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.

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: Jessica Dawson

Jessica Dawson is a New York City-based freelance arts reporter and critic; she contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and Art in America. From 2011-2013 she was on staff at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington as Director of Identity for the Diller Scofidio + Renfro Seasonal Inflatable Structure. Prior to that she was the Washington Post’s Galleries critic from 2000-2011, art critic for the Washington City Paper from 1999-2000 and on staff at Architecture magazine from 1997-1999. Jessica received her BA in art and architectural history from Barnard College and her MA in art history from George Washington University. She is a visiting professor for UCLA in Washington, DC, where she teaches courses in art history, urbanism and museum studies. 

Made Here: Fall Group Show PR

View fullsize

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.

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.