Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Lulled Land ”, a solo exhibition of works by Tai Hwa Goh, currently an Artist in Residence, on view May 6 through June 3, 2016.
Throughout Tai Hwa Goh’s installations, the viewer will see the prolific use of traditional printmaking techniques. These have a unique luminosity through hand-waxing that carry through Goh’s images that are installed on various architectural elements. These images get obstructed and buried under layers of delicately waxed papers transmitting the echo of the image. The process of layering images intends to reflect the accumulation of memory and experiences, and thus represents impenetrability and vulnerability of human body, but, at the same time, recoverability and powerfulness of selfness. Through this exhibition, Goh becomes the extension of nature and nature becomes the extension of her body. Her images evolve from biological forms to landscape, describing the interaction between the inner and outer mass of human body. In the process of folding, cutting, flipping and overlapping printed materials, images are gradually transformed away from identifiable objects, taking on a naturalistic guise of their own, growing into space, posing questions about our accepted definition of printed works of art, as well as the idea of passage.
Goh earned a BFA and MFA from Seoul National University, and an MFA from the University of Maryland. She has had solo exhibitions at the Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; Gallery at Flashpoint, Washington, DC; and the Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA, to name a few. ; She has also shown major installations at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Carriage House, Islip Museum, East Islip, NY; and International Print Center New York. She has participated in residencies at Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY; the NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Emerge 11 at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; and Evergreen Museum and Library Residency at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, among others.
Made Here: Winter 2016
“MADE HERE Winter 2016” Chris Bors, Seung-Jong Isaac Lee, Joiri Minaya and Sarah Nicholls.
Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE Winter 2016” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Chris Bors, Seung-Jong Isaac Lee, Joiri Minaya and Sarah Nicholls. On view April 8 - May 1, 2016. The works included in MADE HERE were created during the artist’s residences this past summer. The title “MADE HERE” carries not only multiple definitions, but multiple conceptual meanings ranging from location to identity, the politics of materials and the historical nature of place. All of these new works deeply considered many of these issues and are only just the beginning points for deeper reflection.\
Seung-Jong Isaac Lee’s newest lithographic prints and rubbings deeply consider ideas of living life in New York City as a foreigner and immigrant. As Lee tries to resolve these issues in his daily life, he choose the ‘manhole’ as a metaphor for his journey. Manholes are seen as an escape route or connection to a new world; the manhole cover as a gate. Thus, Lee creates inter-dimensional portals in his lithographs using the image of the manhole as a symbolic gateway between cultures, nations, and identities. Manhole covers are a reflection of a town’s civic pride, as they are produced by foundries and local authorities. They are also the doors which guide his work to an unknown and underground path, that imply that hardships and storms of life are prerequisites to the new world of escape or freedom.
Chris Bors new paintings use appropriated graphics and imagery from a variety of sources. He has created bold poster-like paintings and prints, sometimes with hand painted elements. Mickey Isis, 2016, features a crudely-rendered Mickey Mouse giving the middle finger, while a large QR code leading to a Google image search of terrorist group Isis floats on the raw canvas. In A.C. (#1), 2016, the sexually-suggestive logo of grindcore band A.C. merges with an abstract painted background of quick brushstrokes and drips. Influenced by underground comics, punk and metal music, fanzines and graphic design, Bors’s work is a post-pop amalgamation of politics, cultural references and appropriated and drawn visuals. Bors coined the term "virtual dumpster diving" to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web.
Joiri Minaya work has a direct focus on otherness, self-consciousness and displacement is inspired not only by women in her family, but issues of labor, dislocation, psychology, myth, art history, magic realism and symbols. These new works come from images collected through Google searches of terms like "tropical hair braider", "caribbean hair braider" and "beach braids". She is drawing attention to a recurring way of framing snapshots in these situations and had created compositions that are only interested in the subject whose hair is being braided, reducing the presence of the braider to their hands. By isolating the essential parts of this action by drawing only the hair and the hands a kind of reversal takes place in the portrait, where the main focus, the face, is refused, bringing the attention back to the laboring hands and their intricate and detailed product.
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. For this exhibition, Sarah Nicholls developed woodcuts for a new limited edition book project. Glasshouse is concerned with greenhouses, botanical texts, and the global reshuffling of tropical species. How do we build structures to contain trees meant to grow elsewhere? What is it like to sail off the edge of what you know? What did economic botany mean in a world before chemical plants and the pharmaceutical industry? What is the relationship between science and empire?
Exhibition: April 8 - May 1, 2016; Opening Reception on April 8, 7-9pm. For more information please contact studio@guttenbergarts.org or 201-868-8585. Guttenberg Art Gallery is free and open to the public by appointment. www.guttenbergarts.org
Summer 2016 Jurors
SHARON M. LOUDEN
Sharon M. Louden is an artist, educator, editor and advocate for artists. She graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Weisman Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Her work has also been written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, ARTnews and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other publications. She has participated in residencies at Tamarind Institute, Urban Glass, Franconia Sculpture Park, Society of the Four Arts and Art Omi.
Louden is also the editor of "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists" published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The book is currently in its 5th printing. A 62-stop book tour which started on November 2, 2013 and concluded on May 29, 2015 included Sharon Louden and other contributors visiting cities across the United States. Highlights include events in the Salon at the Art Basel Miami Beach Art Fair, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, LACMA, the 92nd Street Y, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, The Strand Book Store, MICA and many more stops across the country.
Louden is currently working on a second book entitled, "The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life" which will also be published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press in February 2017, followed by a national book tour in the same year. In addition, she is active on boards and committees of various not-for-profit art organizations and volunteers her time to artists to further their careers. Sharon is also a consultant for the Joan Mitchell Foundation, advising their grantees, and conducts webinars for Creative Capital Foundation.
For more information about Sharon Louden and her work, please visit her website: www.sharonlouden.com.
JENNIFER FARRELL
Jennifer Farrell, has recently been appointed Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a scholar and curator who has a long history of working at institutions throughout New York and New England.Ms. Farrell comes to the Metropolitan Museum from overseeing the exhibitions department and curating exhibitions of contemporary art at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Before that, she was director of the New York-based Nancy Graves Foundation, which maintains the archive of the late sculptor, printmaker, and painter Nancy Graves and makes grants to artists. Before joining the Nancy Graves Foundation, Ms. Farrell served as a senior fellow and then assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. The newly appointed curator’s previous curatorial credits includes “Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization,” which she co-curated while enrolled in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2002, Suzanne McClelland, Found Poems from a Lost Time by Suzanne McClelland, Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, Postwar British Prints, and Vinland: Recent Work by Cindy Bernard. She also published “Get there First and Decide Promptly” : the Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art, which received the Frick Collection’s 2013 Sotheby’s Prize for a Distinguished Publication in the History of Collecting in America. Ms. Farrell has a Ph.D. in art history and a certificate in film studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a B.A. in art history from Smith College.
MARI SHAW
Mari Shaw lives in Philadelphia and Berlin. She is an art collector, advisor to artists, active participant in cultural boards and advisory committees, and intellectual property lawyer. She has taught Originality, Art, Law and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania and lectured at various educational and art institutions. She has written on contemporary art and artists, including Thomas Chimes, (Painter and Pataphysician Thomas Chimes, 2014), Candida Höfer, Paul Chan, Emily Cobb, and Marcel Bischoff. She is working to afford art experiences to children in the Philadelphia public schools.
HRAG VARTANIAN
Hrag Vartanian is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic, the award-winning art blogazine based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in countless publications, and he has been invited as a guest commentator on Al Jazeera, WNYC, KCRW, and other national and international media outlets. In addition to his writing and commentary, he has curated numerous exhibitions, including #TheSocialGraph, which was the first exploration of the evolving landscape of social media art back in 2010. He regularly writes and lectures about performance art, the online art world, street art, and multiculturalism.
Visiting Critic: Jeff De Blois
Jeffrey De Blois is a curatorial assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. He was previously curatorial fellow at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. He holds a master's degree in the History of Art & Architecture from Boston University.
Visiting Critic: Tina Teufel
Tina Teufel is an art historian and curator. She has studied art history, history and Italian in Salzburg, Austria, and Perugia as well as Venice, Italy. After working in different institutions such as the International Summer Academy Salzburg and Dia Art Foundation in New York, she has joined the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2003. As a curator she has been working on exhibitions with artists like Etel Adnan, Stephan Balkenhol, Tanja Boukal, Rudy Burckhardt, Andrea Fraser, Alexander Hahn, Rebecca Horn, Carolee Schneemann, and Nancy Spero since 2006. Together with Wulf Herzogenrath and Toni Stooss she curated the museum’s centennial exhibition John Cage and … Visual Artist- Influences, Impulses presented in 2012, to point out one of the most important group exhibitions she co-curated. Parallel she curated exhibitions in numerous galleries and independent art spaces. She has been in juries of the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and the County of Salzburg and is a member of the consulting committee for the visual arts of the County of Salzburg. Tina currently lives in Salzburg, Austria.
Chris Bors: KILL YOUR IDOLS
Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Kill your Idols”, a solo exhibition of works by Chris Bors, currently an Artist in Residence, on view March 4 through April 2, 2016. Chris Bors’s solo exhibition of new paintings includes his series using logos from hardcore punk bands with a diverse range of imagery in which any visuals are fair game for repurposing, as well as several relying on text only. Titled after the name of the New York Citybased hardcore punk band Kill Your Idols, some of the figures represented include rapper EasyE, Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, and Saddam Hussein, the latter taken from a drawing by the D.C. sniper John Lee Malvo. Influenced by underground comics, punk and metal music, fanzines and graphic design, Bors’s work is a postpop amalgamation of politics, cultural references and appropriated and drawn visuals. Bors coined the term "virtual dumpster diving" to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web.
Bors was born in Ithaca, New York and received his MFA from School of Visual Arts. Solo shows include Randall Scott Projects in Washington, D.C. His art has also been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, Bahnwärterhaus in Esslingen, Germany and Bongoût in Berlin. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Rail and featured in Vogue Italia, K48 and Zing magazine. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog featuring an essay by photographer Carl Gunhouse.
This is pretty cool~ GIANT WOODCUTS
One of our facebook throwback videos from last years Braddock Park Art Festival has gone almost viral with almost a half a million views! /helloworld!
https://www.facebook.com/guttenbergarts/videos/vb.290586624433606/569802659845333/?type=2&theater
"Uncatered" Joiri Minaya Exhibition
Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Uncatered”, a solo exhibition of works by Joiri Minaya, currently an Artist in Residence, on view February 5 through March 1, 2016.
Minaya’s current work for “Uncatered” focuses on the construction of the female subject in relation to nature and landscape in a “tropical” context, shaped by a foreign “gaze” that demands leisure and pleasure. Like nature, femininity has been imagined and represented throughout history as idealized, tamed, conquered / colonized and exoticized. Minaya constantly revises existing cultural products that engage in this form of representation and incorporating them, critically, in her work. These new works include “Siboney" which explores stereotypical constructions of the Caribbean and the Caribbean women based on elaborate fantasies drafted from the position of the foreign other. The performance aims to reflect on the projection of these constructions and how they are later internalized and laboriously constructed by the subject in which they originate. In addition, “DOMINICAN WOMEN - GOOGLE SEARCH POSTCARDS” Uses the postcard format as a platform for images that were culled from a Google search of images for the term "dominican women". The series consists of re-compositions of the bodies of the women represented in these images or to draw attention to their context. The series is subdivided in different groups that follow different logics to re-compose these bodies. Additional works such as “Container” are the first of a series of performative photographs that feature a woman in natural environments wearing bodysuits made out of fabric with designs that represent nature. “Container” oscillates between ideas of agency and impairment within the construction of the “tropical” as a fantasy of leisure, pleasure and exoticness, and the presence of the female body within this fantasy.The use and consistent presence of the body or figure plus the interest in creating distinct power positions with it seem often contradictory, but are operating simultaneously.
Throughout all her work, Minaya’s direct focus on otherness, self-consciousness and displacement is inspired not only by women in her family, but issues of labor, dislocation, psychology, myth, art history, magic realism and symbols. These works thoroughly question and examine historical hierarchies that inform and condition current identities; constructions and manifest through the body and the resulting they are receipt, internalization and then their subsequent regurgitation. Minaya accomplishes this through her varied in depth exploration throughout different media: painting or sculpture might be a departing point for video or performance, resulting in a merge or develop independently into several works making for a conceptually and visually rich body of works.
Joiri Minaya (1990) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work deals with identity, otherness, self-consciousness and displacement. Her work investigates the female body and experience within constructions of identity, social space and hierarchies. Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. Minaya graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales (ENAV) in Santo Domingo, D. R. in 2009, the Altos de Chavón School of Design in La Romana, D.R. in 2011 and Parsons the New School for Design in 2013. Minaya lives and works in the US and Dominican Republic.
Exhibition: February 5 through March 1, 2016; Opening reception: February 5, 7-9pm, Artist talk 8pm. For more information please contact studio@guttenbergarts.org or 201-868-8585. Guttenberg Art Gallery is free and open to the public by appointment, www.guttenbergarts.org.
Open Call for Summer Space & Time Artist Residency Begins Today!!
www.guttenbergarts.submittable.com/submit
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.
