Curator
Owen Duffy is the Director of the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s University, Queens. He earned his Ph.D. from Virginia Commonwealth University, and has published his writing with Artforum, Momus, Bomb, ArtReview, among others outlets.

Artists
Beatrice Modisett earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016, and a BFA from Monserrat College of Art in 2007. Her solo exhibition, Consistency of the Temporal, opened at Eastern Connecticut State University in September 2019. She has exhibited her work at the Queens Museum, Present Company, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Anderson Gallery, among other venues. She was recently awarded a visual arts grant from the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation.

Myeongsoo Kim was born in Korea in 1980, and earned his MFA from Yale School of Art, and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. His work has been exhibited across the United States, including shows at SculptureCenter, Still House, Present Company, Bodega (Philadelphia), Jack Chiles, and recently, a solo show at Roomservice Gallery in Brooklyn.

Nickolaus Typaldos has exhibited and performed at venues including Essex Flowers, Marvin Gardens, David Zwirner, Regina Rex, Shoot the Lobster, Baxter St./CCNY, and Andrew Edlin in New York City, The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, Praz-Delavallade in Paris and Melange in Cologne. He has performed with the experimental electronic band, DROOIDS, internationally at venues including MoMA PS1 and Printed Matter, New York, Power Lunches, London, Centro ADM, Mexico City. They collaborated live with Arto Linsday, James Chance and Fritz Welch among others.

The Weight of the Temporary brings together the work of 25 artists with different perspectives, disciplines, and interests in an effort to explore human adaptation both to and through changing conditions, and living through the heaviness of a moment.

While speaking with the artists in preparation for this exhibition, we often discussed ideas of consumption, the earth getting warmer, relationships with family and loved ones, childhood experiences, traditions, womanhood, feminisms, death, even religion and its contemporary value, and the ways in which we all cope and unfold in our world(s). Whether it is a thought, a landscape, a home, a memory, an exchange, a movement, or just our attention, the momentary aspect of things and events connects us all in impactful ways.

The play on words in this exhibition’s title is reminiscent of Octavio Paz’s ideas in his book The Grammarian Monkey, where he speaks about fixity as a momentary quality and attempts to define what it means “to go to an end.” Paz plays incessantly with language and describes life as an ongoing search, a constant tug between movement and stillness, between the present and the headspace, between the specific goals in life and the uncertainty of the next instant. Similarly, the pieces that have come together in this exhibition remain tied by a continuous blending of

the self with the other,
the self with the outside,
the self with a home,
the self with history,
the self with language,
the self in movement,
the self with nature,
the self with itself,
the self within itself.

The metaphysical opposition of weight and time coexist and thus evoke the notion of occupying two spaces simultaneously, like a musical instrument that slaps, a text that performs, a white noise image, an encounter without regard, space food as a sign of social upper mobility, shifting in a fixed landscape, noise emotions, and the list could go on.

The vagueness of the terms, the finitude of the idea, the embedded cycle without an end… The temporary character of any ‘thing’ is correlated to its importance and to the question of how we measure it –is there in fact a better question? Certainly, the intersectional forces of race, class, gender, provenance, ability, influence, and experience will be definitive in the experience of being in the world(1).




1.After Feminist Data Visualization, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

NARS is pleased to present Now is Always Someone Else: an experiment in curatorial and artistic collaboration, an exercise in decision making, a deconstructed instruction piece, a new way of working through the limitations imposed by distances, whether, metaphorical, physical or rooted in language. The presented work, newly configured by curator Vanessa Kowalski, employs the same material elements of a piece by Levan Mindiashvili previously arranged in an alternative format, originally commissioned for the 2019 BRIC Biennal with support from Erti Gallery, titled Here is Always Somewhere Else. Formally, the elements of the piece, presented in four different embodiments, are based on the word “here” in Georgian. Beside the installation hangs a single hyperlink, or a correlating tangent of the work, in which Kowalski’s handwritten rendition of the word ‘Now’ written from memory in Georgian lettering has been defined in liquid mirror.

Romily Alice Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centres a queer disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Her work has been shown throughout the UK, Europe and North America in solo and group exhibitions. In 2019 she will present solo exhibitions at SOHO20 Gallery New York and Nars Foundation, Brooklyn, as well as being resident at Storm King Art Centre with the Shandaken residency program. Walden’s practice spans sculpture, installation, video and printed matter, all with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology.

Bat-Ami Rivlin (b.1991) is a sculpture and mixed media artist based in New York City. Her work focuses on found materials that explore bodily functionalities in different social and artificial spaces. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as David & Schweitzer Contemporary, NARS Foundation, BronxArtSpace, Time Square Space, and Knockdown Center. Rivlin is the recipient of awards such as the SVA Bronze Casting grant at the MANA Contemporary Ben Keating Foundry, the David Berg Foundation Scholarship, and the Artis Fund Scholarship. Her work was featured in publications such as ArtSlant, Peripheral Vision Arts, and BTR Today.

Yoko Shimizu is an artist and biologist based in Tokyo, Japan. Born in Kyoto and raised in the Unites States, she was inspired by the art scene in New York as a child. To pursue her passion in science, she studied Biology and Chemistry in Kobe University. Her career began as a creative director and consultant in an advertisement company. Currently, she runs her own creative innovation lab in Japan, Lab +1e. Yoko has received numerous awards for biology-inspired installations that integrate art and science, and has held exhibitions in countries around the globe. She is also a media personality on international art and music programs in Japan, and has given talks and performances in global events such as TED, FITC, and Ars Electronica. She is a director of an international art and science festival and a judge of Knowledge Innovation Awards in Japan.

Tai Hwa Goh, an artist working with printmaking and installation, was born in Seoul, Korea, where she spent her childhood years through college. Goh’s installation pushes the boundaries of traditional printmaking from two-dimensional images on paper to three-dimensional sculptural installations that transform space. Goh is a recipient of 2019 New Jersey Individual Artist Fellowship Awards and the Gold Award winner of the 2017 AHL Visual Art Competition. She also has been awarded and grants from National Endowments for the Arts, Lower East Side Print Shop, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Guttenberg Art,Emerge11, Vermont Studio Center, AHL Foundation and Evergreen Museum and Library Residency at John Hopkins University, MD, among others. She had an installation show at Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill and BRIC and her works have shown at IPCNY, DUMBO Art Festival, Islip Museum, William Paterson University, Gallery Aferro, AIR Gallery and Snug Harbor Center for The Art. Goh has participated in the International Artist Residency at NARS Foundation and the Artist-in-Residence, Museum of Arts and Design's Artist Studios Program. She is in the Artist-in-Residence at Children’s Museum of Manhattan now. Goh earned an MFA from the University of Maryland, as well as an MFA and a BFA from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. She has been featured in US and international exhibitions. For more information please visit www.taihwagoh.com.

The Body Responds by Lying Down is an exhibition featuring the works of our 2019 Season I artists-in-residence. The exhibition is titled after a poem by Quinn Latimer which similarly takes its title from a phrase in an essay by Alex Kitnick on the work of Pamela Rosenkranz, which was published in the 2012 catalogue of Pamela's work called [No Core].

Women’s Work is an exhibition that examines the connection between women’s domestic labor and craft. The title of the exhibition comes from the derogatory use of the term “women’s work” and exams the unseen, disrespected domestic labor of women. Ten female artists have been selected to represent this group exhibition. These selected artists create work that examines the labor of women and challenges the patriarchal viewpoint of domesticity and craft.

In their work, the geological becomes a metaphor to talk about general ecologies, the conduit to recreate a dialogue between human and natural forces, the space for mimicry of natural phenomena or inhabiting a character of a science fiction narrative; the idea that makes us wonder about the possibility of acknowledging a second body and the understanding of its impact and extent as a transfigurative form.