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

www.camelartspace.com

www.nycweareone.org

Photos of the event:

[link]

[link]

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

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

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 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
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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)

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/.

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.

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
‘Like’ Camel Art Space on Facebook

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.

Camel Art Space presents:

• Restore Defaults •

image: Calvin Lee, Macbook Pro Spectrum Screen Safer, 2010

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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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