2017 Season I Residency Exhibition
Within a Circuit
March 3 - 24, 2017
Opening Reception: March 3 6-8pm
Carrick Bell | Bat Ami Rivlin | Elise Rasmussen | Nooshin Rostami | Ololade Adeniyi | Sohyun Han | Sophie Barbasch | Svetlana Bailey
Within a Circuit
March 3 - 24, 2017
Opening Reception: March 3 6-8pm
Carrick Bell | Bat Ami Rivlin | Elise Rasmussen | Nooshin Rostami | Ololade Adeniyi | Sohyun Han | Sophie Barbasch | Svetlana Bailey
The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation is pleased to present Within a Circuit, an exhibition featuring selections from the work of 2017 Season I International Artist Residency participants: Ololade Adeniyi, Svetlana Bailey, Sophie Barbasch, Carrick Bell, Sohyun Han, Elise Rasmussen, Bat Ami Rivlin, and Nooshin Rostami.
Taking its title from an installation performance by Nooshin Rostami, Within a Circle showcases the diverse research interests, materials, processes and presentation modes that underlie the art practices the artists in residence have continued to explore and develop alongside each other, over the course of three to six months in South Brooklyn.
Ololade Adeniyi’s installations The Despicable and The Other disassemble notions of home, domesticity and constructed space by rendering their clean, optimistic and perfected forms into gangly and unsettling constructions made of raw and sexualized household and construction materials.
Svetlana Bailey conflates space and time through the staging of objects atop photographs, which are then re-photographed, thus reconciling their coexistence psychologically. The combination and arrangement of these ordinary objects, once stripped of their familiar designations, create new relationships and autonomous entities.
Sophie Barbasch's Training to be a Girl mines Craigslist as both a source of primary material, photographs of items for sale, and as means of posing men various questions, the answers to which reveal attitudes about romantic relationships and gender dynamics, as much as fulfill the artists and her participants’ need for connection through anonymous oversharing and intimacy.
Carrick Bell’s video work draws from seemingly disparate sources of existing material to sound notes in formal, historical, cultural and personal registers. In If You Feel It Let It Happen, Bell juxtaposes Bruce Conner’s 1976 short film Crossroads, most recently on view at MoMA and the Whitney, with Britney Spears' 2002 movie of the same title. Conner’s original soundtrack to the footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll is replaced with the pop star's vocals, who is also seen surveying the alternating shots between aerial views and straight-on shots, to dramatic aural effect.
Sohyun Han’s City of the Blind painstakingly scratches off text and images from the front page of the New York Time’s Trump Inauguration edition on January 21st and Korean newspaper The Chosun-Ilbo’ frontpage news of President Park Geun-hye apologizing for corruption scandals that have mired her administration. Isolated from all but a few select words seem to comment on these two historical moments and frame it, the main photograph is imbued with a prescient and haunting power.
Elise Rasmussen’s A Poetic Truth in a Pathetic Fallacy takes the rhinoceros and human-kinds fascination and misinterpretation of the animal as its starting point and explores its visual representation and collection, the legacy of colonialism and the urgency of extinction.
Bat Ami Rivlin’s collaboration with performer Dana Davenport in Untitled (RECONDITION) blurs the lines between object and body to explore the fleshy characteristics of both domestic objects and the human form.
Nooshin Rostami’s installation inserts the human into a mechanical system, as a momentary resistance that impedes movement and flow of energy. Staged as a performance, in the NARS gallery on Feb 24th, it is presented here both as documentation and a sculpture in its own right.
