calendario eventi  :: 

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17/1/2013

Three exhibitions

The Center for Book Arts, New York

Brother, Can You Spare a Stack

Organized by Yulia Tikhonova

Brother, Can You Spare a Stack presents thirteen art projects that re-imagine the library as a force for social change. Each project constructs a micro library of sorts that serves specific economic or social needs within the community. Each project proposes an alternative politicized realm, which can be imagined and formed to explore the social dimensions of contemporary culture. Small and mobile, these projects resist the limitations of a controlled, highly organized system that governs our society. In contrast to subjective libraries formed by the artists picking and choosing book titles, these projects take a pragmatic and rational approach, using the library model as an interactive field. Selected projects update the principles of relational aesthetics, and shift them towards all-inclusive and useful cultural production. "Brother, Can You Spare a Stack" borrows its title from the lyrics of a popular depression era song, claiming that the artists invent alternative models of questioning, inspiring new perspectives on social transformation. They insert themselves into the most unexpected situations and spaces, in this case libraries, to propose social and cultural improvement. The exhibition includes projects by: Arlen Austin and Jason Boughton; Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune; Stephen Boyer; BroLab (Rahul Alexander, Jonathan Brand, Adam Brent, Ryan Roa, and Travis LeRoy Southworth); Valentina Curandi and Nathaniel Katz; Finishing School with Christy Thomas; Anna Lise Jensen and Michael Wilson; Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden; The K.I.D.S. with Word Up Collective, Eyelevel BQE, Launchpad, NURTUREart, Weeksville Heritage Center, and individual partners, as well as with Emcee C.M., Master of None; Annabel Other; Reanimation Library; The Sketchbook Project; and Micki Watanabe Spiller. Special thanks to Build It Green NYC! for their in-kind donation of materials used both in the Bronx and at the Center for Book Arts.
Support for BroLab provided in part by BRAC and NYPL. Support for Curandi/Katz provided in part by nctm e l’arte and the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Tomie Arai
Tales from Home

Organized by Alexander Campos, Executive Director

Tomie Arai is a public artist who designs community-based projects that explore the relationship between art and history. Collaborating with historians, writers, curators, architects, activists and community residents, she creates works of art that present multiple perspectives and points of view. Through the use of family stories, shared memories and archival photographs, Tomie constructs pages of ‘living’ history that reflect the layered and complex narratives that give meaning to the spaces we live in. The pieces in this Featured Artists exhibition include large silkscreened monoprints and artist books made of wood and found objects. Through these constructions, Tomie explores the ways the printed image can transform the functionality of the materials we find in our environment.

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Candace Hicks
Fabrications

Organized by Alexander Campos, Executive Director

As an ardent reader, Hicks naturally gravitates toward creating books and printing. Most of her projects take the form of books or series of prints as each represents an inquiry or sustained reflection on a given subject. Taking note of coincidences is akin to the kind of observation a landscape or portrait artist practices. Her observations take the form of hand-stitched texts that she calls Common Threads. Sewing every line, letter, and illustration in the books enhances their status as objects. By laboring over a composition book, painstakingly recreating it by hand, Hicks has found a way to express the insignificant as potentially philosophical. Just as a landscape or portrait painter’s observations allow them to reproduce a version of reality; her scrutiny of repetition creates a narrative that navigates fictional universes. Her latest project, String Theory: Understanding Coincidence in the Multiverse undertakes to explain coincidence through science. String Theory is her first attempt to form a hypothesis about the meanings and rules that govern coincidence. Part pseudo-scientific humor, part genuine awe at the complexity of the cosmos, String Theory is an embroidered book in three volumes in which the text and images are entirely rendered in thread. In conjunction with her books is a new series of prints, Compositions. She resolves the abstract patterns on the covers of cheap composition books into representational images. Fabrications connects pattern seeking and coincidence with work that deals with memory and observations from reading.

Image: Valentina Curandi and Nathaniel Katz, The Pacifist Library

Opening Reception: Friday, January 18th , 6-8pm

The Center for Book Arts
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor - New York, New York 10001
Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm, and Saturday 10 am to 4 pm. The Center is closed on Sundays.
The Center will be closed on Monday, January 21, 2013 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Admission is free
free to the public

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