Recess Activities, Inc. Presents Spirit Tours 11, a project by Dave Hardy & Siebren Versteeg.

Dave Hardy and Siebren Versteeg will begin two months of work at Recess, entitled Spirit Tours 11. The artists collaborated as Spirit Tours for the first time in the summer of 2004. In summer 2010, Hardy and Versteeg will continue dictating the future.

Recess invites resident artists to use its storefront as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation; under Hardy and Versteeg’s direction, Recess will become the site of an ongoing sculptural event. Since its inception, the project has evolved to investigate the notion of the journey, a fancy that continues to disappear from a contemporary experience that creates a demand for and delivers immediacy and consumption. At Recess, Spirit Tours 11 will generate what the artists call a “bootleg transformative experience” that takes cues from the gray-market economy in full swing a block away on Canal Street.

Versteeg and Hardy’s residency will begin with a virtual tarot card reading with predictions emanating from an oversized skull. Yes, that’s right. Premonitions that come from the readings will shape the project for the rest of the summer.

About the Artists Siebren Versteeg received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the School of Visual Arts, New York. Selected solo exhibitions include the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Max Protetch Gallery, New York. His work has been exhibited in group shows at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, DC, the Contemporary Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, the National Museum of Art in the Czech Republic and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Versteeg lives and works in New York. Dave Hardy received a BFA from Brown University and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Solo exhibitions include Art in General, New York; La Mama Galleria, New York, and Southern Exposure, San Francisco. His work has been included in group exhibitions in New York at PS1, the Sculpture Center and Jack Shainman Gallery. Dave Hardy lives and works in Brooklyn.