“Flutteries, or A Feeling of Impending Doom” Exhibition
Maiden Lane Exhibition Space
[Image: Really Large Numbers, installation view Air Traffic Control, courtesy the artists]
This event has ended.
Art-in-Buildings presents the newest exhibition in the lobby of 125 Maiden Lane: Flutteries, or A Feeling of Impending Doom, featuring works by Jessica Segall and Really Large Numbers. Segall and Really Large Numbers (a collaboration between Julia Oldham and Chad Stayrook) are multidisciplinary artists whose practices include videos, performances, and objects that seek to develop a means to approach, control, prepare, and envision the future.
Segall’s work Paradise Begins With A Shipwreck, is a handmade, seaworthy replica of a faering, a Viking arctic sledging ship. Rather than sails, the ship’s mast supports a projection screen on which Segall will present a selection of video works dealing broadly with water. Segall’s work often looks to the future as something that will need to be survived. Her practice has an emphasis on the individual spirit, survivalism, adaptation, and off the grid technology. Despite this, she describes her work as “radical optimism.” In keeping with this perspective, Paradise Begins With a Shipwreck does not allude to disaster, but to new beginnings, discovery, adventure, and the hope for a new world.
Really Large Numbers (RLN) conducts research and experimentation that begins with a basis in science and quickly veers into fantasy. At 125 Maiden Lane, they will present two projects Air Traffic Control and Feather Bomb. Air Traffic Control is a demonstration of a teleportation device they invented in 2013. Feather Bomb is an investigation into the physical limits of a weather balloon when filled with feathers. RLN blurs technology and mythology to make work that, although based in reality, is about stretching one’s understanding of the difference between possible and impossible.
An entry from RLN’s unique glossary inspired the exhibition title. The term “flutteries,” defined as “a feeling of impending doom,” is a light-hearted way of describing disaster. The logic of this neologism perfectly captures the connection between the optimism of Segall’s work and the whimsy of RLN’s inventions. The works on view in Flutteries, or A Feeling of Impending Doom combine humor, whimsy, and a willingness to push logic to the brink.
Jessica Segall received her MFA from Columbia University in 2000. She has shown her work extensively in the US and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Recess, New York, NY; De Fabriek, Eindoven, Netherlands; Inside Out Museum, Beijing, China; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA; Pongnoi Gallery, Chang Mai, Thailand; and the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery, Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Segall has been in residence at the AIRspace Residency, Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; Triangle Arts Residency, Brooklyn, NY; Art Omi, Ghent, NY, among many others.
Really Large Numbers laboratory is the creative expedition of multidimensional artists Chad Stayrook (Brooklyn, NY) and Julia Oldham (Eugene, OR). Stayrook and Oldham’s partnership began in 2011 when they encountered each other spontaneously as characters in dreams of mythic adventures. These dreams led them inexorably to a collaborative relationship that combines science, fantasy and dream language to blur the boundaries between the Real and the Unreal. The work of Really Large Numbers has been supported and exhibited by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY; Artists Alliance Inc, New York, NY; Cuchifritos Gallery, New York, NY; the Oregon Arts Commission, Portland, OR; Rooster Gallery, New York, NY; Art in Buildings, New York, NY; the Institute for Contemporary Art, Baltimore, MD; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL; an Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY.
Media
Schedule
from February 18, 2015 to August 29, 2015