For his play on the theme of Six Feet Under, Ryan Humphrey will use White Box as an indoor freestyle BMX facility where he will regress to his creative years before becoming a fine artist. He will assault the architecture with his bicycle, try new maneuvers, mark up the walls and leave skid marks on the floors thus signaling the demise of the clean white gallery space and the economic system that fuels it. Bring on the death of capital. Bring on Mad Max. Bring on the demise of western civilization and say goodbye to your precious art objects.

Six Feet Under is a theme-driven annual summer series featuring six proposals by six curators. As in previous years, the purpose of the series is to offer each curator and artist a weeklong opportunity to tackle White Box’s unique architecture and its six feet below ground exhibition space. The exhibitions are viewed through White Box’s sidewalk-level large window, lobby and in [VideoBox], a division of White Box located in an adjacent outdoor window.

This last and final edition brings to an end the six-year long series with a topic that specifically addresses the impact and scope of the Chelsea Arts District real estate development. Six young and emerging curators are invited to select six galleries, each of which will then suggest an artist to work with. The artists will present and install a work that reflects upon the realities and relationships of Chelsea’s artists’ studios and galleries versus the rampant real estate speculation that has resulted in forever-escalating costs affecting the entire arts industry. Perhaps the real question is whether or not there is complicity between all the forces at play and why some artists and galleries end up losing and others win, which in turn will affect, in unknown ways, the community we have forged.

Organized by Juan Puntes