“TABLEAU” Exhibition

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC)

[Image: Elisabeth Smolarz, archival pigment print, (2016)]

This event has ended.

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) present TABLEAU, a four person exhibition of works that reveal identity through a range of perspectives spanning socio-economics and culture, community and family, and individual memento. BRAC welcomes back former BRAC Gallery Director Chad Stayrook as guest curator.

TABLEAU continues the series of exhibits taking place during the art center’s inaugural year in its restored building. Collectively titled Waypoints: Platforms for Renewal, this series of exhibitions are designed to bring forward core questions for the Bronx River Art Center by accessing its past trajectory. The intent is to situate the organization’s relationship to place-making and community building into a model for the future that reflects upon its development over three decades. Additional curators in the series include: BRAC’s current Executive Director, Gail Nathan and past Gallery Director, Betti-Sue Hertz, past Gallery Director Karine Duteil (with her partner Nadej Hocini of KnN Landscape Design) and Jim Wintner, Co-Director of Tikhonova & Wintner Fine Arts Gallery in Harlem, NY.

culture
Alexa Hoyer’s photo series documents the imaginative storefront displays of state run-stores in Havana, Cuba. The title Montaje al Aire (Air Montage) refers to a unique technique of window dressing in which goods and materials are suspended from the ceiling using fishing line, wire or string. Invented out of necessity due to the scarcity of resources imposed by the U.S. blockade, Montaje al Aire tells a story of creativity in the face of adversity.

community
Amanda Browder’s impressive catalog of work has most notably taken the form of large-scale fabric draped building pieces. The works require collective community efforts including partnerships with institutions and building owners, calls to local residents for fabric donations, and public sewing days with volunteers. Future Phenomenon, created in collaboration with the Greenpoint Brooklyn community in 2010, is Browder’s first such work. In Tableau it is repurposed as an intentionally arranged floor piece that acts as documentation of artist-led community organizing and the fruits such efforts bear.

family
Chloë Bass’s Obligation To Others Holds Me In My Place borrows from the visual language of family home movies and photo albums to capture both the profound and everyday nature of interracial families. Though ultimately manifesting as a four-channel film documenting American mixed-race families through typical familial celebrations, Tableau presents the project’s current form with video essay and found-image and text works depicting fictitious family moments. These works are part of an unfolding, multiform family album which serve as notes for Bass’s future film, questioning of the linear narrative of racial progress and identifying gaps in the American archive.

individual
Elisabeth Smolarz’s Encyclopedia of Things began with an impossible, yet worthy goal: a collective portrait of the human condition depicted through objects-held-dear, one person at a time. For this series of photographs, Smolarz collaborates with individuals in their home environments. Each participant selects personal objects which are portals to memories both precious and meaningful, and then arranged for the camera in a temporary installation. The installations of participants’ most treasured objects embody their sense of self and identity and tell the story of each individual. The final result is series of intricate non-concrete portraits consisting of a prevalent vocabulary made out of ubiquitous objects that echo the universality of the human condition.

Chloë Bass has held numerous fellowships and residencies including recent residencies at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.

Amanda Browder received her MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001, and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2001-07. Amanda was born in Missoula, MT and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Alexa Hoyer received a BFA from the Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts, Webster University in Saint Louis, MO and an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA.
Originally from Hamburg, Germany, Alexa currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Elisabeth Smolarz’s work has been shown nationally and internationally - in venues such as The Bronx Museum, NY, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, NY, Galeria Aleksander Bruno, Warsaw, Oberwelt e.V, Stuttgart, Kunsthalle Galapagos NY, Baden Württembergischer Kunstverein, Photography Triennial Esslingen, Carnegie Mellon, Independent Museum of Contemporary Art (IMCA) Cyprus, Brooklyn Arts Council, Reykjavik Photography Museum, Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, the Sculpture Center and the 3rd Moscow Biennale among others.