“Failing to Levitate” Exhibition

EFA Project Space

poster for “Failing to Levitate” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Curated by Kerry Downey and Natasha Marie Llorens, with guest speaker Heather Love.

“Failing to Levitate” is a platform to think about failure and vulnerability in art practices that are based in the social, in the encounter between people. The project links spaces, bodies, objects, and events in order to consider the ways we gather, socialize, and are affected by the physical conditions of shared space: elevators, board rooms, cars, group exhibitions, Times Square, dance floors…

As curators we decided to borrow our title from Bruce Nauman’s eponymous photograph, which shows the artist earnestly attempting to levitate in his studio and then slumping to the floor awkwardly when he fails. This work speaks to the (still) heroic narrative of the lone artist striving towards transcendence through an act of sheer will. We address failure and vulnerability as key terms in this project because any real discussion of either outside of a binary structure challenges the idea of self-mastery. Self-mastery, an ideology that tolerates no weakness, is in turn foundational to masculinism. We appropriate “failing to levitate” in order to attend, instead, to how physical and social spaces fail us, or create spaces for being vulnerable together.

Many artists in this show are making works that move throughout the exhibition, pushing up against the boundaries of the gallery space. Danyel Ferrari and Rachel Higgins collaborate on a cumbersome vehicle that houses a projector, opening up into an ad hoc stage, a push-cart, and/or a costume of self protection. Jen Rosenblit, working out of dance practice, considers ways to levitate or to hover in the gallery in relationship to the physical space and other works. Malin Arnell’s work is to be “an audience” in order to think about the negotiation of passivity/activity of audience in relation to objects, bodies and live events. Mitch McEwen’s helium balloons suspend a lightweight surface through which State secrets collected from Wikileaks and other public sources are conducted.

Bill Dietz translates the repetitions of the People’s Mic into models for spatio-relational listening exercises. The Anhoek School presents a sound work in the form of a radio “pledge drive” for WMYN. The listener will be enmeshed in the triangulation of three specific failures: that of the feminist revolution, that of the cultural commons, and that of abandoned technologies. These works ask us to lean into the social conditions of listening.

Other works explore the vulnerability of being a student or a witness to others’ presence and needs. Ethan Breckenridge offers twelve “pavilions” built with elements of commercial architecture and everyday consumer versions of equipment for “health” and “work.” Dillon de Give’s work will organize encounters connecting newly licensed drivers with the public to explore the awkwardness of learning to drive. Glendalys Medina presents a video work of herself diligently attempting a “freeze,” a breakdance move inserted at the end of a routine to show control and strength.

As a result of these varying gestures, experiments, and performances, the social space of the gallery becomes a space of persistent shift; between artists, from performance to event, between built form and embodied experience. To be vulnerable is to admit that we do not make meaning alone, that we come into being through the recognition of others, that we are responsible to each other. Failure here is not an end—it is a space that opens up after an idea or an experience has exhausted itself, after balloons deflate and the smoke clears. In this space, together, we hover in not knowing and struggling to listen.

[Image: Courtesy of Kerry Downey and Natasha Marie Llorens]

Media

Schedule

from June 06, 2014 to July 03, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-06-19 from 18:00 to 20:00

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