“Looking for Work” Exhibition

Regina Rex

poster for “Looking for Work” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Each artist in Looking For Work creates a material economy that critically examines their own mode of artistic production by employing, depicting and researching work done by others—from bottle collectors in Chinatown to garment workers in Bangladesh. Through appropriation, documentary photography, outsourced labor and performance this exhibition exploits both the dissonance and harmonies found in the exchange between artist and unintentional collaborator.

Kara Braciale creates small economies around the production of her art. She contracts outside labor to paint an image determined by translating a range of texts such as Marx’s Capital into decorative binary patterns. The subtle differences among handiwork, as well as the titles which bear the names of each maker, stand as a record of the unique “labour-process” of each painting. Kara Braciale is an artist based in Boston, MA; she is Director and Co-founder of Proof Gallery, a non-profit contemporary art space in South Boston, MA.

Aideen Doran’s recent work looks at the garment and textile industries in Northern Ireland, as well as Bangladesh, in an investigation into the value of labour and the shifts between production and non-production in the contemporary economy. Aideen Doran is an artist and researcher based in Glasgow.

João Enxuto’s series of photographs, “Ragpickers,” depicts bottle collectors in Chinatown and the Financial District of Manhattan. The images are made at night with a handheld Graflex press camera used to record blurred figures bending into bags of refuse. Each black-and-white “rag paper” print is color-toned in a soft drink bath. This series extends the tradition of street photography as a documentary practice that both indexes and abstracts. The “Ragpicker” operates in a shadow economy and is indigenous to the modern city. They are the original precariat; subsisting on the trash heap of progress. João Enxuto is an artist based in New York City.

In David Stein’s ongoing project, The T-Shirt Times, the artist makes thirty shirts with thirty unique headlines, each culled from newspapers that day, and then roves around a neighborhood handing them out and initiating conversations about the news. The shirts circulate that day around the city, where residents see them and they become advertisements for the news that day, conversation starters, or confusing fashion statements. Worn weeks, months, years later, these shirts orphan the text further from their source, time, and context. David Stein lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Media

Schedule

from February 22, 2014 to March 30, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-02-22 from 19:00 to 22:00

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