nurtureart 2014/15

NA NP20142015

This publication documents NURTUREart’s 2014-15 exhibition season as well as some of our off-site projects.

Founded in 1997 by George Robinson, NURTUREart Non-Profit Inc. is dedicated to nurturing contemporary art by providing exhibition opportunities and resources for emerging artists, curators, and local public school students.

NURTUREart works at the intersection of art, curatorial practice and education. We support outstanding and provocative ideas in their early stages, helping underrepresented artists and curators take bold steps forward while promoting diversity in making, talking and sharing contemporary art. Above all, we value professionalism and accessibility while engaging broad, inter-generational audiences and encouraging their participation.

Most of our gallery exhibitions, events, and off-site projects are selected from a yearly open call for proposals, free of charge. Final selections are made by a jury of experts (that does not include NURTUREart’s staff;) the members of this jury change every year. A smaller part of our program is curated in-house, allowing us to include an even greater diversity of practices and topics and respond to exciting new ideas and opportunities.

Yasi Ghanbari

YO! I’m Your C.E.O.

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In the early 1990s, the Hungarian graphic designer Tibor Kalman began contributing to Benetton’s advertising campaigns, ultimately becoming art director of Colors, the company’s own magazine. _1 The ads and magazine incorporated documentary photographs related to dire global problems such as disease, hunger, and wars, turning on its head the notion that the last thing any business wants to remind consumers of is the crisis-ridden real world. Rather than proffering a safe space of desire and fulfillment, here the commodity and even the particular brand itself would be wedded to social consciousness. Benetton’s advertisements at this time used a double truck journalistic format (spread across two pages), assailing magazine readers with unexpected images: bloodstained clothes from a dead Croatian soldier, a baby born with the AIDS virus, umbilical cord still attached, etc. This made for a striking contrast with the “United Colors of Benetton” campaign begun in 1989, which presented multiracial groupings of models, often in amorous couplings. Given that Kalman had a hand in these also, they function like a flipside to the brand’s traumatic imagery: fashion’s vision of a tolerant world. In 1995, the company was sued by its German retailers for a drop in sales, said to be from a boycott against this groundbreaking advertising. The late 1990s saw a rise in authen-ticity-based branding inspired in part by cri-tiques of capitalism such as Naomi Klein’s No Logo. _2 One trend in this wave of new products attempted to directly intervene

in given social or political problems by ei-ther donating a percentage of profits to a cause, or by making the product itself ap-parently part of the solution, as with “green” household products or “free trade” coffee. A critique of such products is now familiar to us: the commodity in this case provides a discreet unit of do-wgoodery, a momen-tary sense of having “done something” about the capitalocene, momentarily allevi-ating guilt over relative comfort in the global North. This advertising approach has had its most consistent antagonist in Slavoj Žižek, here railing against Starbucks Coffee in par-ticular: What Starbucks enables you to do is to be a consumerist without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure—for fighting consumerism—is already included in the price of a commodity. Like, you pay a little bit more, and you’re not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on and so on. It is, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism. _3

There is an affective difference between the 1990s, as represented by Benetton, and our arguably even more ideological present. If Jade yoga mats or Warby Parker glasses aim to soothe a consumer’s conscience, it might be argued that Benetton answered guilt with castigation, in its images of suffering, or an overload of desire, in the United Colors ads. Benetton hitched its product’s desire to that jolt of the real, to suffering or eros,

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both “out there” and for the buying sub-ject (the latter being of course ubiquitous in fashion)—something of a Catholic economy. By contrast, contemporary “socially con-scious” commodities tend toward “interpas-sivity”: outsourcing both feeling and action to someone else, so that purchase is not ca-thexis, but freedom. Yasi Ghanbari’s previous work has examined intersections between subjec-tive experience—that which is increasingly difficult to refer to as “private life”—and sophisticated manipulations of affect in digital culture and advertising. Her project for NURTUREart similarly involves installa-tions of manipulated or intermingled ready-mades that are calibrated to produce what could be called “generative insufficiency.” Their affirmative, desiring stance toward their appropriated objects is undercut by imperfection, raw need, or the pathetic. A mannequin garbed in “one-for-one” clothes and accessories (meaning that the company in question buys another such product for someone in need) sits before a slideshow of self-congratulatory publicity. Is this a stand-in for a rather pejorative conception of the gullible consumer, or could the situation be more complicated? The artist has frequently included herself in her work as a sort of char-acter who grapples with questions—how to do something, how to make something, how to get along with someone else. Mundane moments pass; she argues with a boyfriend; she is back to “work,” watching, thinking, curious, desiring, engaged, exasperated. The ideological rub of first-world capitalism

is that it pulls levers already inside us. The way up the stairs and out, as it were, must thus traverse the self. _Daniel R. Quiles

1_Maira Kalman and Ruth A. Peltason, eds., Colors: Issues 1-13: The Tibor Kalman Years (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).2_Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000). The irony of Klein’s book, originally of a piece with the rise of turn-of-the-century anticapitalist movements and the 1999 Seattle WMO protests, becoming a sort of guide for future advertisers has been noted by many; see http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/27/the-revenge-of-the-brands.3_Transcription from Sophie Fiennes’ film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, BFI Films, 2012.

Snow Yunxue Fu

Ryan Whittier H

aleKatie Torn Siebren Versteeg

Brain Scratch

Curated by Chris Romero October 17 - November 21, 2014

16Ryan Whittier Hale

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We do not perceive the world as it actually is, but as the brain computes it most probably to be.

John Smythies

Space, Time and Consciousness

Brain Scratch observes an urge to interpret and find comfort in a world where an increasing amount of time is spent in virtual space. The exhibition title conjures a peculiar notion: it alludes to fervently scratching the head out of curiosity, to the point where scalp and bone are broken to reach the brain. The result is an etching that alters perception. The featured artists interpret a new way of being, one where reality and virtuality have converged, mutating perspectives of time, space, and body. The way the mind is hardwired has changed, Brain Scratch comments on what is, what may become. The exhibition finds Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions as a primary inspiration. Although the narrative, about a two-dimensional square swept into a three-dimensional world, comments on mathematics and Victorian culture, it also holds another implication. The novel is a reflection on the limited capabilities of the mind. Abbott’s reference to a line from Hamlet, “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!” makes this clear. The “wondrous strange” is also explored within the work of each artist in the exhibition. Combining fantasy and manner-ist aesthetics, Ryan Whittier Hale’s digital photographs and sculptures question the

emotional capacity of artificial beings. Hale depicts desolate yet tranquil environments populated with indeterminate humanoids. Their delicate bodies lay on the edge of or-ganic and synthetic. Although posed with dramatic gesture and idealized form, the smooth plastic skin and vacant expression of each android-like being exposes a failed at-tempt at true human intimacy and empathy. In this way Hale questions our identity and behavior as we continue to move deeper into the labyrinths of virtuality. Emerging from Katie Torn’s animations are totems comprised of relics from consumer culture. Utilizing tools commonly employed in Hollywood films and commercials, Torn crafts hyper-real environments made of figures ranging from My Little Pony to bodiless Barbie dolls. The island-woman hybrid of Dream House appears as a landscape in which consumer debris continually accumulates, generating as if from thin air. Although the island contains elements of pop, it remains dystopian, surrounded by nothing but empty space. A monument to desire and waste, Torn comments on the value placed in materiality. The biomorphic and otherworldly installations of Snow Yunxue Fu address humanity’s confrontation with the metaphysical as manifested through digital forms. The Gap 3 is a window into a parallel dimension that stimulates both consciousness and space. Elements of traditional Chinese landscape painting are referenced as Fu creates expressive topographies that exude imagination and contemplation. Conjuring

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Ryan Whittier Hale

Siebren Versteeg

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Snow Yunxue Fu

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spaces of billowing light and exotic matter, Fu’s hypnotizing and trance-inducing environments feel mysteriously familiar. As if depicting something organic within the body, or outward beyond Earth, the depths of The Gap 3 are truly unfathomable. Siebren Versteeg’s algorithmically generated paintings meld computerized and artistic process into one. The paintings of the Sequential Array series are created through custom software that determines elements including brush movement, coloration, and viscosity. Grappling with agency and chance, the series alludes to a passing of time. The program could paint endlessly, but in the exhibition Versteeg selects ten compositions to print, stretch onto canvas, and bring into the real world. Minute idiosyncrasies appear in each consecutive painting – new lines, paint drips, and strokes – but the beginning and end of the series contains an uncanny resemblance. Impressionistic in style, the paintings comment on sameness, completion, and mark making. Brain Scratch moves deeper into a new reality, scratching an irrepressible itch. For the artists of this exhibition the purpose is not to gain a relief or a complete understanding of the world. Rather, now that the physical and digital are sewn together the artists pick at the stiches in response to a strange moment in time. _Chris Romero

21Katie Torn

PROGRAM

Franck Lesbros presents: DustracingSunday, December 7, 1-6PM

Sue Jeong Ka presents: Color Felt, RedWednesday, December 10, 1PMIn collaboration with NURTUREart’s Education Outreach Program

Dave Musgrave presents: Hardware Hacking Video Mixers: Searching for the UnintendedSaturday, December 13, 3-5PM

Talia Link presents: Come do your Monica Lewinsky Nails with me! Live streamed workshop from my bed… =^.^=Monday, December 15, 7-9PM.

Sean J. Patrick Carney presents: It’s Probably Already OnlineThursday, December 18, 10AM-2PMIn collaboration with NURTUREart’s Education Outreach Program

JaeWook Lee presents: LunarmagmaoceanLoveThursday, December 18, 7-9PM.Organizing Actant: JaeWook LeeProposing Actant: Sarah DemeuseCommentary Actants: Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Thyrza Nichols GoodeveLyricizing Actants: Ali VanAssemblage Actant: Simone CoutoNonhuman Actants: various objects assembled by Simone Couto

Franck LesbrosSue Jeong KaD

ave Musgrave

Talia LinkSean J. Patrick C

arneyJaeW

ook Lee

Videorover 9:the workshop series

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In this iteration of Videorover, we focused on process, collaboration, and engagement as we invited artists to stage workshops, lectures and events in NURTUREart’s gallery space.

NURTUREart temporarily transformed its gallery into a pedagogical arena where visitors are encouraged to participate and observe. As an exhibition, Videorover: Season 9 existed cumulatively – each workshop leaving behind a video, installation, or artifact, building into the environment in the process. The works within the gallery space unfolded little by little, culminating in a closing reception on Saturday, December 20, when the entire space was in its final and fullest iteration. In addition to the events held at the space, the Videorover Archive from Seasons 3 through 8 were on display for the duration of the exhibition, re-activating the works which are the foundation of this program.

For the rest of the season, starting January 2015, the videos which were made from or served as inspiration for the workshops will be on display in the Videorover project space, adjacent to the main gallery.

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Sue Yeong Ka

Franck Lesbros

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Family Trees, Coffee Grounds

Recently I bumped into Gabriela Salazar at a panel on “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” the famous essay written by art historian Rosalind Krauss in 1979. I hadn’t expected to see her there, but it hardly came as a surprise, considering how well Krauss’s definition of sculpture as “not-architecture” speaks to Salazar’s own practice. Since 2011, Salazar has developed a vocabulary of wedges, props, and shims—objects emblematic of moments when architecture fails or falls short, when the floor isn’t level, or the stairs are askew. They are the contractor’s quick fix, or the homeowner’s haphazard patch. That is, Salazar’s forms are architectural but not architecture, embedded in the wall but left off the blueprints. They achieve a relation to their surrounds even when placed on a plinth. Yet if Salazar occupies a position in sculpture’s expanded field, she also pressures its limits. Krauss compressed her argument into a Klein group diagram as a means of stressing that the sculpture of the previous two decades had constituted a paradigm shift. The target here was historicism, the attempt to assure art’s continuity by situating each new work within a genealogy. “No sooner had minimal sculpture appeared on the horizon of the aesthetic experience of the 1960s, than criticism began to construct

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a paternity for this work,” wrote Krauss, “a set of constructivist fathers who could legitimize and thereby authenticate the strangeness of these objects.” The italics are mine, the sarcasm Krauss’s. The essay utterly disdains historicism’s familial dimensions. The synchrony of the Klein group suppresses the diachrony of the family tree. By contrast, Salazar’s work is deeply involved in the project of claiming parents. Her sculptures demonstrate that genealogy is no straight line. Rather, family trees are flexible; they can be bent back, looped, split sideways. Nor is inheritance a given; it must be worked for, and worked through. Salazar’s most recent sculpture began with an act of recovery: collecting the used coffee grounds from her parents’ kitchen. She mixed the grounds with flour and salt and shaped the resulting dough into a wedge, hoping it would solidify into an earthy brick. Indeed it hardened, but then it cracked, and eventually it crumbled. Salazar should have realized the wedge was doomed from the start, since coffee lacks a binding agent. Yet coffee is also the tie that binds. The discarded grounds were a direct inheritance from Salazar’s parents, and her mother’s family had operated a coffee plantation in Puerto Rico from the late 1930s to the early 1970s—back when Puerto Rican coffee was known as the finest in the world, before US control and migration-induced labor shortages pushed production to Colombia and elsewhere. As Salazar’s wedges collapsed,

they didn’t deteriorate into mere dirt; they became soil, rich with the sort of personal associations that the white cube usually clears away. For My Lands Are Islands, Salazar has amassed sixteen wedges, each of which will gradually lose its form as entropy, gravity, moisture, and air all do their thing. This slow-motion performance will take place across several white-brick plinths stacked and arranged into shapes that recall the austere geometries of early Minimalism. The bricks are glazed, a type familiar to Manhattan residents from the cladding of numerous apartment buildings, most of them hastily constructed during the postwar housing boom. Here, Salazar connects a set of sculptural “forefathers” to the architectural vernacular of their era. It was Dan Graham who first drew this line, in his prescient magazine piece “Homes for America” (1966), yet Salazar, again, further complicates the genealogy. Her parents, both architects, were schooled in the same late modernist ideals and principles that these “white elephant” ceramic surfaces had first reflected. As Salazar’s wedges disintegrate, one set of inheritances falls into another. Lines of descent begin to twist and get tangled. Over sculpture’s expanded field, a layer of topsoil thickens. _Colby Chamberlain

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ichelle LeftherisPhoebe StreblowA

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Rational Formal is a collaborative curatorial project developed by Mat-thew C. Lange, Michelle Leftheris, Adam Ryder and Phoebe Streblow. Ideas for this exhibition emerged through sustained conversations amongst all participants, regarding the subjects, intents, aesthetics, and strategies in each other’s approach to photography.

At a passing glance, divergences in the artists’ field of action appear sig-nificant. While Matthew C. Lange repurposes mid-century information devices to theorize a cosmological social system referred to as The Plum-met Machine, Michelle Leftheris interweaves photography, sculpture, and video to delineate or transverse corporeal and psychical spaces. Closer to Lange’s interest in generative systems, Adam Ryder’s work focuses on the creation of narratives combining authored and found images referencing the parafictional Renovatio Imperii organization. Phoebe Streblow uses photographs and collage to examine personal and collective unconscious through sibylline astrological perspectives.

Differences notwithstanding, the conditions and means by which all art-ists employ photographic media converge around common values and a willingness to open artistic creation to public or interpersonal discourse. Using the perceived objectivity of image-making, presentation and re-production devices to convey abstract notions or liminal states, Rational Formal consistently references informational or museological display. This mode of presentation combines artworks, sketches, inspiration boards, diagrams, props, related ephemera, and texts, offering them to collec-tive re-evaluation while demanding that their conceptual underpinnings remain central.

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⊕♃♎︎ 0º29’In A Collection Of Perfect Specimens Of Many Biological Forms, A But-terfly Displays The Beauty Of Its Wings, Its Body Impaled By A Fine Dart

⊕“This cabinet card presents an image of an older man in his fraternal organization garb. Note the large star on his jacket. There is no informa-tion on the card to assist in identifying the gentleman in the photograph, nor to identify the photographer and location of the studio. Perhaps a visitor to the Cabinet Card Gallery can examine the clothing in the im-age, and identify the particular fraternal organization represented in the photograph. The card stock of this cabinet card is quite thin, making it likely that the photograph was produced in the early years of cabinet card photography (1870’s or early 1880’s)”

⊕The Plummet Machine is a rational machine. It formulates a theoretical model for allocating power amongst a finite quantity of organic expres-sions.

⊕6CO2 + 6H2O ------> C6H12O6 + 6O2

⊕Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (582-565 CE) sought to reconquer the lost Western half of the historical Roman Empire through the ambitious but only partially-realized Renovatio Imperii or “Restoration of the Empire.”

⊕☽♊︎ 4o33’ A Revolutionary Magazine Asking for Action

⊕An Organization: 1. Archaeological site; 2. An artifact as aberration; 3. The evidence, rationalized; 4. Evidence, in situ; 5. The evidence for evi-dence to come; 6. Grounds for hypotheses; 7. The artifact as overarching evidence.

⊕a dark shape that appears on a surfacewhen someone or something moves betweenthe surface and a source of light

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⊕A Synthesis: [Sidekick / The Sheriff (A Kin To Gregor Samsa)], [Plumb Bob / The Shadow of the Atomic Bomb (Sidekick / The Executive Board)], [A Gang of Desperadoes / The Execu-tive Board (The Shadow of the Atomic Bomb)], [Plumb Bob / A Kin to Gregor Samsa (A Gang of Desperadoes / The Sheriff)]

⊕History <> Eternity / Linear <> Cyclical / Dogma <> Ritual / Rationality <> Magic / Waking Reality <> Altered States / Science <> Art

⊕Two forms moving continuously in front of each other interrupting vision in a constant eclipse of perception.

⊕In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the Ameri-can Renaissance movement, ca 1890–1917; its last manifestation was in Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public projects were the Lincoln Memorial, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the American Museum of Natural History’s Roosevelt Memorial. These were considered stylistic anachronisms when they were finished.

⊕ ☊♌︎2o53’A Middle-Aged Woman, Her Long Hair Flowing Over Her Shoulders And In A Braless Youthful Garment.

⊕“Their power lies in the occult, (magic rituals) and in economy - money creates power. The Illuminati own all the International banks, the oil-busi-nesses, the most powerful businesses of industry and trade, they infiltrate politics and education and they own most governments - or at the very least control them. They even own Hollywood and the Music Industry.” –Wes Penre

⊕“I will tell, in fact, how this strange man carried with him, in his bag, instru-ments that I had never seen before then, which he called his wondrous machines. Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.”

⊕“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical sub-stances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

45R/F/A/V performance, Armory Art Night

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‘And the rest?’‘And the rest?’‘Say it one more time.’‘Say it one more time.’‘2 times.’

‘Did you just call and respond to yourself?’‘I do this when I’m upset’.‘You can’t call and respond to yourself.’‘I do it when I’m lonely’,‘Shit, I do it pretty much all the time.’‘I even did it when they lowered my old man into the ground.’

#Cue rim shot(Clyde Stubblefield)

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‘Ok, so what Key do you want to do this in?’‘I usually do it in the morning.’‘So it’s a tone lower.’‘But that was in the key of F.’‘Yeah exactly!’‘What?’‘So’...‘Ok so what key then?’‘Ask the drummer.’‘Ask the drummer, if he can play in the key of F?’

# Cue ghost notes

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A few weeks ago I met Patrick.

*Pause 0.5 sec

Up for the Down Stroke

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh

March 27 - M

ay 1, 2015

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Patrick wears a silver bracelet on his right wrist. He wears a navy coloured silky bandana with a pen firmly inserted in it, right above his left eye; I’ve never once seen his hair.

#Cue rim shot

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‘Don’t you mean 4 / 4?’‘You mean the augmented fourth?’‘Oh no, that’s the devils music.’‘Ok, lets change it to 4/2.’

*Pause 0.8 sec.

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At some point Patrick moved to New Jersey for a few years where he worked at a carpet factory. There he noticed Americans went crazy for his accent, coming back from lunch break with loads of phone numbers for potential weekend dates.

*Pause look around (1 sec)

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Patrick climbed the pay scale and was put on the phones by the sheer force of his accent’s powers. He hated New Jersey.

#Cue rim shot

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His mother lives somewhere in Central Florida, I told him she would be considered a Snowbird by locals. Some times I stare at Patrick so much he starts looking like Trevor Nelson. He has strong arms although he’s not necessarily athletic. It looks like he worked out quite a bit on his upper body strength at some point in his mid twenties

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He began telling a story during the entire carpet-folding marathon. The client, an Iranian version of Marlon Brando would sometimes interrupt Patrick to tap the rugs with his bare feet and get the perfect fold. Everyone kept folding, listening to Patrick in the background as if his voice carried the necessary rhythm to slot the rug into its perfect pleat. By then, Patrick started recounting Danny Ray’s arrest in 2009, for possession of crack he was 74 years old. His luck had taken a turn for the worse, you know after 40 years doing the same job then suddenly you are out of work because your boss goes and dies.

I am not your valet.

‘And now of course he (Prince) is going around saying the Internet is over, that the Internet is dead’.

‘What does that even mean?‘Like it’s a thing, with a life span?’‘The Internet is never over it’s bigger than all of us.’‘Not to mention the dark net, the deep net.’

Patrick said he doesn’t even believe in Backmasking anymore and had recently tried to get the CEO of the old record company to agree to reverse the material. Declaring the Internet over and abandoning sexual expression.

‘Sex and the Internet can never be separated they need each other’.

At this stage the client was gripping the mothballs, dropping them one by one across the tapestries punctuating Patrick’s account of the array of memorabilia in room 1002. He had all five of us pulling in unison with the extraction fan and once again removing his shoes and tapping the corners of the rug to get the sections perfectly aligned. Patrick had stopped talking to focus on the precision demanded of us, surprisingly though the client insisted on hearing the rest of the story.

We talked about the dirty dozen, 12 Angry Men, The Magnificent Seven, District 9, and Capricorn One.

Patrick enjoys putting on accents, he did Dallas very well, tried some New York set it in a diner, a plummy South English accent and did his mother’s Jamaican when she’s pissed at him. He once raised the pitch of his voice to sound like a geezer.

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Walking into climate control level 2 he joked about someone he had met in Kentucky that sounded exactly like Foghorn J. Leghorn.

#Cue rim shot(Upsetting Dub 1.15 seconds)

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‘I said to him,’‘You sounded like Smiley Culture earlier’He laughed telling me Smiley Culture lived on his street and that he was a Police informant.

#Cue rim shot

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The police came around to question him one day; at some point he went into the kitchen to make them tea and stabbed himself to death.

#Cue rim shot

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Patrick didn’t understand why Smiley Culture wasn’t handcuffed and had the opportunity to make them tea,

#Cue rim shot

Opening Reception/Performance: Susan Conte.

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Project Curate 2014-2015:

Tinia AlbertMirta LopezAngel MontesDestiny PerezGesifed PaucarDavid OrtegaShanice Rodriguez

Teacher Partner:Denise MartinezLead Curator:Adam Parker Smith

Part of NURTUREart’s Education Program, Project Curate provides a class of students from Juan Morel Campos High School an opportunity to experience contemporary curatorial practices by working closely with a professional curator for the entire school year, culminating with an ex-hibition at NURTUREart Gallery. This year their mentor was artist and curator Adam Parker Smith.

What It Was

Curated by Project C

uratew

ith Adam

Parker Smith

May 8 - M

ay 29, 2015

Avantika Baw

aBrent BirnbaumW

yatt BurnsStephanie D

inkinsPatrick C

arlin Mohundro

Scott Rogers

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What It Was asks us to confront our pasts and explore the potential of alter-nate and plural futures. In predicting what role art will have in our own lives and the lives of others, we wonder: where will the future be?

62Stephanie Dinkins

63Patrick Carlin Mohundro

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Avantika Bawa Scott Rogers

Wyatt Burns

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^ Brent Birnbaum >

Stephanie Dinkins

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MOB: The curatorial process behind What It Was can be traced back to one class in Febru-ary during which you asked the students a se-ries of questions about the future. What was your objective with that activity?

APS: The future is fun. It’s attached to us, and we control it maybe, but the reality of it is looser. We get to incorporate our dreams, hopes, fears, questions, and wishes into a vi-sion that we may fulfill. The future was some-thing we all had in common and somewhere we were all going, so it seemed like a good jumping-off spot.

MOB: Did any of their responses to those questions surprise you?

APS: I planned on being surprised by their answers, but I found many to be conserva-tive, pragmatic, and grounded, which was more surprising.

MOB: Why the future? What interested you and your collaborators about the future?

APS: My collaborators seemed pessimistic about their futures in conversations they had with my co-teachers and me. I wanted to find out where that pessimism was coming from. I didn’t imagine that I would be able to ameliorate any of their outlooks, and I didn’t necessarily want to, but I thought by channeling our conversations and consider-ations we could all gain perspective.

MOB: You took on the theme of the future

What would you do after school today if there was no tomorrow?

If there was no future (and you couldn’t get in trouble) and you had 10 cans of spray paint, what would you draw or write?

What is your earliest memory?

When you are old, will your favorite memory be from something you have done already or something you haven’t done yet?

If you controlled your future, what future would you give yourself?

If you controlled Adam’s future, what future would you make for him?

What future would you make for each other?

What is eternity?

Would you want to live forever?

What will art look like in the future?

What will artists look like in the future?

* A conversation between Adam Parker Smith and Molly O’Brien

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and didn’t end up with an exhibition of aliens and the apocalypse. How?

APS: We framed most our discussions on a personal view fo the future...and I had some veto power. MOB: What are the different futures present-ed by the artists in the exhibtion?

APS: Avantika Bawa; global future.Brent Birnbaum; personal future.Wyatt Burns; academic future. Stephanie Dinkins; distopic future.Patrick Mohundro; metaphysical future.Scott Rogers; fictional future.

MOB: Which artist in the exhibition best aligns with your vision of the future?

APS: That’s difficult to say. Other than aliens and dystopia, the future for me is a very personal place. I appreciated the insight that each artist had for their own futures, and the way they presented this to our collaborative group and the public, but my own future is a remote place equally far away from each of the works in the show.

MOB: What strategies did you use to guide the students on making decisions as curators while simultaneously teaching them what that role means?APS: We did a fun activity when preparing for installing the exhibition; we imagined each of the works in the show as a person. We talked about what type of personality each of

the artworks would have and how they might interact with the others. Are they shy, loud, aggressive, funny? Each of us then became one of the works, assuming the personality of the work. We walked around the gallery interacting and rotating until we all found a spot we thought our work would be com-fortable. And that’s where we installed the artworks. MOB: How did working with the high school students expand your notion of the future?

APS: I think every time you meet somebody new, old or young, the future becomes a more interesting place. You want to find out what happens.

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Deep TimeC

urated by Marco A

ntonini June 5 - July 11, 2015

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Seven Paragraphs on Davide Zucco’s Deep Time

The cosmos and its many objects, textures, shades of black, gold and blue must have felt pretty crazy from a pre- or proto- technological perspective. So much so that, across cultures and geographies, any history of making sense of that immensity, ordering it in schemes and grand narratives, should be remembered as much as a history of the universe (as imagined in a particular place and time) as part of a larger, genuinely universalist and deeply sub-conscious pursuit. Wherever art, belief and scientific method coexist, new cosmic narratives and representations emerge, compete, overlap. The visible cosmos has no dark side but in our imagination and in documents produced by technology so far removed by our average understanding of its raison d’être that they fall flat; dead on our lap as most technology, these days. In our 2015, I often look at the moon and see a face, and so do billions of other human beings. It has soft features, an unnaturally rounded visage that would be monstrous among the rest of us, dwellers of the thinly layered strata of the biosphere. Some see the moon as more on the feminine side but who can really tell? It certainly displays humanoid features, simi-larly to one of those cloud formations pho-tographed at just the right time and angle,

when a crooked smile, tribal mask or sharp profile are there. Just for a while. I first saw Davide Zucco’s work in his Bushwick studio a couple of years ago. It offered a refreshingly tangible connection to a cosmos too big to represent, too empty to inspire action or thought on our insig-nificant Earth. Zucco dwells in a symbolical cave lit by signs and symbols, haunted by mythical imagery and folklore as much as by personal narratives and memories. His paintings, drawings and sculptures (present-ing dramatic shifts in intensity: one as thin and frail as spiderweb, the other stretching its muscles over the facade of a remote hik-ing shelter on the Italian Dolomites...) were in and of another time. The scientific notion of deep time refers to the time scale of geologic events preceding humanity. The “discovery” of pre-human time in western science is cred-ited to James Hutton (1726 - 1797). A time-line so infinitely extended before and after humanity’s passage can bring the most vivid imagination to the point of paralysis. Deep Time, Davide Zucco’s first New York solo exhibition, presents a remarkably cohesive body of work. Metal surfaces transitioning from tarnished to polished, flowing over structurally rigorous, symbolic drawing and

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composition. Sweeping gestural inserts, striated by finely detailed plumes inspired by the kaleidoscopic patterns found in pet-rified wood. Where lush, prehistoric forests used to be, thickets of splintered matter reveal a psychedelically colorful core. In-side Zucco’s weave, millions of years ac-cumulate in dense, layered abstraction. Roughly treated surfaces suggest aggres-siveness and violence, contrasting with the subtle lines and delicate structures defining a unique vocabulary of archetypical shapes and symbols. Mining collective subconscious cos-mologies, Zucco’s use of industrial materi-als connect the impossibly remote moods of crystallized prehistoric time to the his-torically tangible decay of urban ruins. His works foreground autonomous, never ending processes of creative destruction, energy flows permeating life in a timeless continuity, transcending the historical forms of human expression while reconnecting us to the universe via mediated experience and reflection, evoking a mood we can all directly experience by raising our eyes to the sky for a moment. On a clear night, when we can catch a glimpse of it, the moon we can see (high in the sky or creeping its way up through the clouds and the rooftops) is forever smirk-ing back. And so are the stars. Flickering. Possibly dead and gone, millions of years ago. Taken in via a pair of human eyes, the whole universe is a triumph of inner space over deep space. Such internalized notions of evidence, translated and flourished ad li-

bitum by conscious and unconscious processes of visual and cultural metabolization, become human matter, leaving the cosmos and entering our shared experience and existence. _Marco Antonini

Keren BenbenistyJessica CannonCalum CraikMaria KondratievAndrea NacciarritiIgor RufNikola Uzunovski

This exhibition brings together works of art that function as orientation marks, cardinal and/or vanishing points inside the gallery space. Focusing the viewer’s attention on natural, artificial and fictional elements, lead-ing beyond their real and perceived con-fines, into uncharted territory. The title pays homage to the nautical instrument that first allowed astral navigation, an ingenious op-tical/mechanical device to calculate the dis-tance between objects/landmarks on land or at sea. Smart, simple and timelessly beauti-ful, a sextant is a powerful reminder of how connected to the universe we actually are. In Sextant, present-tense experi-ence and poiesis reconnect us to the tangi-ble (and symbolical) infinities informing our understanding of the sensible world. The exhibition’s artist list is almost entirely culled from NURTUREart’s Online Registry of Artists and Curators, a free place to share, see and talk art. www.nurtureart.org/registry

Keren BenbenistyJessica CannonCalum CraikMaria KondratievAndrea NacciarritiIgor RufNikola Uzunovski

Curated by M

arco Antonini

July 17 - August 30, 2015

Sextant

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Andrea Nacciarriti Igor Ruf

Keren Benbenisty

Nikola Uzunovski

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Jessica Cannon Maria Kondratiev

84Calum Craik

85Calum Craik Keren Benbenisty

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This page: Raul Valverde’s Cata de Agua, one of NURTUREart’s contributions to JustMad Art Fair, Madrid. March 2015.

Opposite page: NURTUREart’s booth at JustMad, featuring works by Davide Zucco, Raul Valverde, Claudia Weber and

Gabriela Salazar (not pictured) + Interior and exterior shot of Just Mad’s location, COAM Madrid.

Special Projects

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NURTUREart’s booth at NEWD art fair, featuring works by Brian Edgerton, Gary Pedersen, Lior Modan and Jennifer Lauren

Smith. June 2015, Brooklyn NY.

NURTUREart is supported by:The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual ArtsBritish Council of Northern IrelandCity Council Member Antonio ReynosoCity Council Member Stephen LevinCon EdisonGreenwich Collection, Ltd.The Joan Mitchell FoundationMilton and Sally Avery Arts FoundationNew York City Department of Cultural AffairsNew York City Department of EducationNew York State Council on the ArtsThe Walentas Family FoundationMany generous individuals.

We are grateful for significant past support from:The Greenwall FoundationThe Leibovitz Foundation

Generous donations and support:Blick Art MaterialsLagunitasTekserveVolunteer Lawyers for the Arts

Board of Trustees:Karen Marston, PresidentCarol Salmanson, Vice PresidentLawrence Mascera, TreasurerBenjamin Tischer, SecretaryHeather BhandariIan CofreKatherine ChapmanElizabeth DimmitAsya GeisbergChristopher K. HoStephen Scuro

NURTUREart’s Inner Circle (as of January.2016):Catherine BehrendBrooklyn Fire Proof Inc.Deborah Brown and Eric PloumisAlma Egger and Orlando DiazAnn and Lee FensterstockMarianne and Ted HovivianBarbara SalmansonSupreme DigitalSusan Swenson and Joe Amrhein

NURTUREart relies on the support of individuals, businesses, and institutions who are able to make significant recurring gifts. These generous patrons make up our Inner Circle, and we feel fortunate to consider them among our supporters and friends.

Advisory Board:Sayaka ArakiCatherine Hannah BehrendDeborah Brown Bill Carroll Christine Dobush Richard Fisher Ann Fensterstock Susan HamburgerDavid HarperJennie Lamensdorf Julie McKim Sarah Monteleone Fraser Mooney Lee Pacchia Alexander PalmerBarbara PaleyAlexander RahulSara Reisman Richard Stewart James E WeiKatarina Wong

Book design, editing and production: Marco Antonini. All images courtesy the Artists.Jan 2016, New York City.

Staff:Marco Antonini, Executive Director and CuratorLouise Barry, Development DirectorCody-Rae Knue, Education CoordinatorMolly O’Brien, Education DirectorNick Joyce, Gallery ManagerRachel Steinberg, Assistant Director

Volunteers:Kevin ChenVirginia CiminoKara CoxBen CrothersElana GrossmanJacqueline KuperEmma LaramieLisa O’Donnell

Special thanks to:All the artists who, along the years, have donated their works to our annual Benefit and supported our programs and activities.

56 Bogart Street Brooklyn, NY 11206

L train to Morgan Avenue

Call: 718 782 7755E-mail: [email protected]

www.nurtureart.org

nurtureart 2014/15

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