NYAB Event - “Plethora” Exhibition

“Plethora” Exhibition

Soapbox Gallery

This event has ended.

Collaborative performance work by New York-based artist Lia Chavez and Los Angeles-based artists Linnéa Spransy & Maggie Hazen.

During the course of Plethora, vacant space will become a complex installation art piece via small repetitions, endurance performance and hidden activity.

Individually, Lia Chavez, Linnéa Spransy and Maggie Hazen have pre-existing interests that engage accumulation, endurance and repetition as means of accessing their respective studio inclinations. These tools, however, are worlds in and of themselves. They resonate between spiritual practice, the natural world and industrial life and are the subject of their proposed collaboration.

Chavez will begin the piece by performing a minimal practice of silent meditation for eight hours every evening of the two week duration – harvesting the visions generated by prolonged theta brainwave meditation and sharing them with her audience in real time. During her rest periods, Spransy and Hazen will install drawings and create environments based on modular strategies of growth. These will accumulate incrementally, to a crescendo that nearly subsumes or encases the performer; evidence, even to the artists, that from simple, almost automatic actions, whole surprising worlds can accrue.

Immediately following the two weeks of their collaboration, the artists will host a closing event – part salon, part happening – during which they will unpack their collaborative discoveries in real-time. Alongside a panel of special guest experts from the arts and contemplative disciplines, they will discuss how the tools of endurance, meditative performance, incremental growth, installation drawing and intricate sculptural accumulation bring inert space into abundance – demonstrating the transformative potential of simplicity to summon richness.

Lia Chavez is a New York-based visual and performance artist. Drawing upon her fascination with the laws of the physical universe, her work investigates both the body and the photographic image as sites of encounter with a dynamic, mystical reality. She has been presented in numerous exhibitions internationally including the Venice Biennale, Savannah College of Art and Design, Frieze Art Fair, The Armory Show, the Istanbul Biennial and Affirmation Arts in New York. She did her studies at Oxford and Goldsmiths College in London and lectures nationally and internationally at numerous institutions as a visiting artist. Her photography monograph, Lia Chavez: A Thousand Rainbows, is released by Damiani in the fall of 2013.

Linnéa Gabriella Spransy is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist producing both paintings and drawing-as-installation which use her intense interest in science, rulemaking, complexity and limitation as a vehicle to experience the philosophical viability of free will. Odd, conceptually-driven imagery results. She has been presented in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Kunming Arts Biennial in China, Verge/Basel Miami, Scope New York, Princeton University, H&R Block ArtSpace in Kansas City, Madison Contemporary Art Museum in Wisconsin, and Byron C. Cohen Gallery, Missouri. She did her studies at MIAD and Yale University. She has lectured nationally and internationally on the topics explored by her work, and is featured in numerous publications.

Maggie Hazen is a Los Angeles-based contemporary installation artist and sculptor who uses individual everyday objects as building blocks for exploring her interests in cosmology, technology and mapping. She constructs landscapes and environments which question our conscious ability to distinguish reality from a simulated perception. She has been presented in exhibitions nationally including the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. She did her studies at Biola University. She has participated in numerous lectures and discussions on the topics explored in her work and has been featured in a range of magazines and journals including an upcoming publication in Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute’s Transition Magazine. She is featured in a full-length documentary LAR-20 presented at the 6th Annual Korean American Film Festival in New York.