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Continue readingHSF @ 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 – 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.
Masato Nagai – World Tour (2007-2008)
Installation-view details: Masato Nagai, World Tour ( 2007-2008 ), from the exhibition, The (Art of) Dissemblance, HSF, June 26- July 6, 2008
upcoming – June 26, 2008, 6.00-10.00 pm
the (art of) dissemblance
works by:
Masato Nagai
Patrizia Novello
curated by Raffaele Bedarida
opening reception:
June 26, 2008, 6.00-10.00 pm
on view by appointment
June 27 – July 6, 2008
HSF is glad to present The (Art of) Dissemblance, an exhibition featuring works by artists-in-residence Masato Nagai (Japanese, etching, silkscreen, photocopy) and Patrizia Novello (Italian, painting). Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, the show displays projects realized by HSF fellows during their stay in New York (April-July, 2008).
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, to dissemble means to conceal one’s true motives, feelings, or beliefs. To assemble is the act of fitting together the separate component parts of an object. The (Art of) Dissemblance is a diptych, a double reflection on the use and perception of objects, paintings, printings, and photographs, and on their repetition, combination, appropriation, and counterfeit in relation to art practices, strategies, and identities now, half a century after the 1961 MoMA landmark show, The Art of Assemblage. While the latter presented avant-gardes’ and neo-avantgardes’ practices of combining different elements in single works during the first sixty years of 20th century, The (Art of) Dissemblance suggests a shifted condition at the beginning of the new millennium: here, images are disassembled, modified, and recomposed as something substantially fictional. The question is no longer about the threshold between art and life, but rather between seeing and experiencing, images and objects at large.
In the hybrid work Landscape from Her, the calendar scheme of Patrizia Novello’s three months at HSF is reproduced on the wall through 90 fake Polaroids. These are actually fragments of a generic, extremely simple landscape painting by the artist herself: cut into Polaroid-sized, almost monochrome pieces, each is framed by white painting. Rearranged in a different order, the landscape is dismantled and turned into a calendar, a personal journal. The landscape/diary is completed by three large canvases that simulate typewritten notebook pages. Finally, on display is the original manuscript of the artist book, Landscape from Her, which will be published by HSF in a limited edition of ninety copies, each containing a handmade Polaroid. In the era of the digital disembodiment, the artist reflects, by means of painting, on the objecthood of both photographic images and written words. Novello deconstructs and questions the accepted boundaries in art practices between genres (landscape, diary), media (photography, painting, installation, object, text), and strategies (conceptual, emotional, industrial, handicraft, minimal, painterly).
Masato Nagai has combined black and white images in World Tour (2007-2008), a huge wall piece (77”x187”). Photocopies of photographs shot by the artist in Melbourne (Australia), Kochi (Japan), and New York are alternated with silkscreen reproductions of photocopied details from Nagai’s own etchings, and with photocopies from books, catalogues, and posters related to the artist’s sojourn in New York. Auto-biographical visual notes from the artist’s experiences – in his homeland, during his stay at the Australian residency program Wardlow Project, and at HSF – coexist with fragments from his work in a monumental surface, which swarms with interlocked figures, landscapes, and texts. The diverse whole is united by the poetic presence of irregular snippets from Nagai’s etchings, which transmigrate with the zig-zag of a butterfly through the 77 photocopies. If on the one hand, images that are extracted from their contexts as isolated Xerox copies are reintroduced here in a fluid cognitive/memory dimension, on the other hand they are reduced to a changing interrelationship of blacks and whites against the regular grid of the photocopy pages.
Raffaele Bedarida, June 2008
The (Art of) Dissemblance
Opening reception: June 26, 2008, 6:00-10:00 pm
On view by appointment: June 27-July 6, 2008
Lost Bird
New York, May 28, 2008:
thank you friends for coming at Lost Bird party and welcoming new HSF fellow artists:
Patrizia Novello
Masato Nagai
(photographs by Susy Blu)
