London Biennale NYC Satellite Event
Christopher Henry Gallery
127 Elizabeth Street, at Broome, 212-244-6004
East Village / Lower East Side
August 5 - September 1, 2010
Web Site
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday (11-6) and Monday by appointment.
Curated by: Inbred Hybrid Collective
Featured artists: Michele Brody, Walt Cessna, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Scooter LaForge, Max Carlos Martinez, Rob Roth, Smith & Lowles, Reynolds Tenazas, and Lili White
ABOUT THE EVENT:
The London Biennale was founded in 1998 by David Medalla. It has evolved into an artist community loosely based around London and the biennial events that take place there. Totaling over 300 artists around the world, the Biennale organization is not restricted to London, playing an active part in international events. Linking Satellite Events to the London Biennale was conceived by Adam Nankervis, the founder and director of MUSEUM MAN. During London Biennale 2010 Satellite Events have taken place or will take place in Rome on the Pincio Garden, organised by Raffaella Losapio of GalleryStudioRA; in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, organised by Adam Nankervis; in the Social Hall of the Philippine Embassy at Washington, D.C., organised by Marvin de la Cruz Santos; in Las Vegas, organised by Jevijoe Vitug; in Madrid, organised by Filippos Tsitsopoulos; in Prague, organised by Arjan Kok and Julia Drouhin; in San Francisco, organised by Chelsea Wilks and John Dugger; and in Boston, organised by Mary Sherman and Trans-Cultural Exchange (plus many more)
For more info, please log into the London Biennale Page in Facebook.
The London Biennale NYC Satellite Event is conceived and curated by Inbred Hybrid Collective in conversation with David Medalla as a way to bring the themes and experiences of the London Biennale into a more primary context for New York’s artistic community, hi-lighting the strengths of individual artists while promoting the virtues of art without borders. While this event is not medium-specific, the diversity of the work demonstrates the needs of artists to excel beyond expectation in manifesting positive changes in the world with which they have been presented. We are very grateful for the opportunity to work with an internationally cohesive enterprise such as the London Biennale and wish to thank all of the artists involved in this show whose work represents the best of the trans-Atlantic artistic community in NYC. This exhibition would not be possible without the generous support of Christopher Henry Gallery.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:
Michele Brody:
Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1967, Michele Brody received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. Utilizing her strong background in the liberal arts, she creates site-specific, mixed media installations and works of public art that are generated by the history, culture, environment, and architecture of a wide range of exhibition spaces. While living and working in such places as France, Costa Rica, California, the Midwest, Germany, and her home of New York, her art career has developed into a process of working in collaboration with each new community as a means towards developing an interpretation of the sense of a place as an outsider looking in.
Michele Brody has had one-person shows at the Temple Judea Museum in Elkins Park, PA, Chashama, in NYC, Littlejohn Contemporary in NYC, Dina4 Projekte in Munich, Germany, the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo in San Jose, Costa Rica, and at Le Quai de la Batterie, Atelier-galerie d’Art Contemporain in Arras, France.
She has been the recipient of grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pollock/ Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts’ Architecture, Planning & Design Program; and, residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and at Marywood University.
In the spring of 2006 she completed two major permanent public art installations in The Bronx. They consist of a series of faceted glass windscreens for an elevated train platform with the MTA Arts for Transit program, and a hand painted tile mural for a new school through the Public Art for Public Schools program. She has also installed a uniquely designed manhole cover in the sidewalk of Wall Street in commemoration of the Assay Office that once stood at 30 Wall Street.
Walt Cessna:
Is a photographer/writer living in NYC. He spent almost 30 years working as a fashion designer, editor & stylist for publications like The Village Voice, Interview, Elle & Details. For the past 4 years he has been showing his artwork & performing spoken word in NYC, San Francisco & Berlin, Germany. Inspired by Russ Meyer, Thierry Mugler, Diane Arbus & Andy Warhol, Cessna specializes mostly in portraits and still life’s taken on the street, His piece for the Biennale consists of a triptych featuring two large collages each book-ending a large print of the downtown performance artist Nicholas Gorham. Check out more of his work at
Michelle Handelman:
Michelle Handelman makes confrontational works that explore the sublime in its various forms of excess and nothingness. Starting out as a photographer with a series of haunting self-portraits, she has developed a body of work that incorporates video, performance photography, and various forms of digital media. Her videos haves screened internationally including Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; American Film Institute; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley and her performances have been featured at Performa 05, the first biennial of visual performance, NYC; Exit Art, NYC; 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC; Participant, Inc., NYC and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent projects include Dorian, a cinematic perfume (Participant, Inc 2009; MIT List Visual Arts Center 2010); The Laughing Lounge (Performa 05 curated by Roselee Goldberg); This Delicate Monster (touring); Passerby commissioned for the show public.exe: Public Execution curated by Anne Ellegood and Michele Thursz; and DJ Spooky vs. WebSpinstress M an animated collaboration with Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
In the mid 90s Handelman directed the feature documentary BloodSisters, an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene that has just been re-released by the Tribeca Film Institute. Before moving to New York in 1999 Handelman collaborated for many years with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene in San Francisco. Their explicit film Catscan broke into the art world through a series of guerrilla actions where Handelman and Cazazza commandeered the projector during many of the city’s anti-censorship rallies. Together they built several bodies of work including The Torture Series, the video short Hope (1995 Sony Visions Award); the co-authored The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind published in Apocalypse Culture 2, Feral House Press. Her fiction and critical writing appears in Inappropriate Behaviour (Serpents Tail, London 2001); Coming Up: the World’s Best Erotic Writing edited by Michael Perkins (Kasak Books, NY 1995), and Herotica 3 edited by Susie Bright (Plume Books, SF 1994) well as several periodicals. She lives in New York and is an associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.
http://www.michellehandelman.com/
John Kelly:John Kelly is a performance and visual artist. Performance works have been performed at The Tate Modern, The Kitchen, PS 1, The Warhol Museum, the Whitney Biennial, Dance Theater Workshop, The Sundance Theatre Lab, The Drawing Center, LaMaMa ETC, Creative Time, Performance Space 122, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.
As a visual artist he has exhibited at Alexander Gray Associates; The New Museum for Contemporary Art; PS 1; MIT List Visual Art Center; Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Art In General; Momenta Arts; The Kitchen; The American Academy in Rome; FotoGrafia-Festival Internazionale di Roma; MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; Biagiotti Progetto Arte; the Saratoga Art Museum; and Harvard University.
Awards and Fellowships include: 2 Bessie Awards; 2 Obie Awards; 2 NEA American Masterpiece Awards; the American Choreographer Award; a CalArts Alpert Award; a Visual AIDS Vanguard Award; the 2010 Ethyl Eichelberger Award. Fellowships include: The American Academy in Rome; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; The Civitella Ranieri Foundation; The Sundance Institute Theatre Program; The Guggenheim Foundation; and Art Matters, Inc. Writing includes ‘JOHN KELLY’, a visual autobiography, published by the 2wice Arts Foundation; essays for Movement Research Journal, Movement Rrsearch Journal; Inside Arts.
As a singer he performed solo vocal recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall; ‘Paved Paradise’, his homage to the music of Joni Mitchell, was given a performance for Ms. Mitchell at Fez in 1998, and was the opening act for Natalie Merchant’s ‘Ophelia’ tour. Collaborations with composer David Del Tredici, Laurie Anderson (‘Life On A String’); Jazz Passengers (‘Jazz Passengers In Love’), Antony and The Johnsons, Dudley Saunders,and Carol Lipnik.
Acting credits include the role of the opera singer Bartell D’Arcy (in a cast led by Christopher Walken) in the original Broadway production of ‘James Joyce’s The Dead’; the title role (Spencer Reese) in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, a 2010 film by James Franco; received an Elliot Norton Award in Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ (directed by Neil Bartlett at A.R.T., Cambridge); created the dual roles of Jon/Persophene in Rinde Eckert’s ‘Orpheus X’, directed by Robert Wooduff, (A.R.T.).
http://www.johnkellyperformance.org
Scooter LaForge:
After receiving his painting degree at the University of Arizona, Scooter LaForge became legendary in the art scene in San Francisco. Having built up an impressive painting career in San Francisco, he packed up his bags and moved to New York City.
Scooter lives and paints in his art studio in Manhattan’s famous East Village.
He has shown at numerous galleries around the Big Apple, such at Exit Art, Wooster Projects and White Columns to name a few. Recently, he has been selected to attend a fellowship at World Famous Cooper Union beginning this summer.
Also his paintings will be shown at Scope Art Fair, Hamptons.
Scooter’s paintings are permanently on display at Antoine Proulx Showroom in Phoenix, AZ
http://www.antoineproulx.com/scooter.html
as well as San Angel Folk Art Gallery in San Antonio, TX
http://www.sanangelfolkart.com/scooter/
They are rotated as sold.
Scooter’s tee shirt collection has been collected by Iggy Pop, Sandra Bernhard and Perez Hilton and also can be seen on many characters on the day time soap opera The Guiding Light.
The tee shirt line is featured at Patricia Field.
Trash and Vaudeville and Live Fast – (all NYC boutiques)
Max-Carlos Martinez:
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with ancestry dating to the late 1400s. Living in New York City since 1981. Began exhibiting in the city during the nineties. Attended Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 1997, residencies include The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, McColl Center for Visual Art and The Salina Art Center Warehouse. Solo exhibitions at The Tweed Museum, Dulth, Minnesota, Sangre de Christo Art Center, Colorado, Christopher Henry Gallery, New York City and CSID, Switzerland. Currently paintings of acrylic on paper are inspired by mid-19th Century American illustrations and Rock n Roll music.
http://www.artreview.com/profile/MaxCarlosMartinez
Rob Roth:
New York City-born director and visual artist Rob Roth has been called “the mad man incarnate”. A persistent and influential presence in the city’s downtown art and culture since the early 1990’s, his work draws from photography, video, painting, dramaturgy and theater to create experiences that transcend the limits of media and performance. His work has been shown at a variety of venues including the New Museum for Contemporary Art, Performance Space 122, Abrons Art Center, Galapagos Art Space, and Deitch Projects as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Roth co-founded ‘Click + Drag’, the infamous Saturday night at the legendary nightclub Mother, which is now a yearly gathering of performance, art and spectacle. Roth has worked constantly since the closing of Mother in 2001, creating a variety of work for such artists as Deborah Harry/Blondie, Theo Kogan (Lunachicks) Justin Bond (Kiki and Herb), Big Art Group and acclaimed performance artist Julie Tolentino. Roth’s most recent work includes the durational live installation “Fairy Tales” Ascension No 1 and Synaptic Efficacy Refreshment which explore ritual, folklore and endurance. Previously, Rob Roth directed ‘The Mystery of Claywoman – Screening and Lecture’, a mockumentary/theater piece written and performed by Michael Cavadias, featuring Amy Poehler, Alan Cumming and Edgar Oliver, which premiered at The New Museum of Contemporary Art. ‘Claywoman’ follows Roth’s award winning theater spectacle, ‘Screen Test’, starring Theo Kogan and choreographed by Vangeline Theater. Screen Test has been chosen to be featured in the Prague Quadrennial 2011 representing American Theater.
Smith & Lowles:
George Smith – B. 21 – 05 – 1984, Guernsey UK
Amy Lowles – B. 12- 05 – 1984, London, UK
Smith & Lowles met whilst studying at The Slade School of Fine Art, London. They have been in collaboration since 2003.After studying at Cooper Union, New York in 2004, they moved to New York in 2006. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Past Exhibitions
November 2009 – ‘Too Rich Tourists’ Film Installation, MIX Film Festival, New York City
View Installation photographs on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithlowles/
June 2009 – Featured in the 2nd issue of Introducing Art’ , online magazine: www.introducingart.com
June 2006 – Digital Video & Still Photography used to promote UK Band ‘Unkle Bob’
February 2006 – Film Screening, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK
November 2005 – Film Screening, IF3 (investigating film three) The Side Cinema, Newcastle, UK
Reynolds Tenazas
Reynolds first studied art in St. James Episcopal School, and developed a lifelong fascination with religious art and demonology. The Church was a center of anti-war activism, which inspired her attachment to issues of social justice. She studied painting with Richard Pousette-Dart and printmaking with Ansei Uchima at Sarah Lawrence College, graduating with a concentration in Women’s History. She also holds a B.F.A., and an M.F.A. from School of Visual Arts. While at SVA, she furthered her printmaking with Chaim Koppelman, and did most of her prints at Chaim’s Broome Street Studio for the next twenty years. She also printed at Robert Blackburn’s studio. Upon Broome Street’s closure, she pulled the print “Abomination” at Manhattan Graphics. All of the etchings in the present show were printed at Lower East Side Printshop.
Reynolds is also a painter who performs “The Puki Procession”, a participatory performance, which can be seen on the site “Cornwall Tube” under reynoldsnart. She is also included in “Paper Politics”, a travelling print show organized by Josh MacPhee. Her print “Desecration” is featured in his book: Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today. She has participated in every London Biennale event since its inception in 2000, and in the first “Pollination” of 2003; “Changing Channels” organized by Adam Nankervis and Bill Allen. The most recent show featuring her prints was in Valparaiso, Chile: “Moving Mediators: Ghosts of Interventions Past and Present” with Museum MAN. She continues her anti-war activism with the Quakers, and is active with issues of reproductive justice.
Reynolds’ etchings present specters from other times that mediate in contemporary political and personal contexts. Using only intaglio and dry point, she reanimates the detail of “Old Master” prints, while examining the sexual and social themes of the present. Each piece represents a specific narrative, with images woven together from modern media, classic, and ancient representations. Some pieces explore her own experiences of uprisings in other countries where ritual practice helped defeat modern dictatorship- a paradigm in which the fantastic or the bizarre imagination may thwart the thrust of our own American religious right.
Lili White:
Using stylized gestures as a mode of ritualistic format and screen performance, Lili White’s modus operandi is often an exploration on the subject of relationships of power and repression; sometimes drawing from ancient stories re-contextualized into meditations on the world in which we live and the ramifications of inaction and stagnation. Influenced by art history; informed by Eastern philosophy and psychological theory, her content highlights nature, myth, dreams, archetypal imagery and language.
Lili White has exhibited her videos in shows in the United States, Germany, England, Ireland and China. Her work has been called “a magical act” and is influenced by her painting studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
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