NYAB Event - Susan Cianciolo “if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite)”

Susan Cianciolo “if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite)”

Bridget Donahue

This event has ended.

Bridget Donahue presents the gallery’s second solo exhibition with new works from multi-media artist and designer Susan Cianciolo. The exhibition will be accompanied by a selection of the artist’s costumes and archival material organized by Alex Fleming.

For the past twenty years, Susan Cianciolo has moved between fields and formats—from fashion to craft, from performance to filmmaking—works presented in if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite) speak to this restlessness. Cianciolo has produced a body of work that willfully evades categorization, exploiting the false dichotomies of construction and deconstruction, art and design, event and document. This exhibition offers a glimpse into the material flux of an archive being unbuilt in an ongoing and endless process of reformulation.

The material unit of Susan Cianciolo’s installation is a vessel: in the artist’s vocabulary, a “kit.” For each kit, the artist has reworked, painted over, gathered, and torn apart clothing, soft sculpture, drawing, painting, and collage pulled from the past two decades of her practice. The recombinant vessels on view evidence an impatience with personal relics, yet they also yield something that is distinctly contemplative, personal, and sacred in character. Cianciolo gave each artwork to a friend or collaborator to photograph rather than documenting the works in standard installation shots. This highlights the contingent and affective character of the archive, which the artists re-presents as an ongoing reworking of the present. Each kit reflects a lived practice, personal study, and devotional investment. The works possess a spiritual and emotional weight akin to a journal or scrapbook. The kits duly measure hours of material and physical labor at the same time that they capture their contents as documentary objects.

The exhibition also features a selection of handmade books that elaborate upon the artist’s approach to live performance. Among them are zines made for the twelve fashion collections Cianciolo produced under the moniker “RUN” between 1995 and 2001. A considerable oeuvre in their own right, Cianciolo’s books function as 2-D analogs to the artist’s kits, emerging from the same cannibalizing force and engaging a similar scale and handheld relation to the body. Yet, where the kits evoke a complex of possible narratives, the books tether themselves to a single performative event, anchored by photography and collage.

Accompanying these artifacts are a selection of costumes and clothing which, like the rest of the exhibition, bear witness to Cianciolo’s propensity toward group collaboration, experimentation but also echo formal concerns which have been her signature since her first presentations. —Alex Fleming

An exhibition catalog published by Nieves and a suite of posters designed by Harsh Patel with Susan Cianciolo will be printed on occasion. A series of live events and programs will include: a presentation of Cianciolo’s early films selected by Asher Penn, an illustrated lecture by Barbara Moore on “The Fashion Show Poetry Event, New York, 1969;” and Mark von Schlegell and Sophie von Olfers will reanimate a production, in homage to Jack Smith, Hamlet, Mise-en-scène; by Städelschule Pure Fiction Seminar Imagining Being Trained in Reptilian Acting Technique, staged in December 2012 at Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, for which Cianciolo developed costumes. Dates and details forthcoming.

Susan Cianciolo (b. 1969, Providence, RI) studied Fashion Design at Parsons The New School for Design and painting at Winchester School of Art. Cianciolo began her career as production manager for Kim Gordon’s X-girl line and went on to be assistant collection designer at Badgley Mischka. From 1995–2001 she produced her critically-acclaimed collection RUN, revived in recent years in various forms. Cianciolo has presented her work in New York at Alleged Gallery, P.S.1 Museum, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Sears-Peyton Gallery, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, and Ralph Pucci Gallery among others; Internationally at Pitti Immagine Discovery and Kaufmann Repetto, Italy; Purple Institute and Deep Gallery, France; Gallery 360, Presspop, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; MMK Museum fur Modern Kunst and Portikus, Germany. Her work has been featured in publications such as: The New York Times, T Magazine, Vogue, Visionaire, Interview, i-D magazine, Self-Service, Index, Artforum, Hanatsubaki, Vice, Vestoj, Purple and many more. Cianciolo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.