NEW YORK, NY.- For its Winter/Spring 2019 season, the
New Museum presents the first New York museum solo exhibitions by Adelita Husni-Bey and Mariana Castillo Deball, a residency and exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, and a Storefront Window installation by Genesis Belanger. These exhibitions join “Nari Ward: We the People,” the Museum’s lead exhibition of the Winter/Spring season, and “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archical Poetics,” an exhibition of works from Rhizome’s “Net Art Anthology.”
SOUTH GALLERIES EXHIBITIONS
“Adelita Husni-Bey: Chiron” January 22–April 14, 2019
This exhibition by Adelita HusniBey (b. 1985, Milan, Italy) marks the artist’s first institutional solo presentation in New York.
In her practice, Husni-Bey makes use of noncompetitive pedagogical models to organize workshops and produce publications, radio broadcasts, and archives that form the basis of her exhibitions and films. For “Chiron,” she creates a new site-specific installation that incorporates several of her most significant films to date, including the premiere of a major new work. In Chiron (2019), Husni-Bey collaborates with lawyers working for UnLocal, an organization dedicated to providing pro-bono legal representation to undocumented immigrants and their families facing deportation in New York. The work takes its title from the Greek mythological figure Chiron, evoking the notion of the wounded healer, and touches on urgent themes such as migration and displacement. Addressing trauma in the US as a consequence of the country’s foreign policy actions, Chiron continues Husni-Bey’s ongoing explorations of the complexity of collectivity and the human and social consequences of imperialist ventures.
This exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator.
“Mariana Castillo Deball: Finding Oneself Outside” January 22–April 14, 2019
Working in sculpture, printmaking, photography, and installation, Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975, Mexico City, Mexico) examines how knowledge and cultural heritage are produced, organized, measured, and authenticated. Her works often take inspiration from Mesoamerican iconography and narratives, considering their early-colonial transformations and their presence in Central America today. Exploring her philosophical interest in time and space as well as cosmology and depictions of natural order, Castillo Deball has engaged a diverse range of scholars in her research. Her works and installations often reflect Surrealist writer Roger Caillois’s notion of “diagonal sciences”—unusual cross-sections of the world that reveal what he called “neglected correlations,” and “tissues of thought.”
The title of Castillo Deball’s New Museum exhibition, “Finding Oneself Outside,” offers a possible description of a sensation that is central to both the study of history and the experience of encountering an unfamiliar culture. The exhibition’s centerpiece, a specially commissioned inlaid wood floor installation, draws from an early colonial map of San Pedro Teozacoalco, Mexico, which bears a unique stylistic blend of European maps and Mixtec codices of the sixteenth century. A large-scale sculpture, No solid form can contain you (2010), offers a peculiar visualization of space as a would-be mold turned inside out—panels cast from a statue of Coatlicue, the Mexica, or Aztec, mother goddess, are inverted to reveal their concave sides and reassembled to create a hollow figure. Do ut des (2014–19), Castillo Deball’s series of perforated books, borrows its title from a Latin phrase meaning “I give so that you will give,” and her Mathematical Distortions (2012) refers to the shifts in knowledge that occur with shifts in position. Together, the works in the exhibition speak to the place of the viewer, the permeability of surfaces, and ideas of reciprocity and exchange.
This exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.
FIFTH FLOOR GALLERY EXHIBITION
“Jeffrey Gibson: The Anthropophagic Effect” February 13–June 9, 2019
Multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO) will be the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s spring 2019 artist-in-residence. Gibson’s materials and production methods are hybrid and diverse; he often combines digital prints, found textiles, embroidery, hand-sewn fringe, and beadwork in vibrant assemblage-based paintings, sculptures, and garments.
During his residency, Gibson explores the material histories and futures of several traditional Indigenous craft techniques, including Southeastern river cane basket weaving, Algonquian birch bark biting, and porcupine quillwork, as practiced by many tribes across this land long before European settlers arrived. The artist notes that Indigenous crafts and designs have “historically been used to signify identity, tell stories, describe place, and mark cultural specificity,” explaining, “I engage materials and techniques as strategies to describe a contemporary narrative that addresses the past in order to place oneself in the present and to begin new potential trajectories for the future.” Employing techniques learned over the course of the residency, Gibson is producing a new series of garments that will be activated through performances and staged photo shoots in the Fifth Floor Gallery.
This exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, and Sara O’Keeffe, Associate Curator, with Kate Wiener, Curatorial Assistant.
STOREFRONT WINDOW
“Genesis Belanger: Holding Pattern” January 22–April 14, 2019
With finely sculpted porcelain-andstoneware ceramics pigmented in pastel hues, Genesis Belanger (b. 1978) creates fantastical objects that cull the uncanny from the everyday. Seemingly mundane items— from cigarette stubs to soda cans, handbags and stray pills—are rendered strange as they become surrogates for the body, evoking both comfort and disquiet. Belanger conjures associations rich in references from Pop Art to the Surrealist object to seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings, yet her work’s psychic impact remains acutely attuned to archetypes of the present. Belanger’s elegantly smooth and supple forms often contrast with their darkly humorous insinuations relating to pertinent subjects such as mass production, chemical dependency, and the absurdity of patriarchy.
“Holding Pattern,” Belanger’s installation in the New Museum’s Storefront Window, takes inspiration from liminal spaces such as office waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, airport lounges, and other areas where people dwell in a state of limbo. Belanger’s objects invoke this liminality, often appearing limp or wilting as if they have been left in place for a long time or melted under high heat. Viewers peer through the window onto a receptionist’s desk adorned with office supplies and an uneaten lunch, while an open desk drawer reveals items one might consume in order to cope with the stresses of daily life such as candy, a bottle of liquor, and pill packets. A low bench with two grinning lamps awaits possible visitors and a color-paneled curtain punctuates the threshold between the windows, separating the space of waiting from that of anticipation. Ceramic bricks wrapped daintily with notes are scattered throughout the installation, perhaps waiting to be pitched through a window allowing those trapped in purgatory to break free.
“Genesis Belanger: Holding Pattern” joins a new series of Storefront Window installations that relaunches a program the New Museum originally mounted in the 1980s.
This project is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.
