27/6/2009
Four exhibitions
MoMA PS1, New York
On display the winner of the 2009 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the program, which affords emerging architectural talents the opportunity to design and present innovative projects. Envisioned as an "urban shelter", the work will serve as a cooling escape at the heart of P.S.1's Warm Up music series. Before visitors enter the courtyard, a series of tall hut-like "chimneys" with dark thatched skin will be visible from the street. The interior of the conical shelter will provide shade, similar to a Bedouin tent in which the dark textile creates its own microclimate shielding from the summer heat.
Young Architects Program 2009
Afterparty by MOS
The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center announce the winner of the 2009 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program: the architectural firm MOS. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the program, which affords emerging architectural talents the opportunity to design and present innovative projects. Five finalists selected by an invited nomination process were asked to present an urban landscape for the large courtyard entrance of P.S.1, with the allotted project budget of $70,000. The architects were required to incorporate elements of shade, water, seating, and bar areas into a proposed project. MOS's winning landscape, Afterparty, will be on view in P.S.1's outdoor courtyard starting in late June, and will serve as an immersive environment for the 2009 Warm Up summer music series.
Envisioned as an "urban shelter," Afterparty will serve as a cooling escape at the heart of P.S.1's Warm Up music series. Before visitors enter the courtyard, a series of tall hut-like "chimneys" with dark thatched skin will be visible from the street. The interior of the conical shelter will provide shade, similar to a Bedouin tent in which the dark textile creates its own microclimate shielding from the summer heat. Cool air from the thermal mass of the courtyard's shaded concrete walls and concrete water troughs located in the center of the structure will be drawn up through a series of cooling chimneys by induction. This will create a breeze and a "cool down" atmosphere for the active Warm Up crowd.
In addition to MOS (New Haven, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts), the other finalists are !ndie architecture (Denver, Colorado), Bade Stageberg Cox (Brooklyn, New York), L.E.FT architects (New York, New York), and PARA-project (Brooklyn, New York). An exhibition of the five finalists' proposed projects will be on view at MoMA over the summer. It will be organized by Andres Lepik, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, explains, "The project proposes to deal with issues of sustainability and a return to basics, working towards climate altering through passive means, even in the context of an exhibition/party space in the P.S.1 courtyard. It consists of a lightweight aluminum frame of recyclable parts clad in a weave, allowing some light and air to circulate but at the same time shading visitors from the sunlight. Its combination of forms includes tall, chimney-like shapes, heroic cones, and others that are evocative at once of the vernacular village structures world-wide and of the open ruined vaults of the Roman Forum."
Antoine Guerrero, P.S.1 Director of Operations and Exhibitions, adds, "From the ground up, another exciting, ephemeral transformation of our outdoor galleries will leave a lasting impression on over 50,000 summer visitors who will have the chance to cool off."
MOS architects Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith say, "Today, we are rethinking and resituating architecture-not only its conceptual and formal economies but also its inherent ability to engage and produce visceral intimate environments. This project, Afterparty, is a temporary urban shelter and passive cooling station for P.S.1 and its Warm Up events, creating an escape from the summer heat and constructing a network of large, medium, and small cellular spaces that allow for intimacy and social formations to thrive."
SELECTION PROCESS
For the Young Architects Program 2009 selection process, MoMA and P.S.1 invited outside experts in the field of architecture, including architects, curators, academics, and magazine editors, to nominate the finalists from a pool of approximately 40 candidates that included both recent graduates and established architects experimenting with new styles or techniques. After reviewing the candidates, five finalists were selected to present proposals to a panel composed of Glenn D. Lowry, Director; Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director; Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs; Barry Bergdoll, Philip Johnson Chief Curator, Department of Architecture and Design; Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media; and Andres Lepik, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art; and Antoine Guerrero, Director of Operations and Exhibitions, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
HISTORY
This year marks the twelfth summer that P.S.1 has hosted a combined architectural installation and music series in its outdoor galleries, though it is only the tenth year of the Young Architects Program, which began in 2000. The inaugural project was an architecturally based installation in 1998 by an Austrian artist collective, Gelitin. In 1999, Philip Johnson's DJ Pavilion celebrated the historic affiliation of P.S.1 and MoMA. The previous winners of the Young Architects Program are SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli (2000), ROY (2001), William E. Massie (2002), Tom Wiscombe / EMERGENT (2003), nARCHITECTS (2004), Xefirotarch (2005), OBRA (2006), Ball-Nogues (2007), and WORKac (2008).
ABOUT MOS
MOS is an interdisciplinary practice engaging in architecture and design through an inclusive methodology of research, expansive collaboration, and extensive experimentation. The work develops through research ranging from typology, digital production, structure, material, program and use, to larger networks of social, cultural, and environmental consideration. The scope of MOS's research constantly shifts and expands as each individual project has the potential to engage a unique set of parameters, specific to its condition. This process of "radical inclusion" allows MOS to participate in design at different scales-from product design, to private residences, to cultural institutions to large-scale urban infrastructure.
Lead by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, MOS is based in New Haven, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts. MOS has received the P/A award, New York Urban League Emerging Voices series, Surface magazine's Avant-Guardian, and Architectural Record's Design Vanguard award. Current projects include a villa for Ordos 100, Inner Mongolia, China; The Ballroom Drive-In theater, Marfa, Texas; an inflatable factory in Newfoundland, Canada; and a Teen Center, Lowell, Massachusetts. Michael Meredith is an Associate Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Hilary Sample is an Assistant Professor at the Yale University School of Architecture.
The 2009 Young Architects Program is sponsored by Bloomberg.
Additional support is provided by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation, Jeffrey and Michèle Klein, Agnes Gund, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, and Con Edison.
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Carlos Motta
On view June 28, 2009 - September 14, 2009
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center announces a new exhibition program entitled "On-site." Continuing P.S.1's long standing tradition of commissioning in-situ projects such as the "Vertical Painting" series (1997), the first incarnation of this new program will focus on wall paintings, an art form that has a long history in New York City. As part of this program, P.S.1 presents Brief History, (2005-2009), the first solo project in a New York museum by Colombian-born, New York-based artist Carlos Motta. Working primarily in photography, video and installation, Motta engages political history by employing strategies used in documentary genres and sociology in order to interrogate governmental structures, to observe the repercussions of political events, and to suggest alternative ways in which to interpret those histories.
Brief History, on view in P.S.1's Lobby space, consists of a black vinyl mural and an edition of two newspapers. This installation is part of the SOA Cycle (2005-2009) a project through which the artist examines the School of the Americas (SOA)-a Cold War institution sponsored by the U.S. government to train Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics and military strategy, originally established with the aim to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America.
The large black image in the lobby titled SOA: Black and White Pain-ting # 15 (2005-09) was appropriated from a Colombian newspaper and depicts a group of soldiers advancing with guns drawn. This abstracted and de-contextualized image confronts the viewer with a war scene but does not reveal who is fighting against whom. The newspapers, which are free for visitors to take, respectively present a brief history of U.S. interventions in Latin America and a history of leftist guerrillas in the same region, both spanning the years of the Cold War. Brief History engages a history of "enemy" ideologies.
Carlos Motta (b. Bogotá, Colombia, 1978) lives and works in New York. He has had solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia (2008); Konsthall C, Stockholm (2009); Fundación Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá (2009); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2009) and Art in General, New York (2008); and has been included in group exhibitions such as the upcoming X Biennale de Lyon (2009); The Greenroom, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2008); Soft Manipulation, Casino Luxembourg (2008); 5x5 Castelló, Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain (2009) and Democracy in America, Creative Time, New York (2008).
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YAP 10th Anniversary Review
On view June 28, 2009 - September 14, 2009
YAP 10th Anniversary Reviewis a visual chronicle of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art's Young Architects Program, one of the most acclaimed architectural arenas for emerging talent of the last decade. Born from a unique disciplinary and generational collaboration, the first projects included a pavilion designed by the Austrian artist collective Gelitin and an untitled project by one of the most influential American architects, Philip Johnson. From this unprecedented pairing, YAP has become a rare public forum for exhibition of architectural invention fueled by the exuberance of young architects.
Since its inception, YAP has always been linked with P.S.1's live music and DJ series Warm Up. Both programs have grown into much-anticipated summer events merging together to offer a simultaneous experimental experience. Each year a group of nominators is solicited to put forth the names of young architectural talent. From this group of approximately forty candidates, five competitors are invited to propose temporary installations for P.S.1's distinctive walled courtyard. The winning team each year, selected by a jury of P.S.1 and MoMA curators and staff, always incorporate required elements of shade, water and seating robust enough to withstand a 3-5 month exhibition cycle and thousands of P.S.1 visitors.
This anniversary exhibition is arranged as a timeline, beginning with Gelitin's party, moving through the two years of pre-YAP Warm Up parties and the ten years of YAP to date, including all of the winning projects, as well as proposals from 38 finalists. It is a snapshot of more than a decade of architectural experimentation.
YAP 10th Anniversary Review is organized by Christopher Barley and Troy Conrad Therrien, recent graduates of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation with curatorial advice from Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Chief Curatorial Advisor, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
Special thanks to SOHO Reprographics; and the Arts Initiative at Columbia University, this funding is made possible through a generous gift from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation.
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Michael Joaquin Grey
On view June 28, 2009 - September 14, 2009
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents a solo presentation by Michael Joaquin Grey, an artist whose work has bridged the boundaries between art, science, media, and the imagination for the last twenty years. His interdisciplinary practice revolves around the development and origins of life and language, as well as morphology. The self organizing principles of living and nonliving things, from muscle cells up to cultural phenomena, are among the diverse concerns that Grey's work examines. Featuring wall vinyl, computational videos, sculptures, and prints, the exhibition investigates critical moments in natural phenomena and culture with a nearly scientific eye, all the while testing the very limits and boundaries of the tools required in such study.
On view in P.S.1's first floor Drawing Gallery are works that thematically demonstrate the artist's interest in the development of language, living things, and strategic organic systems. Many works relate to the principles of growth and transformation, as seen in Object as preposition (1988-2007) which visualizes how throughout art history the object became part of a performative process in relational aesthetics. Body signals are a recurrent theme; the human heartbeat is used in Perpetual ZOOZ (2005-09), as well as the artist's own biological material in Artificial Muscle (1983-2001), where a sample of Grey's muscle cells is used to create a contracting mass in a test tube.
The computational cinematic projection Perpetual ZOOZ is the primary work in the exhibition, which incorporates two versions of The Wizard of Oz. One version of the movie plays in time with his mother's heartbeat and the other plays in reverse, in accordance with Grey's heart. The projection is designed in a way that both versions of the movie are presented in a sculptural form, like two sides of a spinning coin.
Michael Joaquin Grey (b. Los Angeles, CA, 1961) lives and works in San Francisco and New York. He has had solo shows at Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2007), bitforms gallery, New York (2006), Kunsthalle Loppem, Belgium (1995), Lisson Gallery, London (1994), Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York (1991, 1993 and 1994) and has been included in group exhibitions such as Illiterature, Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica (2009), Beneath the Underdog, Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007), CUT/FILM Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, MOCA, North Miami (2004), Public Offerings, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001), 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1993).
Michael Joaquin Grey is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Chief Curatorial Advisor, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
Special thanks to bitforms gallery.
Press Officer
April Hunt tel. 718 7867375 april@ps1.org
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