“Natural Resistance” Exhibition

Y Gallery (319 Grand St.)

poster for “Natural Resistance” Exhibition

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Y Gallery presents Natural Resistance featuring the works of artists Shay Arick, Adriana Ciudad, and Tamara Kostianovsky. This is the debut show for each of the three artists in the gallery’s new space, as well as the first time the three have exhibited together. The show comprises a mixture of sculpture and wall pieces, created with materials ranging from discarded clothing to kitchen knives, to mixed media watercolor, ink and pencil pieces and more. As a focal point, situated on the floor of the gallery, viewers will find two large hippopotamuses created with ceramic, polyurethane, acrylic and resin, appearing to be submerged in dark water. While each of these artists is unique, they all share the common thread of making acute critique of both environmental problems and contemporary cultural problems in the global regions from which they came.

In addition, through keen individual lenses, each of the artists represents nature as a place of resistance, coupled with some of the worst crimes committed by man against nature, including war, oil spills, and the the ways in which humans consume and destroy animals.
Shay Arick’s featured work, Uprising,is the result of his long investigation process into the current Israeli - Palestinian political situation. Recently, Israel has experienced more and more individual attacks, by Palestinians armed only with simple kitchen knives. Arick chose to investigate this new face of violence in Israel and subsequently create a series of knives, each inscribed with different common Israeli-Palestinian flower: flowers that blossom from the bloodshed. For this show, Arick fills the Y Gallery space with 24 knives, creating the illusion of a beautiful flower field.

Adriana Ciudad’s project, The Weight of Water, comprises a floor installation titled, AGUAS OSCURAS(DARK WATERS), as well as a wall installation titled, EL PESO DE LAS COSAS (THE WEIGHT OF THINGS). The floor installation, AGUAS OSCURAS, makes reference to the hippopotamuses have been procreating in Colombia since the 1980s, when infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar stole a small batch of them from Africa for his extravagant private zoo. After Escobar was trapped and subsequently assassinated, the hippopotamuses were abandoned and began to relocate and thrive. Today there are over 70 of them around Colombia’s Magdalena River, posing a serious safety problem for the surrounding villages as well as a significant environmental problem. To the artist, these hippopotamuses – displaced from their place of origin and brought to other lands – become a metaphor for those child soldiers who were forced into the jungle during the Colombian armed conflict and had to turn that hostile environment into their shelter.

Ciudad’s wall installation, EL PESO DE LAS COSAS, references the Peruvian oil industry, which was just recently responsible for a spill of three thousand barrels of oil in the Marañón River in the Amazon. In effort to repair the damage, the company Petroperu offered individuals in the affected populations 20soles(approximately $6USD) for each bucket of oil they removed from the river. As consequence, dozens of children set out to collect buckets of oil, putting their lives at risk. Included in this installation are an acrylic painting that demonstrates the exuberance and power of the Amazon, juxtaposed with mixed-media drawings that reveal the jungle’s mysterious, dark and chaotic personality traits, and the possible human connections to it.

Tamara Kostianovsky’s trio of sculpturesis titled, The Wound II, and includes distinct representations of deceased birds created out of discarded clothing, upholstery fabric, string, and a metal hook. The pieces, titled “Big Dead Vulture,” “Dead Eagle,” and “Turkey Vulture,” hang prominently from the ceiling below Y Gallery’s skylight. The work is a prime example of Kostianovsky’s signature style, in which she creates fabric sculptures and installations centered on the topic of the torn body. In her work, naturalistic animal parts made out of discarded clothing expose the beauty, violence, and blunt materiality of the body, opening a window into the world of abjection and degradation that exists behind the scenes of our manicured lives. Often compared to imagery found in 16th and 17th century Flemish paintings, Kostianovsky’s work contrasts visceral imagery with soft materials, seeking to make the “repulsive” appear tolerable and the “disgusting” seem appealing.

The special project in Y Gallery’s front room includes sculptures by Ori Carino and Benjamin Armas that appear broken, dilapidated and in ruin, focusing on the inevitable process of decay. Carino and Armas take bricks and materials from demolished tenements and other sites, and chop, chisel, cut and break them in order to build their sculptures. In doing this, the duo hopes for the original spirit of those demolished places to shine through. They were places frequented by the greats before them, many of which were profoundinfluences of theirs, including Gordon Matta Clark, Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Toyo Tsuchiya, and Robert Rauschenberg, along with the post-Dadaists of the lower east side who used industrial waste to build sculpture gardens - and so many others. In addition, the artists apply airbrushed iconography to the sculptures. A deep interpretation of the inevitability of change, and the revelation that evolutionary possibilities are limitless, becomes what the artists see as the thematic undercurrent to these works.

Shay Arick is an Israeli-born artist who is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His recent exhibitions include Y Gallery (New York) and CAFA Art Museum (Beijing). Arick is a recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Arts Award, the Eileen Cooper Award for Creativity, and the America-Israel Award for Excellence in Sculpture. He has also been awarded by several organizations including: The International Sculpture Center, Kadist Art Foundation, Art Kibbutz and The Watermill Center.

Adriana Ciudad was born in Lima, Peru and currently lives and works in Colombia. She has shown individually as well as participated in group exhibitions in Berlin, Los Angeles, Antwerp, Barcelona, Bogotá and Lima. Some of the acclaim she has received includes the renowned DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship, which she obtained to create a project in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition, Ciudad won the Dorothea Konwiarz Sitfung Foundation scholarship in Berlin from 2010 to 2011. Ciudad’s prestigious residencies include an Art-In-Residency program at Commonwealth & Council Gallery in Los Angeles in 2012, and a residency at TUPAC – The Center for Contemporary Creation in Lima in 2011. Currently, Ciudad is participating in a collective show at NC-Arte Bogota alongside James Turrell.

Tamara Kostianovsky was born in Jerusalem, Israel and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, as well as presented in solo and group shows at venues including: The Jewish Museum (NY, USA), El Museo del Barrio (NY, USA), Nevada Museum of Art (NV, USA), Socrates Sculpture
Park (NY, USA), The Volta Show (NY, USA), Maison et Object (Paris, France), and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI, USA). Kostianovsky is the recipient of several grants and awards, including: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, and a grant from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Ori Carino was born in New York in 1982. A lifelong artist, He was raised among many pivotal artists of the 80s post-dada art movement of the lower east side. Early in his career, Carino received the prestigious NYC Studio program grant award, along with two special grants from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and utilized this funding to complete ‘Block 421 Project’ with Toyo Tsuchiya, which included Carino’s first major Brick Sculpture. A prolific talent constantly producing murals, paintings, sculptures, commissions, and more, he has exhibited in New York since 2003, and internationally since 2006. His work is included in several important collections in Europe, Asia, and the USA, including the Pao Collection, Hong Kong, and the Venet Collection, New York. He met the artist, Benjamin Armas in 2007 and they quickly began producing an extensive body of collaborative work in sculpture, installation, and painting, consistently growing its breadth.
Benjamin Armas was born in Caracas Venezuela, 1985. Armas comes from a family of noted artists including his grandfather, master of the modern fable, Alfredo Armas Alfonso. After emigrating to NYC at age 11, Armas attended Cooper Union high school outreach programs before receiving his degree in Architecture at Pratt Institute. He completed construction of his first major residential project in 2014. Armas and Carino continue to work as full time artists, both collaboratively and on their individual works at their art studio in NYC.

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Schedule

from June 08, 2016 to July 03, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-06-08 from 18:00 to 21:00

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