No Longer Empty, a not-for-profit group that places high quality art exhibitions in vacated store fronts throughout New York City, is pleased to announce the launch of its second project in the (yet to be leased) retail spaces of The Caledonia under the recently opened High Line.

To reflect the revitalization of the meat packing area in general and the High Line in particular, the exhibition will reflect this urban regeneration through art works selected to reflect a theme of transformation.

Reflecting Transformations references the regeneration of the area and the transformative nature that art can have on a community. This group exhibit also reflects the minimalist aesthetic that the blank slate of a new development can afford.

We are thrilled at the caliber of artists that have been generous enough to install works in this experiment in public art.

Curators: Manon Slome, Asher Remy-Toledo and Julia Draganovic Assistant curators: Tara de la Garza and Julian Navarro

Participating Artists:

Yoko Ono, Cao Fei, Alyson Shotz, U-Ram Choe, Sebren Versteeg, Stephanie Rothenberg, Sean Slemon, Suzane Song.

NO LONGER EMPTY was conceived as a meeting point between art and the economic crisis. The organization seeks to provide a challenging platform to artists and to revitalize the empty commercial spaces by creating more traffic and showing the sites filled with positive energy instead of being just one more empty storefront in the city. We also want to support the local business community of each area through the increased flow of visitors that these exhibitions will bring.

Notes on the artists:

Yoko Ono

Conceptual and fluxus artist, Yoko Ono, will present a work from her series of space transformations, which as the artist has said work mainly as an invocation “to constructing in your head”. “SPACE TRANSFORMER” as presented in this exhibition will consist of security barriers which delineate a specific site in the space chosen for transformation together with the sign This Is a Space Transformation. The installation will be accompanied by take away cards also urging visitors to “Transform Space”.

Cao Fei

Cao Fei, aka China Tracy, has made one of the more worthwhile visual creations to come out of the popular virtual reality website, Second Life. Her practice focuses on developing the relationships and technical possibilities of film, animation and the internet to depict the swift and radical cultural changes such technology permits and fosters.

Cao Fei has developed a unique pictorial language which superimposes reality and fiction in ways such sites as Second Life makes it ever harder to distinguish. This artwork is part of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami.

Alyson Shotz

Creates works in a variety of media, from large-scale installations to digital photography. Her work focuses on making palpable the shape of space and inhabits a tradition of seeing our culture through the perception of nature. “My imaginary structures look simultaneously natural and artificial and are intended to impel the viewer to confront his or her notions of organic versus artificial creations.”

Her reflective pieces shift the viewer’s apprehension of space and architecture changing constantly in response to light, movement and the presence of the viewer.

Shotz will present a large scale light reflecting wall drawing which consists of computer renderings of virtual space transformed into a two dimensional drawing made out of needles and threads which reflect the light. The final work constitutes a reformulation of volume into a two dimensional work.

U-Ram Choe

U-Ram Choe’s work engages a fanciful dialog of aesthetics and machinery, explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement. In his recent work, large-scale metal and plastic automata materialize with such a delicacy and weightlessness that it seems to take on the shape and silhouette of an organic life form. Motors, heat and light sensitive materials add to the intricacy of Choe’s kinetic sculptures. For this installation Choe will present “Jet Hiatus, ” 2008 Jet Hiatus, first observed at an airplane scrap site in the Mojave Desert, is regarded as an inorganic creature mutated from the microscopic machine living in a gas turbine engine

Stephanie Rothenberg

Stephanie Rothenberg uses performance, video, and net-based media to create interactive situations that question relationships between individuals and socially constructed identities, lifestyles and public spaces. Referencing corporate models and their infrastructures, her work merges popular forms of advertising and market research with participatory experiences involving role-playing and fantasy. “The School of Perpetual Training,” which explores the intersections between physical labor in the real world and the immaterial labor of the virtual sweatshops that have emerged over the past five years in the online gaming industry.

Sean Slemon

"Light Beam at 7 am" is a site specific installation which shows the viewer in material form what the potential sunlight could be in the Caledonia space, if the sun was not blocked by tall buildings on the opposite side of the street. The light beam installation will be constructed from construction plywood-converting an industrial material back into a natural occurrence. The plywood beam has the four edges open by a half inch, to allow bright light to flow out of them, as they run from the window to the floor. Eight fluorescent lights light up the 20 ft length of the beam.

Suzanne Song

Suzanne Song’s painting with its minimalist aesthetic is at once meditative and transformative of the notion of space and volume on the surface of the canvas. Architectural space and depth seem to be suggested by the subtlest application of paint summoning presence from a void or possibility from nothing. As the artist states: I am interested in the principles of illusion- its contradictions and paradoxes- and how illusion can be replicated to reveal a multifaceted dimension.”

Siebren Versteeg

Multi-media artist Siebren Versteeg often writes a code, goes to bed, and wakes in the morning to see what the computer created over night randomly choosing images. His works explore ideas of connectivity in our global culture, the tautological nature of material and immaterial information, and the human spiritual condition in relation to the advancement of technology. Versteeg linked together a Napster marketing slogan “Have everything and own nothing” to the teaching of eastern philosophy and Buddhism, this seemed very apt to some of the important paradoxes of the technical age – letting go, holding on.