Janus Project is pleased to present its sixth and final exhibition, Private Interventions, featuring the work of Jade Yumang and Gabriela Jiménez.

Reflecting upon the historic bourgeois interior of the Janus Project, Yumang and Jiménez created two separate installations that interrupt the space’s traditional configuration. The bourgeois interior arose out of the 19th century as a specific way of organizing and aestheticizing domestic space. Conceived strictly for the private retreat of the traditional family unit, it could be said that the bourgeois interior was constructed defensively as an escape from the harsh social realities of capitalist exchange.

Jade Yumang’s installation spans both rooms of the exhibition space, acting as a perfect foil for the traditional domestic interior. A long table built specifically to fit between the doorway connecting the two rooms at once bridges the rooms together while rendering them useless from their originally intended purposes. Atop the table and hung on the walls, Yumang presents eight labor intensive woodblock prints that subtly obscure and abstract homosexual pornographic imagery, further complicating the relationship of the work to the familial ideal.

Where Yumang’s work questions the private home interior, Gabriala Jiménez’s work reflects upon the structure of the home itself. Jiménez installed modular towers resembling stacked shanty homes, crafted of densely textured and pieced together clothing remnants. The forms are reminiscent of many homes in the villages native to Jiménez’s place of birth, Columbia, where the architecture is often communal, temporary, and vulnerable. Greatly contrasting the look and class origins of the Janus Project’s interior, Jiménez’s installation puts its surroundings into tension, rupturing the space as a ‘private retreat.’

Janus Project is an alternative exhibition space previously inhabited as a family dwelling, occupying two floors of a large house with living spaces above. The hybrid architectural styles and domestic setting lend layered readings of the work that temporarily coexist within its walls.

Located at the corner of 61st Street and 9th Avenue in Brooklyn, Janus Project is an easy 2 block walk from the 8th Avenue stop off the N line.