io.

Please join us at HSF for the opening of io., the tenth group exhibition of artists-in-residence since the program’s foundation in 2007. io. presents works by: Doojin Ahn (Korea), Valerio Ricci (Italy), and Larissa Voltz (Germany-Israel).
Co-curated by HSF Chief Curator, Raffaele Bedarida with Junior Curator, Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved by the three artists during their stay in New York (August-November-2009).

IO.

DOOJIN AHN

VALERIO RICCI

LARISSA VOLTZ

Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci

Opening reception:
November 2nd  6.00-9.00 pm

By appointment:
November 3 – 30, 2009

HSF by Montrasioarte
128W 121st street
Subway 2, 3 to 116th street

www.harlemstudiony.org

Doojin Ahn exhibits Just Caves, an installation consisting of a ring (circum. 239 inches) suspended at the center of a room. The exterior of the circle is covered with a painted frieze, depicting an uninterrupted series of caves. An archetype of wilderness, the cave is turned into an elementary narrative unit for a pre-human (or post-human) mythology. The deserted landscape is painted as visionary comics, but there is no narrative development in it. Deprived of the visual omnipotence given by a two-dimensional painting, the viewer uselessly walks around looking for an event to take place in the reverted panorama. Ahn is the first artist to participate in the HSF-Mongin Exchange Program, a collaboration between HSF and Mongin Art Space in Seoul.

 

Valerio Ricci’s Storage is an installation composed of 204 hand-made bricks, shaped, painted, and cooked by the artist during his three-month stay at HSF. They cover most of the floor’s surface in a room, leaving only a perimetric passageway free. Ordered in an extensive grid, their yellow-glazed ceramic shines as a carpet of gold bullions. Throughout the show, HSF visitors are invited to take home the bricks. Each brick is initialed, dated and numbered on the bottom; each guest can have a brick by filling out a form with his/her contacts and the number of the brick. The artist will therefore be able to send out certificates of authenticity; the owners will become part of a virtual community that would potentially re-unite the pieces. The progressive dismantling of Storage will be documented by a video. The work reverts historical minimalist and participation art practices, and reflects on the paradigmatic artisanal-alchemic nature of art making: it creates a paradoxical short-circuit between the value of things and that of experience, investments of time and real estate. Where will you put a glazed brick (it’s free!) in your mini New York apt.?

Larissa Voltz works on language, expressions, their resonances with different architectural spaces and human environments, and the potentials of their multi-layered meanings. At io., she exhibits two paintings, Je te dérange? 1 and Je te dérange? 2. Their large size (85.4 x 129.5 inches), designed to fill the wall surface of the exhibition space, gives these works on paper a mural-like power to dialogue with HSF non-neutral architecture. More than a dialogue it is actually a clash. The sober, monumental letters of a lapidary text is surrounded by century-old wooden decorations and stucco works. “Am I disturbing you?”, the text repeats several times in French from the two sides of the room (Voltz is German, she lives in Israel, and made this work in New York in the context of an institution where Italian is the second-most frequently spoken language): in Je te dérange? 2, the letters are painted with oil-based Blockprinting colors on black paper; facing it, the same words are traced in negative, where the masking film is cut. Voltz’s artisanal technique was traditionally used to paint texts for advertising and shop signs: cut by hand out of a masking film, the letters were then stenciled on a wall or board. In a room, the words are monumental and aggressive, and the industrial-like letters reveal their textured colors and beautiful vibrations.

(Raffaele Bedarida, New York, October 2009)

ABOUT US
Harlem Studio Fellowship is a privately funded, non-profit Residency Program for international artists founded in 2007 by Ruggero Montrasio and curated by Raffaele Bedarida.
Harlem Studio Fellowship is designed to encourage the creative, intellectual and personal growth of emerging visual artists. We invite two or three young artists every three months, providing them with housing and studio in a townhouse in the district of Harlem. Every residency ends with a group exhibition, displaying works and projects accomplished by each artist during his/her stay in New York In addition to this, a complete show of the artists in residence will be held at the end of the first 3 years, displaying a selection from the works produced at HSF.

LOVISA RINGBORG – ELENA ASCARI

Please join us at HSF for the opening of a double solo exhibition of artists-in-residence, Lovisa Ringborg and Elena Ascari. Co-curated by HSF Chief Curator, Raffaele Bedarida with newly appointed Junior Curator, Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved by the two artists during their stay in New York (May-July-2009).

- LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be

- ELENA ASCARI
Cells

Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci

Opening reception:
July 16th 6.30-9.00 pm

By appointment:
July 17th-31st, 2009

HSF by Montrasioarte
128W 121st street
Subway 2, 3 to 116th street

LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be

Swedish artist Lovisa Ringborg exhibits at HSF two interrelated works. A photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be, which consists of four photographs and a mirror text. More than doing photographs, Ringborg literally works with photography: her initial photographic shots, used as “raw material” (the artist’s words), are digitally altered and combined into carefully composed and theatrically staged images. As with Caravaggio (a rough mattress hardly visible under classical draperies), the fictionality of the represented scene is revealed in her work, and the masquerade in the artist’s studio emerges interfering with the subject matter. Subtle visual inconsistencies insinuate unreliability in the faux staged-photographs and add surreal echoes to their content. But there is no attempt on shocking effects: no juxtaposition of evidently incongruous images and meanings. If the sleep of Goya’s reason produced monsters, the inoffensive stuffed animals that Ringborg photographed at the Museum of Natural History, are turned into the elementary vocabulary of a potentially monstrous language. A language from which narrative is removed and humans, beasts, and objects are kept frozen on the threshold between familiar anxieties and uncanny premonitions. RB

ELENA ASCARI
Cells

The series of paintings presented by Italian artist Elena Ascari starts a new phase in her visual research. Ascari’s previous canvases portrayed the reflecting world of the malls’ escalators through a photorealist technique. The shiny world of glasses and mirrors was turned into a no-less-kitschy surface of gummy paint. The effect was one of complex visual fragmentation: repetitions, reflections, and distortions of the same figures resulted in an optical multiplication that could be read as an open sequence, a deconstructed story. With Cells, Ascari does a step further. Focused on the refracting skin of design objects, these new reflections destroy any perceptive continuity. An ordinary experience given by the popularization and domestication of Deconstructivist architecture is translated into a trope: close-up views become miniaturized oneiric visions. In the resulting kaleidoscope, humans as well as any other recognizable thing are fugacious and isolated apparitions. The story no longer exists, connections are lost. The aesthetic of very small reflective surfaces become, with Cells, a metaphor for the connective isolation of the i-phone era. RB

SCAFFOLDINGS

Please join us at HarlemStudioFellowship by Montrasioarte for the upcoming exhibition,

S c a f f o l d i n g s

featuring works by:
Mariagrazia Pontorno & Tamas Jovanovics
Curated by Raffaele Bedarida

Opening reception: Thursday, April 23, 2009 – 6.00 PM – 10.30 PMBy appointment: April 24 – May 4

Italian artist Mariagrazia Pontorno exhibits two works linked to each other and both entitled Roots. Her series of digital images adopt the iconography of traditional herbaria. Eight species of plants and flowers that grow and blossom in Central Park during the months of Pontorno’s residency in Manhattan, are painstakingly reconstructed in exceptionally precise 3D pictures (with the technical support of Alessandro Lupo and Francesco Palenga). Only at a closer analysis the viewer feels uncomfortable: the tension between naturalness and artificiality emerges slowly and uncannily from those plants. Printed and traditionally framed, the synthetic herbarium further resounds in the early-1900s environment of HSF’s townhouse. Pontorno’s second work is a storyboard, the project for a visionary video animation: the plants of the herbarium are now in Central Park’s Great Lawn. Touched by the wind, they emerge form the ground and levitate. In the background, the skyscrapers takeoff as space shuttles, showing their eradicated roots.

London-based, Hungarian artist Tamas Jovanovics exhibits Horizontal Straight Lines: a series of paintings exclusively consisting of horizontal straight lines (thousands of them) on square-shaped canvases. Combined in triptychs, the canvases are hung at 45 degrees, and the colored-pencil lines dash through the lozenges. The optical result on the canvas’ surface is that of a pulsing vibration, a centrifugal tendency (Rosalind Krauss), described by Jovanovics in terms of evasiveness. Beyond the canvases’ limits, the effect is that of an infinite continuity: the lozenges are “just” the visible terminals of the lines’ virtual limitlessness. An homage to Piet Mondrian’s New York work, Horizontal Straight Lines engage a dialogue with Manhattan: their infinite horizontality is playfully dialectical with the most vertical of all the cities.

HSF – residency program
for international artists
W128 121 St.
New York, NY 10027

www.harlemstudiony.org

www.hsfny.wordpress.com

Andrea Belfi – Stefano Pilia at HSF

• Two special guests, musicians Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia
  have been invited at HSF for the period March-April 2009. Their HSF project consists of a sound performance based on two different works: “Con i piedi per terra” by Belfi and “NY Strings” by Pilia. During their US stay, Belfi and Pilia are giving a series of concerts:

In New York City

-March 18th: Stefano Pilia/Andrea Belfi/Marina Rosenfeld (&Mudboy)
at Paris London
285 Kent Ave btwn s1 & s2
Williamsburg, NY
http://www.shinkoyo.com/parislondon/page1.htm
-March 23rd: Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia
at Goodbyebluemonday
1087 Brodway Brooklyn, NY
http://www.goodbye-blue-monday.com/
http://www.myspace.com/goodbyebluemondayinc
-March 24th: Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia/Margarida Garcia/Barry Weisblat
at the Lit Lounge
93 2nd Ave
New York, NY 10003
http://www.litloungenyc.com
-April 4th: Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia/David Grubbs (& Scott Haggart)
at Issue Project Room
At the Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
http://issueprojectroom.org/2009/03/07/andrea-belfi-david-grubbs-stefano-pilia-trio-scott-haggart/

Out of NYC with Jeffrey Alexander (of Black Forrset/Black Sea:
-March 27th @ H+H, Baltimore MD
-March 28th @ Front Room Gallery, Cleveland OH
-March 29th @ Schlow Centre Region Library, State College PA
-March 31st @ The Nerve, Pittsburgh PA w/ Animental
-April 1st@ Skylab, Columbus OH w/ Caethua, Animental

Vice Versa – January 6, 2009

Please join us at HSF by MontrasioArte for the opening reception of Vice Versa, featuring works by artists-in-residence, Nicola Magrin and Issa Nyaphaga curated by Raffaele Bedarida.

Opening reception:
Tuesday, January 6th 2009 (6.30-10.30 pm)
128 W 121st Street (between Lenox and Powell).
Subway 2/3 to 116th Street or 125th Street

Vice Versa presents two specular approaches to art making. Nicola Magrin and Issa Nyaphaga are poles apart both formally and conceptually, yet they open up complementary possibilities of post-relational art practices.

Paris-based artist Issa Nyaphaga left his country, Cameroon, in 1996 as a refugee after being imprisoned and tortured for the publication of his political drawings, which targeted government officials. Active in counter-information and educational activities with schools, universities, cultural centers and social institutes mostly in France and in the US, Issa’s art practice ranges from painting to political drawing, from body art to performance and installation. At HSF, Issa presents a series of portraits of Barack Obama. Living in Harlem during the last months of the campaign and the presidential elections of November 2008, Issa witnessed these historical events from the outsider perspective of an African exile and with the eye of the political drawer. He has represented the iconic face of the President Elect on the backdrop of his words, white on black, showing the current in-between condition of intense expectations. A participatory performance, part of Issa’s ongoing project Urban Way, will take place during the opening reception, where the artist will dialogue with live music and the public through live painting, action, and body painting.

Italian artist Nicola Magrin exhibits large and medium size calligraphic works on paper where his daily experiences, encounters, and observations during his three-month stay in New York are translated into poetic, rarefied images. Magrin’s wonder before the range of banal and exceptional scenes or events encountered as a foreigner is initially an intimate fact, but it is then progressively turned, in his folios, into more universal images, which are, themselves, instruments of wonder. “Suddenly – he writes — the fear of a sheet of a piece of paper, good paper, clean, white ready to host some images, fruit of my excursions. And then to prepare the color – in this case instinctively mixing an ‘earth color’ with a black, dense and fragile as coal – finally, a lot of water… water from Harlem.” The artist’s presence is substantial: figures made out of single, uninterrupted brushstrokes that skillfully give shape to abundantly diluted ink, are the physical link between the visitor and the artist’s intimacy. Sometimes, if an affinity is established, Magrin works in presence of and for intimate audiences bringing the gesture back to its performative, yet non-heroic dimension.

HSF official web site is now active at:

www.harlemstudiony.org

HSF @ Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour

Harlem Studio Fellowship is participating to
Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour
Saturday Oct. 4, 12-6 pm
Sunday Oct 5, 1-6 pm
(see www.artharlem.org for the full program and the map).

HSF at Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour 2008, Oct 4 & 5, 2008
Harlem Studio Fellowship is glad to participate to Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour on Oct. 4 & 5, 2008 (see www.artharlem.org for the full program). HSF’s townhouse will present a threefold program:
-    Abacism, an exhibition by French HSF fellow artist France Languérand, co-curated by Stéphanie Jeanjean and Raffaele Bedarida;
-    On the Block, a projection of HSF artist Susy Blu’s photographic project;
-    freeDimensional will be hosted with its Action Lab on Economic Migration.
HSF is a residency program for international artists. Conceived by Ruggero Montrasio and curated by Raffaele Bedarida, the program invites young artists every three months. HSF provides them with housing and studio in Harlem, NYC. In addition to presenting their work at the conclusion of their residency, a complete show of the artists in residence will be held at the end of the first 3 years (catalogue by Silvana Editoriale). It will display a selection from the artists invited.

France Languérand – Abacism
Using different media, France Languérand interrogates the structures and systems of a selection of cultural objects, which popularity have turned into clichés and cultural commodities. Engaged in an obstinate relationship with the cultural product, the artist’s activities respond to her absolute need to tentatively set in order and understand a specific object through the structural organization of its components. The object is qualified, and then quantified until it disappears or, better, is re-qualified.
During her residency at HSF, France Languérand proposes two different projects. The first one concerns photographs obtained with a computer program that she created. The photographs are 16 777 216 pixels in size and each pixel corresponds to one color from the 16 777 216 numeric color scale. The second project is a sound piece using the basic chords that anyone must know before playing an instrument. The basic chords will become the material studied and manipulated for this project and result in the creation of an original musical composition.

Susy Blu – On the Block
“Harlem is deeply and quickly changing: many old houses are being restored; new people are moving to this neighbourhood, some residents have to leave because the rent prices are increasing; new shops, bars, buildings, hotels and restaurants are opening, while some old, no more competitive ones are closing. Students from Columbia University, artists, young couples and freelances live and work nowadays in Harlem, sharing spaces and habits with the historical residents of this area. Last summer a lot of white people moved to Harlem and the gentrification is getting faster and faster. The block where HSF is located reflects this interesting phase of transition, that’s why I decided to concentrate on this small but rich reality. Being an agent myself of this process I thought I could only work where I am part of it.” (Susy Blu, On the Block – Concept, Sept. 2007)
Susy Blu’s photographic project On the Block is a systematic study/portrait of the houses’ interiors on 121st Street between Lenox and Powel, where HSF is located. Although absent, their inhabitants collectively emerge through the environments that they have personalized. The project is a reflection on topics such as gentrification, domesticity, identity and privacy. Photographs will be shown shown through a loop projection, commented by text and sounds.

Susy Blu - On the Block 2008

Susy Blu - On the Block 2008

freeDimensional – Action Lab on Economic Migration
freeDimensional (fD) is a platform of collaboration linking community art spaces to social justice movements globally.  fD conducts advocacy on behalf of vulnerable groups and produces tactical media to illustrate critical, contemporary issues.  fD uses existing resources in the art, media and entertainment sectors in order to engage and financially underwrite direct actions, raise awareness and instigate change.
The freeDimensional Action Lab on Economic Migration has been in development since 2006. Starting with an fD resident artist in NYC, Bara Diokhane and the Gowanus Canal “Empty Vessel” Boat Project, up to the artHARLEM tour on October 4/5, 2008 with no intention of slowing down. The project has found a great deal on momentum in 2008. Beginning with an event during New York City’s Immigrant Heritage Week, on to a one week workshop on Economic Migration at the Santa Fe Art Institute and ending the spring season of events with a media intervention in Dakar, with their partner center the Atelier Mustapha Dime, during the Dak’Art Biennale.
Moving from the spring to summer has found fD working with a new and dynamic research project on Economic Migration, “Taking to the Sea”. Taking to the Sea is interested in looking at Egyptian Economic Migration by the sea. fD will feature Taking to the Sea during artHARLEM. fD plans to bring Taking to the Sea to a new audience in New York City and connect it to other projects on migration that are also ongoing. There are a number of community based organizations that are focused on Economic Migration from Central America to the US as well as West Africa to Europe that fD has been working with. fD looks to further the discussion by bringing organizations and community art spaces to work together to focus on the situation at hand.

http://www.freedimensional.org/

Abacism

works by France Languerand

curated by Stephanie Jeanjean and Raffaele Bedarida

opening reception October 3, 6-10 pm

on view October 4 – 5 within the program artHarlem Tour

by appointment October 6 – 12, 2008

Tondo Brunch

Tondo Brunch – August 3, 2008

Tondo Brunch
Sunday August 3, 2008
12:00am – 4:30pm

Calculating, classifying, and sorting are activities that reactivate what was just there, available.

Using different media, France Languérand interrogates the structures and systems of a selection of cultural objects, which popularity have turned into clichés and cultural commodities. Engaged in an obstinate relationship with the cultural product, the artist’s activities respond to her absolute need to tentatively set in order and understand a specific object through the structural organization of its components. The object is qualified, and then quantified until it disappears or, better, is re-qualified. Now, only identified through its constitutive elements, it takes new aspects that cancel out its narrative potentials. However, her research and activity keep a fundamental human scale, the calculation being made “by hand.” The repeated action and systematized time serve a method which, after being defined, has to be strictly respected as chief rule: no arrangement, no exemption is being possible. What would usually take a minute to be completed, using existing software; here can take weeks, even months of quiet effort. Relocating in real time the relationship with the object imposes as well a practical connection with it; while revealing the components of the object also negates, erases, and dissipates its mean.

For her “Welcoming Party,” France Languérand does not present her last pieces but the traces of the activities from which they have resulted; these activities being at the core of her works. As with her work, when the method is set, the activity begins and continues until it ends. The artist never knows how long it would take nor what the result is going to be. The pieces are always shown with the mention: activity, and frequently ends looking like account books. However, during this “Tondo Brunch,” the only visible “objects” will be the circular dishes that France Languérand prepared.

ACTIVITIES:

L’Etranger (from Camus The Stranger, best seller in France during its first publication)
Every letter and punctuation mark is counted and classified by alphabetic order. This same method is applied to every sentence, every chapter, every part, and finally to the entire book; thus resulting into four books.

Metropolis
Every pixel from every movie frame has been counted and then classified regarding their grayscale. This resulted in two movies:
In the first movie, there is a total of 161458 frames; pixels have been classified by grayscale for each individual frame.
In the second movie, the entire film contains 58087297135 pixels, which have been classified by grayscale.

BWV1080
Each musical note is counted and classified by note and/or value of time (systematically from the largest to the smallest).
In Track#1: Notes are classified by value of time, going up the scale from do1 to do5 (all do1 then all ré1 then all mi1 and so on. Inside a same group of notes, for example do1, notes are classified by value of time).
In Track#2: Notes are classified by value of time going up the scale from do1 to do5 (every time nine at first, then every time eight, and so on). Within a similar time, notes are classified by going up the scale (every time nine in do1at first, then every time nine in ré1, and so on)[.]
In Track#3: Notes are classified by name and then by value of time (all do1 by value of time first, then all do2, do3, then all ré1, all ré2, and so on).
In Track#4 : Notes are classified by value of time and then by name. (All do of time nine first, then all do of time eight. All the ré of time nine, and so on)
In order to reduce the risk that subjective enters interpretation, the partitions are played by software using the sound “grand piano.”

Poems (work in progress)
From an accumulation of found words, collected from whatever France reads, every letter of each word is given a numeral value (A=1, B=2, C=3…) and the global value of each word is calculated. The resulting poem is made from all the words that end with the same sum and same number of letters, which are organized by alphabetic order. The constitution of the verses also refers to the sum of the words: if the sum is 83, the first verse has 8 words, the second 3 verses, the third 8 words, and so on. Regularly new words are collected, there are yearly added to the last poems, which incessantly increases.

During her residency at HSF, France Languérand proposes two different projects. The first one concerns photographs obtained with a computer program that she created. The photographs are 16 777 216 pixels in size and each pixel corresponds to one color from the 16 777 216 numeric color scale. The second project is a sound piece using the basic chords that anyone must know before playing an instrument. The basic chords will become the material studied and manipulated for this project and result in the creation of an original musical composition.