© 2024 janna dyk

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  1. CURRENT:

  2. February 17, 2024: "Inter/Non/Anti" presentation at College Art Association, Chicago (link)

      Session Expanding Spheres: Collaborations in Classrooms, Labs, Institutions, and Communities

  3. February 8 - April 5, 2024: "Conversations" at Silber Gallery, Goucher College.

    Conversations features 13 lens-based artists who utilize dialogue in their work.  Artists include: Gabo Camnitzer, Lux Eterna, Bang Geul Han, Adam Golfer, Kyoung eun Kang, Elizabeth Tannie Lewin, Helena Metaferia, Mujero, Ellie Lebovits, Sunita Prasad, Rachel Mozman Solano, Katz Tapper, Gabriela Vainsencher

    Artists Reception: Thursday, February 22, 2024, 5-8PM

    Image: Rachelle Mozman Solano, All These Things I Carry With Me, 2020, still, single-channel video, 24 minutes.

  4. February 8 - May 26, 2024: "Rebecca Marimutu: Portraits (Contacts)," Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College

    Artist Reception: Thursday, February 22, 2024, 5-8PM

    Marimutu explores the notions of self, identity, and portraiture through combinations of digital and analog photography, which she intercepts manually through drawing, painting, collage, and sculptural and photographic processes.

    Image: Rebecca Marimutu, "Portrait(s), Contact #103," 24x30, Archival Inkjet Print, Edition of 5

  5. UPCOMING:

  6. May 6, 2024, 3pm EST: "Crohn's / Chronic," presentation, New York University IBD Center, Dr. Jessica Gerson, for "Art and IBD."  Co-presenters:

    Jordan Reif - New York University
    Kriota Willberg, Artist in Residence, NYU

  7. April 12 - May 26: "Christopher Lin: Earth Bound," Roselie Bond Window, Goucher College

    Baltimore-born, New York-based artist Christopher Lin, whose work engages art and climate change, will present a site-specific experimental installation with neuroponic plants. Details coming soon...

  8. PAST:

  9. DanaidX "Ablutions," cyanotype, 2023

    DanaidX "Ablutions," cyanotype, 2023

    "In the Dark: An Exploration of Chronic Illness," installation view, Rosenberg Gallery

    "In the Dark: An Exploration of Chronic Illness," installation view, Rosenberg Gallery

    DanaidX "Karst," cyanotype, 2023

    DanaidX "Karst," cyanotype, 2023

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      DanaidX "Ablutions," cyanotype, 2023

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      "In the Dark: An Exploration of Chronic Illness," installation view, Rosenberg Gallery

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      DanaidX "Karst," cyanotype, 2023

    October 6 - December 6, 2023: "In the Dark: An Exploration of Chronic Illness," Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College

    With a wide-range of archetypal visual references from art history to punk-rock, to science-fiction, Brooks and Yarian’s images of the female body in everyday domestic life explore the space between creativity and pain in quotidian experience. In so doing, the works invite viewers to question their own understanding of such concepts as rest, wellness, work/life balance, vulnerability, and the passage of time.

  10. Fall 2023: New Position as Director and Curator of Art Galleries and Collections at Goucher College.

    Image: Goucher's Silber Gallery Fall 2022 Exhibition, "We Care: Work By Corita Kent," curated by Alex Ebstein.

  11. Summer 2022: Post (Not-Post?) Pandemic Update - Curatorial Consulting + Commissions

    During the pandemic I began working as a curatorial consultant with individual artists, artist estates, and archives.  Select projects include the Walter Ferro Archive, Barbara Hammer Estate, and Morgan O'Hara, among other individual artists with whom I've worked.  If you would like to speak about working together, please send me an email to schedule a brief phone call to discuss your project needs and goals!

    The type of work I've overed includes:

    > Artist Archives: consultation, strategizing, planning, curatorial research, narrative contextualizing, and artwork cataloguing.

    Writing: for grants, exhibition + residency proposals, press releases, website texts, and project + art statements.

    > Editing: of grants, proposals, press releases, statements, academic papers, text for large-scale website overhauls.

    > Project Management: for complex, multi-step and wide-scale hybrid projects.

  12. October 2022: Book release, + readings at the New York Art Book Fair 2022, of selected writings in forthcoming book, Encyclopedia of Things (Spector Books: Leipzig, Germany), by Elisabeth Smolarz, with contributions from: Chloë Bass, Lily Benson, Ben van Buren, Barbara Butcher, Tyler Coburn, Annabel Dao, Anaïs Duplan, Janna Dyk, Adele Eisenstein, Alex Fialho, Ariel Goldberg, Gabriel de Guzman, Amelia Harnish, Anna Harsanyi, Pablo Helguera, Michelle Levy, Su-Yee Lin, Freya Powell, Alex Ferrando, Jillian Steinhauer, Kendra Sullivan, Danielle Tegeder, Wendy Vogel, Adam Wade, and Neila Wyman. 

    Available for preorder at Target, Barnes & Noble, artbook, Amazon, and Spector Books.

  13. Summer/Fall 2022: Art + cognitive psychology research collaboration with Celia Durkin, of Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and The Kavli Institute for Brain Science.  New York, NY.  CANCELLED.  

  14. June 2022: Curatorial / Research Residency at PLAYA Art & Science Residency & Dark Sky Lab in Summer Lake, Oregon.  I will work on research about the overlaps between cognitive psychology and visual art, from research towards an ongoing curatorial project, [Perception?!?].  Originally August - September 2020.

    Fellow residents: Shelley Jordan, Gregor Holzinger, Alex Arzt, and Jennifer Mannebach.

  15. Summer 2022: Residency at Woodstock Byrdclyffe, Byrdclyffe, Woodstock, New York. I will continue the latest iteration of Revising the Text(s), which negotiates how mental space interacts with our shared understandings of global realities.  Dates pending due to covid-19.  Originally July 2020. CANCELLED.

  16. November 4-30, 2021: "'Sometimes the curtains part...,' 1/6 - 3/10/86, 11/01 - 11/03/21," engagements 1-22, a new iteration of the series of Untitled (Journals), in the exhibition, “Writ,” an exhibition on abstraction and text, curated by Sarah E. Brook (Sarah E. Brook) at Sweet Lorraine Gallery (Sweet Lorraine Gallery), November 4-29, with

    Opening Reception Saturday, November 13, 6-8pm, Sweet Lorraine Gallery183 Lorraine Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231.  
    Artists include: Harriet Salmon, Janna Dyk, Levani Mindiashvili, Shanti Grumbine, Sharmistha Ray. 

    From the press release:

    “Each of Janna Dyk’s blurred polaroids marks the initial moment of engagement with a page of her aunt’s journal, one of several discovered posthumously. In a variation of the practice of honoring a loved one by placing stones on their grave, Dyk creates atop the writing a meditative memorial, which—in transferring the words remaining visible—becomes a collaborative, reductive poem between the two familiar writers. What purpose does it serve to create a textual representation of our internal lives in this way? What meaning can be made of these central psychological threads that may never otherwise be shared with the outside world?”

    #harrietsalmon #jannadyk #levanimindiashvili #shantigrumbine #sharmistharay #sarahebrook

  17. December 2021: Group exhibition and holiday pop-up at Gowanus Dredger's, curated by Sarah Chavchavadze,  Select polaroids from the "'Sometimes the curtains part...,' 1/6 - 3/10/86, 11/01 - 11/03/21," engagements 1-22, a new iteration of the series of Untitled (Journals), will be on view and available for sale alongside other works for the reduced price of $100 (all proceeds go to artists).  More information soon.  Opening reception Saturday, December 11, 2021, 6-8pm, at 165 2nd Street, Brooklyn, NY.

    Image: "Diagram of a breast and illegible writing from a notebook with a soft mustard cover," 2018, from the series Untitled (Journals Found and Kept), 2018-ongoing.

  18. June 2021: Guest Visiting Curator at International Center for Photography

  19. May 2021: Mention with regards to ongoing dialgoues with Columbian photographer Ana C. Vallejo about neuropsychology and visual studies, in "Looking for Love in the Context of a Global Lockdown,"  PH Magazine/ Photographic Museum of Humanity.

  20. POSTPONED Fall 2020: Curatorial/Research Residency with Residency Unlimited.

  21. CANCELLED Summer/Fall 2020: Collaboration with cognitive behavioral neurologist and interdisciplinary artist Dr. Sonja Blum, and the experimental collective HEKLER, for an interdisciplinary workshop within the discussion series, ANTI-FEAR.

  22. POSTPONED Spring 2020: Artist-Thinker Residency with the School of Making/ThinkingUpstate New York.  I will work on an experimental collaborative iteration of the ongoing writing and image project, Revising the Text(s), which poetically examines such concepts as mental space, empathy, interconnectedness, visual perception, attention, and the subjectivity of experience.  Originally April 2020.

  23. June 2020: Guest curator for International Center of Photography graduate portfolio review.

  24. May 15 - June 15 2020: 30-Day Artist-in-Listserve Online Residency, via the "non-corporeal art gallery" digital project Famous Chimps.  To follow additional projects, subscribe here, or visit their web archive.

  25. February 7 - March 15, 2020: work in A.I.R. Gallery's annual fundraising exhibition, Fe * Mail *. Opening reception is Friday, February 14, 6-8pm.

  26. Image of books available at REDIRECT closing, courtesy Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL.

    Image of books available at REDIRECT closing, courtesy Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL.

    February 24, 2020:

    REDIRECT
     catalogues
    , printed by TXTbooks (Brooklyn) with an essay by Paddy Johnson (ArtFCity) are available via Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL, and at the closing event at RAMP/Revolve Gallery, Asheville, NC, February 24, 6-8PM.

  27. February 13, 2020:

    21 Days and REDIRECT reviewed by Kate Averett in "Slow Connection: TSA GVL presents REDIRECT in Asheville," BURNAWAY Art Review.

  28. January 27, 2020:

    Read new work at Hercules Art for Twelve Labors: #3 curated by Rachel Hillery, with fellow artist/writers James Chrzan, Kathleen Granados, Alison Kizu-Blair, and Sarah Sala.   @twelvelaborsreadingseries

     
    Twelve Labors, Session 3
    Monday, January 27
    7:30 pm
    25 Park Place, 3rd Floor
  29. REDIRECT installation, includes work by Joyce YJ Lee, Victoria Bradbury, Jorge Lucero.  Photo by Jordan Whitten.

    REDIRECT installation, includes work by Joyce YJ Lee, Victoria Bradbury, Jorge Lucero.  Photo by Jordan Whitten.

    REDIRECT installation image of "21 Days" (2009/2020). Photo by Jordan Whitten.

    REDIRECT installation image of "21 Days" (2009/2020). Photo by Jordan Whitten.

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      REDIRECT installation, includes work by Joyce YJ Lee, Victoria Bradbury, Jorge Lucero.  Photo by Jordan Whitten.

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      REDIRECT installation image of "21 Days" (2009/2020). Photo by Jordan Whitten.

    January 24, 2020:

    Exhibited "21 Days" (2009/2020), the 672-photo collaborative work, in REDIRECT, curated by Suzanne Dittenbar, at Revolve Gallery's RAMP Space, in conjunction with Tiger Strikes Asteroid SE, in Asheville, NC.  Work on view January 24 - February 24, 2020.  Artists: Conrad Bakker, Victoria Bradbury, Ben Duvall, Janna Dyk, Benjamin Grosser, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Jorge Lucero

    Panel dicussion with Lei Han, Professor of New Media at UNC Asheville, Victoria Bradbury, Ben Duvall, and Joyce YJ Lee, Friday, January 24, 7-9PM.

  30. November 21, 2019:

    Select photographic works from the series is this it / it is this / is it / this / ? exhibited in ascent/assent, a group exhibition curated by Joyce YJ Lee and Albert Pedulla, November 21-December 20, 2019, in conjunction with the Madeleine L'Engle conference, 250 W 80th St.

  31. November 19. 2019, 7-9PM:

    Reading at the Williamsburg Public Library, in a series curated by poet and media artist Diane Ludin.

  32. November 4, 2019, 8-10pm:

    Mimeo Microphone

    St. Mark's Poetry Project

    Readings by Ama Birch, Janna Dyk, Stella Hayes, Adeena Karasick, Julia Knobloch, Diane Ludin, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Bob Rosenthal, Marina Temkina, and Peter Valente.

  33. August - October, 2019, dawn to dusk:

    Taking an early autumn's late "summer," I'll be on a self-imposed sabbatical!  Find me in the woods (or, literally in moments, a rainforrest).

  34. July 25, 2019, 6-9pm:

    "Talking Objects"

    NURTUREart Closing Event, Film Screenings, and Performances

    Yto Barrada, Keren Benbenisty, Shahrazad Changalvaee, and Lulu Meng

    56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY 11206 

    Co-curated by Janna Dyk and Mira Dayal


    Pictured: Sharhzad Changhalvaee, Everything In Its Right Place.

  35. Untitled (Journals Kept & Found), 16-19, 2018 - ongoing, polaroid photographs of journals.

    Untitled (Journals Kept & Found), 16-19, 2018 - ongoing, polaroid photographs of journals.

    Image: video still of exhibtion recording, courtesy Gabriela Vainsencher and 601ArtSpace.

    Image: video still of exhibtion recording, courtesy Gabriela Vainsencher and 601ArtSpace.

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      Untitled (Journals Kept & Found), 16-19, 2018 - ongoing, polaroid photographs of journals.

    • 2

      Image: video still of exhibtion recording, courtesy Gabriela Vainsencher and 601ArtSpace.

    July 1, 2019:

    Install/Deinstall

    601 ArtSpace

    An experimental group exhibition, July 2020

    Curated by Gabriela Vainsencher

    Artists: Samantha Adams    Reut Asimini    Tirzah Bassel    Keren Benbenisty    Ryan Brennan Jude Broughan    Lindsay Burke   Sari Carel    Noa Charuvi    Kim Dacres    Jennifer Dalton    Mira Dayal    Hsini Des    Jamie Diamond    Andy Van Dinh    Janna Dyk    Ira Eduardovna    Kate Elliot    Derek Fordjour    Pricsilla Fusco    Marie-Noële Guex    Susan Hamburger    Bang Geul Han + Steven Mygind Pedersen    Nora Herting    Seong Eun Hong      David Howe    Lisa Iglesias    Sareh Imani    Roxanne Jackson    Katarina Jerinic    Jac Lahav     Elizabeth Tannie Lewin    Sharon Madanes    Katy McCarthy    Summer McCorckle    Andrew McNay    Sara Mejia Kriendler    Naomi Miller    Patrick Carlin Mohundro    Megan Pahmier    Alexander Perrelli    Sofi Quirno    Paul Ramirez Jonas    Rebecca Riley    Jason Rondineli    Arkadiy Ryabin    Naomi Safran Hon    Gabriela Salazar    Sara Shaoul  Zorawar Sidhu    Elisabeth Smolarz    Elisa Soliven    Jane Swavely    Kevin Swenson    Fabian G Tabibian     Tattfoo Tan    Michael Wilson

    Pictured: 1. "Untitled (Journals Found and Kept), 1-3, " 2019 2. Screenshot from time-lapse video, courtesy of Gabriela Vainsencher and 601 Artspace.

  36. May 24 - June 22, 2019:

    Zalika Azim:  Totems

    Curated by Janna Dyk

    Opening Reception: Fri. May 24, 6-9PM.
    Closing Reception: Sat., June 22, 6-9PM

    SOHO20’s +/- Project Space is pleased to present Totems, a solo installation of new lens-based works by Brooklyn-based artist Zalika Azim.

    Investigating the complexities of memory, time, and narrative, Totems features a selection of photographic works that elegantly merge totemic juxtapositions of analogue photography and wallpaper.  In this exhibition, motifs offer and transmit visual codes while conjuring the history of oral storytelling, floriography, and quilting within the American South.

    Through creating abstract environments that act as repositories, Azim projects multiple occurrences to simultaneously reference ancestral knowledges.  Joining a community of artists that explore existential questions through familial archives, she incorporates a collection of double-exposed photographs taken by her late grandmother, Mary E. Lemons.

    Considering photography’s function, Azim asks: How might double-exposure call into consideration our understandings of space and history, while informing memory? In this reflection, double exposure complicates linear narratives, underscoring how images become charged and embedded with intelligence beyond what is immediately apparent.  The multiple visages initiate an investigation into broader considerations of how stories are told, recontextualized, and perceived.

    As offerings the works in Totems exist in an attentive transitional state, mining spatial, temporal, and ancestral realities.

    Zalika Azim (b.1990) is a New York-based artist conceptualizing her practice through photography, installation, performance, collage and sound. Exploring the complexities of personal and collective narratives, her work investigates the ways in which notions of memory, migration, and the body are negotiated in relation to nationhood and the American landscape. Azim’s work has been exhibited within the United States and abroad, including the International Center of Photography, Pfizer, 8th Floor Gallery, Diego Rivera Gallery, the Instituto Superior de Arte, The Dean Collection. Her first solo exhibition “in case you should forget to sweep before sunset” (2019), was recently presented at the Baxter Street Camera Club of New York. Zalika holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from the Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University.

    SOHO20’s Project Space exhibitions are generally supported in part by the NY Department of Cultural Affairs, and by Lagunitas Brewing Company.


    Image: Totem (to bend in strange winds, and perhaps to bloom), 2019, courtesy of the artist.

    Installation images available here

  37. May 19 - 30, 2019:

    Work in the 2019 Every Woman Biennial, curated by C. Finley

    222 Bowery

    Opening Sunday, May 19, 4-7PM

    Image: Screenshots from EWB website, 2019.

  38. May 17, 2019:

    Feature of the Every Woman Biennial, curated by C. Finley:

    "An Art Show for Hundreds of Women, and That's Just the Artists," Melena Ryzik, New York Times.

  39. April 9, 2019:

    Review of Cansu Kormaz's Quite a While:

  40. March 15 - April 14, 2019:

    Cansu Korkmaz: Quite a While
    Curated by Janna Dyk

    +/- Project Space

    Opening Friday, March 15, 2019 6-9PM
    Artist talk, with Osman Can Yerebakan and Janna Dyk: Saturday, April 6, 5pm
    On view March 15 – April 14, 2019

    SOHO20’s +/- Project Space is pleased to present Quite a While, an installation of photographs by Brooklyn-based Turkish artist Cansu Korkmaz.  The works explore the artist and her partner’s relationship as it adapts to their shifting terrains while living in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and eventually New York.

    In this a NY debut of her work, Korkmaz presents the emotional gesture of ripping down the center of a sizable stack of photographs as a space for philosophy.  Torn into a handful of piles by her partner after an exasperated exchange, the photographs trace a consistent line of breakage down their centers, allowing Korkmaz to repair the images by conjoining new halves together in myriad pairings. The process of mending speaks to the perseverance of their relationship as well as to an urge to re-contextualize frustrated memories, embracing the irreversible yet formative impact of wounds.

    “My idea was to live with those broken pieces in heart and mind. After the photographs were ripped, I had to find forgiveness for what happened. I decided to bring the pieces together as new memories,” explains Korkmaz. The resulting reassembled pictures index these intricate moments of loss and resolve. 

    One of many such juxtapositions combines a plate of luscious peaches left in the couples’ bedroom in Buenos Aires, with a view of their kitchen in Uruguay, the most prominent feature of which is a welcome sign in Spanish, “Bienvenidos a esta casa.” Other images alternate between interior and exterior scenes, with equity to fragments of the couples’ bodies, as to a stuccoed wall with a bursting splash of graffiti. 

    Unifying the images, salon style, the artist alternates the final printing sizes according to the space that each occupied in her memory, allowing photographs that loomed more largely in her recollection to occupy more of the viewer’s space as well. In so doing, Korkmaz speaks to the complexity of love and attachment, and to the mind’s resilient capacity to also reassemble, arrange, and mend.

    Turkish-born artist Cansu Korkmaz (1989, Istanbul) lives and works in Brooklyn. She graduated from Bahcesehir University in 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in Photography and Video. Korkmaz was a School of Visual Arts’ Photography and Video-Artist Resident in 2018. Recent exhibitions include “Becoming Cure As Care,” at Daire Gallery (Turkey) and the SVA Residency exhibition at Gramercy Gallery. Other exhibitions include “Mini Çarşı-Mini Market” at Poligon in 2016, and “The lives of others,” for the International Photography Festival in 2015. She was selected for a personal documentary workshop with an artist at SALT. Korkmaz has made two books, including SILENCE (2015) and G arip Bir Enerjin Var (2013). Her work has been featured frequently in Turkish by Voice of America, VATAN, Artful Living, Culture Limited, The Guide Istanbul, Orta Format, KEINmag, XOXO Mag, Bantmag, and Elele, among others.

    SOHO20’s exhibitions are supported in part by the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, and Lagunitas Brewing Company.

    Installation images available here

  41. February 17, 2019, 4-6PM:

    "In Absentia, in Effigy"

    Participating in panel discussion with Shahrzad Changalvaee, Janna Dyk, and Chimney Directors Clara Darrason & Jennifer Houdrouge, about Changalvaee's exhibition, "In Absentia, in Effigy," on view at the Chimney January 18 - February 24, 2019.

  42. Better Never Than Late#2 // Archival Color Print on Paper, Mixed Media, Ink // 18” x 28” x 3” // 2018

    Better Never Than Late#2 // Archival Color Print on Paper, Mixed Media, Ink // 18” x 28” x 3” // 2018

    We Thought it Was Obvious, 2, 2018.  Courtesy of the Artist.

    We Thought it Was Obvious, 2, 2018.  Courtesy of the Artist.

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      Better Never Than Late#2 // Archival Color Print on Paper, Mixed Media, Ink // 18” x 28” x 3” // 2018

    • 2

      We Thought it Was Obvious, 2, 2018.  Courtesy of the Artist.

    September 6 – October 7, 2018

    SHAHRZAD CHANGALVAEE'S "THE UNDERSTANDABLES ALWAYS ARRIVE FROM FAR AWAY" OPENS AT +/- PROJECT SPACE

    Shahrzad Changalvaee's The Understandables Always Arrive from Far Away
    +/- Project Space
    Brooklyn, NY


    Opening Reception Friday, September 7, 2018 

    For the +/- Project Space Changalvaee installed plaster-encased tablets, and a new iteration of You Cannot the Same River Twice (2016).

    Between the space of unutterable words, partial pictures, and visual and mental imagery, with the sculptural photographic accumulations Changalvaee (whose practice in general responds to the materiality of sculpture through a variety of media) “crops, shatters, and relinks” partial referents.  She explains:

    “I re-link and cure internet fluxes, personal experiences, local stories, and present material to alienate established narratives and create landscapes.  As an immigrant finding place in a new home, bringing together shattered narratives, left-out visions, and marginalized details is an urge for me in performing coherency, to reclaim the fragmentations of memory and information, and address issues of agency, power, and control.”

    Within them, found images offer glimpses of hands in various gestures: passive, submissive, listening to authorities in meetings, demanding, claiming, or lingering in streets.  These reside alongside chaotic scenes or abandoned views, bricks, sunset skies, tools, and leftover detritus/refuse/remnants/scraps as might accumulate in a studio.  Acknowledging at once particular indexes (hands joined to politicians, protesters, workers, lecturers, or artists – protagonists within power structures), “by demolishing and minimizing referential signs in pictures,” Changalvaee also seeks to provoke within the viewer a potentially “generic understanding of the unexplainable on an un-verbal level.”

    Aspects of this nonverbal intuitiveness also exist in Changalvaee’s other works at SOHO20. In addition to the tablets, running diagonally from one portion of the ceiling to the opposing corner is the installed sculpture, You Cannot the Same River Twice, which Changalvaee created for the first time for an exhibition in Tehran, and here again as a site-specific installation.  This New York iteration consists of an ostensibly precarious bucket, with a small hole in its side, which reveals a stream of clay running down a wooden structure, and gradually amassing as the clay lands.  A deliberating balance hovers within the piece in that while gradual change may demonstrate its aliveness, clay is also an element of mourning in Changalvaee’s cultural background.

    A selection of Changalvaee’s photographic series, This Tool Shall Pass (2017) hang in the gallery’s office.  As with her other works, these at once interrogate both the act of making, as well as how meaning is itself derived from a ubiquity of images, found in a studio, or on the internet.

    *Title is taken from a line by the poet Yadollah Royaee (b. 1932, Iran)

    Installation images available here

  43. Summer 2018 Resident: Caetani Cultural Center, British Columbia, Canada.  POSTPONED 

  44. December 2017: Review: 'Relative Material' at NURTUREartHuffington Post by Christian Hendricks

    Pictured: 1. Gabriela Vainsencher, "Negative Capability," 2017, video still (full video link here).  2. Screenshot from Huffington Post.

  45. December 10, 2017

    Evening of performances and readings

    NURTUREart
    Bushwick, NY
    nurtureart.org/program/relative-material

  46. Lost in Translation (Elizabeth, 136) (2017) Asuka Goto

    Lost in Translation (Elizabeth, 136) (2017)

    Asuka Goto

    She feels your absence deeply (2017) Golnar Adili

    She feels your absence deeply (2017)

    Golnar Adili

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      Lost in Translation (Elizabeth, 136) (2017)

      Asuka Goto

    • 2

      She feels your absence deeply (2017)

      Golnar Adili


    November 2017 - January 2018:

    RELATIVE MATERIAL OPENS NOVEMBER 17, 2017, 7-9PM, AT NURTURE ART

    PRESS RELEASE HERE

    Artists: Golnar Adili, Jesse Chun, Adam Golfer, Asuka Goto, Rafael Kelman, Qiana Mestrich, Gabriela Vainsencher

    OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, November 17th, 7–9PM

    Relative Material
    Artists: Golnar Adili, Jesse Chun, Adam Golfer, Asuka Goto, Rafael Kelman, Qiana Mestrich, Gabriela Vainsencher

    November 18 - December 17, 2017 
    Nurture Art
    Bushwick, NY
    nurtureart.org/program/relative-material

    .

    “I wonder, parenthetically, whether I too deal thus in autobiography and call it fiction?”
    –Virginia Woolf

    .

    Relative Material examines a spectrum of gestures by seven artists who—through engaging with family mythologies, exchanges, and ephemera—recognize and question broader issues of sociopolitical, historical, and philosophical concern.

    Golnar Adili’s work predominantly investigates the extensive personal archive of letters and family documents that she inherited upon the death of her father, a member of the Iranian intelligentsia who was forced to flee in the wake of the post-1979 revolution. She feels your absence deeply (2017), a set of simultaneously playful and puzzling wooden blocks imprinted with a childhood photo of the artist and her mother, culls its title from a letter that her mother wrote to her father following the latter’s departure. Another letter, Ye Harvest from the Eleven-Page Letter(2016), which her father sent to a lover, reconstructs longing by omitting all but the vowels. Through deconstructing and reassembling family documents, Adili forms a personal linguistics via which to discuss identity, memory, displacement, and translation; bedmates of an unconquerable longing to understand one’s history.

    In select photographs from A House Without a Roof (2016), Adam Golfer arranges and recontextualizes artifacts (photographs, telegrams, letters, text messages, and remembered or fictionalized narratives) of his personal and familial engagement with the waves of history extending from WWII to present day Israel/Palestine. Golfer’s work questions the multiple, simultaneous narratives and perceptions surrounding the region’s ongoing conflict. Likewise intertwined in commentary with these images is a portrait from a foretoken project, Router (2015).

    Qiana Mestrich questions motherhood, belonging, family, race, heritage, self-authorship, and identity with a selection of conceptual poems, photographs, and ephemeral objects from Hard to Place (2016). Reassembled clippings of phrases and vintage photographs emerge from the redacted file of adoption documents that her husband received as a legal memento of his childhood in the British foster care system. Adding to these redactions, Mestrich places photographs of the couple’s son, who emblematically inhabits the histories and identities that her work addresses.

    Conceptual poetry from the immigration documents of multiple countries in which Jesse Chun, her family, and friends have lived informs prints from Valid From Until (2016). Within the semantics of minimalism she forms a new iconography that questions “the meanings embedded within the bureaucracy of place and identity.” Chun notes that “the first ten years of my life [in Korea] were spent as a singular identity, and then everything became fragmented into different codes.” Such codes accumulate multilingually among the forms, creating an often intimate poetry from the material of relocation and displacement.

    In Negative Capability (2016), Gabriela Vainsencher interviews her Uruguayan mother, a psychoanalyst who lives in Israel, which results in a poetic video work that floats between Spanish and Hebrew.  A pair of hands grapple with abstract ceramic objects as the artist’s mother discusses what it is to know and intuit meaning, and how this process complicates our relationships. The work’s title references Keats’s philosophical concept about the necessity to embrace uncertainty “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”  

    A bizarre family history involving a bomb plot, found wooden puppets crafted by an uncle, and a father’s instructions in the techniques of mime and puppetry serve as “inappropriate” means to consider the tributaries of history related to the contemporary war on terror in Rafael Kelman’s Gigantomachy (2015–). Kelman notes that “excerpts from primary documents serve as script and subtitle; objects physically touched by the histories in question become props and set pieces.” As a wobbling, wincing face covered in foam grins and jerks haltingly, the father’s voice behind the camera interjects the video’s poetic subtitles.

    Asuka Goto’s nearly three-year project, Lost in Translation (2014–2017), is a line of questioning in order to better understand her father, a Japanese writer. While also learning Japanese, Goto attempts to translate his 278-page novel into English. Her resulting drawings include collaged elements: printed screenshots from phone conversations with her parents that inform the translations, clippings of current news stories that extend political and historical narratives within his text, and her own personal annotations. Insofar as the meticulous endeavor becomes emotional as much as it is linguistic, Goto notes that “the areas of mistranslation, which certainly exist (as embodiments of our mutual misunderstanding), are an integral part of the piece.”

    Janna Dyk is an artist, writer, and curator based in New York. Her curatorial projects span a range of considerations, from photography and poetry to the relationship between the personal and political.  Past projects include Cottage Industry and Strange Labor, among eight exhibitions while a curatorial fellow at Booklyn, in Greenpoint, and [On Silence], at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, in conjunction with large-scale performances OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK at Eyebeam, and SILENCE at the Rubin Museum for the Chelsea Music Festival.  In 2017 she held a curatorial residency at the Marble House Project (Vermont). Her curatorial projects have appeared in such publications as ArtForum, Art in America, the New York Times, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and Photography Magazine. She is a MFA graduate of Hunter College (2015).  Her writing has appeared in 1000 Words Magazine (London), and SftPwr, among others, and she has been the editor of several artist books, including Adam Golfer’s trilingual A House Without a Roof, which was shortlisted in 2016 for such prizes as Paris Photo and MACK. She has participated in residencies at AIR (Beijing), and NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), and has been a recipient of the Rema Hort Foundation ACE Grant, among others.  Her art has appeared in the New York Times, ArtSlant, Curator Magazine, SEEN, and L’Orient du Jour, among others. A recent exhibition includes Unravelledat the Beirut Art Museum.

    .

    A special thanks to NURTUREart, Director Will Penrose, and Programming Manager, and gallery guru, Ivan Gilbert.

    .

    View installation images from NURTUREart's archive here.

    .

    Press:

    "A Review: Relative Material at Nurture Art," Huffington Post, Christian Hendricks, November 20, 2017

     
  47. "Sunshine," 2014

    "Sunshine," 2014

    "Certain People," 2014

    "Certain People," 2014

    • 1
    • 2

      "Sunshine," 2014

    • 3

      "Certain People," 2014

    November 10, 2017:  Work Featured in ARTSLANT's UNDER THE RADAR

    LINK: https://www.artslant.com/ew/articles/show/48719-under-the-radar-jill-pauline-smith-will-peck-janna-dyk

    Pictured: 1. Screenshot of ARTSLANT feature 2. "Sunshine," 2014, graphite and embroidery thread on paper, 16 x 20 in. 3. "Certain People," 2014, graphite and embroidery thread on paper, 16 x 20 in.

  48. September 2017:

    NURTUREart's 2017-2018 Season Announced.  
    RELATIVE MATERIAL AT NURTURE ART

    NURTURE ART
    56 Bogart Street
    Brooklyn, NY

    Opening November 17, 2017, 7-10PM
    On view November 17, 2017 - January 5, 2018

    Artists: Golnar Adili, Jesse Chun, Adam Golfer, Asuka Goto, Rafael Kelman, Qiana Mestrich, Gabriela Vainsencher

    Curator: Janna Dyk

    Special thanks to Ivan Gilbert and Will Penrose!

  49. Image: Thoughts Over Dinner, 2017, from Revising the Text

    Image: Thoughts Over Dinner, 2017, from Revising the Text

    • 1
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      Image: Thoughts Over Dinner, 2017, from Revising the Text

    • 3

    September 8 - October 11, 2017:

    Our Various Existential Angsts

    Curated by Eriola Pira

    On View September 8 - 24, 2017
    Opening September 8, 2017 6-9PM


    NARS FOUNDATION
    201 46th Street, Brooklyn, NY

    Artists: Ekin Balcioglu (USA/Turkey) | Rachel Garber Cole (USA) | Janna Dyk (USA) | Jackie Feng (USA) | Bas Geerts (Netherlands) | Joshua Liebowitz (USA) | Bryan Martello (USA) | Amaia Marzabal (Spain) | Caroline Phillips (Australia) | Kara Springer (Canada)

  50. August - October 2017:

    FELLOWSHIP AT NARS FOUNDATION

    Brooklyn, NY

    Thank you NARS Foundation for the new friendships, studio visits, and opportunity to work and exhibit while on residency this summer!

  51. April - May 2017: RESIDENCY AT MARBLE HOUSE PROJECT

    Affiliated Programming: Reading, performance and "Source Material," a talk back with Danny Greenberg
    The Barn, Marble House Project, Dorset, VT
    May 2, 2017, 7-9PM

    Thank you Marble House Project Vermont for the delightful community, food, and feedback during April-May's curatorial residency

    http://marblehouseproject.org/

  52. December 2016 - January 2017:

    GOLNAR ADILI'S PERHAPS ALL THE SKY IS UNABLE TO TURN A PAGE OF THIS TIGHTNESS OF THE HEART OPENS AT BOOKLYN, FRIDAY, 12.02.2016, 7-10PM

    Exhibition Dates: December 1 - 31, 2016

    Curated by Janna Dyk

    Booklyn is pleased to present “perhaps all the sky is unable to turn a page of this tightness of the heart,” an exhibition of prints, collages, and a new artist’s book by Golnar Adili.

    Since 2009, the bulk of Adili’s work deals directly with the extensive personal archive of family letters and documents that she found upon the death of her father, a member of the Iranian intelligentsia who was forced to flee in the wake of the post-1979 revolution.  Adili negotiates these textures of her personal history as one might a quilt formed from the clothing of many garments.  Glimpses from literature, Persian poetry, and Iranian cultural and political history coexist amidst a palpable emotional subterrain.

    “There is so much here that my father clearly knew I would eventually see.”

    The exhibition at Booklyn focuses on two series formed from this material.  One is a selection of large hand-made prints redacted from an impassioned set of letters that Adili’s father wrote to a lover: the writings exist as a repeating set of the Persian vowel “yeh,” which resembles the upcurve of an ocean wave.  Assembled in a visually similar shape are a set of epigrammatic collaged drawings that Adili has culled from family photographs of hands.  A new artist’s book arranges these works together into an attentive, notational visual language, contextualized by Adili’s own writing.

    Endless gestural repetitions of hands, fingers, and the occasional forearm are mitigated by a constellation of threads of graphite and the patterning formed of aligned images.  Adili examines such visual movements as might a scientist studying the habits and patterns of a species.  So too the collages nod back to the photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge.  The obsessiveness is devotional: endearing, affectionate: a psychological and physiological portrait study of the father.  Through this emergence, it is at once a specific father; her father, and yet one who figuratively approaches an archetype, existing simply as a person whose presence remains only in words and papers, in the memory and investigative imagings of another generation.

    In this way the work exudes a resilient universality, bringing with it questions of identity, memory, loss, place, and translation; seeming bedfellows of an unconquerable longing to understand one’s history.

    This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

    An affiliated artist workshop with Adili will be held on December 10, 11AM-1PM.  More information and r.s.v.p. here.

  53. October 28, 2016:

    AN EVENING OF POETRY + BEAT NITE

    RSVP on Facebook

    Friday, October 28, 2016

    Beat Nite Greenpoint hours: 6-9pm
    Poetry Reading: 7-8pm

    In conjunction with Beat Nite Greenpoint and the current exhibition on view, artist Jesse Chun's Valid From Until, Booklyn will host an evening of readings by a selection of multilingual poets, writers, and visual artists invited by Chun. As a part of the event, Chun will perform portions of her new book of conceptual poetry, which was published on the occasion of the exhibition.

    Valid From Until at Booklyn

    Participating poets/writers/artists:
    Andrea Arrubla
    Ana Božičević
    Jesse Chun
    Grace Jahng Lee
    Rehan Miskci
    Tiffany Smith
    .



  54. 1000 Words, Issue 23, October 2016

    1000 Words, Issue 23, October 2016

    October 10, 2016:

    ESSAY FOR 1000 WORDS, London.

    Essay for Issue 23 of UK-based photography magazine 1000 Words about Adam Golfer's A House Without a Roof

    ORDER BOOK HERE

  55. October 8, 2016:

    A HOUSE WITHOUT A ROOF
    RECEIVES 2016 APERTURE/PARIS PHOTO BOOK SHORTLIST!

    Link: Aperture/Paris Photo Book Shortlist: 2016

    Distributed in North America by D.A.P. 

  56. October 6, 2016:

    Works reviewed in L'ORIENT DU JOUR (Beirut)

    LINK: "Sortir la broderie de son carcan <<domestique et pas sexy >>," Orient Du Jour, 6 October 2016

    Pictured: 1. "I'm Not Thinking Right Now, I Promise," Book (1960s), graphite, thread, needle.  2. "I'm Not Thinking Right Now, I Promise," Book (1960s), graphite, thread, needle, exhibition view 3. Screenshot of L'Orient Du Jour.

    "Et aussi dans I am not thinking right now de Janna Dyk qui vient chambouler l'ordre des choses en insérant des fils partout au-dessus des pages de The Origins and History of Consciousness, un ouvrage de Erich Neumann qui corrobore la pensée controversée de Carl Jung qui prétendait que la conscience est un attribut strictement masculin. La preuve qu'on peut piocher dans un « art du passé », et, avec, inventer l'avenir."

  57. Valid From Until Book, Jesse Chun 2016

    Valid From Until

    Book, Jesse Chun

    2016

    • 1
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      Valid From Until

      Book, Jesse Chun

      2016

    October 21 - November 18, 2016:

    JESSE CHUN'S VALID FROM UNTIL

    BOOK RELEASE + EXHIBITION OF RECENT WORKS
    Curated by Janna Dyk
    Opening Reception: October 21, 7-10PM
    Beat-Nite with Jason Andrew: October 28, 6-9PM

    Booklyn is pleased to present Valid From Until, a solo exhibition of works by artist Jesse Chun. 

    Chun’s work explores the codes and constructs of belonging through the rhetoric of travel, migration and immigration. Working with a collection of multilingual documents that are largely from her own immigration archive, she employs the role of the artist as editor to recontextualize bureaucratic paperwork into Concrete Poetry and abstraction.

    Chun selectively deletes the found texts on various immigration documents, while leaving all the fonts, spacing and sizing in their original context. The erasure is simple yet thoughtfully considered - intentionally transforming the paperwork into metaphors of our collective transit. She also uses methods of photography and digital manipulation to create abstractions that highlight the sheer volume, physicality and paper-ness of the forms that exist to validate our identities and mobility. 

    Chun’s poems and abstractions are devoid of their original function and individual specificity. By transforming the existing information, interrogation, and narratives of homeland, she constructs transcultural poetics of locating and dwelling.

    This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

    BIOS

    Jesse Chun is a visual artist from Seoul, New York, Hong Kong and Toronto. She holds a BFA from Parsons the New School for Design, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been internationally exhibited at select venues in New York; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Julie Saul Gallery, Seoul; CICA Museum, Incheon International Women Artists Biennale, Hong Kong; the Gallery at the Hong Kong Central Library, Istanbul; Space Debris Art, and Toronto; CONTACT. Guest lectures and artist talks include Parsons the New School for Design, the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, and New York University. Select reviews include Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic, Vice, The Korea Times and Asia Literary Review. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s BHQFU Studio + Teaching program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

    Janna Dyk is an artist and independent curator based in New York. In 2015 she received a MFA from Hunter College, after studying Photography at the School of Visual Arts, and Literature and Spanish Linguistics in undergraduate. A 2016 Rema Hort Foundation ACE Grant recipient, she has exhibited and curated work in the United States, Lebanon, and China. Recent exhibitions include Unravelled (2016) at the Beirut Art Center, To Tell You (2015), and Shall We Talk or Will We Just Gaze (2014), both at 205 Hudson Street (New York). Curatorial projects include Reverse (2012) and [ON SILENCE] (2012) at the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK (2012) at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology; Strange Labor (2015), Cottage Industry (2015), Hard to Place (2016), and Family Portraits (2016) at Booklyn. She is editor of A House Without a Roof, the forthcoming trilingual artist book published at Booklyn with Adam Golfer and Ghazaal Vojdani. Her art and curatorial projects have been reviewed in The Curator, SEEN, ArtForum, Art in America, the NY Times, and Hyperallergic.

  58. September 9. 2016:

    NY TIMES MENTION OF UNRAVELLED AT BEIRUT ART CENTER

    LINK: New York Times, September 9, 2016: Global Arts

  59. September 7, 2016:

    UNRAVELLED
    OPENS AT BEIRUT ART CENTER
    curated by Rachel Dedman and Marie Muracciole
    7 September - 6 November 2016

    Majd Abdel Hamid • Mounira Al Solh • Yto Barrada • Taysir Batniji • Alighiero e Boetti • Michele Cohen • Janna Dyk • Mona Hatoum • Sheila Hicks • Annette Messager • Khalil Rabah • Karen Reimer • Nasri Sayegh • Laure Tixier • Raed Yassin

    Unravelled is a group exhibition that deals with embroidery in contemporary artistic practice. Organized in collaboration with the Palestinian Museum and co-curated by Rachel Dedman and Marie Muracciole, it brings together a number of widely-acclaimed international and regional artists.

    Unravelled emerged from Dedman’s large-scale research project for the Palestinian Museum on the history and politics of Palestinian embroidery, which culminated in the exhibition At the Seamsin Beirut in 2016. This striking satellite show Dedman  curated for the new Palestinian Museum and hosted by Dar el-Nimer for Arts and Culture, analyzes in-depth the historical and political uses of a craft that deals precisely with a geographical and identity-driven language. Responding to this project, Unravelled looks at embroidery in recent artists’ practices and unravels some of the questions that these peculiar gestures raise: to disentangle and investigate at the same time. As embroidery has lost its former relationship with tradition, identity, and place-hood, artists today are embarking on something new. Therefore, this exhibition encompasses the wider practice of embroidery, reflecting on the ways in which different artists, from the twentieth century until today, have dealt with embroidery’s various significations as concealment, as narrative, as a marker of time and as a form of gendered labour. The exhibition explores these different positions and experiments with the generative exchanges embroidery can confront by virtue of its situation between masculine and feminine; art, craft and industry; the figurative and the abstract; concept and materiality; the decorative and the destructive; concealment and revelation.

  60. September 16, 2016:

    A HOUSE WITHOUT A ROOF
     LAUNCH AT NEW YORK ART BOOK FAIR MOMA PS1


    A House Without a Roof (AHWAR) scrutinizes the histories of violence and displacement connecting Europe, Israel, and Palestine. With photographs, appropriated imagery, and texts, fictions of Golfer's family history are woven together with representations from Israel’s founding and ongoing military occupation of the West Bank. Ethnic and national identities rupture as the project wrestles with contradictory histories and points of view. The narratives in the book are framed via relationships between three generations of men in Golfer's family: his grandfather – a survivor of Dachau, his dad – who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, and Golfer himself. Memory and time fold into one another as the mythologies of Golfer's family become entangled with the ongoing narratives of violence and trauma in Israel and Palestine.

    A House Without a Roof was shortlisted for the 2016 Mack First Book Award >, and received the 2016 Snider Prize, along with numerous grants and features.  The exhibition of the same name, curated by Janna Dyk at Booklyn Artist Alliance, was featured as a 2015 ArtForum Critic's Pick.  (Press release available here.)

    Book Concept: Adam Golfer
    Managing Editor: Janna Dyk
    Art Direction and Design: Ghazaal Vojdani

  61. Summer 2016:

    “Up Against the Wall,”
    group exhibition of posters from and about Palestine, Booklyn, Greenpoint, NY, August.

  62. Head Too Big for One Body, courtesy of artist.

    Head Too Big for One Body, courtesy of artist.

    April 15- June 3, 2016:

    Abelardo Cruz Santiago: Shared Location (Family
     Portraits)


    Booklyn
    Greenpoint, NY
    booklyn.org/event/family-portraits-abelardo-cruz-santiago
    Curated by Janna Dyk

    Affiliated artist book: Berlin Winter.  Affiliated programming: “Jogging Comfortably,” Eric Ramos Guerrero + Abelardo Cruz Santiago, outdoor performance on gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, Apr. 3, 2016.

    Booklyn is pleased to present Shared Location (Family Portraits), a compilation of over twenty collage works that Abelardo Cruz Santiago began in 2008.

    The collages assume cleverly bizarre, playful hybrids of vintage Spanish, German, French, English, and Aztec illustrative book-pages and educational images of maps, political figures, and cultural relics, which Cruz-Santiago moderates with hand-drawn symbols, words, and other drawings that exist among a constellation of personal imagery. Influenced by fusing and negotiating with multiple cultural and linguistic experiences, in Mexico, the United States, and during studies in Germany, collectively these drawn interventions exist interchangingly as iconic cultural hybrids, critical subtext, and at times flippant notations.

    Baseball caps, cowboy hats, masks referencing those worn during festivals such as in Cruz-Santiago’s birthplace of San Juan Mixtepec, and other created symbols exist atop and within Aztec carvings nearly as often as they cover the busts of American presidents (as in works such as “Miner’s Symbols,” “As Cowboys,” “George’s Hat Collection, or “American Tourist,” all from 2013).

    Although Shared Location is the fifth in a series at Booklyn following artists whose work negotiates concerns that are at once personal and sociopolitical in nature, Abelardo is the first to note that his work is not (political), per se.  “I like to just let the work happen… I don’t want to treat myself as the local, because then I’m disrupting it.  I want to live within the jurisdiction, but not toggle with it.  I want to learn the idiosyncratic language that exists; absorb versus disrupt it.”

    As noted by the artist,  this cultural toggling occurs like a child ethnographer, more curious than precarious, moving with ease and falling in sync with the social surroundings.  When explaining the work, Cruz-Santiago notes the importance of early family memories growing up in Mixtepec, Mexico, and of later moving to Northern California, negotiating elements of each and both cultures.

    The artist’s stint in Germany proffered further sources of cultural fusion and linguistic slippage, as in the varied meanings with the letters “ICE,” whether in rap culture, German, American slang, or the US customs (in an untitled work from 2014).  Also included in the exhibition is Berlin Winter, in the form of a tourist postcard book of works made during this time.

    Works such as “American Me,” from 2011, are painted atop Homeland Security Forms in such a way so as to leave textual indicators that note the paper’s history.   

    “Holy Wings” (2013) pairs images of eagles, nationalistic symbols of strength and individualism for several countries, with a cryptic, icon-like arch inside of which exists an eagle visually bred with the depiction of a dove. 

    Collectively, as in other works such as “White on White,” “Nike’s China Football,” “Jesus Chain,” “Capitals,” or “Orange Decoration,” “Hat Dreams,” or “Latin Fatherland,” references both appropriate and at times seemingly abolish their affiliatory concerns. 

    This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

  63. Qiana Mestrich: Hard To Place

    February 5 - March 15, 2016

    Curated by Janna Dyk
    Booklyn
    Greenpoint, NY
    booklyn.org/event/qiana-mestrich-hard-to-place/

    Affiliated programming: “Domestic Obscura,” workshop with Liz Sales, Booklyn, Brooklyn, NY, Mar. 12.

    Press: Photography Magazine.

    Introductory essay by Paula Kupfer.

    Hard to Place is Qiana Mestrich’s first body of work focused on someone else’s life, and also the first time she’s taken a man’s history as a subject. But as her husband, this man’s history is intricately bound up with her own, and thus represents an important continuation of Mestrich’s explorations of family and ancestry. Conceived both as a book and as a collection of photographs, texts, and objects, Hard to Place traces the journey of Joseph, a mixed-race foster child growing up in London in the 1960s and 1970s. Born to a married Nigerian father and a single Irish woman who was deemed mentally unstable, Joseph, like many other mixed-race children, was categorized as a “half-cast(e)” and described as “hard to place.”

    Mestrich learned of this in 2013, when Joseph received photocopied documents from the London Borough of Camden that chronicled his itinerant childhood years. Before receiving these files, Joseph’s story included large gaps—the absence of a family, for one, but also the lack of a personal history during the years that he was “in care.” This resonated with Mestrich, as she, too, had experienced a complicated family situation, identifying as mixed-race and having been raised by a single mother who immigrated to a big city. She had read about, and become interested in similar cases in 1960s and ’70s London even before Joseph received the files. “Back then, many young, unwed women were forced to give birth in convents and give their mixed-race babies up for adoption,” she says. “Just the act of exiling women to give birth in secret is evidence enough of this denial and erasure.”

    The body of work that’s resulted from discovering Joseph’s tucked-away childhood story loosely emulates the form of a file or archive: Hard To Place includes vintage photographs of Joseph’s parents and of him as a child, new photographs taken by Mestrich of their son, as well as fragments of the official documents from the Camden file, and single words extricated from their context. The loose elements string together a new narrative, one of a history reclaimed, at least partially, and of care and family unity paid forward to the couple’s son. In the form of a book, Hard to Place records a history heretofore untold, allows for a contextualization of the documents and their vocabulary, while also serving as a family album of sorts. Important to Mestrich is also recognizing the “huge void of books by photographers of color in the photo-book world… For me it’s important to publish my work as a way of sharing and archiving it,” she says.  

    The different visual elements in Hard to Place convey that it is a difficult and deeply personal story to tell and understand, one that will inevitably have some gaps. The vintage photographs return humanity to Joseph’s parents, particularly to his mother, Maureen, who was described in the documents as having an “unstable Irish temperament,” and being “not very intelligent.” In one picture, she is lying on a bed next to a bright, curtained window, her face relaxed in a seeming state of bliss, revealing youthful elation and innocence. Another shows her standing on a busy street corner, her eyes closed, with one hand loosely holding a white stroller, Joseph sleeping soundly inside. The hat-clad shadow of the man taking the picture is a poignant reminder of the absence of a father figure in Joseph’s early life, while Maureen’s expression—her closed eyes, her forlorn look, her one loose hand—can read as if she’s already partially let go. The humanity of the photographs tempers the coldness of the language in the legal documents, and this is nowhere as true as in Mestrich’s photographs of her son. They contribute to the work her voice as an image-maker and mother, and propose a different narrative for the “half-caste” boy of the text. “We have many photos of Joe as a child but for me it was important to visualize a mixed-race body without any personal identity, which is why you don’t ever see my son’s face,” she says. In the exhibition, the documents and photographs are complemented by some of Joseph’s mother’s personal objects, further coloring her as a character, and countering “the dominant, fictitious narrative(s) of the orphan child as someone who comes from nothing and no one.”

    With Hard to Place, Mestrich has peeled back the layers of Joseph’s early history, opening up the ways we can read and understand a person’s trajectory and forcing a sharp look at the outcome of xenophobia and racism. Despite the London setting of this particular narrative, it stands in for countless other stories in other cities that may remain untold. But Mestrich is careful to avoid a sentimental eye: “Nostalgia and photography are inextricably linked,” she recognizes, “but to me this work is not sentimental because it is not dishonest and does not try to romanticize what happened.”  Despite the stark reality it showcases, Mestrich is convinced that with Hard to Place “there are other emotions that the viewer can experience … like humor, bliss, happiness, and uncertainty.” In addition to unveiling a hidden narrative, and prompting questions about the inseparable links between race, ancestry, and culture, Mestrich adds new layers to Joseph’s story: she contradicts the notion that denied histories are self-perpetuating, and makes a case for taking control of one’s own.

    This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the New York State Legislature and additionally, in part, by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

    Bio
    Qiana Mestrich is a photographer, writer, digital marketeer, and mother in Brooklyn, NY.  In 2007, she founded the blog Dodge & Burn: Diversity in Photography History.  With interviews and profiles of photographers of color, the blog aims to provide a more inclusive version of photography history, featuring contributions to the medium by underrepresented cultures.  Mestrich is currently writing a book based on the blog scheduled for publication in early 2017.

    Mestrich is also co-editor of the book How We Do Both: Art and Motherhood (Secretary Press), a diverse collection of honesty responses from contemporary artists who have walked – and are still walking – the tenuous tightrope of motherhood and making art.  Now in its second edition, How We Do Both is available on Amazon.

    A graduate of the ICP-Bard College MFA in Advanced Photographic Practice, Mestrich received her B.A. with a concentration in photography from Sarah Lawrence College.  She is currently the Associate Director of Digital Content and Engagement at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

  64. Mary Walling Blackburn and Rafael Kelman: Cottage Industry 

    November 13- December 29,2015
    Booklyn
    Greenpoint, NY
    booklyn.org/event/cottage-industry

    Affiliated programming: “ARE Anhoek Record Examination,” Mary Walling Blackburn, performative workshop, Sunview Lunchntte, Greenpoint, NY.

    Press: Art in America., December 15, 2015


    “MAN, PLANT YOUR OWN COMMUNITY-BASED  ANTI FERTILITY GARDEN”                                           
    -excerpt from exhibition poster text

    Together, Mary Walling Blackburn and Rafael Kelman exhibit works that animate their own reproductive, economic and artistic collaboration as wet and dry; burden and beast; hoot and whimper. The works are animated by research into the historical production of citizen-workers through reproduction and reproduction as forced labor (Silvia Federici), as well as the problem of the couple as core building block of capitalism (Guy Hocquenghem). The selected works use Walling Blackburn’s ANTI FERTILITY GARDEN project, a response to national and state pressures on women’s reproductive rights, as a departure point.

    ncluded are Studies for Seed Bags, 2015, a series of paintings executed on plastic, sandpaper, and wood that are simultaneously self-portraits, nude studies, and packaging designs. For this work, Kelman repurposed Walling Blackburn’s private snapshots of himself, the visual history of the seed packet, and his own WASPish prudishness. In Seed Bags, 2015, the aforementioned paintings are reproduced as product labels for sets of plastic seed bags containing neem, papaya, skunkbush sumac, myrtle, and cottonseed, all plants that mediate male fertility. In Cribby Cribby, 2015, a painted hex on an infant bedsheet, Walling Blackburn uses initials to suggest which adult demagogues might be subject to an infertility spell. Two of Walling Blackburn’s sculptures, Infertile Myrtle, 2015, and Italian Cod Pack, 2015, materially draw from Shaker and ancient Roman medicinal industries. Family Residency, 2015, incorporates observations from the Soviet neuropsychologist, A. Luria’s studies on head wounds, Emily Dickinson’s letters regarding her mother’s death, and field notes on creatures living on the grounds of an artist residency; these elements are rendered as a diagrammatic drawing on a bedsheet, formulating a meditation on the artist as mother and the mother’s artist as collaborator. Lastly, a series of posters featuring herbs that mediate the fertility of men have been produced to accompany the show. Walling Blackburn and Kelman will distribute these posters throughout the Greenpoint neighborhood where Walling Blackburn lived as a bachelor in a basement until 2012.

    Mary Walling Blackburn (b.1972, Orange, California) and Rafael Kelman (b.1986, Randolph, Vermont) customarily work independently of one another. Their only prior official collaboration was WMYN, a semi-fictional feminist radio station on the brink, broadcast at EFA Project Space as part of Failing to Levitate (New York). In April 2016, Walling Blackburn will be screening SMS Iran, a collaboration with Naeem Mohaiemen, at Centre Pompidou, Paris. Kelman will be showing part of his ongoing project Gigantomachy in “Son,” an upcoming show (April 2016) at inCube Arts in New York. Headlands Center for the Arts materially supported the production of the work for this exhibition.

    This exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

    COTTAGE INDUSTRY is the third in a series of exhibitions considering artists who negotiate, reference, or embody socio-political concerns in their work.

  65. Sara Shaoul: Strange Labor

    September 17 - October 31, 2015
    Booklyn
    Greenpoint, NY

    Curated by Janna Dyk

    Press: "Synchronizing the Cycles of Capitalism and the Human Body," Hyperallergic.

    Booklyn is pleased to present a solo­exhibition of artist Sara Shaoul’s multi­disciplinary work that exploresthe connection between the female body and socio­economic forces.

    Regarding her new works in the exhibition, which include images, text and sculpture, Shaoul writes the following:

    “Strange Labor is an exploration of how bodies move in and out of commodity states within the scaffold of global capitalism in general, and American culture in particular. The starting point of the work was a discovery of the visual and ideological convergence of the female reproductive cycle with certain stock market cycles, in particular the pattern of a market “bubble,” in which the market value of an asset deviates considerably from its “intrinsic value,” ultimately resulting in a crash. In addition to studying general reproductive patterns, I charted my own cycle by measuring my basal body temperature, a practice that visually tracks the stages of a monthly cycle, as well as the potential existence or loss of a pregnancy. It seemed both revelatory and sinister that financial charting and analyses should mirror so closely the emotional language and details of reproduction.

    Through an examination of the personal, economic, and cultural forces that influence reproductive decisions, particularly the complex ways in which the value of the female body is linked to its capacity or incapacity to create new consumers, I also consider how many bodies shift in and out of value states, by what means a body is assigned a monetary, social, or ideological value, and how assigned value intersects with other forms of stratification as well as changing socioeconomic forces. The basic patterns of capitalism are forced upon, embedded in, and expressed by bodies. The shape of profit and the pattern of loss are ingrained in our consciousness as a measure of both institutional and personal successes or failures. The title is a nod to Marx’s essay about the alienation of the worker, Estranged Labor.”

    Also included in the exhibition is the work, “Erin Mahoney (Friend, Organizer, Activist)”, a 15 minute video from 2014 in which the artist’s friend, a union organizer, describes her experience of Occupy Wall Street while brushing out Shaoul’s tangled hair. The piece explores how ideology is expressed through intimate connection. As with much of Shaoul’s work, the video occupies the space between personal experience, research, “information,” lyrical moment, and perception, returning what can be distant politics into the space of personal and communal re/cognition.

    Sara Shaoul is a Brooklyn­based conceptual artist. Her work examines the structures and scaffolds of human interaction, from bureaucracy to the family, exploring how personal narratives intersect with social history. She has a BA in Art History from Cornell University, an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Book Arts, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, White Box Gallery, Present Company, the Scope Art Fair in New York and the Aqua Art Fair in Miami, among other venues. In 2014 she was awarded the Artslant Georgia Fee Residency in Paris France, and was chosen as an AICAD Artist­in­Residence in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times and Huffington Post.

    The exhibition is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and additionally in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

    Strange Labor is the second in a series of exhibitions considering artists whose work addresses socio­ political concerns in a manner that is decidedly personal.

  66. Adam Golfer: A House Without a Roof
    July 11 - September 6, 2015
    Booklyn
    Greenpoint, NY
    booklyn.org/event/adam-golfer-a-house-without-a-roof

    Curated by Janna Dyk.

    Press: "Critic's Pick," Ian Bourland, ArtForum

    Golfer’s family history - its memories, objects, and mythologies - becomes material for taking stock in the divergent iterations of global narratives.

    A House Without a Roof concerns the strands of history connecting the Jewish Diaspora out of Europe and forced massmigrationsfromPalestinefollowingWWIIwiththecreationoftheStateofIsrael. Thebookassociatedwiththe exhibition loosely traces the triangular relationship between Golfer’s grandfather - a survivor of Dachau, his father - who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, and the artist - caught between the membrane of histories that turned the oppressed into oppressors and residents into refugees. A​House Without a Roof n​egotiates the splintered narratives of war and displacement between Europe, Israel/Palestine, and the United States.

    The exhibition also includes the video piece, R​outer (2014), a work that epitomizes Golfer’s hybrid approach to art and filmmaking. R​outer s​hifts between the actions of two subjects; a New York performance artist, and a German WWII reenactor, creating a distinctly separate dialogue by way of the space between them.

    A House Without a Roof w​as begun in 2011. Its sense of “rooflessness”, of disjointed familiarity, - architecturally, historically, and politically questioning one’s sense of being planted - hovers t​hroughout Golfer's book, use of imagery, and in the uncertainty of the space between the two characters in R​outer. As in the reading of the book’s text, one memory is often redirected by the addition of another. One’s ability to locate era, subject, or speaker (third and first person voices diverge and overlap) is complicated by a perpetual relocation of literary devices.

  67. select past past:

  68. May - June 2015: 

    To Tell You (Was to Not)
    MFA Thesis
    Hunter College

  69. August 2014:

    Curator Magazine feature. 

    "Dyk’s work has taken a variety of forms over the last few years, but the unification of her various modes and the ideas she’s commenting on have never been more apparent. Starting out with drawings, then moving into photography of drawn and assembled sculptures, and then re-photography of those photos, which might eventually become mixed-media photographic sculptures, etc., her process of splicing ideas and objects together naturally plays into her reading of how conversation (relatedness itself), particularly web-based communication, can be fragmented, removed, and reassembled in unusual ways.

    Walking into a recent installation of Dyk’s work, Alexandrov remarked that: “photographs, works on paper, art books, and a wall projection appear as splashes of color floating ethereally in a white cube. The different levels of seeing that are experienced upon entering the space are echoed in the works themselves.”

    “Dyk explores the complexities of the contemporary human experience through layering and distortion of relationships among objects, text, and image. Neither the relationships among the exhibited works nor a definitive message are made obvious to the viewer. This confusion is purposeful; Dyk challenges her audience with ambiguity, and her works encourage investigation. Unidentified pronouns appear in text throughout many of Dyk’s works, and raise difficult, thought provoking questions of “knowingness” versus “unknowingness,” “meaning” versus “non-meaning.”

    While Dyk’s work is bound up in its relevance to timely conversations, it, at times, is also a less layered interaction between lasting, non-ephemera, and traditional techniques as seen in her book stitching. 

    Dyk’s work can be read as seemingly devotional, each memo and assemblage a deliberate act of speaking or remaining silent which, for a viewer, is very compelling. One is left wondering what she’s thinking in the studio, what she’s felt, and what questions she is posing to us when we encounter the work."  - Meaghan Ritchey

  70. April - May 2014:

    Will We Talk or Shall We Just Gaze?
    Hunter College

  71. "Through a Glass Dimly" in The Big Question
    St. Paul's Cathedral
    New York, NY
    Curated by Michael Benrube

    September - November, 2013.
    Performance: September 10, 2013.

  72. Spring - Fall 2013:

    Work in LIC-Project's "The De-Tour" Issue, and accompanying traveling exhibitions

  73. &quot;Untitled (Realignment),&quot; 2012, from the series&amp;nbsp;Communication Objects

    "Untitled (Realignment)," 2012, from the series Communication Objects

    Communication Objects series in Double Take
    Curated by Brooke Tomellio
    Fall 2012.

    Pictured: "Untitled (Realignment)," 2012, Digital C-Print, 16 x 20 in.

  74. April - June 2012: Curated exhibitions and events at Eyebeam (Chelsea), the Rubin Museum, and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies the 2012 Chelsea Music Festival, as the Collaborative Visual Arts Curator.  Projects included Morgan O'Hara's OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK, a 75-person performance (Eyebeam), On Silence, a 25-person evenings of performances (Rubin Museum), and the group exhibition [ON SILENCE] and collaborative performance Reverse (NYCAMS).

    Series Press:

    "Music, Meeting at the Crossroads," New York Times, Anthony Tomasini, June 18, 2012

    "Select Upcoming," TIME OUT NY, June 2012

    "Summer Festivals," New York Times, May 17, 2012

    OPEN CAGE : NEW YORK 
    June 17, 2012
    Eyebeam
    New York, NY
    eyebeam.org/events/open-cage

    OPEN CAGE : NEW YORK - a one hundred minute performative work honoring John Cage in 2012, the centennial of his birth. In 1992, OPEN CAGE: BRATISLAVA was created and directed by artist Morgan O'Hara as a celebration of John Cage's 80th birthday, and performed in the Slovak Philharmony Hall in Bratislava. The original 80 minute score (which was to include John Cage, who unexpectedly passed away prior to its completion) has now been expanded to encompass details of Cage's music, instructions, texts, and stories for the performance in New York in 2012. On Sunday, the 17th of June, from 7:30PM-9:10PM O'Hara presents the work once more at Eyebeam in conjunction with the Chelsea Music Festival.

    Simultaneous activities will take place in and around an installation of cages with their doors open. Actions will be performed by members of the New York art, poetry, and music communities, Cage enthusiasts, musicians participating in the Chelsea Music Festival, and interested audience members, under the direction of O'Hara. The one hundred minute performative work will involve recorded music and music performed live, texts from Cage's writings, stories written by Cage collected in his books, objects and instruments for which he composed music, a complete chronology of his works read aloud by a musicologist, texts describing his methodology with chance operations, and his studies of Zen Buddhism. 

    Morgan O'Hara, Artist and OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK 
    Janna Dyk, Chelsea Music Festival, Collaborative Visual Arts Curator 
    Ken David Masur and Melinda Lee Masur, Chelsea Music Festival Artistic Directors
  75. ON SILENCE
    June 18, 2012
    The Rubin Museum of Art
    New York, NY

    Curated by Janna Dyk

    On Silence, a collaborative event featuring musical and visual components, is a dialogue on the concept of silence in visual art and music, a nod to the 2012 centennial of composer and theorist John Cage. The evening’s series of performances, curated by Janna Dyk, will feature music by CMF 2012 Composer-in-Residence Somei Satoh as well as original compositions by Joshua Clayton, Brent Dickinson, James Hall and Aaron Kruziki, which derive from a thoughtful engagement with the topic, instigated by the reading of Silence, written by premier Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, and in consideration of excerpts from John Cage’s book of lectures by the same title. The two texts create a diverse and uncanny conversation, one whose language here spans genres from classical to progressive jazz, ambient, experimental, and the avant garde, on the nature of silence, its effects, and implications.

    The event at the Rubin Museum of Art is in conjunction with an art exhibition of over 20 New York artists' works, which will be exhibited at the NYCAMS Gallery in Chelsea, June 14-25, 2012, with an opening reception on Thursday, June 14, from 6-8pm. The reception is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are 10am-4pm, or by appointment.

  76. [ON SILENCE]
    Jenna Bauer, David Brown, J Carpenter, Joshua Cave, Lia Chavez, Joshua Clayton, Dean Ebben, Jung Ah Kim, Karine Laval, Thomas Martin, Morgan O'Hara, Ned Shalanski, Kristen Studioso, Karen L. Schiff, Elizabeth Tubergen, and Shimpei Takeda.


    June 14-25, 2012
    NYCAMS Gallery 
    New York, NY

    The Chelsea Music Festival is pleased to present [ON SILENCE], a group exhibi- tion of New York-based artists whose work addresses the concept of silence in visual art, using the peculiar juxtaposition of two distinctly diverse texts on si- lence: Silence, by premier Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, and the compilation of lectures by the late American composer and theorist John Cage of the same title. Via such modes as erasure, negative space, covering, absence, pause, and the like, the works, which include analog and digital photography, painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and mixed media, and many of which were realized specifically for this exhibition, address the psychological, spiritual, and spatial implications of silence. In remaining true to the festival’s mission statement, artists include a crucial combination of both “seasoned professionals, and exciting newcomers on the New York scene.”

    While these two texts represent seemingly incongruous, at times arguably dichoto- mous, perspectives on silence (that of the spiritual and psychological, alongside that of the material or chance-based) the works in [ON SILENCE] address three elements which are prevalent in both texts: the noisy and sonorous aspect of silence, the subtleties of the visceral and the natural in noting the presence of si- lence within a space, and the aspect of containment, and implicitly, potent longing, present in silence.

    As Cage notes in the section in Silence entitled “THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: A CRE- DO,” “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.” The works in this exhibition lie in the spectrum between this “try as we may” and the resolve to rest in the subtleties within the “something to see” through the various means of:

    subtle folds in a paper,
    to “organize,” “improvise,” a

    a transmission
    observed of
    movement, recorded
    by graphite,6 the traces
    of salt water to
    photo-negative,c the granularity: a degrading analogue

    photograph
    subjected
    to the digital, a “surrender

    to the

    weight
    of the ocean.d
    the grueling wait for the fly

    to embody its name,b

    jittering lines -
    pen and
    lapice, a response to
    “visceral emotion,” “prolonged searching,”5 gathering changes,

    brief interactions of
    “light and surface”
    via photographic lens,4 time’s passage - a remnant image of
    iceland, a “residual landscape through light.” 3

    we’ll process endo via code;2
    “examine the nature of textuality” through matzah.g

    shreds of bread to converge a fault,e edible concrete registers fear.f a domestic scene, absent of figural presencez the wide span of “blank” canvas in tossed flowersw

    an “exploration of heavenly bodies and earthly ones,”x

    a meditative glance, held up by a grid.y

    “beware of
    that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment the telephone may ring or the airplane
    come down in a vacant lot. A piece of string
    or a sunset, possessing neither,
    each acts and the continuity happens...” *

    “Just as before, the cicada kept on singing their song, dry and hoarse. There was not a breath of wind. Just as before, a fly kept buzzing around the priest’s face. In the world outside there was no change.” ^

    ________________________

    a Thomas Martin 6 Morgan O’Hara c Shimpei Takeda d Karine Laval
    b Kristen Studioso
    5 Ned Shalanski
    4 David Brown
    3 Elizabeth Tubergen 
    2 Joshua Clayton
    g Karen L. Schiff
    e Dean Ebben
    f Joshua Cave
    z J Carpenter
    w Jenna Bauer
    x Lia Chavez
    y Jung ah Kim

    The work will be exhibited at NYCAMS (New York Center for Art & Media Studies) at 44 W 28 Street, Floor 7, New York, NY, from June 13 to 26, 2012. Gallery hours are from 10am to 4pm, Monday through Friday, or by appointment. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, June 14, 2012, from 6-8pm.

    This exhibition is in conjunction with an evening of performances, which includes five newly created music-based compositions, at the Rubin Museum of Art, on June 18, 2012, at 7:30pm

    Contact: Janna Dyk, jydk@chelseamusicfestival.org

    * John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence. ^ Shusako Endo, Silence, page 119.

    Pictured: 1. Installation for John Lennon's Piano, collaboration between Joshua Clayton and light artist. 2. Untitled, Jung Ah Kim (artist website).

  77. Website under construction...  Missing pieces may be found by emailing me!

    [Image: A puzzled text to Rachel.]