A NEIGHBORHOOD-WIDE VIDEO ART SERIES, PROJECTED
ONTO THE BQE AND BRIDGES OF DUMBO.
Where else can you see trucks, taxis and subways passing by atop world class video art! Join us for beauty, whimsy and humanity all on display to brighten the dark days of winter.
PREVIEW | JANUARY 11 – 13, 2023
Featuring “Sound the Deep Waters” in all three locations.
VOLUME ONE | JANUARY 18-FEBRUARY 10, 2024
Volume One is a “catalog of imagined possibilities,” (according to participating artists Jason
Urban & Leslie Mutchler) translating our innermost musings and projected desires into abstract
digitizations. The lush, richly colored images ask viewers to, as participating artist Grant Cutler
notes, “reckon with automated modes of perception,” each distinct in its own abstracted and
evocative way.
ON VIEW:
Location 1: Speculative Geologies & Speculative Geologies (Triptych) by Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler (2023, 21:44 minutes)
Location 2: Sound the Deep Waters by Josh Miller & Angela Fraleigh (2024, 16 minutes)
Location 3: Protectors by Mz.Icar (2022, 17:28 minutes)
Location 3: Ocean with Spirit Patterns by Grant Cutler (2022, 10:00 minutes)
VOLUME TWO | FEBRUARY 15 – MARCH 18, 2024
Volume Two is a delightful reflection on urbanism and what it means to live in a city like New York. Playing off New Yorkers’ well known love of voyeurism, these works are at once chaotic and poetic, presenting the rhythm and patterns of everyday life, delving into questions of anonymity, homemaking, and intersectionality.
Location 1: Flower Man by Kyoung eun Kang (2012, 2:00 minutes)
Location 2: Chew and Walk Gum by Josh Klatt and Eliana Pérez (2023, 1:21 minutes)
Location 2: Intersections by Tala Schlossberg (2023, 0:33 minutes)
Location 2: Rhythms by Tala Schlossberg (2023, 0:24 minutes)
VOLUME THREE | MARCH 21 – APRIL 12 and APRIL 18 – 20, 2024
Volume Three is a collection of works that blend real life, animation and hand drawings into surreal videos that take the viewer on whimsical and unexpected journeys, all ultimately in the pursuit of creating one’s home.
DUMBO OPEN STUDIOS — CLOSING GROUP SHOW | SATURDAY APRIL 13 & SUNDAY APRIL 14, 2024
FROM DUSK-10pm
This project is made possible with support from the New York City Department of Small Business Services, the New York City Department of Transportation and NYC DOT ART, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and Leo Kuelbs Collection.
VOLUME ONE
JANUARY 18 – FEBRUARY 10, 2024
ON VIEW THURSDAYS – SATURDAYS FROM 4PM – 10PM
Speculative Geologies & Speculative Geologies (Triptych)
2023, 21:44 minutes
What raw rare earth materials are transformed into the “magic” of our smartphones? With this question as a starting point, Speculative Geologies catalogs the imagined possibilities. An ongoing series of almost 400 individual 3d modeled proposals, the project focuses on the impact of technology on our physical environment and society, while also highlighting the origins, beauty and complexity of the enigmatic elements that make up our digital world. Each invented specimen is associated with an attribute or action that results from our relationship with digital devices (ex. 1 rock or mineral that needs constant attention, A rock or mineral that urges you to subscribe and save).
{LOCATION 1} ON THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE ANCHORAGE AT ADAMS STREET
Sound the Deep Waters is a collaboration between artists Joshua Miller and Angela Fraleigh. The installation is an Interactive Victorian Flower Language dictionary that engages a dynamic conversation between site, audience and context by inviting visitors to submit unique text messages that will be translated and transformed into bold, brilliant, floral imagery derived from DUMBO and beyond.
Languages orient us to the world. They shape our place in it. Across cultures they are a foundational vehicle for understanding abstract ideas like time, complex systems like gender, race and class and the coded way we wield power or create and delineate boundaries. In Sound the Deep Waters, the Interactive Victorian flower language dictionary will play with this notion of subversive decor. Read more here.
The Protectors is a video art project. It depicts a third-generation local youth swinging from the moon while the protectors watch on and protect them. This piece speaks to migration, gentrification, home and the need to be held by community and environment.
Ocean with Spirit Patterns is a multi-channel 8mm animated film which challenges the viewer to reimagine their relationship to their environments through trance-viewing; the film brings attention to the mechanisms of our awareness, challenging our automatic modes of perception. Ocean with Spirit Patterns is meditative, deliberately slow (at tidal pace), impressionistic and colorful – exposing the depth and density of ecological environments while de-centering the dominant human narrative. Reducing the visual sensory plane to color-fields and simple graphic gestures is intended to amplify the often subtler voice in the continued dialog between nature and culture.
This project was conceptualized and developed while in residence with two organizations during the winter of 2022: the Artist Association of Nantucket, and BEAST gallery in Bornholm, Denmark. Many hundreds of hours of audio field-recordings were captured in the wild areas around both locations with a focus on the unique coastal landscapes inherent to each island. The film was inspired by these recordings. The analog 8mm filming of the work was generously supported by New York State Council on the Arts and Wave Farm.
{LOCATION 3} ON THE BQE IN SUSAN SMITH MCKINNEY STEWARD PARK
VOLUME TWO
FEBRUARY 15 – MARCH 18, 2024
ON VIEW THURSDAYS – SATURDAYS FROM 4PM – 10PM.
Kyoung eun Kang’s work focuses on mundane gestures and subtle interactions that offer insight into human nature and connection. Traversing the various forms of estrangement that culture imposes upon human relationships, her work encourages an exchange of interests, curiosity, and empathy to invite bonding at the micro- and macro-levels of her communities. In this silent video, Flower Man, the exchange of a flower between two hands characterizes an intimate moment. As both the artist and the receiver of the flowers, Kyoung eun Kang brings various flower-sellers together through her individual, personal interactions with them. Ultimately, she makes visible the subterranean immigrant community of New York City flower-sellers that is often overlooked. Through its investigations of generosity and industry, this piece celebrates the ways in which an invisible workforce enlivens a city through their anonymous efforts, calling attention to the work they do for human connection.
Chew and Walk Gum is a humorous take on the selfish misuse of public space and the resultant deterioration in the quality of life for New Yorkers. By layering hand-drawn animation on top of live-action video, we glimpse a parallel New York City where a ubiquitous contaminant refuses to be ignored.
What is at the intersection of art and intersections? This Brooklyn-based work explores the often overlooked spaces of overlap, and the beauty that comes from the chaos. The work was created using an iPhone footage, printed out as individual frames onto cardstock. Acrylic paint was then applied to each frame and the dried sheets were scanned and resequenced to create a stop motion animation.
Rhythms captures the hidden harmonies of Brooklyn, and explores the musicality in our everyday lives. The animation was created by painting over physical video frames, which were then rescanned and sequenced.
Fronts is an ongoing video-based portrait of contemporary urban life in public spaces, made from the 4,700+ short videos that Fraser has recorded of storefronts since 2010. Each video is carefully framed to capture the day-to-day activities of city street life, painstakingly assembled using dozens of individual clips filled with scenes from every corner of the city. Scenes are filled with people living their lives in every way imaginable. The seasons and the weather vary widely, as does the social-economic level of the neighborhoods depicted. Projecting these videos back into the very spaces depicted offers both multiple layers of rich imagery and messages private and public, profound and mundane for the audience on the street. Fronts functions as a manifold portrait of contemporary urban life in public spaces.
{LOCATION 3} ON THE BQE IN SUSAN SMITH MCKINNEY STEWARD PARK
VOLUME THREE
MARCH 21 – APRIL 20, 2024
ON VIEW THURSDAYS – SATURDAYS FROM 4PM – 10PM.
The Acorns’ Big Adventure is a surreal narrative animation about two brothers who embark on a misadventure in an underground fantasy world. Sepe’s media work is often paired with sculptural objects: she inserts video content into objects constructed from traditional building and sculpture materials. The content is derived from personal and human experience and observation, paired with history, literature and elements from the unconscious. She uses illustration, geometric form, movement and interaction to reference dwelling, figure and imagined narrative.
Drawing parallels between human societies and the biological altruism and non-hierarchical collectivism of social insects, aricoco investigates personal and communal concepts of home as organized temporary shelter, while questioning the privilege of human dominance. As a simultaneous practice of self-fortification and community-building, she creates environments for provisional habitation, combined with sculptural garments/bags and masks that serve as her protective living/traveling gear. aricoco harbors a deep-seated fear of the untamed environment, especially insects, while also paradoxically identifying with both the power and the vulnerability embodied in insect life. She disguises herself as one of the members of the insect society, performing a ritualistic play of surrendering her “powerless” body to the habitat.
Animals on the Verge combines Google’s ready-made 3D animals (described online as the “perfect quarantine activity”), and drawings of holes on paper, combined via Augmented Reality on a mobile phone. Some of these holes are gas emission craters, where melting permafrost releases trapped gas in an explosive crater-forming event, or the infamous Gates of Hell in Turkmenistan – a fiery pit left burning since a 1971 Soviet drilling accident. Animals appear tentatively at the edge, swimming in, or trapped in the giant holes.
Big Top is a video montage of two thematically linked videos, each representing an endless cycle of the repetitive movement of a feminine figure suspended high above the ground/floor plane. The imagery is symbolistic and surreal.
{LOCATION 3} ON THE BQE IN SUSAN SMITH MCKINNEY STEWARD PARK
Diaphanous was created as part of the inaugural phase of Audible’s Newark Artist Collaboration. Linardaki used fabrics from communities she met in Newark, NJ, constructing a composition that speaks of the multifaceted lives of the communities that create a city. This particular video comes out of an ongoing practice of collecting fabrics from her travels, and layering and combining these fabrics to create textured compositions that speak to the rich tapestry of our shared human experience.
{LOCATION 3} ON THE BQE IN SUSAN SMITH MCKINNEY STEWARD PARK
ARTIST BIOS & PRESS STILLS
VOLUME ONE ARTISTS
GRANT CUTLER. Grant Cutler (b. USA 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound, film, photography, textile, and media technologies across installation, performance, and expanded cinema. His current work aims to emphasize listening as a spiritual-erotic experience through the creation of environments, objects, and films that give dimension to that which is often weightless or invisible. Projects take form as analog film projections that test the threshold of awareness, objects fabricated from textile, ceramic, or wood that demonstrate a non-cochlear listening potential, and sound installations exposing the near-silence of endangered soundscapes. His work has been featured by the Guggenheim’s CPA commission series, Baryshnikov Art Center, Wave Farm, Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, NPR, Pitchfork, BBC, WNYC, and many others. His award-winning scores have been exhibited at film festivals world-wide including Tribeca, Ashland Independent, Sound Unseen, and Paris International. Cutler holds an MFA in interdisciplinary arts and lives/works in Brooklyn, New York. @grantcutler
ANGELA FRALEIGH. Angela Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University School of Art and her BFA from Boston University. Her solo exhibitions include PPOW Gallery in New York, Inman Gallery in Houston, TX, Peters Projects in Santa Fe, NM and James Harris Gallery in Seattle. She has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and has been the recipient of several awards and residencies including the Yale University Alice Kimball English grant, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Brooklyn, NY and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. Fraleigh has created site-specific solo projects for the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center (Shadows Searching for Light, 2018) and the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site (Lost in the Light, 2015), the Everson Museum of Art (Between Tongue and Teeth, 2016) and the Delaware Art Museum (Sound the Deep Waters, 2019). Fraleigh looks forward to upcoming exhibitions at Inman Gallery, Hirschl and Adler Gallery, Reading Public Museum, Swope Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum and the Weatherspoon. She currently lives and works in both New York, NY and Allentown, PA, where she is Full Professor and Department Chair at Moravian College. @angelafraleigh
JOSH MILLER. Josh Miller’s teaching and professional creative practice operate at the intersection of art, design, and software development. Since earning his MA in Computer Science, and MFA in New Media, Josh has taught courses in web & graphic design, video game design, creative coding, user experience, and application development. Outside of the classroom, he develops interactive installations and user-focused online experiences, exhibiting his work both locally and internationally. Josh has exhibited work in Malmo, Sweden, the Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea, and most recently, a 10-day light festival in Scottsdale, Arizona attended by over 200,00 people. Miller is a tenured Associate Professor at Kutztown University in the Department of Art & Design where he encourages students to think creatively and analytically as they navigate technology as an expressive, artistic tool. @codesketchbook
MZ.ICAR. Mz. Icar is an anonymous art collective composed primarily of Black Women. Their name is racIzM, backward. They recognize that gender and race are constructs, and that their identifications reflect this particular time, place, and context. They mention both primarily to contextualize the point of view of the work. Members comprise of an Illustrator, Photographer, Videographer, Designer, Prop stylist, Street Artist, and Collage Artist. They started this collective to tell stories that celebrate Women, Global Blackness, and Play, and their work explores play, beauty, and radical liberation, informed by their collective experiences, and fascination with color, texture, and proportions. Their works are explorative element arrangements resulting in murals, photographs, illustrations, moving images, and installation work. @mz.icar
JASON URBAN and LESLIE MUTCHLER (JULMStudios) have been working collaboratively since 2012; they live and work in Brooklyn, New York. As a collaborative duo, they exercise a coequal approach to art and life that focuses on research and problem-solving. With a relationship of physical to metaphysical in mind, their practice is about the natural world and the way digital technologies influence and distort our relationship to nature. The pair has had solo exhibitions at Eastern Edge (St. Johns, Canada), Center for Book Arts (New York, NY), Monaco (St. Louis, MO), the Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), Centre for Fine Print Research (Bristol, UK), Space Gallery (Portland, ME), Atelier Circulaire (Montreal, Canada), among others. They have been awarded numerous residencies including Edition/Basel in Basel, Switzerland, Cork Printmakers International Visiting Artist Residency in Cork, Ireland and Dieu Donne Workspace Residency in Brooklyn. @julmstudios & @speculative_geologies
VOLUME TWO ARTISTS
NICHOLAS FRASER. Nicholas Fraser creates installations, videos and sculpture. He was awarded a 2014 NYFA Fellowship for his ongoing video project Fronts. Fraser has completed residencies at Skowhegan, Art Omi, Sculpture Space, LMCC’s SwingSpace and was a BRIC Media Fellow in 2012. He’s exhibited work at the Bronx Museum, Poster House, the Drawing Center, Interstate Projects, Flux Factory, Bronx Art Space, Art in Odd Places, La Mama La Galeria, Jack the Pelican and Taller Boricua. His work has been shown in Paris, Seoul, Toronto, Cuba and Germany. He earned his BFA at the Atlanta College of Art and his MFA at the School of Visual Art. Born in the U.K., he lives in Brooklyn. #nicholasfraserart #frontsproject
KYOUNG EUN KANG. Kyoung eun Kang is a New York-based artist born in South Korea. Kang works in a wide range of media, including performance, video, painting, photography, installation, text, and sound pieces. Kang’s work has been exhibited internationally and across the United States in galleries and museums, including: A.I.R. Gallery, Collar Works, NURTUREart, BRIC Project Room, Soho 20 Project Room, and the ISCP project space in New York; the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.; the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Australia; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Korea. She has also performed in multiple venues, including: the Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Arario Gallery, FiveMyles, and Essex Flowers in New York; The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas; and others. Kang has received residences and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Marble House Project, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, the IPark Foundation, ChaNorth, BRIC Media Arts, the NARS Foundation, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the LES Studio Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Ground Floor Residency at ISCP. She received a BFA and MFA in painting from Hong-ik University in South Korea and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. Kang is a 2023-24 studio artist at Smack Mellon. @kyoungeunkang_studio
JOSH KLATT. Josh Klatt grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and lives in New York City. A street photographer, he works to subvert the propaganda and carefully curated public personas we adopt for the relentless performance of our personal brands. @joshklatt_nyc
ELIANA PÉREZ. Eliana Pérez lives in New York City. She studied Fine Arts and Printmaking at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s currently working on a series of artist books exposing human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and the suffering that occurs at the widening margins of extractive capitalism, especially in her native country of Colombia. Her work has been acquired by The Library of Congress, Yale University, Stanford University, and Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, among others. @elianaperezstudio
TALA SCHLOSSBERG. Tala Schlossberg is an animator and video producer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her experimental video work focuses on the intersection of the physical and the digital, with an emphasis on capturing the beauty in the mundane. Schlossberg’s commercial and editorial work includes narrative shorts, experimental videos and data visualizations for clients including Patagonia, Planned Parenthood, and the New York Times, where she previously worked as an animator and video producer for the newspaper’s Opinion Video section. In 2022, Schlossberg co-founded the woman-owned studio Two Toes Creative, which strives to embrace the absurd and wonderfully unexplainable parts of human existence. Schlossberg experiments in a wide variety of mediums – she regularly scores her visual work with original compositions, produces an independent magazine called “The Eliditarian” and is currently working on a collection of short fiction. @talaschlossberg
VOLUME THREE ARTISTS
EIRINI LINARDAKI. Eirini Linardaki is an artist and public art project developer. She received her fine arts education at L.I.T. Limerick, Ireland, the Universität Der Kunst of Berlin, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, France. Linardaki has developed numerous public art projects, collaborating with organizations such as the MTA, NYC Parks Department, the NYC Mayor’s Office for Climate Policy, and the NYC Department of Transportation. She has been also an active member of the Newark artist community, where she created public art installations that reflect Newark’s unique character and history, with Project for Empty Space, Four Corners Public Arts, Newark Artist Collaboration, Audible, Newark Liberty Airport, and Newark Arts. She is also known for her community-based projects, particularly through workshops on accessibility and multiculturalism in several other countries like Liberia and France, where she lived for over 20 years. In 2019, she initiated the “Occupy Art Project,” a collaborative art research group that involves artists and curators from the US, France, and Greece. Linardaki’s activist work was recognized with the 2022 Artivist Award from Sing For Hope. She is the mother of two children. @linardakiandco
JILLIAN MCDONALD. Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn and Troy, NY. She teaches art at Pace University. Exhibitions include Undercurrent and FiveMyles in Brooklyn, The Esker Foundation in Calgary, and AxeNéo7 in Québec. A CBC Ideas documentary profiles her videos, which were also reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art. Critical discussion appears in The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies at The Headlands Center for the Arts in California, The Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize in Scotland, and The Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard. @jillianmmcdonald
NANCY SEPE. Nancy Sepe uses digital media and sculptural materials to create work that references dwelling, figure and experience. Combining rawness with precision, she incorporates digital technology into common materials. Through form and representation, her work describes what are often indeterminate narratives and concepts. Having lived in metro and rural Northeast, her work has been influenced by the post-industrial landscape and the products made by hand and machine. Her work as an illustrator and designer also informs her wallpapers, drawings and paintings. Sepe holds a B.F.A. in studio art from Alfred University and an M.F.A. in digital media from UMass Dartmouth. She has exhibited her work at galleries and museums across the U.S. and overseas. @nancy.sepe
ARICOCO (ARI TABEI). aricoco (Ari Tabei), born and raised in Tokyo, is an interdisciplinary artist, living and working in NYC. After earning her MFA from University of Connecticut in sculpture and video performance art in 2007, aricoco moved to NYC to exhibit and perform extensively in the city. She was awarded Franklin Furnace Fund in 2018, LMCC Creative Engagement Fund in 2020 and New York City Artist Corps Grant in 2021 to continue working on her socially-engaged collaborative project PIPORNOT. In 2022, aricoco received SU-CASA residency program as well as ChaShaMa Immigrant Artist Fellowship, which supported her solo exhibition at one of their presentation spaces. She was a recipient of Shape-Walentas Studio Program 2022-23. @runawayaricoco