www.parallelartspace.com

Thanks everyone for your support, participation and attendance.

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!

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

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)

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.

Camel Art Space presents: Narrative Ability

Ted Partin, Mountaindale IV, 2010

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

Further info at: www.camelartspace.com or contact camelartspace@gmail.com

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]

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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
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