A Gathering Of The Tribes - Past Exhibitions

Past Exhibitions

PAPER VIEW, A Show of Works on Paper

September 3 – September 24

Opening reception, Saturday, September 3 from 6 to 9

Poetry reading on opening night, September 3 at 7pm : Jeffrey Cyphers Wright and Ga Hae Park

Poetry reading Saturday, September 24 at 4pm : Jeffrey Cyphers Wright and Star Black

Gathering of the Tribes, 285 East Third Street (Between Ave C&D)

Ga Hae Park, “Light drawing, Rhythm and color”, 2011, 16x20inches, cut paper, ink.

Two Artists Using Paper in Powerful New Ways

The legendary East Village salon space, Gathering of the Tribes presents a show of evocative and innovative works on paper by Gahae Park and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright. Both artists cut, paint and glue to achieve oppositional results.

Gahae Park combines traditional painting techniques with a sculptural vision. By cutting small windows into paper she creates meditative layers. The results can read like an advent calendar in which each window opens to reveal a picture inside. These visual poems resemble musical scores while questioning notions of notation, purity, linearity and repetition.

A Korean native, Park received an MFA in painting from Pratt and has been in 10 solo shows and scores of group shows. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, NY Arts and Chelsea Now. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation and was a resident at Art Omi.

: Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, “Fairy Mine” 2010, 5×7 inches, mixed media

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is best known as a poet. He is also a “master collagist,” according to the East Villager. Wright’s collages incorporate conventional materials like antique paper and everyday ephemera with emblematic materials from his East Village base. Graffiti, rock and roll stickers and cartoon iconography provide inspiration for dynamic compositions that exude pop flair and calligraphic wonder.

Wright studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College where he completed the MFA program in Poetry. He is the author of 11 books of verse. His artwork has been included in several group shows. He had a solo show at AC Projects in Chelsea in 2010. From 1987 to 2001, he published Cover Magazine, the Underground National. Currently he edits Live Mag! Several of his performances can be viewed on Youtube.

“Also featuring a piece by Laura Traynor titled, “Splat!”. Laura Traynor is currently a student at the University of Arts London.

PREVIEW ON FLICKR

Janet Bruesselbach

“I Hate Art” show

April 23- May 23, 2011 Closing Reception May 23 5-9 pm

Tribes Gallery (bring your own cup)

285 E 3^rd St. 2^nd Floor New York, NY 10009 (5 Blocks east of F at 2^nd Ave)

You have assumptions, if you’re reading this. Either that it will explain what you’re looking at, or that it will be theoretical gibberish, or that it will be yet another idiot artist whose shtick is to defy of either of those assumptions. There are many ways what you are observing could only fulfill your expectations.

Wallow in Immanence, 2011. Oil on canvas, 32 x 32 in

You should probably tell Janet what you’re seeing, and tell her what to paint. She doesn’t know either any more. If you have empty wall space, maybe you should put art in it. Otherwise, it’s not going to try to be socially conscious or transcendent or even successfully satirize those goals.

Consider these experiments produced by an algorithm that forces choices on a well-trained* unconscious human machine. See something not about art, but about science, that is, the pursuit of truth, and therefore, compulsively honest, to the point of both representational loyalty and continuous contradiction. Choices were made to please you, to make something that is simultaneously what you want to see and what you’ve never seen before. They were made by finding sympathetic shapes in other shapes, generating one signal out of another by treating it as noise. Or simply trying to make a self-deprecating joke.

You should visit on Saturdays for “The Artist is Absent”[minded]. You may buy the portraits, and the proceeds will go towards turning this building into somewhere artists can be as stupid as they want to be. You should leave feedback, but only if it’s negative. We are fishing for insults, here. If this attitude annoys, you can reasonably be expected to ignore it. Thank you. I’m sorry.

janet@bruesselbach.com www.bruesselbach.com/hateart

*MFA, New York Academy, 2009. BFA, RISD, 2006. TMI, Internet, just Google her, you hardly know her.

For immediate release:

Wassily Kandinsky, in an effort to explain bodily reactions toward form and color, wrote “Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.” Kandinsky was a synaesthete, meaning that his relationship towards color was informed equally by his relationship with sound and music. The fusion of the two senses is clearly visible in his works, as he aimed to transcend the boundaries between each separate mode of perception.

The nature of the photographic medium is playing with light, one form of energy, to evoke surroundings, situations, and ideas. When one sense is diminished, the others are heightened, creating unique perceptive experiences from the remaining information.

Blind Light focuses on two extreme examples, inspired by A Gathering of the Tribes’ owner Steve Cannon’s blindness, and the synaesthetic experience of two senses intertwining to become one. Restriction and multiplicity become central themes from within which further visual exploration can arise. Restricted to photography as the sole medium, these works challenge, manipulate, and describe sound, touch, smell, and taste to re-define and further the possibilities and essence of photography as a transcendental medium through matter, energy, experience, and content.

Featuring work by:

Tyler Benz

Angela Datre

Athena Denos

Iona Hall

Leia Jospe

Monet Lucki

Cheney Orr

Radomir Petrov

Sean Stewart

Curated by Ana Maria Bezanilla and Deondre Davis

VANDALIRIUM

June 17th – July 06th

Opening Reception Friday June 17th 7-11

Tribes Gallery

285 E 3rd St. 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10009

212 674 3778

Artists: Zero, Ozbe, Mrs

Curated by: Claudine Aime

Building on the visions of their predecessors, the artists leave their mark creating a patchwork mixing old and new ideas, a makeshift mural in its entirety for the public to be its audience.

It’s plastered all over the streets: statements that bleed into the daily scenery, conveying a powerful urban message that gives the artist a voice and makes graffiti much more than just vandalism. Coming straight off the walls and on to a canvas (and other unconventional things) this show is the culmination of color, form and abstraction without the conventional mediums to unleash the power of art; untamed and uninhibited. The artists use acrylic paint, spray paint, silk screen and spray-paint acetate. Along with elements of collage to break down the abstract forms that make up letters and words, this process results in distorted letters becoming less representational and taking on a form of their own.

UNPOP
September 4-30
Opening Reception September 4 8-10 pm
285 E 3rd St.
Second Floor
New York, NY 10009

Curatorial Statement by Janet Bruesselbach

“A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.” –Adlai Stevenson

Unpop has a variety of playful reactions to both art as commodity and the legacy of pop art. Art is a commodity so oversupplied that it may be the testing grounds for a post-scarcity economy. Its economy of attention is particularly independent from its capital economy. No artist avoids status anxiety from the judgments of polymarkets, and it often seems the only ideology defining art remains anti-Capitalism, despite pop art’s ubiquitous ironic recombination of fine and commercial art.

The “problem” of existing in a market, one particularly labor-saturated, occupies context-conscious artists worldwide. While we often acknowledge that good art is not necessarily sold art, some of the best commercially-overlooked work is anything but anti- or a- commercial. Duplicating the structures, and becoming part of, the system one is critiquing, is conspicuous, but not the only means of critique. Nor is critique ever a simple argumentative stance.

I would not be surprised if there were not already consumption artists: individuals who self-consciously defined a particular pattern and choice of spending as an art form. We could easily say that any consumer is an artist, ironically or not. While defining art has become entertainingly open-ended, fitting some unpop work into the context of gallery exhibition was unexpected – particularly Chavez and Pocker. Chavez’s videos were byproducts of his struggle to market other artwork, while Pocker’s photos document hyper-attentive shopping (consumption artistry) and were not marketed as anything.

Everything in the marketplace is simultaneously buyer and seller. Sam Pocker, Jenny Bhatt, and Lauren Hoffen deal most directly with consumer identity. The freedom a consumer has is to defy neoliberal economics with their irrationality, and not necessarily succumb to the cultural pressure to not be a sucker. Art buyers most intend to defy homo economicus as a type. At the same time, considering art buying as a form of charity, done more because the artist needs money than because the artist did work, enables neoliberalism, as this essay by Yasmin Nair explains.

The peculiar irony of UnPop is that A Gathering of the Tribes, its natal location, as of September 2010, is a nearly broke non-profit, non-commercial, arts organization run out of an old blind guy’s apartment. Traditionally, this is an opportunity to exhibit the kind of work that fronts at freedom from the constraints of marketability. But the competition for grant money in this part-socialized, part-privatized alternative to a capitalist-style marketplace for art, has tightened in the recession. As of the dispossessed among nonprofits, the venue avoids insipid “art for arts sake” and leans toward the dangers of demanding free labor for political reasons that Nair takes apart so well.

Contemporary pop art rules the market because it is self-consciously and self-righteously a commodity. They are artists who refuse to pretend the very obliviousness to their worth that collectors value. In Unpop, we show that spaces peripheral to the art market are all the more market-obsessed. The more money one has the more one can afford not to think about it, so to display reticence toward naming or discussing prices of art objects, or arguments for “pricelessness” (that is, worthlessness) can conventionally be interpreted as anti-radical, siding with the owners. Naturally the politics are more complex than that, and stigma shouldn’t be placed either way, but to avoid discussing money out of anxiety or enmity may as well be reverence, especially when one is, reasons aside, unpopular.

Status anxiety extends to the transitional attention economy. Too easily can we both say and hear the myths connecting fame to money and vice versa: that success is just who you know, that art and politics and business and so on are all popularity contests, that self-promotion is most if not all that matters. Such simplifications are both true and devalue the complex interplay of measures of value. Ubiquitous cynicism generates its own measures of worth as art entertainingly becomes social – or a-, or anti-social. Run through your supply of prefixes.

There is as much conceptual beauty to be found in examining our resistance to the pressure to socialize as there is in flattening the dynamic and generating the image of popularity. And popularity is just that: not an actual measure of who knows whom or what, but a self-perpetuating infectious meme, a variable assigned but not necessarily related to anything else. In a cultural turn perhaps not inherently recent, popularity can be a label more detrimental than not. Unpopularity, while feared in acknowledgement of a society that will likely never be perfectly free, can be beneficial as a label – if only in the modern, very NYC phenomenon of Indie Cred.

Many visual styles have come to be called pop, or post-pop, or pop surreal, and so on, all functioning with a specific kind of irony that differentiates between commerciality and anti-commerciality by fulfilling both simultaneously. Unpop involves artists who either use pop tropes or engage commodification in non-dialectical ways. The advertising-inspired aesthetic of high-saturation solid colors, forms simplified to communicate, and assumed exuberant optimism, still pervade. But they are always tempered by something that undermines pop art historically, or doesn’t necessarily shape itself to the demands of as many people as possible.

Jenny Bhatt has sent paintings from India that fuse cartoon Western popism with the well-established philosophical conversation of Hindu Buddhist mythology, featuring a cast of conceptual deities in consumerist narratives. She makes interactive work and comic strips at her site

Sam Pocker is a radical coupon clipper and retail prankster; where Warhol asserted the beauty of mass-produced commercial products, Sam’s sardonic eye finds moments of dysfunctional absurdity, enforced ignorance, and thoughtless ugliness required by a late capitalist marketplace.

Washington Chavez went to every gallery in New York City asking them to look at his paintings, and filmed all of it. The result is a queasy litany of rejection, the dying profession of door-to-door salesman multiplied by the eternal buyer’s market of art, emotional sadomasochism intensified by raw documentary recording.

Rita Alves’s anamorphic installation paintings are more engaged with the national politics of U.S. human rights violations than directly with consumer politics. The use of funhouse optics to undistort image evidence of atrocities questions the tension artists feel between the obligations to be both sensitizing activists and entertainers. As sculptures they demand a single viewpoint.

Lauren Hoffen paints commercial and political parodies that literalize ironic double-speak through blacklight-sensitivity. They are made in the nighttime moments spared by an artist working a day job.

James Mercer assembles ephemeral cardboard and paint installations (as well as digital and ink drawings) resembling video game levels. They are idiosyncratic, generative rewarders of attention from Millenial observers trained by extremely creative-labor-intensive products.

Pricelist

Lauren Hoffen Consumer Acrylic /oil on canvas 4”x5” 2008
$5000