Artfront/Waterfront: Artists Explore

The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, March 28, 2024


Artfront/Waterfront: Artists Explore



STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK.- The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center presents "Artfront/Waterfront: Artists Explore the Staten Island North Shore," an exhibition of over thirty newly commissioned visual and performance projects by regional and internationally recognized artists in the Newhouse Galleries and at public locations along the North Shore of Staten Island.

A necklace of parks, museums, and historical sites is strung along the North Shore of Staten Island from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the Bayonne Bridge. This wealth of attractions looks out on one of the most commanding vistas in the City of New York, yet undiscovered by most New Yorkers or visiting tourists.

Working with a coalition of community groups and cultural organizations, Snug Harbor Cultural Center along with the Artists Project Ltd, based in Wales UK and Doma/A Casa/At Home, Independent Art Project, NGO, based in Zagreb, Croatia, has developed a project to explore the distinctive character, profile and stories of these places - their dynamism and inherent beauty. In July 2001, a group of 20 artists from Western and Eastern Europe, as well as New York came to Snug Harbor for a research residency. During this two-week residency, the artists toured available sites and met with representatives of the participating organizations and with artists, students and teachers from the surrounding community. The findings from their research have been posted on the SITE-ATIONS web-site: www.site-ations.org after which an invitation to submit proposals for the 2002 exhibititon was extended to approximately 70 artists.

ARTFRONT/WATERFRONT has grown from a number of timely observations. The first is the growing emphasis on how context creates meaning in the visual arts. This process pits the primacy of authorship and individual expression against the ideal of the artist as respondent, observer, facilitator, or catalyst. These notions are common place in the artworld and yet are still found to be discomforting, if not alienating to a larger public. As we enter the 21st Century, there is a call to encourage new models for the practice of progressive art in collective activities that are open to and embrace a wide public - to invent methodologies that go beyond the didactic through empathy and engagement. ARTFRONT/WATERFRONT attempts to formulate a new model for international exhibitions by creating a field of temporary coalition among diverse artists and audiences as a platform for interdependence and mutual responsibility.

The projects selected are as diverse as the character and mutability of the waterfront sites themselves. Passengers arriving and departing on the Staten Island Ferry will be greeted by a series of tubular bells, nearly two stories high by Eliza Proctor. The bells will be activated by the docking and departure of the ferry boats as well as the wave action of the harbor tides. Entering the main waiting room of the Ferry Terminal, will be a project proposed by Goran Trubljak who will attach lyrics from popular hip-hop songs to the spokes of each turnstyle. Around the exterior of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, Aisling O’Beirn will mount billboards of simple text that recounts Waterfront Stories. The stories will be from local personalities but will reflect issuses of broader global interest. O’Beirn has also arranged for the stories to be broadcast by the local College of Staten Island radio station, WSAI 88.9 FM.

A work by Bozo Jurjevic, entitled Escape, will be performed on the abandoned pier at the Stadium Esplanade to be documented in a two-channeled video. The performance will consist of Jurjevic and his partner Josip Bace tied together with a bungie cord trying to run away from each other until they collapse from exhaustion. Before coming to Staten Island, Jurjevic will perform the same action with his partner at a twin site in the harbor of Dubrovnik. The concept put forth by Richard Powell also brings the New York Harbor into the galleries. Powell, fascinated with the fact that it is both hard to get to the waterfront and even harder to get into the water itself, will create a two-part project. The first part will be the artist’s actual experience of crossing the Kill Van Kull by boat, by swimming, and if possible by walking across its basin in a weighted diving suit. The second part will be an installation in the gallery that is a "stand-in" for the experience of the artist. Another off-shore/on-shore endeavor has been proposed by Marc Rome. His concept is to coalesce a group of students who live on the North Shore who have had little or no opportunities to examine their island from the water - save for rides on the Staten Island Ferry. Rome is particularly interested in getting young people on working boats in the New York Harbor to experience how the crews on ships regard those locked on land. Their research will be documented on video and presented in the Newhouse Center and/or the recreation center at Faber Park.

At the most western edge of the project - Faber Park -- Julia Healy will build a garden in front of the recreaction center. Healy’s project hopes to emulate a quintessential Staten Island front yard - gardens festooned with corkscrew bushes, miniature statues, and broad swaths of marble chips. These visually busy compositions, which some consider in bad taste, reflect the buoyant, positive and opimistic sentiments of the occupants. Further down the shore, on the grounds of Snug Harbor, Claire Lesteven will install a large scale camera obscura, constructed from a wooden water tower. This walk-in camera shows the world up-side down; it will be used by the artist to document a selection of vistas along the waterfront in mural-size photographs. Along the Stadium esplanade, Anna Macleod will site totemic sculptures made from salt obtained from the salt depot on Richmond Terrace that lies between the Ferry Terminal and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Salt has been a material the artist has used in major outdoor works in the past, symbolizing the importance of the sea and other metaphorical archetypes, such as preservation and incorruptibility. To be performed at water’s edge will be a solo work by Milenka Berengolc. This 20 minute performance entitled La Mere will investigate cultural, historical and mythological imagery through folklore, sonnets, songs and pop culture icons.

At the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences (SIIAS), just above the Ferry Terminal, Zsuzsa Dardai and Janos Saxon will develop an installation with elements of the SIIAS natural history collection. In particular, Dardai and Saxon are interested in the intricate patterns of dentrite crystals, the subtle variations in the 450 species of cicadas in the collection, and the vibrant array of locally collected butterflies. Charlie Citron and Richard Thomas will collaborate with the curators of SIIAS to create a "social sculpture" out of the collection that will include plant specimens, geological samples, charts , maps, memorabilia and drawings by the artists which allude to the dynamic systems of exchange that shape external appearances and inherent functions.

Three artists will make projects for the charming Alice Austen House. Amy Hotch will animate the still interiors of the famous photographer’s house with a large scale (walk-in) camera obscura and small monitors hidden in the period rooms of the house museum. Simon Lee and Ann-Katrin Speiss will make work on the exterior of the Austen House, while referring to the house’s and the photographer’s inner life. Lee will render shadows of Austen’s furniture in cast iron and imbed these forms in the grassy slopes that lead to her front door. Speiss will build two small constructions for viewing the sky and the water that mimic vine laden white clapboard of the the Victorian home.

Just down Bay Street, from the Alice Austen House will be a project at Fort Wadsworth by Martina Galvin who creates structures with mirrored surfaces that have the effect of decomposing their surrounds. The Fort’s complex of arcades and passages provides an ideal setting for her manipulations.

Stephanie Dinkins, a Staten Island-based video installation artist, will document a few shoreline haunts of the legendary Staten Island maritime artist John Noble, who combed the waterways of the New York Harbor by rowboat, skiff, and tugboat. Ginevra Godin’s Population Shift - The Water Experiment addresses the dichotomy of how we are at once connected and separated by water. Godin will combine evocative imagery of water, maps, images of cities destroyed by war, images from the New York Harbor and a game of chess in slide projections, video and site-specific sculpture. In a similar vein, Kristaps Gulbis, who is Latvian, will collaborate with Latvian immigrants who settled on Staten Island after World War II. With these local residents, Gulbis will create a sound installation that is juxtaposed with the stories of more recent immigrants.

Dagmar Uhde, will travel from Germany to New York by freighter, a trip which takes thirteen days. Uhde, who travels frequently by freighter, reflects on the perceptual shifts that occur during slow oceanic crossing. Her work will combine collected images and objects that will be developed in relationship to the sailors on the ships and ideas of transformation and exchange. Jason Simon plans a video, film and photographic installation about the margins of the New York Harbor and about eccentric collectors from Staten Island to make connections between the flow of the waters and the commerce.

Alastair MacLennan, a performance/installation artist who represented
Ireland in the 1997 Venice Biennale, has long worked on issues of conflict and its resolution in Northern Ireland. MacLennan’s plans are to create an initial live artwork and subsequent installation, incorporating photo documentation. This will echo his work on Northern Ireland and reference the September 11th events. He will create a contemplative space for the leaving of private thoughts by members of the public.

Leszek Knaflewski, from Poland, and Swedish artist Lotta Lindbeck play with representations of the Staten Island. Knaflewski will comb the Staten Island coast for organic detritus like plant roots, twigs and grasses. With them he will assemble a large-scale array that suggests thousands of microorganisms. Lotta Lindbeck plans an interactive installation entitled Harbor Fractal, which emulates the turbulence of the water where it meets shoreline. Lindbeck will suspend long poles from the gallery ceiling in a line that charts, to scale, the configuration of the coast from Faber Park to Fort Wadsworth. Suspended from the ceiling in one of the galleries will be a three-dimensional mobile of concentric orbits and floating islands by Spanish artist Paco Simon. It will present a gyrating abstraction of flora and fauna of Staten Islands past and present. Simon will draw from the resources of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences.

While not a literal mapping, Robin Locke Monda, from Staten Island, will configure a meditative chamber entitled Transcending Borders. Composed of rear-lit light boxes bearing motifs found in the Island’s natural world as well as that of maps, charts and diagrams, she will suggest a range of subjects from the microscopic and corporeal to the planetary and celestial. Staten Island-based Birgitta Lund’s photographic installation Water will also use charts and mapping as a conceit to explore the layers of personal narrative that one can project into images that are as seemingly innocent as family snapshots. Snug Harbor Japanese Artist-in-Residence, Miyuki Yokomizo, will create an installation in the galleries using salt from a nearby factory. Resembling white sand found at the beach, Yokomizo draws on the properties of salt as a means of cleansing, purifying, preserving and healing. Treading the line between fantasy and fact is Ann Marie McDonnell’s whimsical Shoe Museum. McDonnell, from Staten Island, will design portraits of famous people associated with Staten Island, such as Dorothy Day, Alice Austen, Louise Bourgeios and Herman Melville. With less specificity Gorki Zuvela has proposed a humorous work that links famous historical figures by facial identifiers like mustaches or accessories like glasses, toys or rings.

Several other projects will refer directly or indirectly to the history of place and the sense of a fading past one would associate with Snug Harbor as a former retirement home for sailors. Mariusz Olszewski (Benek) and Mariusz Soltysik, from Lodz, Poland, will shoot a video at Snug Harbor that will be projected on to a grid of florescent string in the gallery. The video images will fade in and out, and as they do, they will activate the florescent paint in the string to reveal quotes inspired by the site’s maritime heritage.

Curator and artist, Dean Jokanovic Toumin, from Zagreb, Croatia, was one of the earliest proponents of the SITE-ATIONS INTERNATIONAL PROJECT. Toumin will contribute a work that he has shown all over the world that has a special resonance with his own war torn country and with current events in Afghanistan.











Today's News

March 28, 2024

'Titanic' door prop that saved Rose (sorry, Jack) sells for $718,750

Vitra Design Museum opens 'Transform! Designing the Future of Energy'

Kunstmuseum Bern bequeathed five major paintings by Eberhard W. Kornfeld

Richard Serra, who recast sculpture on a massive scale, dies at 85

Museums and galleries across the UK to share world-leading collections with local communities

Group exhibition explores the concerns associated with the use of paper as a material

Intesa Sanpaolo opens Cristina Mittermaier's first retrospective in Europe

Filmmaker draws censors' wrath: 'A Price I Have to Accept'

Inside the Garrick, the elite men-only London club rocked by criticism

Is humanity out of fashion?

First solo UK exhibition of Italian designer Enzo Mari opens at the Design Museum

Seance? Celebration? A risqué tribute to Sinead O'Connor arrives.

Thaddaeus Ropac now represents Hans Josephsohn Estate

A director brings TikTok's chaotic vibe to the big screen

Aurora tourism in Iceland: You can seek, but you may not find

"Pino Pascali" opens exhibition at Fondazione Prada

Marjorie Perloff, leading scholar of avant-garde poetry, dies at 92

Governors Island taps new head curator

Lawrie Shabibi now representing Mandy El-Sayegh




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful