Bushwick Victorian-Gothic Landmark Reopens as Project Space with Debut Show, “Ghost Face”

Featuring Local Contemporary Artists

Opening Event Saturday, March 17th, 6 pm – Midnight Featuring music by Ice Machine & Swift and Rachel Mason & Little Band of Sailors

Exhibition open 11 am – 7 pm on March 18th, 24th and 25th

Closing Event Sunday, March 25th 6 pm – 9 pm Featuring music by Young Heel

Artists include: Andrew Ohanesian, Xaviera Simmons, Adam Parker Smith, Brent Owens, Kristof Wickman, William Powhida, Ben Godward, Amy Brener, Don Pablo Pedro, Nathan Gwynne, Audrey Hasen Russell, Fabian G. Tabibian, Fabio Ernesto Corredor and Steven Mykietyn

Ghost Face, opening Saturday, March 17th at 6 pm, is a group exhibition featuring local artists whose work evokes a sense of nostalgia, absence or loss through an overabundance of form, including scale, color, iconography and detail. This theme is echoed in the architecture of the surrounding property, a looming re-purposed church and elementary school full of memory, history and empty spaces.

Many of the artists deal with uncanny and haunting feelings of emptiness or isolation in their work. Adam Parker Smith often uses a jarring sense of humor to explore the aura of desire and longing surrounding works of art, as in his wall piece featuring a ghost with an erection underneath its white cloak. Andrew Ohanesian continues to spatially and contextually dislocate the viewer by installing “Mandies,” a bar big enough for just one person. Inside the church, the work becomes a true confessional, and will be on display through the summer. Ben Godward’s overflowing, candy-colored, globular sculptures convey both the excess and the ultimate vacuousness of much of contemporary pop culture. And Xaviera Simmons’ large appropriated image of an owl in mid-flight with its prey evinces the loneliness and isolation of the creative active itself – a process which often takes place unseen and is then exposed through the exhibition of the work.

Ghost Face is curated by Dave Bates. The project space, presented by Bobby Redd, is devoted to promoting Bushwick’s vital community of artists, musicians, writers, gastronomes, performers, and poets for an ongoing series of boundary-pushing and genre-bending events.