calendario eventi  :: 

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12/9/2014

Three exhibitions

Art in General, New York

Mika Tajima: Total Body Conditioning

Art in General is pleased to present Total Body Conditioning, a New Commission by Mika Tajima.

Total Body Conditioning is an exhibition by Mika Tajima comprised of three scenes—display, work, and fitness—that invoke technologies developed to control and affect the body. These are techniques that shape bodily experience of time and space, taking the human body as a target of power. The works in the exhibition include hot tub painting objects, a series of abstract woven textile portraits, and transparent paintings set to changing ambient lighting and sound sequences. Each scene in the exhibition traces the management of the body in different spaces and temporal contexts from factory assembly lines to therapeutic “after work” locations.


The exhibition takes its name from a physical conditioning program developed to adapt the body to an exercise regimen emphasizing endurance, flexibility, and performance through the seriation of time and the partitioning of bodily space. Total Body Conditioning refers to the complete investment of the body, taking the Greek practice “to care for oneself” into the Foucauldian register of discipline and control exacted on the self—where individual practices of freedom are intertwined with modes of domination.


Created specifically for the exhibition, Lucite cast acrylic sheet hot tub painting objects that are reverse-spray enameled in saturated gradient colors ground the gallery space. These new hot tub objects are ergonomically molded to the human form, underlining how the body is articulated in relation to an object. The invention of the hot tub began out of an aviation company, which later developed hydraulic pumps for medical therapy before evolving into a social recreation with its multi-seat tubs. Here the tub form acts as a container for the body and paint, fusing figuration with abstraction.


Tajima will also present a new group of works from her “Furniture Art” series consisting of spray enameled transparent paintings each subtitled by a geographic location—Shikoku, Ojo Caliente, Kerala—drawing on the psychogeographic associations produced by the affective names of industrial colors and paints. These works among others in the exhibition will be set to shifting lighting and sound sequences. In one scene, the lighting color temperature is choreographed to a soundtrack of musical cues that signal problems on the assembly line to workers in a Toyota factory.


The exhibition will feature a new series of “Negative Entropy” acoustic woven textile portraits derived from recordings of Toyota-powered Jacquard looms, an assembly line at a Toyota car factory in Japan, and a server colocation center. These recordings were transmuted into image files and physically interpreted by a weaving designer into a Jacquard fabric. The woven textiles were then stretched over custom acoustic panels, whereby they assume the function of sound- deadening tiles, similar to those used in recording studios to isolate sounds made by individual performers.


Before Toyota began manufacturing cars, the company was built on the mechanization of the weaving process through the power loom and the streamlining of factory production in the early 20th century. To this day, Toyota continues to manufacture power looms alongside the production of cars, applying the principle of “jidoka”—the core of Toyota’s production method of lean manufacturing that defines the relationship between machines and workers (referred to as “automation with a human touch.”) Through extreme control of time and space demonstrated by this global production system, the natural body comes in tension with the machinic body.


Total Body Conditioning will feature a sound collaboration between New Humans and Alvin Aronson, a NYC-based DJ and musician. Aronson’s forthcoming debut for White Material records is scheduled for release in 2014.

Special thanks to Eleven Rivington, Greehouse Media, Alvin Aronson, Madeline Best, Lucite Lux, and Dynasty Spas

Bio
Born 1975, Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in New York.

Mika Tajima employs sculpture, painting, video, music, and performance, often drawing on contradictions in modernist design and architecture to consider how the performing subject (e. g., speaker, dancer, designer, factory worker, musician, filmmaker) is constructed in spaces in which material objects outline action and engagement. Tajima’s most recent work extends her interrogation of “the built environment and the maximized performer to the global flow of life energies sought by unraveling systems.” Tajima also works collaboratively under the moniker New Humans, including projects with Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, Judith Butler, and C. Spencer Yeh, among others.

Tajima’s work has been shown internationally, at venues including the South London Gallery, London; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; SculptureCenter and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York City; Bass Museum, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Tajima lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA from Columbia University.

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Zachary Fabri: lorem ipsum

Curated by Kristen Chappa

Art in General is pleased to present lorem ipsum, a newly commissioned installation by Zachary Fabri for the Storefront Project Space.

Best known for his video work and performances that feature the artist as protagonist, Art in General will present a lesser-known trajectory within Zachary Fabri’s practice. Here, he will create a site-responsive installation for the public storefront space featuring a series of large-format graphic prints. This project, titled lorem ipsum, conflates the aesthetics of American Apparel with American Black Nationalist titles predating 1920, when Marcus Garvey popularized Pan-Africanism in the United States and abroad. The installation, manifesting as printed signage, borrows the design and marketing strategy of a trendy urban clothing store chain in order to brand a political ideology and reroute possible perceptions of the exhibition site.

Fabri’s artistic practice seeks to create a space for discourse around social and political systems of oppression through artworks that manifest in a range of mediums, including drawing, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Continually investigating the movement and politics of the body, Fabri’s work prompts viewers to locate themselves as “insider” or “outsider.” Fabri often meditates on the memory and weight of history; the ideologies and beliefs that define us. His works offer reminders of the ideas that shape identity—exploring its limits and possible transformations.

Zachary Fabri was born in Miami, Florida in 1977 and currently lives in Brooklyn. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art in graphic design from the New World School of the Arts, Miami, in 2000, and later relocated to New York City to receive a MFA from Hunter College in 2007. Fabri’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Sequences Real-time Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland; the Nordic Biennale: Momentum, Moss, Norway; Gallery Open, Berlin; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York. Fabri has completed residencies at the Jardim Canadá Art and Technology Center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and LMCC in New York City. Upcoming exhibitions include Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond at the Brooklyn Museum, October 2014–January 2015.

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Gediminas Akstinas

Curated by Inesa Pavlovskaite Brašiškė, Gerda Paliušytė

Art in General and The Gardens (Vilnius, Lithuania) are pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Lithuanian artist Gediminas Akstinas, curated by Inesa Pavlovskaitė Brašiškė and Gerda Paliušytė, and on view in Art in General’s Musée Minuscule from September 13– October 25, 2014. This is the fifth and final exhibition in The Gardens’ yearlong curatorial residency at Art in General.

Gediminas Akstinas (b. 1961, lives and works in Vilnius) is a sculptor whose artistic practice is characterized by a combination of formalist and conceptual approaches. For the occasion of this exhibition, Akstinas created a sequence of watercolors, continuing a series-based body of work not revisited since the 1980s. The selection of new paintings on view features a repeating cup—an everyday object that is both domestic and mechanical in its production. Here, associative or narrative connections cannot be avoided; every iteration of the cup results from formal choices in the preceding image. Whether additive or tautological, the relational logic that generates each new cup is not geared towards a preconceived form but unfolds as an event. There is no “original,” however, each composition evokes individual responses in the viewer. Akstinas foregrounds the creation and perception of the image—“seeing” as an act of the mind, not the eye. As such, Akstinas implicates both himself and the audience as co-authors.

Akstinas’ broader practice investigates the possibilities of representing everyday life, as well as the resulting tension between realism and abstraction. His work ranges from large-scale, site-specific sculptures that elaborate upon architecture (“Carriage,” 1998) to portable, hand-made, and domestic objects (“Shelf-pupils,” 1990; “Bench,” 2012). Analyzing the “potential” of an object and the relationship between form and function is central to Akstinas’ oeuvre. Recent exhibitions include: The Orangery, Užutrakis Manor Estate, Trakai (2014); Exhibition of Meetings, The Gardens, Vilnius (2012); and Sparrows, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2012).

The Gardens is a project space founded by two curators Inesa Pavlovskaitė Brašiškė and Gerda Paliušytė in Vilnius, Lithuania and dedicated to the practice and dissemination of Lithuanian contemporary art in Lithuania and abroad. The Gardens is mainly working with the younger generation of artists but also organizes cross-generational projects as well as programs concerts and screenings in the premises of Vilnius planetarium where it is originally located. www.thegardens.lt

General Support of Art in General is provided by General Hardware Manufacturing Inc.; the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; The Greenwich Collection; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Agnes Gund; the William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and by individuals. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

The New Commissions Program is made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Trust for Mutual Understanding; National Endowment for the Arts; and Jerome Foundation. Support has also been provided by Commissioners’ Circle leaders Jeffery Larsen and Joseph Bolduc; Commissioners’ Circle supporters Sandra Ho and Jang Kim, and Cher Lewis, and Commissioners’ Circle members Roya Khadjavi-Heidari, Mary Lapides, Richard Massey, Leslie Ruff, Joyce Siegel, and Jeremy E. Steinke.

Additional special event support in 2014 provided by ALoft Hotels Brooklyn, Hotel Hugo SoHo, and ROOT[Drive-In]
Art in General funders

Additional support for Total Body Conditioning provided by Greehouse Media, Lucite Lux, and Dynasty Spas with special thanks to Eleven Rivington, Alvin Aronson, and Madeline Best

Image: Mika Tajima, Total Body Conditioning, digital rendering, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Eleven Rivington

Opening reception: Saturday, September 13, 6–8pm

Art in General
79 Walker Street - New York, NY 10013
HOURS
Summer Office Hours: Monday – Thursday, 10 – 6pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm (as of September 13, 2014)
ADMISSION
Free

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