PURPLE STATES
curated by Sam Gordon
PURPLE STATES continues the investigation of the space between “insider” and “outsider” within a unique installation. PURPLE STATES is a term for states that are neither red nor blue and have begun to merge.
Including: Adolf Wölfli & Raymond Pettibon, Agatha Wojciechowsky & Brian Adam Douglas, Andrea Joyce Heimer & John Lurie, Anonymous Boro & Cheryl Donegan, Brent Green & William Kentridge, Dan Miller & Scott Reeder, Emery Blagdon & Steve DiBenedetto, Forrest Bess & Tony Cox, Gee's Bend & Sabrina Gschwandtner, Guo Fengyi & Lorenzo De Los Angeles, Henry Darger & Paul Chan, Howard Finster & Elisabeth Kley, James Castle & Chuck Webster, Judith Scott & Josh Blackwell, Katherine Bernhardt/Youssef Jdia & The Magic Flying Carpets, Korwa & Brion Gysin, Lonnie Holley & Lizzi Bougatsos, Mario del Curto/Richard Greaves & Beverly Buchanan, Morton Bartlett & Gina Beavers, Sister Corita & John Giorno, Susan Te Kahurangi King & Peter Saul, Tantra & Richard Tuttle, Thornton Dial & Lucky DeBellevue, William Copley & Brian Belott
LISTEN TO THE ZEITGEIST & THE EXISTING CONNECTIONS & SEE THE RIGHTEOUS NETWORKS IN EXISTENCE & VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF PULLING FROM THE PERIMETER TO THE CENTER & ART BRUT & DANCE & POETRY & TEXTILES & CERAMICS & PAIRINGS & PARTNERS & COUPLINGS & COLLABORATIONS & JUXTAPOSITIONS & MOVING BEYOND LOOK-ALIKE COMPARISONS IN MANY VARIATIONS & CONCURRENT PRACTICES TAPPED FROM SAME CHRONOLOGICAL COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS & DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES DRAWING FROM THE SAME WELL & LITERALLY COMING TOGETHER TO CREATE NEW LIFE OR A PAINTING OR A RECORDING OR A SITUATION & HUSBAND & WIFE & HUSBAND & HUSBAND & WIFE & WIFE & VISIONARY TEXTS & INTERNET MANIFESTOS & SHAKERS & QUAKERS & VALERIE SOLANAS & TED KACZYNSKI & GEORGE BUSH PAINTING & SANDY DESTROYED SISTER CORITAS & TOP OR BOTTOM & IN BETWEEN & SIDE BY SIDE & A CORE SAMPLE OR A CROSS SECTION & A RANGE OF POSSIBILITIES FROM THE FIGURATIVE TO THE ABSTRACT & BACK AGAIN & SAMPLING OF A RELATIONSHIP THAT INFORMS BOTH WAYS & RECENTLY IN THE AIR LIKE WHEN THE STARS BEGIN TO FALL (THOMAS LAX) & MINGEI: ARE YOU HERE? (NICOLAS TREMBLEY) & MACHO MAN, TELL IT TO MY HEART (JULIE AULT) & WHEN HUDSON HAD A HAND IN PARALLEL VISIONS TOO YEARS AGO & JANE KALLIR NOT SURE WHAT THEY WERE LOOKING FOR BUT KNEW IT WHEN THEY SAW IT & JEAN DUBUFFET & ANDRE BRETON & PARIS IS BURNING & HANS PRINZHORN & LEE GODIE SELLING HER WARES ON THE STEPS OF THE ART INSTITUTE & RAY JOHNSON AS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN INSIDE & OUT & LAST CALL FOR ECCENTRIC RECLUSES & ELABORATE FANTASY WORLDS & WESLEY WILLIS HEADBUTTS & UPSIDE DOWN & INSIDE OUT (EXCERPT)
Cafe Dancer Pop-Up
curated by Sam Gordon
Jessie Gold and Elizabeth Hart collaborate to transform the gallery's reception area into a Cafe Dancer satellite titled Gone Fishin’, activated for the opening night and 2 more evenings of events. Serving tequila sunrises and margaritas inspired by the songs of The Eagles and Jimmy Buffett, the bar exists inside the gallery within the exhibition. Established in 2013 by Gold and Hart, Cafe Dancer at 96 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side is an artist-run space collaborating with musicians, dancers, and visual artists.
Echoing the Naomi Fisher mural that runs the length of the Frank Benson-designed bar on Orchard, a loose checkerboard line of works by artists who have worked with Cafe Dancer will be featured along the long corridor of the gallery. Including: Lucky DeBellevue, Naomi Fisher, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Fowler/Gordon, Frank Haines, Marc Hundley, Corinne Jones, Sadie Laska, Sara Magenheimer, Michael Mahalchick, Mary Manning, Arley Marks, Robbie McDonald, Monique Mouton, and Jacob Robichaux.
Contemporary Dancing began as a conversation between Sam Gordon and Jessie Gold and became a Pop-Up bar with a 3-day program of 45 participants performing dance throughout the duration of NADA New York 2013. The results of this endeavor have been compiled into a one-hour documentary, which will be screened on the hour with narration by Cassie Mey of the New York Public Library and music by Jealous Orgasm.
Including: AUNTS with Maggie Bennett, Addys Gonzalez, Stacy Grossfield, Larissa Velez- Jackson, Jen Rosenblit, Mariana Valencia, Arturo Vidich; Brittany Bailey with Bryce Hackford; Megha Barbabas with Wayne Tucker; Biba Bell with Tyler Ashley and Nicole Daunic; Rebecca Brooks with Ursula Eagly, Bessie McDonough- Thayer, and Emily Wexler; Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen with Eun Mi Yeo and Emily Wong; Walter Dundervill with Tyler Ashley, Benjamin Asriel, Rebecca Brooks, Jennifer Kjos, Kevin Lovelady, Athena Malloy, and Sarah Perron; Stanley Love Performance Group with John Beilecki, Stephanie Dixon, Adam Dugas, Ivy Elrod, Lauri Hogan, Shizu Homma, Jonathon Love, Julie Ramirez, Ashley Steele, and Leila Zimbel; Michael Mahalchick; Cassie Mey; robbinschilds; Jealous Orgasm; Flora Weigmann; and Greg Zuccolo.
Two evenings of events will compliment the exhibition: Contemporary Poetry Too, with NADA & BOMB, on July 10th, and Screening & Performances, on July 24th.
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Contemporary Poetry Too
Curated by Sam Gordon
Presented in collaboration with NADA & BOMB
Thursday, July 10th, 6 – 8 pm
You sent me on a secret mission every night.
And there was a beautiful gash on your cheek.
⎯ Excerpt from “You Were Lost in the Delta Quadrant,” by Bianca Stone.
For Contemporary Poetry, a marathon reading at NADA New York on May 10th, 2014, Sam Gordon invited Rachel Foullon to create a floral arrangement inspired by the program. Foullon selected a couple lines of Bianca Stone’s poetry and invited Louise Sheldon to collaborate with her to produce a living sculpture, which serves as the announcement for Contemporary Poetry Too. A new bouquet will be created for this evening, which will also mark the launch of a podcast featuring the program hosted by BOMB magazine along with portraits of the participants by Mariah Robertson.
Forming a kind of postscript to the marathon reading at NADA, the group of writers gathered here are composed of those who were not able to make it to NADA and those who had inquired about re-imagining the traditional platform of a reading by presenting video projection, performance, and ‘poetry in the expanded field’, so to speak.
In this, Contemporary Poetry Too is not necessarily a sequel but rather a remix of the classic ‘one microphone, one speaker’ model of the original reading at NADA. This experimental evening will continue the ongoing inquiry into the poet as artist. Poets are employing the tropes of performance and video art within their texts⎯ their language⎯ in order to open a new territory for art. In finding and using text in many variations, poets are increasingly crossing into the traditional precincts of visual art to their own advantage.
Including: Alan Longino, Alina Gregorian, Angelo Nikolopoulos, Bianca Stone, Emily Skillings, Greg Purcell, Ishmael Klein, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Jess Arndt, Juliana Huxtable, not_I (Ana Božiĉević & Sophia Le Fraga), Paul Legault, Sampson Starkweather, Simone Kearny, Stephen Boyer, Willa Carroll, Zachary Pace.
Special guest DJs: S&M (Shannon Michael Cane & Matt Conners)
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Magic Flying Carpets of the Berber Kingdom of Morocco
Katherine Bernhardt & Youssef Jdia present a pop-up souk
Thursday, July 17th, 12 – 6 pm
The artist Katherine Bernhardt met the Berber Youssef Jdia while travelling in Morocco. It didn’t take long for her to fall in love with both Youssef and the carpets he sold. Katherine’s studio in New York, located just a few blocks from the apartment she shares with Youssef and their son Khalifa, is piled high with carpets and filled with paintings that Katherine and Youssef have recently begun making together. I first discovered the Magic Flying Carpets from the Berber Kingdom of Morocco at the Armory Show, where CANADA covered the floor of their booth with rugs⎯it was love at first sight for me as well.
Katherine's obsession with the carpets quickly seeped into her paintings; the patterns and wild color combinations making complete sense with her earlier raw and loose portraits of models torn from magazines for which she was already well recognized. For a solo show at CANADA, Katherine transformed the gallery into a souk, and has since continued to hold roving pop-up souks in New York⎯at various galleries including Feature Inc.; in projects organized by Jeanne Greenberg and Clarissa Dalrymple; and in Los Angeles, at the Pacific Design Center and at International Art Objects.
Katherine and Youssef travel throughout Morocco to collect these unique rugs. Katherine curates them in accordance with her own aesthetic, while Youssef's well-informed eye for carpets⎯self-trained after years of experience⎯offers a different perspective; combined, their take is at once ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’.
In addition to supporting the predominantly female laborers who create the rugs, Katherine and Youssef’s mission is to spur production and keep the vital weaving traditions of these rural women alive. The carpets are handmade by both Berber ‘cave’ women and nomads in tents, using hand-spun wool from their own sheep and recycled clothing from their respective families. These rugs can be read like hieroglyphics. The many symbols to be found within the weavings range from tents, tangines, and mountains to ‘evil eye’ repellents. There are also references to vaginal and birthing shapes, as well as abstract designs and painterly compositions. In terms of style, the carpets range from the traditional ‘Beni Ouarain-style’ (mostly white and cream-colored) to the contemporary ‘boucherouites’ or rag rugs; there are even some titled ‘Picasso-style’ for their visual connections to the artist’s cubist and abstract phases.
Please join us for a very special pop-up souk that will take over the gallery, spread onto the street and provide visitors the opportunity to learn more about Magic Flying Carpets from the Berber Kingdom of Morocco.
⎯ Sam Gordon
Youssef Jdia was born in Erfoud, Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara desert in North Africa. He doesn’t know his real age or birthday, as there are no written records of it. He grew up with nine brothers and sisters, and never went to school. He started working as a mechanic around the age of eight, after which he became a tour guide in the Sahara desert. At age twenty, he left Erfoud (to evade an arranged marriage) and moved to the surfer town of Essaouira to work at The Maison Berbere selling carpets.
Katherine Bernhardt was born in Missouri in 1975. She is an internationally exhibited artist represented by CANADA Gallery. Notable group exhibitions include: Material, curated by Duro Olawu, Salon 94, New York (2012), Katherine Bernhardt, Alfred Jensen, Chris Johanson, Chris Martin, Andrew Masullo, Judith Scott, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York (2011), and New York Minute, curated by Kathy Grayson, Macro Future Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome and The Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009, 2011). She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE: SCREENINGS & PERFORMANCES
curated by Sam Gordon
THURSDAY, JULY 24th:
Andrew Edlin Gallery
134 Tenth Avenue, 6 – 8 pm
Cafe Dancer
96 Orchard Street 8 – 10 pm
Please join us for a special evening of short films selected by Mary Manning, interspersed with performances from Brian Belott, Joe Heffernan, and Dean Spunt together with Beth Houfek and Jacob Robichaux.
The photographer Mary Manning recently held a solo exhibition at Jackie Klempay Gallery in Bushwick and curated a film program in conjunction with her show at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. She continues to share her interest in early experimental film and vintage archives, presenting three shorts sourced from Youtube: Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor by Trisha Brown⎯video shot by Jonathan Demme; From an Island Summer by Charles Atlas featuring Karole Armitage; and Blue Monday by New Order⎯video shot by William Wegman.
Brian Belott is a multidisciplinary powerhouse, whose work is included in the Purple States show⎯in a pairing with William Copley⎯as well as in numerous current summer shows including Don’t Look Now at Zach Feuer curated by 247325. Belott recently performed at Rachel Uffner Gallery, presenting a mix of experimental sound and song along with absurdist and abstract narratives. For this evening, among other actions, he will present his infamous frozen paintings made from a range of materials in his freezer at home.
Joe Heffernan is a classically trained musician and experimental artist who performed with HARIBO and SADAF during Performa 13 and has collaborated with Juliana Huxtable on performances for White Columns and Artist Space. Heffernan has composed works including a Chamber Symphony for the International Contemporary Ensemble during their residency at Columbia College Chicago. A two-time alumnus of the Brevard Music Center, Heffernan has orchestrated for wind symphony and symphony orchestra. Taking a hiatus as touring drummer, his focus now is on music theory and composition for the piano.
Jacob Robichaux is represented by American Contemporary and has recently performed at the Mandrake in LA in 2012 and at Cafe Dancer in 2013. Exploring the space of the art bar, Robichaux pulls together collaborators to engage in short interventions incorporating play, magic, and accidents. For Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, Robichaux will present a performance in collaboration with Beth Houfek, Dean Spunt, and Hank Hanstad.
Dean Spunt is primarily known as a musician from his work with the band No Age who have toured internationally. Recently he began a conversation with Robichaux and Beth Houfek and together they will debut an experimental percussion-based performance.