Artists: Ashley Cortes, John A Rivas, Umber Majeed, Quay Quinn Wolf, Erin Davis, Max C Lee, Ivoire Foreman, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Tabitha Nikolai, rook, Neotenomie
Exhibition title: Re: Art Show
Curated by: Erin Davis and Max C Lee
Venue: Pfizer Pharmaceutical Factory, Brooklyn, New York, US
Date: June 23 – July 8, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists
Erin Davis / Max C Lee and are pleased to announce
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re: Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:, the 22nd iteration of Re: Art Show and the two year anniversary of the project.
Participating artists include: Ashley Cortes, John A Rivas, Umber Majeed, Quay Quinn Wolf, Erin Davis / Max C Lee, with a performance by Ivoire Foreman on opening night. There will also be digital works curated by Porpentine Charity Heartscape including Tabitha Nikolai, rook, Neotenomie, and herself.
Re: Art Showis an ever-evolving, recurrent, curatorial project spearheaded by Erin Davis and Max C Lee.
Currently roving within sections of the former Pfizer Pharmaceutical factory in Brooklyn, Re: Art Show brings together an abnormally wide breadth of artists in an abnormal environment. Through the embrace of chance, ad-hoc adaptation, and experimental collaboration (both with the environment and the artists themselves), each iteration acts as a fluid network of ideas whose connections are, at once, coincidental and directed. For every iteration, another Re: is added to the show’s title.
The project is rent-free, organizer-funded, and artist-collaborative. We believe in creating an accessible model for those who want to stage their own exhibitions, but may not have the funds or professional network required to do so in a designated art space. We also believe Re: Art Showis a method for organizers to better consider their audience, their community, and to be more aware of how a DIY art-show like ours impacts the people around them. It is a project which is not commercially motivated. It does not seek to become anything more than a model, operating much like the way it has for the past two years. However, moving forward, we will be opening the model of Re: Art Show to organizers other than ourselves to apply our criteria in different spaces, in their own communities, with artists and curators they feel should be given opportunities to show work.
To celebrate our two year anniversary, we will be releasing a manifesto which outlines the criteria with which we have operated Re: Art Showso far. It covers the project’s relationship to money, space, gentrification, and the people who choose to collaborate with us. Printed copies will be available for free.
John A Rivas’paintings are primarily influenced by his family. Working from an archive of personal photos, he depicts his upbringing in a Latino household and community. Incorporating found objects near his home in Newark, NJ – and painting in the living room of his family’s apartment – Rivas constructs a narrative of familial bonds and cultural signifiers, using portraiture as his scaffolding.
Ashley Cortes is a Queer Puerto Rican who is originally from the Bronx. Her photographs, shot primarily on black and white film, focus on familial burdens and the nature in which they pass through generations. “I grew up in a single parent household just like my mother and her mother before her. Father figures were not in abundance and most often the women were forced to presume both the roles of mother and father. This upbringing has led me to question how this has affected me as well as other women in my family. I am fascinated with how strange and beautiful these women are, particularly my mother.”
Quay Quinn Wolf: “Wolf’s sculptural practice oscillates between archival and non-archival materials; each work hinges on processes of stabilization and its resilience pitted against inevitability of decomposition. By making use of ephemeral organic components to form a constant gradient of shifting media counterweighted by commercially available stabilizers the work tracks the material process of memory…” – Nate Hitchcock. Wolf was born in New York, and lives and works in New York.
Umber Majeed: Presenting two works in this show, Don’t get water in your eyes!(2015) and Oasis (2016), Umber Majeed is focusing on the body’s relationship to water – “all elements in the video are bodily; the audio is a sound created by a performer’s mouth.” These imitated sounds of water drops, and a tapestry of small inflatable pools, according to Majeed “[address] ideas on migration and mobility in regard to certain ethnic bodies.”Majeed was born in New York and lives/works between New York and Lahore, Pakistan.
Ivoire Foreman will perform Transplaining on opening night. This piece, carried by the artist’s recorded voice, begins by stating that “blackness, transness, gender, art, sex, mmhmm, queerness, being, presence, yaaass queen, is being re-appropriated like somebody’s public domain.” Foreman lives and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape “is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xenofemme scifi/fantasy, cursed videogames, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds.” Her work was exhibited in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and has been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome. She was invited to curate digital works for this exhibition. She organized works by rook, Tabitha Nikolai, Neotenomie, andherself.
Erin Davis / Max C Lee are the organizers of Re: Art Showand also create collaborative works.Their work addresses their own white suburban upbringings and how it fosters white, male, heteronormative supremacy. These works subvert familiar aesthetics for those who grew up in a white-flight environment and mentality. In doing so, the violence not far beneath the cul-de-sac comfort can be seen by those who perpetuate and enable it. Both are based in New York.
