Sarah Nicholls: Reading Time

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Reading Time”, a solo exhibition of works by Sarah Nicholls, currently an Artist in Residence, on view January 7 through February 6, 2016.

Artist books and artist-driven publications have risen to a new level of prominence despite the ongoing digitization of culture and communication. Books are a technology that, among other things, can respond to and depict the passing of time. Reading is a time-based activity, one that can slow down and create interior lapses in time. Your interior “reading voice” helps to both reinforce the private nature of reading, and the one-on-one connection the act creates.Handmade books in particular ask the reader to pause and contemplate the physicality of the book, the particular hands that have produced the work, and the time it took them to do so.

Reading Time is a reading room installed in the gallery at Guttenberg Arts that invites visitors to engage with monologues, brochures, ephemera, manifestos, scientific matter, propaganda, and alternate histories in the form of printed language. Included are a range of publications and a selection of prints which collectively revolve around the authority of the printed word. 

Publishing creates community, though that community may only be temporary and hard to hold together. In a culture where visual noise is inescapable, printed matter creates an opportunity to pause, ruminate, speculate, and share.

Sarah Nicholls is a visual artist who makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words. She often uses found language and metal type, combining image, visual narrative, and time. She has written a collection of self-help aphorisms, she publishes a series of informational pamphlets, and recently completed a field guide to extinct birds. Her limited edition artist books are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. For twelve years, she ran the studio programs at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. Currently she teaches letterpress at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Visiting Critic: Jennie Lamensdorf

Is the Director and Curator of the Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings Program in New York, NY. Art-in-Buildings brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for the occupants, residents, and guests of Time Equities Inc. properties. Recent projects include exhibitions and installations by Grimanesa Amóros, Jesus Benavente, Brent Birnbaum, Kevin Cooley + Philip Andrew Lewis, Justin Cooper, Frances Goodman, Mary Mattingly, Really Large Numbers, Carolyn Salas, Jessica Segall, and Jay Shin, among many others. She is also the curator of the Francis J. Greenburger Collection.  She is a Board Member of Art Omi, the visual arts residency at Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY; a member of the NurtureArt Advisory Board in Brooklyn, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit International Advisory Committee. She received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Visiting Critic: Jason Eppink

Jason Eppink creates interactive experiences, organizes events and exhibitions, and throws raging art parties as the Curator of Digital Media at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. When he’s not doing that, he corrupts young minds as an adjunct professor at New York University, where he teaches students how to make animated GIFs and video games under the auspices of art. When he's not doing that, he engages in public space magic, open source scheming, moving image mischief, photon reappropriation, and linguistic subterfuge.

His doings have been seen worldwide because they’re all on the internet. Also they’ve been seen worldwide in galleries, but no one really goes to those. Good Magazine proclaimed him one of the top 100 most important, exciting, and innovative people making our world better and changing the way we live.

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Visiting Critic: Regine Basha

For Curator Regine Basha, no two projects are alike; over the course of her 20-year career, her inventive approach has explored the very specific contexts or situations for the production of or engagement with new work – whether it be a sound show resonating throughout an entire town (The Marfa Sessions), artists' interviews (Resident:Host), a radio presentation (Tuning Baghdad), commissions for abandoned buildings (WHEN YOU CUT INTO THE PRESENT THE FUTURE LEAKS OUT, Old Bronx Courthouse)  Often, collaboration and connecting diversified fields of knowledge are central to her curatorial practice and interest. Much of her research and engagements connect artists from throughout North America, the Middle East (Istanbul, Cairo, and Tel Aviv) and Latin America (Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio) into the United States.  She has written for Art Papers, Cabinet, Art in America, and Art Lies. She has advised The Museum of Art and Design, The Queens Museum and The Shandanken Project, and No Longer Empty. She is a member of Art Table, AICA and currently sits on the board of Art Matters, New York. Recent exhibitions and projects include such artists as: Basim Magdy (upcoming), Nina Katchadourian,  Stephen Vitiello / Leah Beeferman,  Paul Pfeiffer, Hope Ginsburg, and exhibitions at Cabinet Magazine, Mass MoCa (EXCHANGE WITH SOL LEWITT), SculptureCenter (TREBLE), Bloomberg's Headquarters with Julieta Aranda, Beth Campbell, Cao Fei and Ana Prvacki (SPECULATIVE FUTURES) and many others, including numerous exhibitions exploring sound as sculptural material (THE MARFA SESSIONS AT BALLROOM MARFA). Her curatorial site bashaprojects.com also features video conversations with artists of interest.

Meet our Winter 2016 Space & Time Artists in Residence

Sarah Nicolls

My work is centered on the social act of publishing. I use the tone of authority inherent in the printed word to explore the comforts and limits of community, exploring both the language we use to communicate and the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are. I enjoy the ways in which language can be used to prevent communication as easily as it can be used to foster it. I aim to create interior monologues and alternate histories, and exploit the kinds of interior lapses in time that reading creates.

Chris Bors

My graphic, post-pop, conceptual paintings feature a mash-up of images and text, in which any visuals or themes are fair game for repurposing. I often appropriate logos from hardcore punk bands or use altered text based on song titles, underground or pop culture, or the inner-workings and politics of the art world. They are meticulously hand painted to resemble silkscreen prints, political advertising, or t-shirt graphics. Often focusing on obsessive personality traits while throwing in autobiographical references for good measure, my work is intentionally ambiguous. I coined the term "virtual dumpster diving" to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web.

Joiri Minaya

My ideas are concerned with otherness, self-consciousness and displacement. Iʼve made work inspired by women in my family, labor, dislocation, psychology, myth, art history, magic realism and symbols. I interrogate the way in which historical hierarchies inform and condition current identity constructions. Iʼm specifically interested in how these constructions manifest through the (mostly female) body: how they are received, internalized and then regurgitated by it.

Meet our Winter 2016 Jurors!

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

Graduated in art history from the City University of New York – the CUNY Graduate Center, USA (2000). Her dissertation was dealing about modernist movements in Harlem and Havana between 1925 and 1945. Rocío Aranda-Alvarado works for the Museo del Barrio as associated curator and then curator, since 2009, and after the renovation of the museum. There, occupying this position, she participated in curating El Museo del Barrio’s biennials, The (S) Files. Lately, she was part of the curatorial team of the exhibition Caribbean : Crossroads of the Worldat the Queens Museum of Art, at El Museo del Barrio and in The Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York, USA, 2012-2013. Before that,  Rocío Aranda-Alvarado was curator for the Jersey City Museum, from 2000 to 2009. There she curated, amongst others, the exhibitions Hair Tactis, 2010 ; Beth Gilfilen : The Big Hunch @ The Majestic, 2008 ; 99 Cents, by Colwyn Griffith, 2007 ; The Feminine Mystique, 2007 She also curated independently : Dominican York Proyecto Grafica at the NoMAA in New York (2012) ; Viewpoints at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark (2011) ; Boundless Discourse at the Ramapo College of New Jersey Art Galleries, USA (2010) ; Encountersat Governors Island, USA (2010) ; Color/form at the Praxis Gallery in New York, USA (2010) ; Contemporary Humanism at the A.I.R Gallery in Brooklyn, USA (2009) ; Flo : art ,text, new media at the Center for Book Arts in New York, USA (2009) or Urban Renewal : Afro-Caribbean Art & Artists in New York City at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, USA (2000).In 2011, she was jury for the NEXUS NJ, a contemporary art exhibition in the Arts Guild in New Jersey.

Gabriel de Guzman

Curator of Visual Arts at Wave Hill, where he organizes the Sunroom Project Space series for emerging artists and thematic group exhibitions in Glyndor Gallery. He also coordinates Wave Hill’s Winter Workspace residency program. In 2013, he was one of the co-curators of Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, featuring 73 artists who participated in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program in 2012–13. As a guest curator, he has organized recent exhibitions for Rush Arts Gallery, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA), Boriqua College, and the Affordable Art Fair, New York. Before joining Wave Hill’s staff in 2010, he was a curatorial assistant at The Jewish Museum, where he coordinated exhibitions on Louise Nevelson, Harry Houdini, Joan Snyder, Andy Warhol, and Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider. His writings have been published in catalogues for Wave Hill, the Bronx Museum, The Jewish Museum, Rush Arts Gallery, NoMAA, and Kenise Barnes Fine Art. He earned an M.A. in art history from Hunter College, City University of New York, and a B.A. in art history from the University of Virginia.

Alexandra Schwartz

Alexandra Schwartz is the founding Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montclair Art Museum. There she established the New Directions series of exhibitions, which has featured artists including Spencer Finch, Jean Shin, Dannielle Tegeder, Saya Woolfalk, and Marina Zurkow. Her exhibition Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s appeared at Montclair from February to May 2015, and is touring nationally in 2015–16, to the Telfair Museums, Savannah; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; and the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. It is accompanied by a major catalogue from the University of California Press. Previously she was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, where her exhibitions included Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now and Modern Women: Single Channel at MoMA PS1. She is the author of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010), the co-editor of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2010; winner of the Association of Art Museum Curator’s Prize for Outstanding Permanent Collection Catalogue), and the editor of Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages by Ed Ruscha (MIT Press, 2002). A contributor to numerous journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs, Schwartz has taught at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Montclair State University, and in the Education Departments at MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Ellen Harvey

Ellen Harvey was born in the United Kingdom and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  She studied at Harvard and Yale Law School and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program and the PS1 National Studio Program.  She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  Solo exhibitions include The Unloved at the Groeninge Museum, Bruges, Belgium, The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington DC at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The Nudist Museum at the Bass Museum, Miami Beach, FL, Ruins are More Beautiful at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland, Mirror at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and A Whitney for the Whitney at Phillip Morris at the Whitney Museum at Altria.  She has completed numerous commissions, including Arcadia for the opening exhibition of the Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK and permanent installations for New York Percent For Art, New York Arts in Transit, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Flemish National Architect and for the Federal Art in Architecture program, among others. Her book, The New York Beautification Project, was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. in 2005 and her work been the subject of several books: Ellen Harvey: Mirror published by the Pennsylvania Academy in 2006, Ellen Harvey: The Unloved published by Hannibal Publishing in 2014 and Ellen Harvey: Museum of Failure, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. this year.  Her installation Metal Painting is currently on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.