Installation: Mixed Media, video projection, scent and sound
10' x 12' x 8'
EXHIBITION "RISING TIDE" OPENS TO THE PUBLIC MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND OPENING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, JUNE 9, 2-5PM
HOURS: SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS, 11AM–5PM, through September 29th Also open the Monday of Memorial Day and Labor Day
LOCATION: BLDG. 19b, GOVERNORS ISLAND (NOLAN PARK AREA)
PRESS CONTACTS:
Ginger Andro p: (201) 803-4778 e: glicksmandro@optonline.net Stephen Keltner p: (917) 854-5717 e: keltner.steve@gmail.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- The Sculptors Guild is pleased to announce its 6th- annual exhibition on Governors Island entitled "Rising Tide." Brooklyn-based art critic Sarah Schmerler (Art in America, Photograph, W+G News) curates, selecting site- specific projects and stand-alone sculptures by 13 Guild members. All are installed in a yellow clapboard Victorian mansion in the Nolan Park section on the north-eastern edge of the Island, which, during Hurricane Sandy, was the site of a 16-foot tidal surge. Little damage was sustained on the Island overall, but the same cannot be said for many of the participating artists. "Eight months after Hurricane Sandy, artists across our region are still putting the pieces of their lives back together," writes the curator. "Might we not ask what other factors rock our creative community on a daily basis? Economic crises, the demands of family and job, the changing face of artworld politics.... This show will focus on the new forms that artists come up with in their continual efforts to 'stay afloat.”
Yasmin Gur (an Israeli artist who has worked in Ursula Von Rydingsvard's studio) fills a huge living room ceiling with a jagged, abstract construct of weathered wood salvaged from Sandy's devastation of Gerritsen Beach, as well as other locations. Upstairs, in a bedroom area, New Jersey-based Elaine Lorenz shows a floor-based ceramic work that plays with scale and surface: nesting abstracted wave forms with crisp edges, all covered with a gunmetal-grey patina that affects the drippings of an oil slick. Long Island City-artist Bernard Klevickas transforms the kitchen with
upcycled materials that are both whimsical and loaded with portent: a 'melting' iceberg sculpture of white styrofoam food containers; and a tornado-like miasm of plastic- detergent-bottles and plush toys that erupts out of a pantry sink.
The domestic setting is nicely counterbalanced by the often-odd and utterly diverse materials here, as in Ginger Andro and Chuck Glicksman's unsettling video loop of rain falling on Long Beach Island, reflected over a fireplace mantle piece (where a cozy painting or mirror might normally go), and the view of Manhattan's still-unfinished Freedom Tower, visible through the bedroom window from which a metal sculpture of fractured, geometric planes by Stephen Keltner looks out. "Such confluences couldn't be predicted," says the curator, who has scrawled the show's wall labels in pencil, directly on the house's peeling-plaster walls, "but I'm glad they happened. There must be a sense of tension in the air; and, frankly, tension is good for making art."
Participating artists include Andro & Glicksman, Meg Bloom, Colin Chase, Michelle Greene, Yasmin Gur, Lucy Hodgson, Stephen Keltner, Bernard Klevickas,
Coral Penelope Lambert, Conrad Levenson, Elaine Lorenz, Sassona Norton, and Philip Simmons. Building 19 is located in Nolan Park, steps away from the landing of the Brooklyn ferry, and a six-minute walk away from the landing of the Manhattan ferry and is not wheelchair accessible. The content of this exhibition is family friendly and highly appropriate for children of all ages. Please consult docents on site as to which artworks may be touched.
Transportation to Governors Island is available free to the public, every hour, via ferry departing from Pier 6, Brooklyn, and the Governors Island Ferry Terminal, Manhattan, Saturdays and Sundays, 10AM–5:30PM. For more information, visit www.govisland.com.
Rear Window reinstalled 2013
From the "Ready or Not" exhibition catalog. Essay written by Shlomit Dror, curator, Newark Museum, 2014
"The subject of nature and nature itself directly and indirectly in some of the artworks. Ginger Andro and Chuck Glicksman's "Rear Window" 2013 questions how fluctuations in climate causes humans either to be mesmerized by nature's wonders or held captive and at its mercy. Their video, a slow-motion documentation of a spring rain shower in Barnegat Bay in New Jersey, is a projected on an old window the artists appropriated, distorting the projection through the window's grids. Capturing this moment in nature through physical and conceptual elements, the artists created the illusion that raindrops seen in the video are beating on the windows surface. The sound component, attacking mantel clock, augments the feeling of anticipation and fear one can experience during a natural weather occurrence. In this post-Sandy era, these emotions are even more accentuated. The artists also experiment with aromatherapy, blending a unique scent-a mixture of wood and humidity-reminiscent to viewers of the shore. The visual component of this work is accompanied by the familiar presence of outdoor mist, which similarly also aims to capture another feeing moment in nature that affected viewers' indoor experience."