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Contact
camelartspace(at)gmail.com
Camel Art Space has moved on and is now Parallel Art Space
With Souvenir Had Camel Art Space its last exhibition after a 3 year run in East Williamsburg with over 25 exhibitions. The artists that ran the space have moved on to Ridgewood NY, where they will open Parallel Art Space on April 14th, 2012. To stay in the loop please click this link and LIKE us on on Facebook.
Thanks everyone for your support, participation and attendance.
Souvenir • 3/16/2012 – 3/18/12 (one weekend only!)
Camel Art Space presents:
Souvenir
Camel Art Space’s last exhibition.
March 16th – March 18th, 2012
One Weekend only: 1 – 6 pm
Opening reception: Friday, March 16th, 6 – 10 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue 2nd Fl., Brooklyn NY 11211
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
Artists: Hilary Baldwin, Nathan Davis, Gina Dawson, Rob de Oude, Eric Doeringer, Rebecca Goyette, Carl Gunhouse, Sara Jones, Todd Kelly, Peter Lapsley, Kerry Law, Joe Lawton, Calvin Lee, Geddes Levenson, Amy Lincoln, Rebecca Litt, Matthew Mahler, Thomas Marquet, Sam Martineau, Chris McGee, Ben Needham, Keri Oldham, Yuka Otani, Ted Partin, Joe Partlett, Lauren Portada, Jamie Powell, Babette Rittenberg, Christine Rogers, Ryan Syrell, Adam Taye, Julie Torres, Elisa Velazquez, Oliver Warden, Audra Wolowiec, James Woodward, Andrew Zarou
curated by Tom Marquet & Camel Art Space
Souvenir is an exhibition not of art but of objects which recall and refer to the work of artists who have exhibited at Camel Art Space. Artists were invited to produce a memento of their work, of the sort that might be sold in the gift shop of their mid-career retrospectives (or their multi-gallery show of dot paintings). These objects are very close to, but not quite art; things we wouldn’t stand in line to see, but might stand in line to purchase. Although the souvenir is often only the faintest echo of our experience, we grow attached to these objects in a way that is different from, but not necessarily less potent than, our attachment to art. It’s this attachment that makes us prefer a particular coffee cup in the morning. It’s this desire for a concrete memory that makes us take a book of matches, even if we don’t smoke. This is a show of objects that court that attachment, and are willing to forgo their status as art to get it.
After close to 3 years and over 25 exhibitions will Souvenir be the last exhibition event for Camel Art Space in our current location before we will open our new exhibition space called Parallel Art Space in Ridgewood Queens, at 1717 Troutman Street. Our first exhibition is scheduled for mid April and more information on this is soon to follow.
Thanks everyone and hope to see you at this last event and at our new location!
Yuka Otani • 2/10/2012 – 3/11/2012
Presents:
Yuka Otani
February 10th – March 11th, 2012
Weekends only: 1 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday, February 10th, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue 2nd Fl., Brooklyn NY 11237
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
In the Project Space Yuka Otani will be showing a new installation inspired by “Hojoki”, an essay by Chomei Kamono: a Japanese 13th century poet who expresses the sense of mujokan(impermanence) during the medieval age of wars and disasters.
Bio:
Yuka Otani’s sculptures and installations incorporate transparent and fluid materials such as glass, water, melted sugar and light to invoke a shift in a viewer’s perception of physical and cognitive spaces. The vulnerable materials change their appearance over time, thereby simultaneously emphasizing both presence and absence. Her work has been featured in venues including Museum of Art and Design, Whitney Museum of American Art, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Wight Gallery at UCLA.
First Truth • 2/10 – 3/11/2012
Camel Art Space presents:
First Truth
February 10th – March 11th, 2012
Weekends only: 1 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday, February 10th, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue 2nd Fl., Brooklyn NY 11237
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
Artists: Gina Beavers, Megan Hays, Sara Hubbs, Janelle Iglesias, Sara Jones, Siobhan McBride, Danielle Mysiliwiec
curated by Sara Hubbs and Sara Jones
The artist who sets out to examine or establish a truth sometimes runs into the bigger truth that came before it: that what one wants to accomplish may be fleeting and may possibly be unaccomplishable, or that what one creates will transform into an unforeseen thing between the time it is conceived and the time it is completed. This first truth takes the form of gaps and inconsistencies that erupt when attempting to tell a story, remember a vision, or attempt to follow a rule, and it is fueled by unreliable memories, unraveled experiences, and inexplicable imprecisions. It can be fought against, accepted, ignored, or even embraced, but the first truth — which can also be called the first anomaly or the first disappointment — emerges through the work whether it is intended or not. The artists in this exhibition intend and do not intend, but nevertheless communicate, this first truth in a variety of ways.
Gina Beavers labors to recreate images and scenes from an experience that passed by with no documentation, leaving no physical reference except for the impression in her memory. Setting herself up for an impossible task, she nevertheless feverishly tries to stick so very closely to an exact replication of a memory of an experience that she inevitably fails.
Megan Hays’ attempts to anthropomorphize states of longing, loneliness and vulnerability and define the forms that exist in these intra-personal states. Glaring, bound, and excreting, these strange forms of life announce and assert their vulnerability and their inadequacies.
Sara Hubbs’ sanded drawings are the mark and the un-mark. Through the process of addition and subtraction, the work is left to feel unfinished or undone–suspended somewhere before or after the illusion.
Janelle Iglesias’ curiosity lies in the fluctuating value and meaning of objects and their materiality when displaced from their source. Severed from a previous utilitarian or emotional function, she’s interested in how they can be reused and reappropriated in new contexts.
Sara Jones’ paintings capture the slippage between the accurate representation of a calamity and its role in a larger framework of disaster. Her work often depicts the intimacy of physical or emotional aftermaths, and uses a variety of materials to describe the rift between personal experience and collective memory.
Siobhan McBride creates cinematic narratives with gouache and paper that depict a disjointed alternate reality, a fantasy and an escape. Culled from memory, photos, and clips from magazines, the works are both loose diagrams for understanding events from the past, and strange prophetic puzzles to decode experiences yet to be known.
Danielle Mysliwiec abides by a strict rule-based process of working that in itself forms its own narrative. As the materials pass through this process the perception of the piece is literally and figuratively changed. The shapes shift and open to new associations where the weaving seems to gently hug an unidentified form or express an energetic quality. By virtue of the process used in creating these pieces, “perfection” is unattainable.
(image: Siobhan McBride, Fruitcake Weather 2, gouache on paper, 2011)
Matthew Mahler and Andrew Zarou • 1/6/12 – 1/29/12
New Works by: Matthew Mahler and Andrew Zarou
Jan 6th – Jan 29th, 2012
Weekends only: 1 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday, 6th, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue 2nd Fl., Brooklyn NY 11237
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
Matt Mahler, Magic Carpet, 2011, 20″ x 24″ , acrylic on canvas
Andrew Zarou, Flotilla /14, 2011, 10″ x 10″, collage on paper
Matt Mahler‘s work plays with the reassessing of past esthetics. At first glance you recognize a sort of stringency and rigidity through his approach, but upon further investigation you realize what you are looking at is playing tricks with what you perceive to be good and bad in art. His compositions are, although adhering to formal rules, center based and mostly mirrored, but purposefully slightly off. So are his colors, being of a sunny California surfboard palette, with drips of paint left to blur the line between what seems purposeful and what seems accidental. The mixture of what is so called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sparks the process of reevaluating these elements within art as a whole.
The Flotilla series of Andrew Zarou are his starting point for a series of collages about the organization of space and the relationships of architectural units via an aerial view. Built on graphite lines spaced one inch apart, with the outer left and right one inch spaces always left untouched. The collage components are composed of paper cut into three distinct shapes: two different isosceles triangle shapes, and a diamond form. These pieces probe the tenuous nature of pattern and how through the accumulation of form, it can be either created, negated or ideally fought for simultaneously.
Telescoping 1 – 8 are new works on paper composed of cast-off cuts from preparing future “flotillas”.
With these Andrew probes the questions of what is still vital, what is truly waste and what is resourcefulness?
In pairing these two artists we see multiple artistic directions that can be taken via the personal interpretations of a familiar formal vernacular.
Narrative Ability • 1/6/12 – 1/29/12
Camel Art Space presents: Narrative Ability
Jan 6th – Jan 29th, 2012
Weekends only: 1 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday, 6th, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue 2nd Fl., Brooklyn NY 11237
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
Artists: Linda Gallagher, Joe Lawton, Ted Partin, Amber Hawk Swanson, Ryan Syrell
curated by Carl Gunhouse
“The fact (is) that photographs — they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looks like, but you don’t know what’s happening… (It’s) a piece of time and space (that) is well described. But not what is happening. I think that there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability. Any of ‘em. They do not tell stories – they show you what something looks like… It’s a picture problem. It’s part of what makes things interesting.”–Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand’s picture problem of how to create a complex meaning (in his case narrative) in a silent and still medium is at the heart of the art-making process, that is, turning the materials of the world into something that makes a point in a compelling manner. All the artists in Narrative Ability address this visual problem by creating seductive visual cues that establish the tenor, characters and setting of their art, in hopes of enticing the viewer into providing a solution or a story that reflects both the artist’s intention and the viewer’s desires and prejudices.
In each artist’s work, the amount of control the artists take in tilting the narrative to their respective ends varies from the eloquently subtle to the dramatically directed. Joe Lawton’s pictures skillfully establish a setting that allows the viewer to form a narrative based on the slight gestures and passing glances of a cast of unknowing strangers. Where Lawton’s dense tableaux exist only in fractions of seconds of real time, Ted Partin’s pictures appear to be taking place in infinity. The subjects seem to be seduced into laying themselves bare in the face of the camera’s never-ending glance. The pictures result in an instantaneous emotional charge created by an unseen back story built on the small details that result from staring at a person, the subtle twitches in the face, the wear on the clothes, and the nature of their settings.
While Lawton and Partin’s pictures are open narratives, Linda Gallagher takes a more abstract approach, creating her meaning from a series of visual associations among evocative objects like high heels, handbags, and penises. As unexplained as the objects are in their empty visual space, the images are so laden with content it is hard not to have a gut response to the work, a response that suggests a subconscious connection between shopping and sex that most of us wouldn’t necessarily like to acknowledge.
Amber Hawk Swanson’s project encapsulates an open narrative while taking an overt role in crafting the viewer’s experience of her work. She pairs silent and shocking images of a mangled RealDoll (a life-size silicone sex doll) of herself with a long, dense video in which she sternly reads the often over-the-top comments of an online thread about her art practice. The pictures paired with the video result in a piece of art that defies obvious explanation but provides an overly-detailed, almost academic investigation of their existence.
Narrative Ability is rounded out by the playfully agile paintings of Ryan Syrell in which he takes the most familiar of childhood motifs and sets them to the adult task of making art where cartoon turtles compete for conceptual rigor with Jessica Stockholder’s sculptural ideas. While Road Runner-less western landscapes await either the coming calamity of the chase or the peaceful moments after the childish attacks of a cartoon coyote have passed, allowing us to sit and simply enjoy how nice the cliffs look.
Works by: Matthew Mahler and Andrew Zarou
Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current trends in art within a not for profit work frame, is a member of Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk. Situated in one of New York’s artistically defining neighborhoods we strive to provide an accessible exhibition platform and meeting venue for artists, curators and audience alike.
Further info at: www.camelartspace.com or contact camelartspace@gmail.com
12/17/11 • WE ARE ONE – JAPAN BENEFIT @ Camel Art Space
WE ARE ONE – JAPAN BENEFIT @ Camel Art Space
EXHIBITION: December 17th, 10:00am-6:00pm
ART WORKS SALE / RECEPTION: December 17th, 6:00-9:00pm
Location: Camel Art Space
722 Metropolitan Ave., 2nd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11211
In cooperation with:
• Japan Earthquake Relief Fund at Japan Society
• NY Art Beat• SakeOne
• Sapporo U.S.A., Inc.
• UTRECHT Art Supplies, 536 Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205
•ITO EN Inc.
• Tricana Import
Contact: weareoneatcamel@gmail.com
Press Release:
We’d like to announce the second exhibition of “We Are One”, to assist with the ongoing earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis relief efforts in Japan.
It’s been approximately eight months since the tragedy in northeastern Japan.The Japanese people are still struggling to find peace of mind as they face an on-going nuclear crisis, and many people in the disaster areas still do not have homes.
Some experts say it will take more than 10 years for a full recovery of Japan. We feel strongly that it is necessary to continuously support Japan with a long-term perspective.
The “We Are One- Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Crisis Relief Exhibition” held at the New York Institute of Technology on April 11th, 2011 was a big success. Over 100 artists contributed their time and artworks, and the joint efforts created an unforgettable experience for all artists and volunteers. We were able to raise over $17,000, of which 100% of the proceeds went to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund. Thank you again for making that exhibition a reality.
Camel Art Space and WE ARE ONE’s second benefit exhibition is scheduled for Saturday, December 17th, 2011.
The art work will be sold at an affordable price below $200, to ensure that many works will be bought during this one-day event. The works will be sold on a first come basis, and 100% of the proceeds will go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, a reputable fund that works diligently at ensuring all the money goes to the places in Japan where it is needed most.
We sincerely hope you will support the effort and come to WE ARE ONE.
Participation Artists who have generously donated their works:
Gen Aihara, On Megumi Akiyoshi, Noriko Ambe, Asai Kakeru, Andrew Atkinson, Yi Bomee, Carl Auge, Ayako Bando, Jaclyn Brown, Sanae M.Buck, Caroline Burghardt, Ai Campbell, Matthew Crowther, Chris DAcunto, Jacquelyn Dingle, Hilary Doyle, Tiffany Edwards, Esquivel Felix, Sabra Friedman, Ben Finer, Shannon Finnegan, Peter Fox, Brian Friedman, Tomoko Fujiki, Max Fujishima, Ayakoh Furukawa, Carl Gunhouse, Nora Hagert, Kyrnan Harvey, Nona Hatay, Reid Hitt, Kaoru Hironaka, Takashi Horisaki, Shis Chien Huang, Kenneth Hubener, Yojiro Imasaka, Yoko Inoue, Meredith Iszlai, Akihiro Ito, Shigemi Iyota, Sossi Joseph, Aya Kakeda, Kohey Kanno, Liko Kanno, John Kesling, Chiho Kikuchi, Maho Kino, Kenjiro Kitade, Saeri Kitatani, Miwa Koizumi, Yasutaka Kojima, Maria Kondratiev, Yuliya Lanina, Lance Lankford, Kerry Law, Joseph Lawton, Amy Lincoln, Matthew J. Mahler, Akiko Matsuo, Karl Metz, Chris McGee, Hitomi Mochizuki, Jenn Morse, Shinji Murakami, Junpei Murao, Miki Nagano, Atsunobu Nakada, Kenichi Nakajima, Manami Nakano, Ben Needham, Gary Nichols, Maho Nishimura, Yoko Nishiwaki, Yuko Oda, Chie Ogura, Satoshi Okada, O’Shea Tamara, Naoko Sumi, Yuka Otani, Hiroki Otsuka, Rob de Oude, Jesus Polanco, Gerda Postma, Sarah Pringle, Stephanie Prussin, Ellie Pyle, Ward Roberts, Karen Schiff, Kiriko Shirobayashi, Jun Shoji, Ben Sloat, Yoko Sugiura Selden, Hiroshi Sunairi, Mariko Suzuki, Motohiro Takeda, Kyoko Takei, Fumiha Tanaka, Maria Tanikawa, Jeremiah Teipen, Philip Tomaru & Martin Masetto ( Arts and Sciences Projects), Julie Torres, Joan Weber, Johanna Wolfe, Audra Wolowiec, James Woodward, Andrew Zarou and more…..
Organizers:
On Megumi Akiyoshi – Artist
Mariko Tanaka- Independent Curator
Yuko Oda- Visual Artist/Assistant Professor, New York Institute of Technology
Rob de Oude – Artist / Director, Camel Art Space
Photos of the event:
[link]
[link]
48 HRS. • 10/23/11
Camel Art Space
presents:
48 HRS.
Sunday, October 23, 2011, Noon – Midnight
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211, 2nd Floor
Directions: L train to Graham Avenue, G to Metropolitan
Artists Include: Paul Behnke, Brian Bustos, Lauren Collings, Julie Curtiss, Rebecca Goyette, Katarina Hybenova, Warren King, Ken Kocses, Geddes Levenson, Rebecca Litt, Chris McGee, Joey Parlett, Jamie Powell, Babette Rittenberg, Julie Torres
48 HRS is a celebration and exploration of art-making and socializing in Brooklyn. It is a 48-Hour residency that will culminate in a site-specific group show.
Artists will meet at Camel Art Space for a marathon art-making session, sleep over in the space and exhibit their work the next day. The entire event will take place over a 48-Hour period.
The show will be open to the public for one day only..
Artists will be present at the opening to discuss their work and the process. Photo and video documentation of the art-making event will also be exhibited. Join us for this thrilling and experimental event!
Organized by Julie Torres
Space Over Time • 11/4/11 – 12/11/11
Space Over Time
Oliver Warden, Ziggeraut, 2010, Oil on Canvas, 21″ x 26″
November 4th – December 11th, 2011
Opening reception: November 4th, 6 – 9pm
Open Weekends: 12 – 6pm and by appointment
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue [map]
2nd Friday Art Walk: November 11th & December 9th,2011
“. . .a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community…. A landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature. . . . it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.”
—John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
Space Over Time is an exhibition of artists whose work uses landscape as a means of investigating history. Through practices which oscillate between representation and abstraction, the artists in this exhibition find within landscape not just a place in the present, but also a physical manifestation of historical time, whether that history is geological, political, imaginary, or all of the above.
Artists: Gina Dawson, Lauren Portada, Benjamin Tiven, Oliver Warden, Lauren Warner
Curated by Thomas Marquet
Oliver Warden’s paintings subsume diagrammatic renderings of landscapes into works which are palimpsests of time and place. In his work, multiple cartographies are absorbed into the language of abstract painting. In their layering, his works not only offer the optical present of abstraction, but also literally manifest the accumulation of geological and political history which shapes the world we live in, and by extension, the painting we’re looking at.
Geology, politics, and painting also intersect in the work of Lauren Warner. Her painting begin with the picturesque landscape of the US National Parks system, but subtly upend this idea of nature as “view” by picturing natural phenomena which frustrate our vision and processes which occur so slowly as to appear entirely static. With these images Warner reflects our tendency to imagine nature as a thing to visit and view, but frustrates that desire by offering us images which obscure as much as they reveal.
In Lauren Portada’s works on paper, we see a similar vision of spectacular nature, here deformed and obscured by an invasion of alien forms, instances of abstraction which foreshadow the “invasion” of wild spaces by human agency. These crystalline objects are not only figures within the natural world, but also axes around which spaces are folded and fissures appear, allowing for other places to intersect with these landscapes.
Gina Dawson’s work considers a different invasion of alien forms. In So You Won’t Be Lonely, Dawson takes as her subject the anonymous intervention of the crop circle. Whether the work of misguided land artists or extraterrestrials with poor communication skills, these paradoxically anonymous signatures impart to the landscapes on which they appear a greater significance. Dawson’s cut paper field brings two vernacular sculptural forms together, creating not merely the form of communication, but the very field which makes it possible, hinting at the larger history of which these circles are a part, that of our efforts to communicate with forces greater than ourselves, and the equal parts hope and fear which inform those efforts.
While Benjamin Tiven’s work also addresses interventions in the landscape, it does so to very different ends. In The Delight of the Yearner, the built landscape provides a cross-section of the experience of exile in the 20th century. The site of the Oceanic hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, provides a point of intersection of the lives of the German exile architect Ernst May and the Romanian exile urban planner Erica Mann. The intersection of their histories on this site serves as a point from which to consider the relationship between individual lives and the historical forces which shape them. This is reflected in the photographs of the ground on which the Oceanic hotel once stood, in which Tiven considers the ground itself, creating images in which description and abstraction are mutually entangled.
For all of these artists, the landscape serves not just to address history but also to consider the history of its representation. Whether by conflating geological history with current events, considering the history of our notions of natural beauty, or investigating the ways in which our interventions in the landscape reflect not only the time in which they were made but the history of which they wish to be a part, all these artists access history by considering space over time. – Thomas Marquet
Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current trends in art within a not for profit work frame, is a member of Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk. Situated in one of New York’s artistically defining neighborhoods we strive to provide an accessible exhibition platform and meeting venue for artists, curators and audience alike.
Further info: camelartspace@gmail.com
‘Like’ Camel Art Space on Facebook
Sequence and Seriality • 11/4/11 – 12/11/11
presents:
Nevember 4th – December 11th, 2011
Opening reception: November 4th, 6 – 9pm
Open Weekends: 12 – 6pm and by appointment
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue [map]
2nd Friday Art Walk: November 11th & December 9th,2011
A sequence is an ordered list of objects. Seriality, the quality of succession in a series, a social construct taking form in labels, either imposed or voluntarily adopted.
Camel Art PROJECT Space is pleased to present Sequence and Seriality, an exhibition of drawings, paintings, fiber reliefs and artist books that center around the notion of sequencing and grouping. The selected images can be arranged into linear and non linear narratives, either by line, color, shape or form.
Artists: Carolina Duque, Joshua Goode, Lindsay McCulloch, Sara Pringle, Bartek Walicki
Curated by: Bartek Walicki
Carolina Duque, a New York based painter turned fabric artist, crochets wool and sews cotton felt into off-white wall reliefs. The work, meticulous and focused, deals with issues of motherhood and femininity. The act of weaving, of constructing small sculptures out of thousands of woolen loops is perhaps the clearest example of sequencing. Ordered patterns parallel each other and grow, eventually forming three dimensional objects. Carolina’s work is mostly small. She displays her sculptures attached to walls. They ask to be cared for and viewed up close.
Joshua Goode is an installation artist and printmaker. His ambitious large scale installations, prints and drawings germinate in his small Texas garage. Joshua also makes artist books in his favorite medium, etching. Those, bound with heavy canvas, hand sewn and then painted, tell poignant stories. Small black and white images are grouped into narratives, some clear and other less defined. All of Joshua’s work centers around his disabled sister Sara, her relationship to her family and her presence in Josh’s psychological fabric. The installations made of wood, tar, paper and paint are reminiscent of ancient tombs; homes for the dead, places of familiar comfort. Their interiors are often lined with sequenced monotypes, linked to the larger forms by color and shape. Through his art, Joshua tells his specific mythology.
Lindsay MacCulloch is a painter and printmaker who lives and works in Maryland. Her work is often based on photographs, which she takes on her daily commute to work. The images often depict suburbia devoid of human presence. Lindsay transforms the mundane photographs into powerful and haunting prints and paintings. Her etchings and monotypes, sophisticated in their execution, lend themselves perfectly toward her pictorial goals. Lindsay often displays her work in grid formation or binds her pictures into artist books, creating a visually cohesive narrative.
Sara Pringle paints easel size self portraits in her loft apartment in Brooklyn. In them, she places herself along her cat and a young man, whose image she found on the internet. The figures are in foreground of vast natural settings: mountains, the ocean. Sara has painted this subject matter for over a year now; the need for investigation of the unlikely duo driving her series. Her beautifully painted pictures address the notion of intimacy in a world quickly becoming devoid of one via the society’s attraction to online existence.
Bartek Walicki lives and works in Brooklyn. He makes drawings, prints, dioramas and stop motion animations. The time consuming animations are painted, image by image on walls or canvas. Later the photographed images are assembled into a video file, and when played back, give an illusion of movement. Bartek’s cartoons are made with water colors, ink and markers on small sheets of paper, bound into accordeon style books. Their subject matter can mix sexual fantasies and sophomoric humor with violence. Some groups of images exhibit clear progression of time, other are categorized by content. Overall, Bartek’s art investigates the relationship of invented characters to their immediate surroundings. It takes from popular culture, current events, contemporary and past artists and most of all from his imagination. The depicted stories are often whimsical or absurd but always exhibit keen awareness of the human condition.
Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current trends in art within a not for profit work frame, is a member of Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk. Situated in one of New York’s artistically defining neighborhoods we strive to provide an accessible exhibition platform and meeting venue for artists, curators and audience alike.
Camel Art PROJECT Space is the project wall of Camel Art Space, used for solo projects, impromptu showings and experimental groupings of art work.
Further info at: www.camelartspace.com or contact camelartspace@gmail.com
‘Like’ Camel Art Space on Facebook
LIVE/WORK SPACE • 9/9/11 – 10/16/11
LIVE / WORK SPACE
Round Robin Collective at Camel Art Space
722 Metropolitan Ave., 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11211
September 9 – October 16, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday September 9, 6 – 9pm
Hours: Sat – Sun 12pm – 6pm (or by appointment)
+ additional hours for special events
The Round Robin Collective is pleased to announce the exhibit LIVE / WORK SPACE at Camel Art Space in Williamsburg. Members of the collective will exhibit new collaborative pieces, created with fellow members and invited guests.
Current collective and exhibiting artists include: Mary Billyou, Amanda Browder, Caroline Burghardt, Lisa Caccioppoli, David Coyle, Martin Esteves, Francis Estrada, Jamie Kim, Deirdre McConnell, Katherin McInnis, Christopher Rose, Stephanie Rothenberg, Janos Stone, and Audra Wolowiec.
Expanding the term to include imaginative space, LIVE / WORK SPACE makes visible Round Robin Collective’s productive, shared collaborations. Opening a candid view into the Collective’s work and the contexts in which it has been made, the exhibit features installation, sculpture, paintings, and videos, as well as a library of related texts culled from the artists’ studios. Allowing for conversation and critique, film screenings and informal discussions will be held on current and historical conditions under which artists live and work in New York City. In the spirit of open-ended experimentation, we understand space not as a static site, but as a mutable location with multiple functions. It is also a place of dreaming, doodling, and testing hypotheses.
The Round Robin Collective is a Brooklyn-based group of artists established in 2008 in response to the economic downturn of the art market. Pooling resources, the collective activates existing available spaces and works in all media, fostering a dynamic exchange across disciplines. The collective regularly hosts exhibitions and events, extending the spirit and discourse of the cooperative model to a broader public community. Current projects organized by RRC include Round Robin in Residence a month-long exhibition featuring new works by Collective artists, a limited edition portfolio, artist talks, and video screenings at A.I.R. Gallery in August of 2011 in D.U.M.B.O. Future projects will include Hospitality, an exhibition regarding the figure of the guest, at Arts@Renaissance in the Old Greenpoint Hospital, in January 2012.
As a part of LIVE/WORK SPACE, events will be held at Camel as well as at Microscope Gallery, another alternative space at 4 Charles Place in Bushwick. The schedule of activities is currently (please visit website for updates/changes):
At Camel Art Space:
Friday, Oct 7 – pie party and informal discussion on the recently passed loft law and the history of the NYC Artist-in-Residence program (Mary Billyou, Erin Sickler, & guests TBA)
and on select Saturdays rambling tours of the surrounding neighborhood guided by Mary Billyou, Martin Esteves, and Katherin McInnis.
At Microscope Gallery:
Sunday, September 18 – Phantom Highway, on Robert Moses’ failed project of the Bushwick Expressway (Katherin McInnis)
Sunday, October 2 – screening of Gordon Matta-Clark & Carol Goodden’s FOOD.
For additional details about Round Robin Collective and updates regarding events and future projects visit our website: www.roundrobinbrooklyn.blogspot.com or our Facebook page. We ask that you direct all inquiries to Round Robin Collective at roundrobinbrooklyn@gmail.com. For directions to Camel Art Space, please refer to http://camelartspace.com/ and for Microscope Gallery, http://www.microscopegallery.com/.
Camel Art PROJECT Space: Kerry Law’s Empire States • 7/8/11 – 8/14/11
Camel Art PROJECT Space
presents:
Kerry Law’s • Empire States •
July 8th – August 14th, 2011
Opening Reception: July 8 from 7 – 10pm
Kerry writes on ‘Empire States’;
For years I painted the Empire State Building during the daytime, often with a view through trees. I’d travel throughout the boroughs looking for interesting vantage points. Two years ago I was looking for a new place to live, again traveling throughout the boroughs looking for the right place. When I saw the view from the second floor of my house, I knew that I had found what I was looking for. I have been working on this series for the last year and a half. Each painting is made in one evening from direct observation alla prima. I love the fact that I can paint the same thing every night, and every night it is different. Every night the same, every night different. The colors of the building lights change frequently. In addition, the weather and the color of night are never the same. I look for opportunities to take subtle formal variations. Lately, I have been photographing the finished painting and posting it instantly on Facebook, sharing my experience of this New York icon in real time.
Kerry Law is a New York artist and art teacher. He has had solo shows in the United States and abroad. His paintings are in collections in the United States, Korea and Germany. He has a studio in the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens.
Cordially Yours • 7/8/11 – 8/14/11
Camel Art Space presents:
Cordially Yours
July 8th – August 14th, 2011
Opening reception: July 8th, 7 – 10pm
Open Weekends: 1 – 6pm and by appointment
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue [map]
2nd Friday Art Walk: August 12th, 2011
NEW YORK – As artists, we all wish that our carefully selected portfolios and painstakingly written emails to art galleries may some day be considered, or even looked at.
At Camel Art Space we decided to not only consider every submission we received, but to put our favorites in a group show all their own. We are therefore proud to offer Cordially Yours, a group show of 7 artists selected by Camel Art Space from portfolio submissions received over the past year.
Artists: Tom Engel, Dominik Halmer (Ger.), Monika Malewska, William O’Neill (Ire.), Joey Parlett, Jillian Ross (Can.), Liam Wylie (Can.)
‘Cordially Yours,’ ‘Kind Regards,’ ‘Sincerely Yours,’ ‘Best Regards’…These are the closings to the letters we received for requests to be considered for showing in our exhibition space. Before these endings were written, the writers revealed their hopes and aspirations to be part of an artistic scene of emerging peers. To be selected out of a multitude of artists all vying for that same spot on the wall; to be given an additional stile up the ladder of their artistic careers is every artist’s ambition.
Even though the chance ratio of getting selected by galleries through online submissions is rather slim, it has still undoubtedly become a standard practice for many to keep sending out their work for consideration anyway. At Camel Art Space, we feel it a dutiful part of our programming to look at submissions and try to do something with them. Last year we invited everyone who had sent work for consideration to participate in our group show On the Grid. This year we decided to make a careful selection that amounts to an exhibition of discoveries of national and international emerging talent.
Tom Engel
Tom’s collages are born through a process of shuffling colors, glueing, and tearing paper, the results of which are pictorial simulacra: images appearing as both what they are and what they are not. The balance of forms, created from magazine clippings and found photographs, seems to simultaneously depict a collection of cut paper pieces and a landscape, a sculpture, a portrait photograph, a note left on the table.
His work primarily deals with the illusion of space and the reorganization of structural cues. The arrangement of parts form new structural macrocosms, each of which contains varied traces of the originating source material, as well as the premise for a new whole. Additionally, the interplay of textures, and the pairings of disparate parts, serve to heighten the depth of the work and underscore the deceptiveness of simplistic appearances.
Tom Engel was born in Albany, NY in 1980, received his BFA from SUNY Purchase, NY and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Dominik Halmer
Dominik Halmer deals with one basic question in his work: What is the reason for making a painting? Respectively: How can one deal with the overload of the surrounding world? One approach is to follow the idea of organizing the chaos and imbalance of a world that constantly forces one to act. The painting grows while attempting to explain or depict abstract coherences, processes, situations in life. A vocabulary of symbols and signs is set up.
A second approach puts its focus on the simple, existential wish to fortify ones own being in the world. The painting looks for a strong pictorial presence that is meant to be a real part of the world itself instead of just being a reference to reality. Thereby Halmers permanent concern is to highlight the active and projective aspect of perception. Revealing how strongly perception and meaning in general are dependent on conventions and education, he urges the viewer to make individual evaluations and to create sense in an active process. (Antonia Faber)
Dominik Halmer was born in 1978 in Munich Germany, studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf and Vienna and lives and works currently in Berlin, were he directs Bureau Adelbert, an artist operated exhibition space.
Monika Malewska
Monika’s recent series of paintings consists of large scale watercolors on paper depicting various wreath-like arrangements made of bacon. Most of them are symmetrical and somewhat reminiscent of the Rorschach ink blot test. She combines the formal elegance of design with the recognizable banality of bacon, along with the surreal and absurd accompaniment of other decorative elements such as flowers, butterflies, and fruits. The arrangements are playful and whimsical in a rococo fashion but also grotesque. Her not-so-still still-lifes, are drawing subtle parallels between the decadence and frivolity evident in certain historical genres and our contemporary culture.
Monika Malewska was born in Warsaw Poland. She received her BFA degree from the University of Manitoba in Canada and her MFA degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
William O’Neill
William’s work is about painting symmetrical and geometrical forms. Compositions are carefully considered, typically they incorporate themes of architecture and straight-lined objects. At times he utilizes collage-making techniques to create his own compositions and in others works simply unaltered photographs are portrayed. Throughout O’Neill displays his underlying concern with accuracy and rigidity in the finished work. The austere approach portrays a different sense of security and intimacy between indoor and outdoor spaces. More recently some of his paintings use urban settings as a focal point with an underlying theme of transport.
Wiliam O’Neil received his BA in Fine Art Painting, N.C.A.D. and lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.
Joey Parlett
Joey’s drawings close the perceived divide between Fine Arts and Illustration. His seemingly immaculate technical approach, following a preconceived serial concept, allows for a world of refinement.
Joey says himself:
“I draw with simple materials—an average office gel pen or traditional quill pen and ink—which allows me a quick, direct approach when exploring ideas, and clearly displays the thought and work that goes into each image. I believe it’s important to show my process—the viewer should be able to see how the images are constructed, including the inevitable mistakes and experiments that comprise my creative thinking.
The drawings shown here at Camel Art Space are part of an ongoing series based on photographs of various NASA missions and scientific research about space. Each piece was created with an average office gel pen.”
Joey was born in Ohio in 1982 and studied at Kent State University in Kent OH. He currently lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Jillian Ross
The series of video works in this exhibition examines the unclear boundary between physicality and virtuality; as the files are brought from one format to another, information is lost in the saving and compression of images, and the files disintegrate as their source code is disrupted.
Jillian Ross recently graduated with her BFA from the Drawing and Painting program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Toronto and co-directs the online 3D art gallery Barmecidal Projects.
Liam Wylie
Liam’s art explores the convergence of contemporary science and ancient myth in the attempt to apprehend what we cannot articulate within the core dilemma claimed by the role of the visual artist in representing the unrepresentable.
Erik Davis wrote in his book TechGnosis that we are a “hypertechnological and cynically postmodern culture seemingly drawn like a passel of moths toward the guttering flames of the premodern mind”. Taking cue from this statement, Liam’s sculptural work investigates a speculative future-past at the permeable boundaries between nature and technology, belief and science, myth and machine. He exercises an imaginative realm once reserved for parable and fable.
Liam was born in Ottawa in 1989. He received his BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University and he currently lives and works in Toronto.
Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current issues in art within a not for profit work frame, is a member of Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk. Situated in one of New York’s artistically richest neighborhoods we strive to provide an accessible exhibition platform and meeting venue for artists, curators and audience alike.
Further info at: www.camelartspace.com or contact camelartspace@gmail.com
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Book release of •Flood Letters• by Karin Gottshall – 4/22/11
722 Metropolitan Avenue, 2nd Floor
Brooklyn NY 11211
Argos Books is pleased to announce the release of Flood Letters by Karin Gottshall
Please come and celebrate with us on the evening of Friday, April 22nd at 7pm
At Camel Art Space (722 Metropolitan Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Readings by Karin Gottshall and Claire Hero, recent winner of Tarpaulin Sky’s chapbook contest!
Karin Gottshall is the author of Crocus (Fordham University Press, 2007). Her recent work has
appeared in FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and in the online journals La Petite Zine
and Memorious. A native of Michigan, Gottshall now lives in Vermont and teaches poetry at Middlebury
College.
“Karin Gottshall’s poems are compelling invitations to an interior landscape that feels
relentlessly surprising. Her poems contain an attention to melancholy that’s startling for
its loveliness; here the darkness is tender if unsettling, and the observations feel vital
and new.”
–Allison Titus
Claire Hero is the author of Sing, Mongrel and three chapbooks: Cabinet, afterpastures, winner of the
2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, and Dollyland, forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky. Her poems
have recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Handsome, Bone Bouquet, and are forthcoming from
Columbia Poetry Review. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at SUNY – New Paltz.
Restore Defaults • 3/25/11 – 5/1/11
Camel Art Space presents:
• Restore Defaults •
March 25 – May 1, 2011
Weekends only: 12 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday, March 25, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11237
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
2nd Friday Art Walk: March 25 & April 8, Performances by Nathan Davis starting at 7:30pm
Restore Defaults is an exhibition of artists who use elements already of interest in the world as a starting point for their art. Rather than seeking to disguise or destroy these beginnings, they embrace and emphasize their role in the process of creation.
Works by: Hilary A. Baldwin & Matthew Ward • Nathan Davis • Jenny Drumgoole • Calvin Lee • Wacdesignstudio
Curated by: Carl Gunhouse & Thomas Marquet
The default settings in software are the norms that programmers set as a starting point for users. These defaults determine not only how the program will work, but perhaps more importantly, how the user will interact with it. The preexisting settings that create a working context for artists are the basis for the artworks in Restore Defaults. These works, like all creative efforts, find their origin within a larger social context, be it highway systems, cooking shows, computers, or consumer goods. However, rather than taking these contexts for granted, these works focus our attention on those things that have been so long in our field of vision that we no longer see them.
Hilary A. Baldwin and Matthew Ward are both from Brookline, MA, and both studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Collaborators since childhood, Matthew and Hilary explore a wide range of art historical contexts, appropriating ideas and imagery from Abstract Expressionism to B-movies. “Together,” they say, “We inhabit these genres, which we know only through histories. We simultaneously celebrate and satirize their austerity via our responsibilities to each other as collaborators.”
Inspired by natural processes and acoustic phenomena, composer and percussionist Nathan Davis makes music that elucidates essential characters of instruments and the fragile athleticism of playing them. He has received commissions from the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Calder String Quartet, the Ojai Festival, and received awards from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, and ASCAP. Nathan’s music has also been programmed at NYC’s Carnegie Hall and Merkin Hall, and in concerts and festivals around the world. Recordings include his electroacoustic percussion cd Memory Spaces and a forthcoming longplay from ICE.
On March 25th, Nathan will be giving an intimate performance of his pieces Crawlspace and Diving Bell, right off the recent debut of his composition Bells at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, which the New York Times described as an “alluring … pensive musical experience.”
On April 8th Nathan will be joined by fellow International Contemporary Ensemble member Joshua Rubin and they will be providing a taste of what the New York Times described as no less than “the most adventurous and accomplished groups in new music.”
Jenny Drumgoole is a Philadelphia-based multimedia artist who incorporates video and performance into extradisciplinary actions inserted into the public domain. Her most recent video-based performance work involves the artist physically and virtually infiltrating competitive events with subversive art actions which question our obsessions with celebrity, desire, and the limits and illusions of individuality in popular culture. Drumgoole received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2006. Her work has been shown at the IFC Center in New York, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, The Center for Contemporary Art in Israel, the Figge von Rosen Gallery in Germany.
Calvin Lee is a conceptual-based photographer from Boston, MA. He received an MFA in photograph & media from California Institute of the Arts in 2009; and a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA in 2007. His work combines conceptual strategies to explore the connectivity of images, the repression within representation, and the visual semiotics of an image through metonymy and metaphor. Through his analytical, personal, and experimental practice, his work deals with multiple theory based discourses in conversation that question technology, culture, representation, and language. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
wacdesignstudio is an independent design studio based in Houston, Texas founded in 2009 by Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright. Their focus is on the discourse of contemporary art and its relationship to design and architecture.
Camel Art Space is an Artist operated exhibition Space with a focus on current issues in art within a not for profit work frame, is an affiliate member of the Williamsburg Gallery Association and is participating in 2:nd Friday Art Walk.
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Get on the Block • 5/13 – 6/12/2011
Camel Art Space presents:
• Get on the Block •
image: Travis LeRoy Southworth, The Growing Metaphysical Void at the Center of My Bedroom Ceiling, 2010, spit wads from magazine ads, dims vary
May 13 – June 12, 2011
Weekends only: 12 – 6 pm or by appointment
Opening reception: Friday May 13, 6 – 9 p.m.
Location: 722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211
Directions: L – train to Graham Avenue
2:nd Friday Art Walk: May 12 & June 10
Works by: Julianne Ahn • Alex Paik • Matt Phillips • Travis LeRoy Southworth • Liz Zanis
Curated by: Lauren VHS
The works in Get on the Block explore social and self-conscious anxieties and motivations
surrounding art production and exhibition. Through sincere humor, humility and coy absurdity, these
artists confront what critic Jan Verwoert has termed “the pressure to perform,” the expectation and
demand that artists and cultural producers present only absolute, correct assertions with the “genius-
like” promise of positive results. In contrast, these works offer open-ended proposals or temporary
conclusions, rendering suspect the desire and criteria for defining success or failure.
Suspicious of their assumed positions as key-holders to a romantic, isolated world of the studio, the
artists in the exhibition both embrace and push against the problematic of this rarified space. Jubilance
and serendipity direct Alex Paik‘s skewed, hyper-saturated geometric cut paper drawings and reliefs,
nuanced by a pointed fixation on rudimentary elements. A similar upheaval of and reverence for
formalism is conveyed in Matt Phillips‘ paintings, as picture-making rules are shattered and refracted,
alluding at once to physics, psychedelia and high modernism.
Autobiographic works consider the conditions for their creation and the artist’s interior life as a similar
workspace, exposing the labor of production as an intrinsic result of their everyday experience. Liz
Zanis‘ miniature facsimiles of commonplace objects such as wrapped floral bouquets, train tickets
and phone books reflect upon and speak to anxieties surrounding personal and public exchange and
perception. Julianne Ahn‘s labor and time intensive works reference the intimate mania of art making
and domestic life, as dirty laundry and the grid appear as equals in a hierarchy of categorical terms,
the physical minutia of one realm is allowed to populate the other. Emulating the work of work, Travis
LeRoy Southworth‘s spit-wad accumulations embody a constant churning of thoughts and desire for
action, ruminating at once on where to begin and what could determine an end.
If the idea of the studio distinguishes a place for art-work, or production with the goal of display, then
viewing one’s labor as play becomes a radical gesture. Subverting the anticipation of the artist as
authority and reconsidering the definitions of emotional, intellectual and physical boundaries in the
context of object-making, these works fuse these spaces to propose a more unified and fluid concept
of production.
For additional information contact Lauren van Haaften-Schick: Lauren@LaurenVHS.com
Camel Art Space @ Fountain Art Fair • 3/4/11 – 3/6/11
Camel Art Space @ Fountain Art Fair NY 2011
Pier 66 Maritime
26th Street & 12th Avenue in the Hudson River Park
BOOTH # Mini 3
March 3: Preview & VIP, 12 noon – 6pm
March 4 & 5: 12 noon – 12 midnight
March 6: 12pm – 6pm
NEW YORK – Camel Art Space is pleased announce its participation in Fountain Art Fair 2011,
featuring artists: Gina Dawson, Rob de Oude, Enrico Gomez, Carl Gunhouse, Reid Hitt, James Isherwood, Peter Lapsley, Tom Marquet, Chris McGee, Keri Oldham, Lauren Portada, Christine Rogers, Elisa Velazquez.
Camel Art Space is an Artist Operated exhibition space and collective established to create opportunities for artists and curators. Started in 2009, Camel Art Space has become a bedrock for emerging artists in the East Williamsburg and Brooklyn community. An artist studio facility, exhibition space and collective rolled into one, Camel Art Space presents 10 plus exhibitions a year curated by its members, independent artists and outside curators. A primer space for experimental work, Camel has become renowned for its abundance of artists and exhibitions centered on contemporary curatorial practice. Camel Art Space was named by New York Magazine as one of the City’s 2010 new galleries to watch, as well as featured by Flavorpill, ArtForum, and L Magazine.
Camel Art Space
722 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY.
Hours: Open weekends 12-6pm or by appointment
For additional information:
camelartspace@gmail.com
www.camelartspace.com
