Past Programs | Abrons Arts Center

Frances Stark: I’ve Had It, And A Half

November 4, 2011

Borrowing words and phrases from novels, poems, and pop songs, Frances Stark turns them into visual materials that evoke the process of writing. Stark’s Performa commission takes viewers on a semi-autobiographical stroll through the creative chaos of the artist’s life, working closely with a dancer and DJ from New York’s dance hall “daggering” scene.

The Color of Company

November 4 - December 18, 2011

Culling from corporate and consumer culture, the domestic and the decorative, Darren Bader, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Charles Harlan, Lisa Oppenheim, and Donelle Woolford rearticulate high-brow aesthetic forms with low-brow American culture. Canvas scraps, chain-link fencing, Crayola color codes, cats, boxes, and other bric-a-brac are assimilated as both deadpan formal gesture and lukewarm polemic.

Maude Léonard-contant: Beautiful West Nightscape

October 8 - October 29, 2011

In the past year, the palm tree has been the main figure of Maude Léonard-Contant’s work, mediating between object of desire and reminiscence and totem for religious cult. The work she has developed for the Abrons Art Center will end the cycle on palm trees: the ridiculous adoration has turned into a campy nightmare, within which only ghostly traces of the palm remain. Inspired by noir fiction, the hoax of the coconut pearl and Epyptomania, the resulting installation depicts an oasis at night that tells a story with a plot that remains obscure.

Tomaz Hipólito: Reflex_01

October 8 - October 29, 2011

reflex_01 is a series of works developed over the course of Hipólito’s residency in New York. In this latest iteration, Hipólito systematically avoids a direct view of the subject. This in situ project shows the Abrons Arts Center grabbed in a poetic shape, displaying a pattern technique of geometrical disturbance, thus revealing an intuitively true sight of a particular building.

Creative Time: Living As Form Talks

September 24 - September 25, 2011

Living as Form provides a broad look at a vast array of socially engaged practices that appear with increasing regularity in fields ranging from theater to activism, and urban planning to visual art. The project brings together 25 curators, documents over 100 artists’ projects in a large-scale survey exhibition inside the historic Essex Street Market building, features nine new commissions in the surrounding neighborhood, and provides a dynamic online archive of over 350 socially engaged projects.

Andrew Mount: Graphemes And Epigraphs

September 10 - October 1, 2011

Andrew Mount‘s body of work investigates the production of images, the use of language and the act of seeing. Through various formats such as photography, drawing, books, and videos, the artist questions the problematic of representation. He resists established conventions through the creation of strategies that highlight the power of communication that lies in imagery. By employing diverse mechanisms and techniques such as interlacing, juxtaposition, and repetition, Mount draws the observation into the inherent contradictions inscribed in images or their politicized contents.

Time/Bank: Time/Food

September 4 - October 16, 2011

Time/Bank is a tool for people in the arts to get things done without using money. Started by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle last September, Time/Bank is an international community of more than 1,500 artists, curators, writers, and others in the field of art who are interested in developing a parallel economy based on exchange of time and skills. Time/Food is a temporary eatery that operates on the Time/Bank economic system — a platform where individuals can pool time and skills, bypassing money as a means of value — allowing visitors to pay for their lunch in exchange for time credits and time currency earned by helping others in the Time/Bank community

Deb Sokolow: Notes On Denver International Airport And The New World Order

July 21 - September 3, 2011

Inspired by subgenres of sci-fi literature, police TV series, and cult Hollywood films in which paranoia plays a central role, Sokolow scripts intricate, non-linear narratives based on mystifying, enigmatic pieces of information. These puzzling stories feature mysterious characters who uncover sinister plots, from the Illinois State University Watterson Towers suicide rumor to McDonald’s chicken nuggets being D.C.-area spies’ favorite food. The accounts unfold in the form of charts comprising drawings and other pictorial components made with materials such as pen and pencil, correction fluid, and highlighter, typical of office supply cabinets, as well as caption-like written elements. Sokolow’s approach to deception, secrecy, and suspicion constitutes an examination of the relationship between the ideological state apparatus, mass media, and the public mind.

Image Wars

July 21 - September 3, 2011

Image Wars addresses the representation of conflict in visual culture in an age of global crisis. This exhibition is curated by Miguel Amado and brings together works by Yevgeniy Fiks, Rinat Kotler, Michael Mandiberg, Carlos Noronha Feio, Mary Temple, and Kai-Oi Jay Yung. The artists in this exhibition mix archival documentation and fiction as well as research and personal reaction to daily events to comment on the articulation of geopolitics and the media in the “spectacularization” of warfare. The works on view examine the picturing of zones of conflict, from armed conflicts between countries trough dissent across national borders; the charismatic character of world leaders and unknown soldiers; and manifestations of both control and powerlessness in news and individual narratives.

Chelsea Knight: Frame

July 21 - September 3, 2011

Chelsea Knight explores the political — in her view, a dimension of life of which the essence is dissent rather than concord. In her projects she examines social control in general and the ideologies of authority in particular. Informed by theatricality (among other aspects, stage design, improvisational acting techniques, and spoken word) and language as a cognitive and emotional apparatus, she creates narrative-based videos, photographs, and participatory performances that focus on the current state of democracy — its principles, values, and aspirations.