions are: embodied learning, active listening, participation, research-creation, and strategic utopia. She seeks to investigate the intersections between performance practices and advocacy journalism: the former limited by its obligation to metaphor, the latter limited by its obligation to immediacy. While social justice journalismʼs greater goal is engagement, linking information and resources wherever possible to increase visibility, the greater goal of performance is to create transformative experiences, thus accomplished through storytelling and explorations in embodiment. When art fuses with social justice, artworks become tools for engagement: truthful storytelling that is interactive and sensually engaging has a doubled power to both mark itself within current affairs, while embedding its politics into art history and art communities. Her practice follows divergent directions, seeking to emphasize and to capture the immediacy of social presence through time-based mediums and social intervention:audiences become participants, implicated through the process of embodiment. Guided by a politics of space making that prioritizes individual choice,engagement and participation are cultivated rather than expected.