Kurator/ Curator: Mgr. art Katarína Balúnová, ArtD.
5. 4. 2023 – 16. 7. 2023/ April 5 – July 16, 2023
SLOVAK:
Premiérový medzinárodný výstavný projekt Galérie umelcov Spiša pod názvom Niekoľko zelených záznamov nadrozmernej čiernej skrinky je utopicko – dystopickým zamyslením sa nad budúcnosťou našej planéty. Diela 10-tich súčasných umelkýň a jednej autorskej dvojice reflektujú v diferentných médiách súčasný environmentálny stav aj vízie možných nových svetov.
V ramci vystavy Kristyna a Marek Milde prezentú novú videoanimácia Alienators, 2023, ktera je vstupom do utopicko – dystopického vesmírneho priestoru zaplneného lietajúcimi fantasktnimi družicami a kozmickými loďami vytvorenými s foto kolazii modernistických stavieb. Toto 2-kanálové video sa premieta na dve protiľahlé steny v galérii a vytvára tak vesmírnu čiernu skrinku. Dielo vychádza z rovnomenných autorských koláží, v ktorých umelci uvažovali o vplyve odcudzenej modernistickej architektúry na mestský priestor. Niektoré budovy totiž vyzerajú ako mimozemské stavby, ktoré náhodne pristáli v krajine našich miest bez zmyslu pre gravitáciu a pre to, čo je hore a, čo dole.
Habitat ako biotop, urbánne prostredie či obytný blok sa tak stáva nosnou konštrukciou pre diferentné naratívy. Autori poukazujú na častú necitlivosť projektantov voči ekologickým a historickým kontextom miesta, čo narúša krehkú sieť spoločenských aj mimoľudskýchv vzťahov. Video prehodnocuje minulosť a budúcnosť architektúry a skúma monstrozitu modernistických stavieb. Ako by vyzeralo možné presídlenie našej civilizácie na iné planéty? Obdobie moderny bolo presiaknuté vesmírnym optimizmom, ktorý sa ani po niekoľkých desaťročiach nenaplnil. Preto vo videu umelci satiricky transformujú modernistické stavby v kozmickej lode, ktoré môžu voľne odplávať do vesmíru.
Názov výstavy odkazuje k vymedzeným ekologickým umeleckým projektom a snahám v čase masívnej deštrukcie prírodného prostredia. Čiernou skrinkou sa v prenesenom význame stáva celá naša planéta, ktorá neľútostne zaznamenáva každú našu akciu. Čierna skrinka je rakvou, ale aj utopickým čiernym Malevičovým štvorcom, kozmologickou budúcnosťou s (Kollerovským) otáznikom. Čierny štvorec / skrinka môže byť smrťou aj znovuzrodením sveta a umenia, môže a nemusí byť finálnou bodkou za nenásytnou ľudskou civilizáciou. Podľa behaviorálnych psychológov je aj ľudský mozog čiernou skrinkou. Ľudská myseľ reaguje na podnety – ak chceme zmeniť správanie, musíme zmeniť podnety, nie myseľ, ktorá na podnety reaguje. Práve k tomu môže slúžiť umenie, ktoré má jedinečnú schopnosť premieňať informácie na emócie. Jednotlivé diela či projekty vybraných umelkýň a umeleckej dvojice, sú snahou o hľadanie lepšieho, „zelenšieho“ sveta. Sú náčrtom ekologicky zameraných ideí, možných východísk, lokálnych revitalizácií, či environmentálnych akcií v diferentných médiách, od prác na papieri po objekt, video a inštaláciu, s využitím nájdených a recyklovaných materiálov. Aj keď sa tieto snahy môžu zdať menšinové a zanedbateľné, majú svoj význam v distribúcii myšlienok, ktoré stoja na začiatku každej zmeny.
Projekt z verejných zdrojov podporil Fond na podporu umenia.
Mgr. art Katarína Balúnová, ArtD., autorka a kurátorka projektu
ENGLISH:
The international exhibition project of the Spiš Gallery of Artists entitled Several green records of an oversized black box is a utopian – dystopian reflection on the future of our planet. The works of 10 contemporary female artists and one author couple reflect the current environmental state and visions of possible new worlds in different media. The project was supported by public funds by the Art Support Fund.
As part of the exhibition, Kristyna and Marek Milde present the new video animation Alienators, 2023, which is an entry into a utopian-dystopian outer space filled with flying fantastic satellites and spaceships created with a photo collage of modernist buildings. This 2-channel video is projected on two opposite walls in the gallery, creating a cosmic black box. The work is based on the author’s collages of the same name, in which the artists reflected on the alienating influence of modernist architecture on urban space. Some buildings look like alien structures that accidentally landed in the landscape of our cities without a sense of gravity and what is up and what is down.
Habitat as a biotope, an urban environment, or a residential block thus becomes a supporting structure for different narratives. The authors point to the frequent insensitivity of designers to the ecological and historical context of the place, which disrupts the fragile network of social and non-human relationships. The video revisits the past and future of architecture and explores the monstrosity of modernist buildings. What would a possible relocation of our civilization to other planets look like? The modern period was imbued with cosmic optimism, which was not fulfilled even after several decades. Therefore, in the video, the artists satirically transform modernist buildings into spaceships that can float freely into space.
The name of the exhibition refers to specific ecological art projects and efforts at a time of massive destruction of the natural environment. Our whole planet becomes a black box in a metaphorical sense, which mercilessly records our every action. The black box is a coffin, but also a utopian black Malevich square, a cosmological future with a (Kollerovsky) question mark. The black square/box can be both the death and the rebirth of the world and art, it may or may not be the final dot behind the insatiable human civilization. According to behavioral psychologists, the human brain is also a black box. The human mind responds to stimuli – if we want to change behavior, we must change the stimuli, not the mind that responds to the stimuli. This is precisely what art, which has the unique ability to transform information into emotions, can serve. Individual works or projects of selected female artists and the artistic duo are an effort to find a better, “greener” world. They are sketches of ecologically oriented ideas, possible solutions, local revitalizations, or environmental actions in different media, from works on paper to objects, videos, and installations, using found and recycled materials. Although these efforts may seem minor and insignificant, they have their importance in the distribution of ideas that stand at the beginning of every change.
Mgr. art Katarína Balúnová, ArtD., author and curator of the project
Kristyna a Marek Milde sa vo svojej tvorbe programovo venujú environmentálnych témam, pričom poukazujú na odcudzenie sa človeka prírodnému svetu. Pracujú na pomedzí viacerých médií, vytvárajú inštalácie, ktoré často reagujú na špecifické prostredia in-situ. Prostredníctvom umenia vo verejnom priestore sa zapájajú do spoločenského diania, skúmajú ľudské správanie a vyzývajú diváka na aktívnu spoluúčasť. Kristyna Milde študovala maľbu na Assenza Malschule v Bazileji vo Švajčiarsku, kým Marek Milde navštevoval odbor sochárstva v Ateliéri Dodekaeder v Nemecku. V roku 2007 obaja úspešne obhájili magisterský titul na Queens College v New Yorku. V rokoch 2008 – 2015 pracovali v Českom kultúrnom inštitúte v New Yorku, kde organizovali kultúrne programy.62
Dôležitou súčasťou práce Kristyny a Mareka Milde je komunikácia s ľuďmi a prostredím. Habitat ako biotop, urbánne prostredie, či obytný blok, sa stáva nosnou konštrukciou pre diferentné naratívy súčasnej kultúry. Veľkomestské problémy vykorenenia, strata pevných oporných bodov v živote a pasívny konzum marketingom starostlivo predpripravených receptov na šťastie, spôsobuje fragmentáciu identity. Umelci hľadajú spôsoby, ako prostredníctvom umenia otvoriť nové perspektívy vnímania, ktoré by viedli k pozitívnej zmene. Využívajú pritom osobnú skúsenosť s prírodnou krajinou, ktorá im otvára poznanie seba samých a tým aj sveta: „Utopická ekologická krajina evokuje predstavu rajskej záhrady ako harmónie rastlín, zvierat a človeka… V ideálnej budúcnosti by sa mala nájsť rovnováha medzi kultivovanou produktívnou krajinou a divokou prírodou. Dôležité je, aby ľudia mali možnosť priameho vzťahu k prírode. Jednak vďaka osobnej možnosti pestovať a kultivovať rastliny a stromy a zároveň mať možnosť krajinu fyzicky objavovať a pohybovať sa v nej. Dôležitosť vidíme tiež v integrácii prírody v urbánnom priestore. V poslednej dobe sa tieto tendencie stále zlepšujú a už vopred sa v plánovaní a dizajne myslí na ekologickú stránku priestoru.“63
Autori aktívne pracujú v odbore dizajnu a navrhujú zelené riešenia pre architektonické celky. V projekte Plantarium: Circles and Constellations, 2021 vytvorili živú skulptúru vo forme rastlín zasadených v oceľovej platforme ako mikrokozmos odzrkadľujúci okolité prostredie. Dielo prepája dom s otvorenou krajinou a stáva sa tak mostom medzi privátnym a vonkajším priestorom, pričom pozýva na rozjímanie o sezónnych premenách a plynutím času. Táto práca nadväzuje na projekty Homescape, 2014, Plantarium, 2017, či Plantarium – Tea Garden, 2018, kde umelci spájajú ideu záhrady, interiérového dizajnu a pestovania, pričom sa sústreďujú na sprostredkovanie telesného prežitia prírody. Site-specific participatívne inštalácie otvárajú otázky, nakoľko sme ovplyvnení postindustriálnou realitou, kedy väčšinu svojho času trávime v interiéri, obklopení civilizačnými produktmi. Produktom sa stáva aj jedlo, ktoré kupujeme naaranžované a zabalené v lákavých farebných plastových obaloch.
V dielach Dinner Garden, 2013 a à la cart, 2014 autori skúmajú možnosti založenia komunitnej záhrady v mestskom prostredí, aby upozorňovali na kontext a proces produkcie potravín. Projekty pritom nemali ambíciu byť profesionálnych kurzom záhradníctva, ale skôr fungovali ako ihrisko, ktoré povzbudzovalo nové zážitky a zároveň prehodnocovalo hranice konzumu – účastníci si vo finále mohli pripraviť jedlo z vlastnoručne dopestovaných surovín. Umelci pritom nevyzývajú k plošnému návratu k agrárnemu spôsobu života, možným riešením sú aj technologické inovácie: „Podľa našej skúsenosti je dobré veci individuálne posudzovať. Inovácia môže pomôcť vyriešiť mnoho súčasných problémov a otázok, nakoľko vytvára nové zdroje cez ľudskú vynaliezavosť. Ale je dobre veci testovať v malom, aby sme videli celkový dopad. Na druhej strane jednoduché riešenie môže byť často to najlepšie. V matematike sa napríklad teórie a rovnice posudzujú aj z hľadiska svojej jednoduchosti a harmónie, v konečnom dôsledku sa totiž práve tie ukazujú ako pravdivé.“64
Jedným zo spôsobom ako sa postaviť k súčasnej ekologickej kríze je recyklácia. Kristyna a Marek Milde často vo svojej práci používajú nájdený a vyradený materiál, ktorý vnímajú aj ako súčasť výskumu kultúrnych javov. Zaujímavým fenoménom sú často vyhodené tropické rastliny, ktoré sa kvôli svojej veľkosti stávajú nepohodlnými. V rámci projektuCarpetorium, Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan, 2021 zhromažďujú tieto rastliny, aby upozornili na konzumný vzťah, ktorý k nim prechovávame. „Lietajúci“ koberec sa stáva metaforou transkontinentálnej vynútenej migrácie a zároveň upozorňuje na zánik prirodzených biotopov, ako sú tropické pralesy.
Autori veria v transformatívnu silu umenia: „Umelec môže vyzdvihnúť a poukázať na rôzne aspekty súčasnosti, ktoré sú buď zakryté alebo neviditeľné. Zároveň vďaka umeleckému tvaru reči a vyjadrovacích foriem, ako je metafora či nadsázka, môže diváka doviesť ku kreatívnym a novým pohľadom na skutočnosť. Tie sa potenciálne môžu premietnuť aj v budúcom rozhodovaní. Myslíme si, že umenie by malo viesť vnímanie diváka nad to každodenné a otvoriť mu dvere do nových svetov… Utópia sa môže potenciálne stať realitou. Samozrejme musí byť nosná a praktická, aby sa dala skutočne aplikovať. Slovo utópia už v sebe nesie sľub neuskutočneného, nedosiahnuteľného ideálu. Môžeme ju teda vnímať skôr ako kompas podľa ktorého sa riadime na ceste do budúcnosti. Bez vyšších ideálov strácame orientáciu a zmysel života.“
62 Kristyna and Marek Milde. http://www.mildeart.com/about (10.12.2021)
Excerpt from the essay by Mgr.art.Katarína Balúnová, ArtD.
SOME GREEN OVERSIZED BLACK BOX RECORDS
ECOLOGICAL UTOPIAN IDEAS IN CZECH ART
In their work, Kristyna and Marek Milde, address environmental topics while pointing out the alienation of culture from the natural world. Their work is at the interface of multiple media, creating installations that often respond to specific in-situ environments. Through art in public space, they engage in social events, explore human behavior, and invite the viewer to active participation. Kristyna Milde studied painting at the Assenza Malschule in Basel, Switzerland, while Marek Milde studied sculpture at Atelier Dodekaeder in Germany. In 2007, both successfully defended their master’s degrees at Queens College in New York. In the years 2008-2015, they worked at the Czech Cultural Institute in New York, where they organized cultural programs.62
Communication with people and the environment is an important part of Kristyna and Marek Milda’s work. Habitat as a biotope, urban environment, or residential block becomes a supporting structure for different narratives of contemporary culture. Urban problems of uprooting, loss of fixed points of support in life, and passive consumerism by marketing carefully prepared recipes for happiness, cause fragmentation of identity. Artists are looking for ways to open up new perspectives of perception through art that would lead to positive change. In doing so, they use their personal experience with the natural landscape, which opens up their knowledge of themselves and thus of the world: “A utopian ecological landscape evokes the idea of a paradise garden as a harmony of plants, animals, and man… In an ideal future, a balance should be found between a cultivated, productive landscape and wild nature. It is important that people have the possibility of a direct relationship with nature. On the one hand, thanks to the personal opportunity to grow and cultivate plants and trees, and at the same time to have the opportunity to physically explore the landscape and move around in it. We also see the importance of the integration of nature in the urban space. Recently, these tendencies have been improving and the ecological side of the space is already being thought of in advance in planning and design.”63
The authors work actively in the field of design and propose green solutions for architectural units. In the project Plantarium: Circles and Constellations, 2021, they created a living sculpture in the form of plants planted in a steel platform as a microcosm reflecting the surrounding environment. The work connects the house with the open landscape, thus becoming a bridge between private and outdoor space while inviting contemplation of seasonal transformations and the passage of time. This work follows on from the projects Homescape, 2014, Plantarium, 2017, či Plantarium – Tea Garden, 2018, where the artists combine the idea of a garden, interior design, and cultivation while focusing on mediating the physical survival of nature. Site-specific participatory installations open up questions about how much we are influenced by post-industrial reality, when we spend most of our time indoors, surrounded by civilizational products. Food, which we buy arranged and packaged in attractive colorful plastic packaging, also becomes a product.
In the works Dinner Garden, 2013 a à la cart, 2014, the authors explore the possibilities of establishing a community garden in an urban environment to draw attention to the context and process of food production. At the same time, the projects did not have the ambition to be a professional gardening course, but rather functioned as a playground that encouraged new experiences and at the same time re-evaluated the limits of consumption – in the finale, the participants could prepare food from their own hand-grown ingredients. At the same time, the artists do not call for a general return to the agrarian way of life, technological innovations are also a possible solution: “According to our experience, it is good to assess things individually. Innovation can help solve many current problems and questions as it creates new resources through human ingenuity. But it’s good to test things on a small scale to see the overall impact. On the other hand, a simple solution can often be the best. In mathematics, for example, theories and equations are also judged from the point of view of their simplicity and harmony, because in the end, it is precisely those that prove to be true.”64
One of the ways to deal with the current ecological crisis is recycling. Kristyna and Marek Milde often use found and discarded material in their work, which they perceive as part of research into cultural phenomena. An interesting phenomenon is often discarded tropical plants, which become inconvenient due to their size. As part of the Carpetorium, Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan,, 2021 collect these plants to draw attention to the consumer relationship we have with them. The “flying” carpet becomes a metaphor for transcontinental forced migration and at the same time draws attention to the disappearance of natural habitats such as tropical forests.
The authors believe in the transformative power of art: “An artist can highlight and point out various aspects of the present that are either covered or invisible. At the same time, thanks to the artistic form of speech and forms of expression, such as metaphor or exaggeration, it can lead the viewer to creative and new perspectives on reality. These can potentially be reflected in future decision-making. We think that art should lead the viewer’s perception beyond every day and open the door to new worlds… Utopia can potentially become reality. Of course, it must be load-bearing and practical in order to be really applied. The word utopia already carries the promise of an unrealized, unattainable ideal. So we can perceive it more like a compass according to which we are guided on the way to the future. Without higher ideals, we lose orientation and the meaning of life.”
62 Kristyna and Marek Milde. http://www.mildeart.com/about (10.12.2021)
63 Kristyna and Marek Milde. Interview, 07.03.2022
Daniela Brasil (AT/BR), Jiří Černický (CZ), Hrvoje Cokarić (CRO), Alexis Dworsky (DE), Hannes Egger (IT), Hafnargarður Community Garden (ICE), Benjamin Hao Lap Yan (HKG),
Kristyna and Marek Milde (USA/CZ), Lukas Kühne (UYU/GER), The Trinity Session (SA), Sam Van Aken (USA)Daniela Brasil (AT/BR)
Curator/ Kurátor: Michal Koleček
Exhibition open from December 8, 2022 m- March 11, 2023
Termín konání výstavy 8/12/2022 – 11/3/2023
We are excited to announce that we will participate in the exhibition Gardening of Soul at the Dům umění Ústí nad Labem / Ústí nad Labem House of Arts opening December 7, 2022. The show features international artists that use gardening and different forms of gardens as a strategy in their work.
We will be creating a new installation Carpetorium: Wilderness of Home, that will take a form of a garden created with house plants borrowed from different people’s homes. These plants are planted into a flying carpet to create a platform, a community garden, where people can sit and contemplate our relationship with nature.
It is a continuation of our project Carpetorium: Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan, 2021 at MoCA Westport.
You can participate in the project by lending us your house plant. More info is in Czech below.
Česky:
Milí přátelé
Radi bychom oznamili naši účast na výstavě Gardening of Soul v Dům umění Ústí nad Labem / Ústí nad Labem House of Arts, která bude zahájena 7. prosince 2022. Tato mezinárodní výstava představuje umělce, kteří ve své tvorbě používají zahradničení a ruzné formy zahrad jako strategii. Pro vystavu připravujeme novou instalaciCarpetorium: divoká krajina domova, která bude mít podobu symbolické zahrady vytvořené z pokojových rostlin zapůjčených z různých domácností. Tyto rostliny jsou zasazeny do ornamentálního létajícího koberce, aby vytvořily platformu, komunitní zahradu, kde mohou lidé sedět a rozjímat o našem vztahu k přírodě. Projekt koumá, jak nám naše běžné pokojové rostliny, které často hýčkáme po mnoho let, někdy i po generace, vytváří pocit domova, zakořenění s místem a sounáležitost s přírodou. Projekt propojuje příběhy rostlin s příběhy lidí, ornament koberce se zde prolíná s živou květinou a připomíná, že spojení s přírodou je v nás hluboce zakořeněné.
Můžete se účastnit projektu tím, že zapůjčíte svou pokojovou rostlinu, aby se stala součástí této unikátní zahrady.
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Carpetorium: Wilderness of Home, House of Arts Ústí nad Labem, 2022, site-specific installation, oriental carpet, houseplants borrowed from people’s homes, dimension variable
Kristyna a Marek Milde, Carpetorium: divoká krajina domova, Dům umění Ústí nad Labem, 2022,
specifická instalace, orientalní koberec, pokojové rostliny zapůjčené účastníky, 3m x 2m x 2m
VÝZVA K ÚČASTI:
Milovníci květin a přírody!
zde je unikátní příležitost se zúčastnit našeho uměleckého projektu Carpetorium: krajina domova v Dům umění Ústí nad Labem / Ústí nad Labem House of Arts
Máte doma pokojovou rostlinu, která si zaslouží vyniknout? Dopřejte jí “pět minut slávy” a přineste ji do Domu umění do 28.11. 2022. Stane se součástí umělecké instalace, které bude vystaveno na mezinárodní výstavě Gardening of Soul. Dáte jí tak novou roli a dovolíte jí zazářit.
V případě zájmu prosim kontaktujte Zuzanu Dolezalovou email: Zuzana.Dolezelova@ujep.cz
Uvítáme, když nám napíšete i osobní příběh Vaší rostliny, co pro Vás znamená a symbolizuje.
Prosíme účastníky, aby emailem sdělili nasledujicí informace.
jméno:
město kde bydlíte:
název rostliny:
přibližné stáří rostliny:
příběh rostliny a co pro Vás symbolizuje:
fotku rostliny v domácím prostředí:
Informace budou použity v rámci projektu. Pokud chcete aby Vaše jméno zůstalo anonymní dejte nám vědět.
Art and Architecture TV episode Transboder Art
Excited to share the episode about Art and Architecture produced by the Transboder Art, where we talk about our work in relation to architecture. It is being screened on various TV channels (see details below) and is now available to watch online.
42-Art and Architecture
Emireth Herrera, Kristyna and Marek Milde, Maddy Rosenberg, Giandomenico Pellizi describe their quest to connect nature with the architectural spaces we inhabit. Architecture ground us, persons of very different backgrounds, countries, and experiences find a balance between the marvel of architecture and the beauty of nature.
Plantarium: Circles and Constellations (2021), S-A House, Upstate NY,
corten steel plates, metal frame, soil, local plants and stones, pond, 32’x 7’x 4′
Plantarium: Circles and Constellations (2021) by Kristyna and Marek Milde is a permanent living sculpture developed as a site-specific private commission for the new S-A house by the architects LevenBetts in upstate NY.
Designed to create an immersive experience of nature Plantarium is a steel sculpture and a garden connecting the atrium of the house to the open landscape. It takes the form of a rusted Corten steel platform dotted with laser-cut circular openings that host living plants. Its design is based on emerging circular patterns in nature, mapping the complex relationships in the ecosystem. The piece is a microcosm mirroring the surrounding environment, reflecting natural diversity on site. It features a selection of local plants and stones transferred from the property. A small pond in a form of water droplets represents the local wetland, ferns and mosses recall the shady woodlands, and the arrangement of stones echoes the dry and sunny environment of a gravel quarry. More
Bagnare le rose, Cambiare le cose
Curated by Jose Ramon Ais
Galleris Cavo, Trieste, Italy, November 16 – 25, 2021
Join us for the show about roses and fictional nature Bagnare le rose, Cambiare le cose curated by Jose Ramon Ais at Galleris Cavo, Trieste, Italy, November 16 – 25, 2021. For the exhibition, we created a series titled Herbarium Funeralis, where we document a new type of roses growing on the graves in an old Linden Hill Cemetery in Queens. These flowers are resisting the change of seasons eternally commemorate the departed loved ones.
Between the Ground and the Sky
MoCA Westport
19 Newtown Turnpike | Westport, CT 06880
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Donna Forma, Anne Burmeister, and Ashley Skatoff
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Carpetorium, Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan at MoCA Westport, 2021
rescued discarded house plants, carpet, 8’x10’x7’
The exhibition Between the Ground and the Sky features two of our new site-specific installations: Carpetorium, Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan, showcasing tropical houseplants we found discarded on the streets in Manhattan. And In-Tree-Net an installation made of trees and branches.
Between the Ground and the Sky also includes natural, organic works of artist Donna Forma and more than 50 photographs of local farms by Anne Burmeister and Ashley Skatoff.
In conversation with Christelle Havranek, Chief Curator of Kunsthalle Praha
Friday, 1 October 2021 at Kunsthalle Praha
By invitation only
On the occasion of the unveiling of CABINET OF ELECTRICAL CURIOSITIES, a new permanent site-specific installation by Mark Dion at Kunsthalle Praha we will be talking together with the artist and Christelle Havranek, the Chief Curator of Kunsthalle Praha about our recent projects, and our common inspiration in the art that engages the natural world.
Mark Dion & the Czech artist duo Kristýna & Marek Milde, all three based in New York, are long-time friends. Although working in different media, Dion and the Mildes share number of approaches and strategies. As explorers of the natural world, rescuers of found objects, observers of human behavior, they share a comparable artistic vision. In conversation with Kunsthalle’s Chief Curator Christelle Havranek, the artists will present some of their recent projects and discuss their practices, influences, and preoccupations. They will also talk about their experience at Mildred’s Lane, innovative visual art education and residency program co-founded by Mark Dion in Narrowsburg, Pennsylvania, and often visited by the Mildes.
The event is by invitation only and will take place on Friday, 1 October 2021 at the soon-to-be-completed Kunsthalle Praha, in presence of the artist Mark Dion and Kunsthalle Praha’s founders PavlÃna & Petr Pudil.
Cabinet of Electrical Curiosities: A permanent site-specific installation created by Mark Dion for Kunsthalle Praha. Using industrial objects collected on the site of the former Zenger electrical substation, Dion’s work tells the story of the Kunsthalle’s building, from its construction in the 1930s to its current conversion into a modern cultural space.
Field Guide: Accompanying Mark Dion’s installation, the publication includes an interview with the artist, a timeline, and a selection of objects with descriptions penned by the Czech technical historian Milan GuÅ¡tar.
Kristyna & Marek Milde
Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artists duo, originally from Prague, Czech Republic. In their practice, they investigate the shifting relationship between culture and environment, often using natural and man-made found materials to create interpretative archives, sculptures, and site-specific installations. The Mildes have been awarded numerous residencies and awards and have exhibited internationally in institutions such as the Queens Museum and MoMA in New York, the DOX Center for Contemporary Art, Futura, and Meet Factory in Prague, among others. They won the Westport Art Center collaborative competition and their work is part of private and public collections. Kristýna Milde studied painting at Assenza Malschule in Basel. Marek Milde studied sculpture at the Atelier Dodekaeder in Germany. They both received MFAs from Queens College, CUNY, New York, in 2007.
Unison Arts Center, New Paltz, NY Sunday, January 19, 4 – 6 pm Exhibiting thru March 8th, 2020
Joann Alvis, Kathleen Anderson, Michael Asbill, Alan Baer, Jebah Baum, Amy Benedict, Jeff Benjamin, Matt Bua, Amy Crews, Mary Anne Davis, Tim Dehm, Tasha Depp, Alexis Elton, Kate Farrington, Mimi Graminski, Beth Haber, Jan Harrison, Amanda Heidel, Sam Horowitz, Maxine Leu, Maria Lupo, James Lynch, Michael McDonough, Kristyna and Marek Milde, Ilse Schreiber-Noll, Joel Olzak, Carol Padberg, Todd RaderLaurie Sheridan, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Patricia Tinajero, Susan Togut, Moira Williams, Millicent Young
Curated by Linda Weintraub and Michael Asbill
In all vital ecosystems, organized structures – living and dead, biotic and abiotic, manufactured and grown – ultimately succumb to disorder. This imperative served as the inspiration for the artworks in this exhibition. They celebrate the natural process by which organized matter becomes dismantled so the molecules can be rearranged to form new generations of living entities.
Exhibition curated by Linda Weintraub and Michael Asbill connects to “Composed to Decomposeâ€, an innovative outdoor art exhibition in the Unison Arts center Sculpture Park, in which artists dispense with conventional art practices and adopt ecosystem dynamics as the model of ecologically responsible human behaviors. This exhibition opens at Unison Arts Center in New Paltz, New York on July 21st at 4 pm. We welcome the community to come and explore the installations and meet the artists.
Co-curators Michael Asbill and Linda Weintraub explain, “This exhibition invites artists to challenge the widespread social, personal, and economic desire for material stability, and demonstrate that humans disturb ecosystem functions when they attempt to defy biodegradability. Forty-five artists have composed installations that are intentionally designed to decompose over the course of an entire year. They demonstrate that it is through decomposition that fertility is replenished, ecosystems are revitalized, and life is renewed.â€
This significant frontier of contemporary culture is identified as “Eco-Materialism.†The concept is explored in a popular new book by Linda Weintraub entitled “What’s Next: Eco-Materialism and Contemporary Art.†Like this text, “Composed to Decompose†advocates for humans to respect non-human systems and functions. This entails inviting the effects of weather, season, and wildlife. By July 2020, when the exhibition year ends, the vitality of each site will be enlivened and enhanced by these decomposed artworks.
In addition to the individual year-long installations, a companion exhibition, entitled “Composed to Decompose: Sequential Responsive Transformations,†will include twelve artists working on a single site, sequentially, over the course of the year. The curators explain, “Each month a new artist will enter the site to add to and/or alter the remains of previous artists’ installations, contributing to an ongoing sequence of interactive interventions. In this manner, artists emulate the responsiveness that prevails among wildlife, instead of the domination that prevails in contemporary industrial practices.â€
Kristyna and Marek Milde in collaboration with Valerie Tomaselli and Brian Carey, Where Things Go (Rock Hill Library of Overdue Books), 2020, books, W18 1/2†x H18 1/2†x D 6 ½â€
Books from a private property in Rock Hill, where they have been intentionally placed in the woods for a number of years to naturally deteriorate and transform. The project explores the ephemerality o human culture versus the cycles in nature. It asks a question: What will happen to the ideas, stories, and information written in the books, once they can’t be read? Is there a place where they go? Similarly, what will happen to our digital footprint once we are gone?
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Where the Things Go (Bookworm Library); 2019, pencil on paper, 14†x 11â€,
Sketch of an installation consisting of a metal bookshelf placed in the wood and filled with books, that would deteriorate and compost over time.
Science Fictional Thinking
Storefront Practices in the Social Realm
Opening December 7, 3 – 7pm
Open thru March 14, 2020
2 Post Hill Road and Main Street / Mountaindale, NY 12763
Vincent Castro / Jorge Colombo / Mark Dion / Joy Feasley / Sophie Friedman-Pappas / Hope Ginsburg / Norberto Gomez / Heather Greene / Jeffrey Jenkins / Alex A. Jones / Cameron Klavsen / Samantha Lopez / Abby Lutz / Kristyna Milde / Marek Milde / J Morgan Puett / Rebecca Purcell / Ryan Rennie / Alexander Rosenberg /Alex Schechter / Matthew Solomon / Paul Swenbeck / VIROSA / Allison Ward / Natalie Wilkin / Amy Yoes
Cocurated with Alex A. Jones and Cameron Klavsen
Image: Alex A. Jones and Cameron Klavsen
It is the year 2020. You are living in the future, and it is nothing like you imagined.
This show asks how science fiction can be a tool for artists to anticipate meaningful notions of the future. Sci-fi is not simply a genre, but a vehicle for expressing collective dreams and fears about our ever-changing world. Nor are the aesthetics of sci-fi limited to the space age, for we do not seem destined for a future of technological salvation. The varied works in this exhibition are therefore grounded in trans-historical thinking. They are imaginative leaps, speculative propositions, compromises, and even fantasies. The curatorial premise of their grouping is this:
Imagine a future world…what object sits beside you? If sci-fi is a tool for thought, what does that tool look like?
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Alienator No.2, 2019, detail,collage on blackened aluminum, cut out photographs from a book about modernist architecture, 41″x32″
Petrified Times – Styles, 2018, detail, from the series Petrified Times, New York Times Styles section newspaper collected for one year, glue, H19†x W12â€x D12â€
We are happy again to be part of the annual Bushwick Open Studios 2019! Come by on Saturday, September 21, 1 – 7 pm to visit our studio to see a selection of our recent works. Get an insight into the process of making Petrified Times, sculptures made of New York Times newspaper. Also Chairing New York will be on view, the ongoing photo saga following the story of hundreds of found broken chairs exhibited at the Queens Museum and the Public Library a sculpture made of rescued books. Read in!
Our objects, sculptures, and installations are based on collections and archives informed by our interest in the changing culture nature relationship. Our projects investigate the emergence of cultural patterns seeking the environmental context of the daily lifestyle.
About Bushwick Open Studios:
Now in its 13th year, Bushwick Open Studios BOS2019 will feature over 200 artist and venue locations. Bushwick Open Studios is a self-organized, collaborative festival produced by Arts In Bushwick. Hundreds of artists open their studios, participate in group shows, and perform in events. Festival activities take place in a myriad of venues and environments, including galleries, theaters, homes, artist studios, local businesses, parks, street corners, and other public places. The purpose of the festival is to create an open and inclusive event that benefits the neighborhood through sharing artistic projects, encouraging dialogue and fostering greater engagement with the arts.
We are thrilled to be awarded the international Art Omi Residency, 2019. Join us for the Art Omi Open Studios Sunday, July 7 from 1-5pm.
The event takes place at the Art Omi, 120-acre sculpture and architecture park it starts with Artists brunch at the Art Omi Ledig House in the morning 11am – 1pm and is followed by the Open Studios at the Studio Barn in the afternoon 1pm- 5pm, presenting work of over 30 artists from around the world.
During the Open Studios, we will be showing our work in progress Petrified Times, a series of sculptural objects exploring news cycles and media reality in the context of environment and cycles in nature.
Explore the open studios of the 30 artists-in-residence, along with special pop-up performances and installations. An intimate glimpse into the work of international artists who, for the last month, have been in residence at Art Omi. Featuring artists from a range of disciplines and techniques—from painters to sound artists to social practice, you’re invited to take a trip around the art world without leaving the Studio Barns! Art Omi welcomes the public to its events and grounds free of charge.
Artists Brunch: Mix and mingle with the thirty-one international artists-in-residence on the sweeping lawn at Ledig House. Featuring mimosas and a sumptuous brunch by Simons Catering. Get Tickets: $40 for members, $50 for not-yet-members
We are pleased to be part of the Whitney Art Staff Show 2019 already for the second time. We will be showing Sitings, series of collages investigating street life scenes and situations of the unconventional use of the public space in New York City.
From its origins in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Greenwich Village studio in 1914 to its relocation to the Meatpacking District in 2015, the Whitney Museum of American Art has always sought to support living artists at critical moments in their careers. Many of the Museum’s staff members, who make the Museum’s exhibitions, programs, publications, and day-to-day operations possible, are artists themselves.
For the fourth time in its history, the Whitney’s Staff Art Show will be held in a public space, offering staff an opportunity to share their work and deepen connections with one another as well as a wider audience. This year’s exhibition will include the work of over ninety artists, presenting a wide range of media and content, and reflecting the diversity of thought and artistic practice among Whitney’s staff.
A GUIDE TO THE FIELD: Storefront Practices in the Social Realm
Opening Saturday, April 20th, 3pm-7pm
April 20 through August 4, 2019
2 Post Hill Road and Main Street / Mountaindale, NY 12763
Barbara Botting / David Brooks / Jorge Colombo / Barrbara de Vries / Mark Dion / Hope Ginsburg / Dennis Gordon / Gary Graham / Brooke Grant / Heather Greene / Amanda Heidel / Aaron Hicklin / Jeffrey Jenkins / Alex Jones / Cameron Klavsen / Abby Lutz / Pam Mayer / Kristyna Milde / Marek Milde / Rebecca Purcell / Garnett Puett / J. Morgan Puett / Joshua Quarles / Gina Siepel / Laura Silverman / Allison Smith / Matthew Solomon / Caroline Wallner / Allison Ward / Paul Ward / Natalie Wilkin / Amy Yoes / Mary Lou Zelazny / Jim Zivic / and others swarming the topic – FACTORY.
Image / Design: Jeffrey Jenkins
factory | ˈfakt(ə)rē | noun (plural factories) 1) a building or group of buildings where goods are manufactured or assembled chiefly by machine. 2) A manufacturing plant is a site, with machinery, or a complex, where workers manufacture goods, operate machines processing materials into another form or products. 3) a person, group, or institution that continually produces a great quantity of something specified: a huge factory of lying, slander, and bad English. 4) the body as factory. 5) Historical; an establishment for traders carrying on business.Origin. Late 16c.from Latin factor (see factor). factory (sense 1) based on late Latin factorium, literally ‘oil press’.
A Guide to the Field is a project gallery devoted to showing, making and collecting socially and politically sensitive artwork, including; textiles, sculpture, clothing, furniture, photography, painting, ceramics – fine art in the every day – set in topic-driven installations (swarmings) by artists working in the social sphere. Visitors experience a storefront apartment environment; an interactive installation of making, cooking, cleaning, playing, resting, reading, thinking – being.
Factory is a show hearkening to earliest sites of production – the household – evolving into what we understand as the industrial revolution; on to the rapid evaporations of a technological 21st-century. Here, artists are factories, as if coming full circle. Creative workers and thinkers tell stories, weave histories, sports reflections, make demonstrations, share collections, manufacture clothing and hold events throughout the spring exhibition.
Kristyna and Marek Milde, in toto, 2019, household dust, soap, edition of 7, Each 2 3/16†x 3 5/8†x 1 ¼†(5,5 cm x 9,3 cm x 3 cm)
“In Toto is an amusing, ironic and provocative work created around the modern obsession with extreme cleanliness and the fear of dirt. This object in the form of a bar soap made of soap and household dust embodies an oxymoron: the possibility of cleaning and dirtying yourself at the same time, with the same gesture and the same tool.â€
Marta Elisa Cecchi, Inventario #13
Factory-made, industrial products are synonymous for the notion of the modern, pristine clean and perfect. The soap is an ultimate tool defining our culture, which is based on constant elimination of what is dirty and filthy. In Toto challenges the modern obsession with extreme cleanliness and the fear of dirt represented by the constant use of antiseptic hygiene products. For Mildes dust is a unique substance, a matter universally present, which they explore for its environmental and cultural significance. It is an inclusive entity consisting of many small particles of all possible things both natural and man-made like shavings of cloths, parts of human bodies and stardust from far away galaxies. In Toto represents idea of wholeness reflecting the matter in transition, its constant, accumulation, and dispersal in the cycle of nature, that we as humans attempt to interrupt, succeeding only temporarily. It represents a model of reality as a whole.
A Guide to the Field: Storefront Practices in the Social Realm
2 Post Hill Road and Main Street / Mountaindale, NY 12763 www.aguidetothefield.com / Instagram: @aguidetothefield
The show is proposing new platforms for conversation. It re-imagines and reinvents the Victorian-era conversation bench–also known as a tête-à -tête. Homescape: Tête-à -Tête is a model of a living sculpture that reframes and elevates the environment. It transforms the landscape into a bench to create a space for dialogue. Based on a design commissioned by Wave Hill for our solo show at Sunroom Project Space curated by Jennifer McGregor and Gabriel de Guzman. Now on view at Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center as part of the public tour.
Tête-à -Tête, is a unique piece of French furniture that emerged in the 19th century and translates to head-to-head–describing the early functionality of these seats during the Victorian era as a courting bench, conversation bench, kissing bench and gossip’s chair.
The traditional tête-à -tête seat features chairs with S-shaped, curved backs facing opposite directions that share a center armrest. Early tête-à -tête pieces were designed to enhance many kinds of discrete yet intimate conversations such as courtship. The exhibition is envisioned as a symbolic way to encourage conversation and civility within our community. We aim to foster dialogue in these polarized times–as people sit, talk and listen, their understanding and tolerance of each other will organically improve. A contemporary re-imagining of the conversation bench will make this project relevant to today’s sensibilities. Our categories—fantastical, functional and collaborative—allow for a wide range of exhibitors with diverse artistic training and abilities.
Our hope is that, ultimately, the winning bench will find a home along the Saugatuck River or be an installation piece that travels around town or becomes part of Westport’s Permanent Art Collection (WestPAC). Creative programming developed by community organizations and centered around the idea of listening is the natural outgrowth of this project.
Kristýna a Marek Milde – Petra Gupta Valentová
G18 Gallery Zlin, Czechia
Opening: Wednesday, March 13, 6pm
On view March 13 – April 25, 2019
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Dům v domÄ›/ Home in a Home, 2012 – 2019, wallpaper detail
a pattern designed with stories shared by the project participants about their favorite objects they collect to create a sense of home
The theme of the (In)Visible Patterns, engages the issues of everyday lifestyle, in consumerism and how they connect to larger environmental, social and cultural context. The current global world and consumer lifestyle bring together many issues and basic questions for which there are no simple answers, it is vital however to examine and look at them in context, not in isolation. One of such challenges is the current environmental crisis and the role of the individual in relation to (post) industrial society and to the so-called third world.
The exhibition (In)-Visible Patterns by Kristyna and Marek Milde and Petra Gupta Valentova present a selection of their environmental projects that seek to actively contribute to the general discourse. Mildes follow the phenomenon of a special kind the modern man, which they named Homo Interius, an individual who spends most of his life in a bubble inside a white cube separates himself from the surroundings, passively, with a purely interior attitude to the world. They present a series of installations Home in a Home, Do-It-Your-Self: Color of a Home and Cabinet of Smells, addressing the environmental deprivation by searching for the color, smell, and essence of home.
Petra Gupta Valentova founder of the IM.PRINTED brand focuses on the technique of Indian wood-working and Czech blueprint. Valentova is also behind the BBs – Bagru Bhabhis project, representing the tread patterns and gauge from the Bagru printers. However, the author is by no means interested in the products themselves only, but she is striving to contribute to the current topic of sustainable cooperation with third-world craftsmen who she believes should become real owners of their work, not just suppliers.
“StejnÄ› jako jinà umÄ›lci stále hledáme nepopsanou zemi.”
Kristýna a Marek Milde, Kabinet vůnà (Cabinet of Smells), 2015, pohled do instalace výstavy Double Vision v EFA Project Space, NYC|foto: Kristýna a Marek Milde
The NYC Creative Salon is a series of discussions that take place bi-weekly. Each discussion is approximately an hour and a half long and takes place on a weekday evening. Each series is six discussions under one topic and each discussion has a different group of participants speaking on the topic. Ultimately, there will be six different discussions on one topic, in hopes of reaching a thorough investigation of that idea. The participants include a moderator and approximately 8 people working in various creative fields. We restrict the number of participants to 10 people in order to keep the group intimate and the discussion focused.
We produce and consume information. We accumulate fragments of the world we live in. We store and archive these crumbs in books, hard drives, and heads. We have developed the need of having notions for the interpretation of the past and theorization of the future. Like erected mile-stones in a flat field, we use them to orient ourselves in our living.
As art and cultural institutions are strictly connected with this entire process of producing, questioning and reinterpreting the ever-changing foundation of our contemporary being. How do we build knowledge that fuels our existence?
The first part of the exhibition and related events took place September 6th – September 30 in and around Flux Factory. The second part of the exhibition is taking place at Queens Museum’s Community Partnership Gallery, October 28 to December 2.
S.T.E.P…. seeks to be an overlapping convergence and entanglement of walking, walk-based works and programming, mobilizing throughout New York. S.T.E.P… embraces the many ways and bodies we walk while asking how walking as a creative act can challenge notions and open conversations around visibility, gender, labor, exploration, counter-mapping, colonialism, feminism, motherhood, contesting borders, community building, calling out gentrification, street harassment, (dis)ability, carbon debt, who sets the pace and measurement of the world, the power of dreams, and our entanglements between all of these and one another. S.T.E.P…. is open to all people of all abilities.
Walks and events occurring at the Queens Museum will be posted shortly.
About the Curators:
Christina, Emireth, and Moira met at Flux Factory’s residency in 2016. Christina’s practice intervenes into existing systems, approaching culture as something we actively shape together. Moira Williams’ co-creative practice weaves together performance, bio-art, food, sound, sculpture, and group walking as a lived experience. Emireth Herrera is a curator who aims to reveal social transformation through democratic processes.
Support for Saunter Trek Escort Parade…(S.T.E.P….) is provided by Friends of Flux, Queens Museum, the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, in-kind support from Materials for the Arts, ART WORKS arts.gov, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the New York State Legislature.
Join us for the opening of the exhibition Encampment on October 6th at the A Guide to the Field: Storefront Practices in the Social Realm,a new project gallery by J. Morgan Puett and Abby Lutz, where we will be showing new collages from our project “Sitings”, that explores the domestication and “encampment” of public space.
Encampment,A Guide to the Field’s inaugural installation, offers visual and functional conversations around living in an ever-migratory society. Visitors will experience a storefront apartment environment, where artist’s works are responses to one’s daily activities of clothing, cooking, cleaning, making, playing, resting, and thinking/being.
A Guide to the Field: Storefront Practices in the Social Realm exhibits and sells socially and politically sensitive artworks, textiles, sculpture, clothing, furniture – fine art in the everyday – set in topic-driven installations (Swarmings) by artists working in the social sphere.
Sitings, 2018, 16″x 20″, collage, part of an ongoing project documenting the use and domestication of public space in Lower Manhattan started as part of the LMCC Process Space Residency at Governors Island in 2016. Sitings is a series of site-responsive sculptures functioning as furniture exploring the phenomena of unconventional domestication of public space. Sitings examines the conventions and limits of design and urbanism and its isolating effects on the human relationship to the environment.
On 15 September, volunteers and partners worldwide will come together to rid our planet of trash – cleaning up litter and mismanaged waste from our beaches, rivers, forests, and streets.
A powerful ‘green wave’ of cleanups will start in New Zealand and end 36 hours later in Hawaii, with millions of people working towards one goal: a clean and healthy planet.
World Cleanup Day harnesses the power of everyday people to achieve incredible things by joining together. Its beauty lies in cooperation and collaboration: building bridges between disparate communities, and including all levels of society – from citizens to business, to the government.
A world changing idea with a humble beginning. The movement was born 10 years ago in Estonia, when 4% of the population came out to clean the entire country of illegally dumped waste, in a matter of hours. This captured the imaginations of people worldwide, who were inspired to follow suit with the same ambitious ‘one country, one-day’ formula.
This was the beginning of a global bottom-up civic movement, Let’s Do It! World which has spread like wildfire around the globe. The movement has grown to be the biggest of its kind in the world – uniting people from all corners of the planet to work together in cleaning the world of trash.
But, the Let’s Do It! Movement has never been purely about cleaning up trash. It also works to raise global awareness and implement lasting changes to end the global waste epidemic, once and for all.
As Estonia celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, World Cleanup Day 2018 is the country’s gift to the world.
Whitney Staff Art Show 2018
WESTSIDE EXPOSURE
Organized by the Whitney Museum and the Westbeth Gallery
Exhibition: July 11–26, 2018
Opening Reception: July 10, 2018, 6–8 pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6 pm
Please, join us for the opening of the Whitney Staff Art Show 2018, where we will be showing for the first time our piece “Timescapeâ€, a sculpture made of bricks found on the shores of the East and Hudson Rivers. The bricks rounded by water over a time to pebbles of various shapes are assembled together according to their size to resemble a relief of a landscape. From its origins in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Greenwich Village studio in 1914 to its relocation to the Meatpacking District in 2015, the Whitney Museum of American Art has always sought to support living artists at critical moments in their careers. Many of the Museum’s staff members, who make the Museum’s exhibitions, programs, publications, and day-to-day operations possible, are artists themselves. For the third time in its history, the Whitney’s Staff Art Show will be held in a public space, offering staff an opportunity to share their work and deepen connections with one another as well as a wider audience. This year’s exhibition will include the work of over ninety artists, presenting a wide range of mediums and content and reflecting the diversity of thought and artistic practice among Whitney’s staff.
Timescape, 2008 – 2018, 40″x 40″ x 8″, installation view at the Westburn Gallery, bricks found on the shores of the East and Hudson Rivers
Please join us for the opening of the exhibition Human Nature featuring our new sculptures Petrified Times commissioned by Arts Brookfield. Nature, and our relationship to it has been a theme in art since humans began drawing on cave walls during prehistoric times. Over the millennia, our methods of expression may have changed but our fascination with observing the natural world remains constant. Commissioned by Arts Brookfield, Human Nature presents six new works by seven contemporary artists inspired by the natural landscape and the use of organic forms. Utilizing visual cues from nature, the artworks in this exhibition are distinct interpretations of our environment and the complex relationships to it. Some works utilize organic materials such as plants and natural fibers to reveal creative interactions with the earth’s resources; others rely on man-made and industrial materials, highlighting the contrast between the modern world and the idealized vision of nature we inherently possess. The vibrant and unique interpretations in Human Nature serve as visual landmarks in our perpetual quest to understand the ever-changing world that surrounds us. – Tom Kotik, curator
Petrified Times – Art,2018, From the series Petrified Times, NewYorkTimes Art section, newspaper collected for one year, glue, metal stand, 19†x 12â€x 5â€
Wilder LIC
Group exhibition organized by the Flux Factory
Participating artists and performers Amirtha Kidambi, Andrea Haenggi, Alex Nathanson, Christopher Kennedy & Thomas Choinacky,
Ellie Irons, Jessica Pavone, Johann Diedrick, Katya Khan, Kristyna and Marek Milde, Richard Garet, Valeria Haedo…and Flux Iron Chefs!!!
Join us for the opening of the exhibition Wilder LIC, where we have been commissioned by the Flux Factory to create a new permanent living sculpture “Plantarium -Tea Garden” at the Windmill Community Garden located across the street of the Flux Factory which Flux co-founded with neighborhood partners in 2016, this marks the opening of the very first group exhibition in this new location. The exhibition curated by Lorissa Reinhart, independent curator, and Nat Roe, Director of Flux, includes artists and performers who explore the urban wilderness and our relationship to the often overlooked environment. New artworks will be on view May 5 – June 16, with special events and performances throughout the month. In his recent book Feral, George Monboit discusses his theory of ecological boredom that posits much of the existential ennui experienced by urban denizens is a result of our self-distancing from the wild in favor of more homogeneous landscapes. To advance this idea further, one might postulate that our evolutionary biology seeks and yearns for biodiversity, recognizing this as the keystone of a sustainable environment. Simultaneously, our contrary desire is to find safety in the controlled and understood leads us to create places where the other is wholly absent. Thus we find ourselves increasingly migrating to megacities devoid of any contact with what one might call nature as even city parks are highly regulated spaces where an errant leaf is a cause for a gas powered blower. Outside the city is hardly better as agribusiness monoculture creates unbroken seas of Roundup-ready cash crops. By banishing any hope of the aleatory, these barren spaces inhibit imagination and creativity. This exhibition seeks to channel what is wild through familiar media and technologies in order to create an accessible platform for new ideas about ecological and cultural diversity. It suggests the wild can be understood as a complicated system necessary for the perpetuation of life as we know it, rather than the chaos that should be simplified and abolished. Finally, this exhibition encourages artists, scientists, programmers, and designers to work together and borrow from each other to create new lenses through which we might see and experience our wilder nature.
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Plantarium – Tea Garden, Flux Factory/Windmill Community Garden, 2018,
view of the work in progress, transplanted foraged wildflowers, soil, stones, steel, 12′ x 12’x 6′
Plantarium – Tea Garden is a new permanent installation commissioned by Flux Factory taking a form of a wildflower garden functioning both as a living sculpture and an open platform, serving the local Windmill Garden Community to grow and harvest plants for teas and infusions and host variety of events, tastings, and educative workshops to deepen the interest in native plants and learn about its cultural, culinary and medicinal use. Plantarium – Tea Garden consists of an organic interlocking system of circular garden beds featuring a spectrum of uncultivated local plants displaying native alongside the introduced species hardy perennials herbs such as the Bea Balm, Mountain Mint, and St. John’s Wort reflecting the evolving culture-nature relationship. The design is based on the idea of an interlocking mosaic of wild plant in nature, where they connect with each other to create a living social network a parallel to the diverse communities living in NYC. Some of the circles will also function as seating areas, where people could relax, socialize and experience the textures and smells of the plants. The project evolves in series of walks, studies, and workshops gradually establishing a wildflower garden in collaboration with the local community reflecting the natural diversity through the seasonal change. The project is part of series of site interventions and participatory actions where we engage themes of environmental alienation by promoting an active experience of wild plants through use, consumption, and interpretation to explore our relationship to the environment. It father expands concepts of our developing project Plantarium, Garden for Weeds, Bees, and Teas, a wildflower garden, and an educative platform, which we started in 2017 at Mildred’s Lane in PA that explores local wild plants and flowers its use and cultural significance. With our project, we aim to enable positive change in our relationship to the environment and public space on the social, ecological and urban planning level. We want to facilitate awareness about the space we live in and connect people to their immediate environment raising awareness about current alienation and disconnections from our surrounding. We are interested in activating local communities through direct experience and interaction to thrive towards a more responsible and sustainable future.
About the Windmill Community Garden Located across the street from Flux Factory, the Windmill Community Garden was founded in 2016 and is a permanent GreenThumb NYC Park. The Garden is led by three neighborhood nonprofits including Flux Factory, The Growing Up Green Charter School, and the Dutch Kills Civic Association, in addition to local community members.
Wilding, Wasting, Workstyling
Mildred’s Lane Sessions 2018 YEAR OF TIN & CHINAJune 18 – 24, 2018 Accepting Applications!
Session Leading Artists: Donna Cleary, Daria Dorosh,
Kristyna and Marek Milde, J. Morgan Puett, Shelley Spector, Amy Lou Stein
Wildcrafting is a term defining food as naturally medicinal, concerned with sustainability. Fellows are engaged in detailed studies of the dynamic landscape at Mildred’s Lane, practicing foraging routines with a focus on transforming food/waste systems and critically processing plants throughout the seasons. Local naturalists, gardeners, botanists, and other contributing artists will workshop around topics including collecting, pressing, tincturing, planting, soil biology – wilding; while focusing on the dynamic transformation of the Mildred’s Garden adjacent to the Mildred’s Lane TransHistorical Society and Museum. The group becomes an emergent collective working on all projects concerning botanicals of Mildred’sLane. Kristyna and Marek Milde are working on their permanent site project, Plantarium – Garden for Weeds, Bees, and Teas. Donna Cleary presents workshops on drying botanicals in preparation for tincture making. Amy Lou Stein is advising on a mother indigo dye system, starting with planting. Shelley Spector shares applied skills in the art of soap-making from recycled products. With collective outcomes, we will experiment with our printing press. J. Morgan Puett refines our daily workstyles as we go. Other special guests include a TOWN Friday with Daria Dorosh.
TOWN FRIDAY, June 23, is free and open to the public. Daria Dorosh talk, titled “Take back your body.” It considers the current commodification of the body, how to take it back, and why it matters now more than ever. Our five senses are key in this exploration as well as conventional fashion and gender politics.
Donna Cleary pulls from her experiences as a Registered Nurse, mother and Herbalist to embody Healer, Medicine Woman, Wise Woman. Donna’s interest lies in traditional healing practices. A descendant of Irish Herbalists, she has reclaimed that familial knowledge. Focusing on the rituals, ceremonies, and objects that accompany medicinal vehicles, her crocheted fertility sculptures reflect on the past by comingling the Feminine Mystique with Pagan Goddess Symbolism, the cycles of life, death, and regeneration. Graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 2014, her exhibitions include Freight and Volume, Petzel Gallery, A.I.R., Art in Odd Places, with reviews by Roberta Smith, Hyperallergic, Rhizome. She attended residencies at MASS MoCA, Cill Rialiag, chaNorth, Mildred’s Lane and founder of 184 Project Space. www.donnacleary.net
Kristyna and Marek Milde are Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artists duo, originally from Prague, Czech Republic. Their work takes a form of sculptures, installations, and participatory site interventions that investigate codes and mechanism of culture and modern lifestyle exploring its shifting relationship to the context of environment and nature. The Mildes were awarded residencies at ISCP, LMCC Process Space, Queens Museum Studio in the Park, EFA SHIFT, and A-Z West. They exhibited in the Queens Museum, MoMA Studio, Wave Hill, Smack Mellon, EFA, Abrons Art Center, Knockdown Center, HVCCA, Russell-Wright-Design Center, Temple Contemporary, DOX Center for Contemporary Art; Futura; Meet Factory. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, BTR Radio, and Czech National Television, among others. In 2007 they received MFAs from the Queens College, CUNY. www.mildeart.com
J. Morgan Puett. Georgia. BFA, (painting and sculpture, 1981,) and MFA, (sculpture and experimental filmmaking, 1984); from SAIC. Puett is a trans-disciplinary, creative with accomplished work in installation art, clothing & furniture design, architecture, film, writing and more – rearranging multiple intersections by applying conceptual tools and research-based methods with interests in history, environment, design, craft, and collaboration. Morgan’s early work forged new territory by intervening into the fashion system; and since innovative in the realm of social engagement, founding Mildred’s Lane. She continues to explore genres, citing that being is profoundly a social and political practice. Most recently, Puett received The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award and The Pollock- Krasner Foundation Award, both in 2016.www.mildredslane.com,www.jmorganpuett.com
Shelley Spector is a multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. In her practice, she responds to available resources, often discarded, in combination with a changeable work environment. She produces specific bodies of work in search of universal themes. Currently, she is working on several long-term projects through which her work is intended to generate rather than deplete resources. Her work is part of many public and private collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which presented her solo exhibition “Keep The Home Fires Burning†in 2015, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC. Spector has received grants from the Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Leeway Foundation. www.shelleyspector.com
Amy Lou Stein is a fiber artist who works with natural dyes, eco-printing, textiles, and crochet. She is the founder of Craftwork Somerville, a makerspace that since 2015 has aimed to build community through craft by curating workshops and classes for makers of all ages. Her passion for plants and botanicals grows out of a commitment to sustainably interact with nature and to find creative fulfillment for herself and other by repurposing and reusing. She has taught at Squam Art Workshops and Lakeside Fiber Retreat; and received a technical scholarship to develop her craft and assist teaching at Haystack. Amy Lou draws inspiration from fashion, music, film, and other media: as a principal of Ozma Designs in Los Angeles, she has worked as a costume designer and wardrobe consultant for Beck, Beth Orton, Mercury Rev, and the Eels.www.amyloustein.com
Daria Dorosh, Ph.D. is a co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery, NY, and adjunct faculty at SMARTlab, University College Dublin, Ireland. She was a keynote speaker at VSMM 2017, a conference on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia at UCD and has given many presentations including The Future is History: feminist legacies in contemporary art, at the Brooklyn Museum. Dorosh studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, NY. She taught fashion design at FIT and fine art at Parsons School of Design, NY. Her Fashion Lab in Process, LLC, is a research platform to identify new economic models for artists. www.dariadorosh.com
Sessions 2018: YEAR OF TIN & CHINA2018 is a notable year for us. We are celebrating the tenth season of sessions and the twentieth anniversary of the project site we call Mildred’s Lane. We invite you to share experience and knowledge during the Summer Sessions 2018!
Organized by the Brooklyn Public Library as part of the Democracy Lab
Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY
Tuesday, June 10, 2018, 6 – 7pm
Guided walk through the neighborhood focused on exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in around Grand Army Plaza, focusing on wild plants and animals who found a home in our dense urban environment.
Led by artist and curator of Chance Ecologies Nathan Kensinger, artists duo Kristyna and Marek Milde, presenting a herbal drink made with wild plants gathered on their foraging trips and expeditions, Sarah Nelson Wright and Edrex Fontanilla, featuring a virtual-reality glimpse into distant chance ecological sites, and Matthias Neumann intervention engaging the idea of “invasive” and “illegal” species.
Chance Ecologies is a public art project that explores un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in New York City’s abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills.
Peripheral ARTeries Art Review – Aniversary Edition
We are pleased to share a newly published interview we did for the magazine Peripheral ARTeries. We very much enjoyed talking to the curators of the Peripheral ARTeries Dario Rutigliano (United Kindom) and Melissa C. Hilborn (USA/ Germany) discussing in detail our collaborative artistic process and strategies we utilize in our recent projects. The article is available on page 4-31.
Check out our interview on the BTR Radio as part of the Art Uncovered series hosted by Kimberley Ruth. In the interview, we discuss many topics and projects including the Public Library currently on view as part of the exhibition Building and Rebuilding at Repair the World. It was a very rich conversation and we hope you will enjoy it!
Tags: Bees | Books | Collaboration | Environment | Furniture | Home | SustainabilityArt Uncovered brings you interviews with an eclectic mix of artists and creators. On the show, they discuss their work and how it may intersect with technology, pop-culture, science, and the larger culture. Kimberly Ruth is a New York-based multi-media artist, radio host, founder of the Gnome Magazine, and Professor of Journalism and Photography at SUNY New Paltz. Her work explores the failures and inconsistencies of language, especially in the digital age.
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 30, 7 pm – 9:30 pm
Public Library, 2017, installation view at Repair the World, exhibition Building and Rebuilding
collections of discarded books found on the streets since 2012, custom sized plywood boxes, dimensions variable
Please join us for the opening of the exhibition Building & Rebuilding curated by Shlomit Dror on November 30 from 7 pm- 9:30 pm at Repair the World, 808 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn presented by the Asylum Arts. The exhibition presents our new installation project “Public Libraryâ€, a sculpture and a growing archive of found books rescued from the New York City waste stream. The piece functions as an interactive library allowing for browsing and reading of over 30 book collections we gathered over several years in the trash on the NYC streets. The library takes a form of irregular conglomerate sculpture, serving as a bookcase built of a variety of custom sized rectangular segments, housing individual book collections, resembling elements and structures of architecture. Public Library preserves these collections as cultural statements, which we consider as curated selections that at the same time function as imaginary portraits of unknown characters reflecting the multitude of unique contexts and cultural narratives defining a place such as NYC. The project is an inquiry into the theme of books and their changing role in consumerism, examining the cultural significance of collecting and disposal, it is a part of series of projects in which we utilize the idea of an archive, and collections as a platform to explore current issues of society and culture. The concept of the Public Library is open-ended while suggesting a parallel to the city and urban development, its shifts and expansion, the library will further continue to grow in size and shape with the addition of new finds. Learn more here.
This group exhibition Building & Rebuilding addresses the effects of the rapidly-changing landscape in our urban surroundings as a result of sprawl, evident by endless demolitions, empty lots and new high-rises. The works in the show contain familiar elements from city landscapes, such as scaffolding, urban detritus, abandoned buildings, and public gardens, all addressing the hurried transformation of cityscapes closely related to gentrification. The social and architectural shifts in which many neighborhoods in Brooklyn (and elsewhere) encounter are primary themes within the artists’ works. Some of the works in the show are more abstract than others, presenting imagined structures as a way of exploring the notion of permanence and impermanence in “new†territories and spaces. Other works in the show mirror a tangled topography and inspire association with urban sprawl, interrogating urbanism and the tension that occurs due to shifts in the landscape.
Group Exhibition curated by Jennifer Mac Gregor and Gabriel de Guzman
September 10 – December 03, 2017
Opening Reception, Sunday, September 10, 2 – 4:30pm
Wave Hill, Glyndor Gallery, 675 W 252nd Street, Bronx, NY 10471
Kristyna and Marek Milde,In-Tree-Net, 2009-2017, installation view at Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill, 10,5′ x 1,5′ x 6“ tree trunks and branches, plumbing hardware
We are happy to invite you to the group exhibition Call & Response at Wave Hill at the Glyndor Gallery curated by Gabriel Guzman, where we will present our project In-Tree-Net, a site-specific installation on the theme of borders architecture creates towards the natural world. Please join us for the Opening Reception on Sunday, September 10, 2 pm – 4:30 pm. In the spirit of experimentation synonymous with the Sunroom, a space devoted to site-specific work by emerging artists, Wave Hill’s curatorial team has invited 50 artists who have shown in the Sunroom over the last ten years to return and present new responses, encompassing an exhilarating re-examination of the site. The show will feature new work, ranging from art objects created using natural materials on site, to sound and video pieces, outdoor installations and performance works.
For the exhibition Call and Response at Wave Hill Kristyna and Marek Milde created a site-specific installation titled In-Tree-Net, a part of a series of sculptural interventions, responding to issue of environmental fragmentation embedded in architecture. In-Tree-Net takes the form of an organic nervous system growing through the building. The installation is made with trees and branches assembled together with plumbing hardware resembling pipes and engineering structures. At Wave Hill, the installation penetrates the walls of the historical rooms in which once dwelled families of Roosevelt’s and the writer Mark Twain. Trees and their complex interconnection present in the ecosystem of the woods are here reduced to a rigid model of a machine representing the common mechanistic perspective of nature.
The Mildes say: “We are interested in connecting our insulated interior reality to the environmental context. In the project, we confront the cultural notion of framing and dividing nature with artificial borders. In-Tree-Net represents the vital element of nature symbolically crossing these barriers, pointing to the continuity of environment.†The artists conceived the project In-Tree-Net as a developing algorithm open to being applied site-specifically to a variety of sites and places, institutional, public and private. The project already evolved in response to a number of sites and places in the US and Europe confronting borders and limits of architecture. They are interested in reviewing proposals from individuals and institutions to consider possible interactions with specific sites.
The Sunroom Project Space provides an alternative to the kind of white-box setting a contemporary gallery might typically offer. Instead, it features distinctive, arched windows, bringing awareness of the vibrant garden oasis beyond into the installation space and informing and inspiring the work within. For ten years, Wave Hill has opened the space to emerging, New York-area artists to create a site-specific solo project, responding to the unique natural environment of Wave Hill’s gardens, setting, and history. This flourishing program draws artists from the Bronx, as well as other parts of New York City, and is an integral part of the cultural life of the borough. More info here
Exhibition review about the anniversary Call & Response show at Wave Hill, where we presented our site-specific installation In-Tree-Net.October 6, 2017
Please join us for our Open Studio Event taking place at our Studio, Home and Backyard this weekend held as part of the 11th annual neighborhood-wide festival Bushwick Open Studios festival (BOS) September 22-24, 2017.
You will get insight into the process of making our newest projects we worked on in the last months, such as the developing installation Felling Times targeting media narratives, and project Home in a Home focusing on the theme of domestic integrity we created during our recent ISCP Summer Residency. There will be many more new works to see and we look very much forward to have you over for an informal visit and discussion. We will have some home-made refreshments, please BYOB. Our BOS 2017 listing FB event page
There is much more happening around us, the Bushwick Open Studios Festival features several hundreds of participating artists and cultural events, concerts and performances made in Bushwick. So visiting this weekend is a unique opportunity to explore, the currently hottest NY artist neighborhood. Check out the official Festival Website for more information: Bushwick Open Studios 2017
During the weekend most studios will be open from 11am – 7pm on Saturday and Sunday with opening night festivities on Friday night kicking off AiB’s annual Seeking Space group show. Some studio hours will vary, check the community events calendar for studio listings with precise locations and times. You can also browse by location, category or search our artist directory. Visitors and neighbors can also enjoy a series of events, performances, and panel discussions coordinated by AiB in partnership with local businesses and cultural institutions. Some of the Official Arts in Bushwick events during BOS weekend will include:
Opening night of Seeking Space at Beyond Studios NYC
272 Seigel Street
Friday, September 22, 2017 from 7-10pm: The weekend’s kick-off party and opening reception launching the Bushwick Open Studios signature group show, Seeking Space, open 1-5pm Saturday and Sunday through the BOS weekend. Pick up a copy of Making History Bushwick – cataloging ten years of Bushwick and featuring 400 artists – while you’re there!
“AiB Art Walk†Coordinated with Graham Avenue Business Improvement District
All Weekend, September 23-24: Artists have been invited to display work in storefronts along the avenue. Closest Subway J/M/Z at Flushing Avenue
“Deface vs Displace†Curated by Color Scenes and Bushwick Street Art
1009 Broadway #203
Saturday, September 23, 2017, 12-5pm: This action-packed performance and exhibition event will include live painting, vendors, performances and an art exhibition. Curated by Color Scenes and Bushwick Street Art, in coordination with Arts in Bushwick. Located at Bushwick Street Art Gallery,
The BOS Afterparty at House of Yes
2 Wyckoff Avenue
Sunday, September 24,9pm: Proceeds will go to Educated Little Monsters, a creative focused, youth empowerment organization in Bushwick.
A free information map will be available throughout participating hub sites around the community. This free event is a unique opportunity for the Bushwick community and our visitors to tour hundreds of artist studios throughout the neighborhood and a little beyond, to see and feel firsthand the creative vibrancy of a flourishing community.
For art collectors, BOS presents an incredible opportunity to support local artists and purchase high-quality artworks from emerging and renowned artists alike.
If you are a visitor, we recommend taking the L train or J train. The L will let out at the northwestern part of the area at Morgan, Jefferson and Dekalb Avenues, while the J will land you in the southern parts of Bushwick along Broadway. Note, the M train is running to Myrtle-Broadway, but operates as a shuttle bus beyond this stop. Please visit the MTA website for specific information about subway service.
ISCP’s second-floor lounge, 1040 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Home in a Home, 2016,
Installation view at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, wallpaper, digital print on vinyl, molding, furniture, and project’s survey, 144×120×108 in. (365.76 × 304.8 × 274.32 cm)
Please join us Tuesday, September 19, join us for the artist talks by ISCP residents Kristyna and Marek Milde and Yumiko Ono.Kristyna and Marek Milde will speak about their art practice and current project Home in a Home, a research-based work that explores domestic identities. Specifically, they investigate the role of collecting nonfunctional objects and memorabilia in creating personal space. The Milde’s art practice engages themes of modern lifestyles and everyday realities, including domesticity, food, and a variety of cultural rituals that explore society’s alienation from the wider environmental context.Yumiko Ono will address her interest in communist culture, especially in the field of architecture and how the idea of utopia connects to her own cultural background. She will explain how this interest circulates throughout her current research in New York. Ono will also present past works to demonstrate the evolution of her work from a particular point of view about form.
Bellow you can watch a video from the ISCP Artist Talk, the first 30min is Yumiko Ono talking about her work, followed by our presentation.
We are working on our project Home in a Home. Come to visit us at the studio # 203!
The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) supports the creative development of artists and curators, and promotes exchange through residencies and public programs. Housed in a former factory in Brooklyn, with 35 light-filled work studios and two galleries, ISCP is New York’s most comprehensive international visual arts residency program, founded in 1994. ISCP organizes exhibitions, events, and offsite projects, which are free and open to all, sustaining a vibrant community of contemporary art practitioners and diverse audiences. Artists and curators from more than 70 countries, including the United States have undertaken residencies at ISCP.
The Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), established in 1891, was founded as an umbrella organization representing approximately eighty Czech and Slovak cultural, educational and athletic community groups and clubs. With contributions from the newly arrived immigrants, the Bohemian National Hall (Narodni Budova) was built four years later as a gathering place for these organizations in the Yorkville section on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The original mission of the BBLA was and continues to be to preserve the Czech and Slovak culture in New York City.
Kristyna and Marek Milde presentation and workshop: Wednesday, June 7, 2 – 4pm
517 Plank Road, Beach Lake, PA, 18405
Contributing Artists:
Morgan Puett, Athena Kokoronis, Donna Cleary, Jan Mun, Virginia Poundstone, Nathaniel Whitmore, Laura Silverman,
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Tom and Cecilia Coacci, James Prosek, Amy Yoes
We are pleased to be the contributing artists for the Wasting, Wilding, Workstyling II session at Mildred’s Lane, while working on our new project Plantarium – Garden for Weeds, Bees, and Teas, a wildflower meadow around Mildred’s Lane bee yard featuring a spectrum of uncultivated foraged local plants. Please join us for our presentation and workshop on Wednesday, June 7, 2 – 4pm at Mildred’s Lane. During the week long session artists, local naturalists, gardeners, botanists, beekeepers and other contributing artists J. Morgan Puett, Athena Kokoronis, Donna Cleary, Jan Mun, Virginia Poundstone, Nathaniel Whitmore, Laura Silverman, Tom and Cecilia Coacci, James Prosek, Amy Yoes will be leading workshops and presentations around topics including beekeeping, collecting, pressing, tincturing, planting, mycoremediation, soil biology – wildcrafting; while focusing on the redesign and dynamic transformation of the Mildred Garden and the Radical Apiary, both adjacent to the Mildred’s Lane TransHistorical Society and Museum.
If you would like to participate as a fellow, please email Mildred’s Lane to get more info, day passes are available too.
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Plantarium – Garden for Weeds, Bees and Teas, a developing site-specific project at Mildred’s Lane, 2017
wildflower meadow designed with transplanted uncultivated local plants and weeds
Plantarium – Garden for Weeds, Bees, and Teas, a new developing site-specific project taking a form of a wildflower meadow around Mildred’s Lane bee yard, featuring a spectrum of uncultivated local plants transplanted from the wild. While serving the plants animals and humans alike. Plantarium is an open platform promoting an active experience of wild plants through use, consumption, and interpretation to explore our relationship to the environment.
Plantarium – Garden for Weeds, Bees, and Teas explores local wild plants and flowers its use and cultural significance. Mildes gather and transplant uncultivated plants, and weeds on their walks and foraging trips on site and in the Upper Delaware River region. The garden surrounding the local bee yard is designed to accommodate bees and insects, while also serving humans to educate and provide culinary and medicinal herbs for teas and cutting flowers for wildflower bouquets. Plantarium is part of series of site interventions and participatory projects in which Mildes engage themes of environmental alienation, and connecting modern lifestyle with the wider context of nature.
Plantarium aims to recall the significance of wildflowers and weeds overlooked in our culture and to explore its usefulness and role in daily rituals, traditions, and symbolism. In traditional cultures, wild plants were an inseparable part of everyday life, and a valuable resource crucial for survival, connecting natural knowledge and sensitivity to the environment, common skills we largely lost in the western world. The project addresses our vanishing access to natural resources, its mystification, and institutionalization, such as the restriction of harvesting wild plants on the public lands and criminalization of its medicinal use. While our relationship to plants today is dominated by its idealized images, representations, and cultivated forms, Plantarium highlights the wild and uncultivated, bringing them back into the center of our attention. The project is a window into the unique local environment and shifting narratives both natural and cultural, in which the native plants are mixed together with the specimens introduced in the colonial era.
The project evolves in a series of walks, studies, and workshops gradually establishing a wildflower garden reflecting the natural diversity through the seasonal change. The wild plants are planted in a circular form around the bee yard containing 14 different varieties of weeds and uncultivated plants and at the later stage, will be allowed to transform into a wild meadow to blend with its surroundings. The project reverses the idea of a garden, based on growing crops as a monoculture in isolation separated from each other by a mulch, in the Plantarium plants are allowed to go wild and grow as in nature, connecting and interlocking with each other, creating a living social network.
Mildred’s Lane is an arts center on a rustic, 96-acre site deep in the woods of rural northeastern Pennsylvania, in the upper Delaware River Valley, which borders New York state. It is an ongoing collaboration between J. Morgan Puett, Mark Dion, their son Grey Rabbit Puett, and their friends and colleagues. It is a home and an experiment in living, hosting a variety of programs, artist residencies, public events, and site-specific projects. Mildred’s Lane attempts to coevolve a rigorous pedagogical strategy, where a working-living-researching environment has been developed to foster engagement with every aspect of life. www.mildredslane.com
Elisabeth Foundation for the Arts, 323W, 39th Street, NY, NY
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Ha, Ha, Ha, Yo, series Igeology, 2017, hand embroided plastic shopping bag, silk
On the evening of Wednesday, June 14th, EFA honors 25 years of service with a reception and exhibition at EFA Center in Manhattan. The reception will feature an exhibition of the nearly 100 exceptional works of art that are available on our online 25th Anniversary Art Auction. We are pleased to support Elisabeth Foundation for the Arts by donating our artwork Ha, Ha, Ha, Yo, from the series Igeology for the EFA Benefit. The exhibition celebrates and highlights the work of prominent and emerging artists who have benefited from EFA’s mission, full list of artists is available here. The two-week online auction Paddle8.comopens June 14 and will be up until June 28, 2017.
The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts is a public charity dedicated to providing artists across all disciplines with space, tools, and a cooperative forum for the development of individual practice. We are a catalyst for cultural growth, stimulating new interactions between artists, creative communities, and the public.
“Like a hike through the mountains, their art practice involves a well thought-out navigation through our environment that offers new perspectives and views on what we humans might have forgotten in our Anthropocene era.â€
“While Milde’s work reframes modern lifestyle and everyday rituals it is an “archeological†exploration into cultural memes that is also visionary; imagining a future, where the lost environmental connection could be re-established through awareness and active engagement, fostering integrity of culture and nature.â€
We are very pleased to announce that our installation project In-Tree-Nethas been featured in this new comprehensive publication on environmental and sustainable art by Barbara Benish and Nathalie Blanc.In-Tree-Net, 2011-2013 is a series of site-specific installations engaging architecture and its alienating effects from environment. In-Tree-Net is sculptural installation made with tree trunks and branches, mimicking pipes and engineering systems in architecture, it represents a metaphor for the inherent connection of built spaces to the vital element of nature.
Form, Art and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability adopts a pluralistic perspective of environmental artistic processes in order to examine the contributions of the arts in promoting sustainable development and culture at a grassroots level and its potential as a catalyst for social change and awareness.
This book investigates how community arts, environmental creativity, and the changing role of artists in the Polis contribute to the goal of a sustainable future from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives. From considering the role that art works play in revealing local environmental problems such as biodiversity, public transportation and energy issues, to examining the way in which artists and art works enrich our multidimensional understanding of culture and sustainable development, Form, Art and the Environment advocates the inestimable value of art as an expressive force in promoting sustainable culture and conscious development. Utilizing a broad range of case studies and analysis from a body of work collected through the international environmental COAL prize, this book examines the evolution of the relationship between culture and the environment.
This book will be of interest to practitioners of the environmental arts, culture and sustainable development and students of Art, Environmental Science, and International Policy and Planning Development.
Come to the fourth installment of the popular SVU’s 6-Minute Challenge: Academic Show &Tell series presenting Czech and Slovak artists, professionals, scientists, students and scholars at local universities and institutions. The 6-Minute format challenges participants to present their project, subject of their research and studies through a presentation in English limited to six minutes.
Participants include: Andrea Cumpelik (NYU-neuroscience), Petr Dubecky-Fawcett (OAX-graphic arts), Hana Gregusova (jazz singer), Monika Hankova (Jewish Museum in Prague -oral history), Michal Horny (Boston U.-Public Health), Pavel Kocourek (NYU—Economics), Kristyna and Marek Milde (environmental art), Paul Linden-Retek (Yale-political science) and Henrieta Scholtzova (NYU– biomedicine).
Moderated by Christopher Harwood, PhD, Columbia University
RSVP: newyork@svu2000.org
Queens Museum at Museum’s Theater and Community Partnership Gallery October 23, 2016, 12noon – 4:30pm
Exhibition Dates: October 8 – 30, 2016
Curated by Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger
We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming symposium organized as part of the exhibition Chance Ecologies: Queens. The event takes place this Sunday, October 23rd from noon till 4:30pm at the Queens Museum’s theater and Community Partnership Gallery. During the gallery talk (1:30pm – 2pm) we will discuss our new evolving project Gone Wild engaging wild flowers and the urban wilderness. The symposium will feature a day of screenings, artists talks, and discussions about Chance Ecologies.
The Chance Ecologies: Queens exhibition, open till October 30, includes projects of 20+ artists working with un-designed landscapes and natural environments found in abandoned spaces and post-industrial sites in Queens. The exhibition curated by Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger is organized by Chance Ecologies in collaboration with Queens Museum and New York City Department of Parks.
While at the museum we also recommend seeing the Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art retrospective.
A screening of new video works by Joianne Bittle, Laura Chipley, Nate Dorr, Maya Edelman, Dylan Gauthier, Nathan Kensinger, Edmund Mooney, Matthias Neumann, and Natalia Roumelioti (ntilit)
Over the past two summers, the artists of Chance Ecologies have engaged with three different sites in Queens: Hunter’s Point South, the Newtown Creek and the Flushing River. The works in this screening present a wide range of responses to these post-industrial sites, ranging from collaborative performances to solitary explorations, and employ a variety of film techniques, including stop motion animation, underwater recordings, and drone footage. Each of these films is a unique creation inspired by a different aspect of these landscapes, and when viewed together, they present a larger picture of the ideas informing Chance Ecologies. The screening will be following by a Q&A with the artists.
1:30pm – 2:00pm: Chance Ecologies on View
Gallery walk and refreshments
The curators of Chance Ecologies will lead a walk-through of Chance Ecologies: Queens, the current exhibit in the Queens Museum Community Partnerships Gallery, giving an overview of the ideas behind Chance Ecologies. Several artists, include Kristyna and Marek Milde, Marisa Tesauro, and Joianne Bittle, will be present to give details about their individual works. Light refreshments will be provided.
“Vegetative Resistance: Weeds and Wildness in Human Dominated Landscapesâ€
Ellie Irons works with cosmopolitan spontaneous plants that thrive in landscapes heavily impacted by human activity. Often described as weeds, they provide a starting point for exploring nativeness, invasion, gentrification and the future of land use in the face of global climate change. As we concern ourselves with big questions of globalization, mass extinction, and climate change, we exert control in small ways by attempting to restore or cultivate landscape fragments to mimic historical ideals. As we pour resources into such measures, what are we losing, erasing, eradicating? Expanding from these questions, Irons will explore the tale of one particular weedy species: Asiatic dayflower (Commelina communis), while raising questions about human and vegetative agency in the so-called Anthropocene.
“Hidden Vistas: Empathy and Place in Virtual Reality Installationsâ€
What does it mean to have empathy for a place? How can we use cutting edge technologies such as virtual reality and 360° video to immerse a viewer in places that no longer exist? That are too difficult to find? Too hazardous to visit? Edrex Fontanilla and Sarah Nelson Wright share their creative process of applying “the empathy machine” to wild geographies.
3:30pm – 4:30pm: Digging into Chance Ecologies
A public discussion led by the curators of Chance Ecologies and Daniel Campo
The closing event of this daylong symposium will open up a larger conversation amongst the artists and participants of Chance Ecologies, lead by co-curators Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger and by Daniel Campo, author of “The Accidental Playground.†This discussion will consider the underlying themes of Chance Ecologies: What is the importance of unplanned green spaces? What types of ecologies can thrive in liminal, post-industrial landscapes, and why? How can we responsibly interact with and advocate for these spaces? What is the role of artists and creativity and community in these spaces? How can chance ecological landscapes becomes sites of new relational structures between humans, the environment and other species? What will happen to these spaces in the future, as the city faces challenges caused by rising sea levels and climate change?
Chance Ecologies was created in 2015 by Catherine Grau, Nathan Kensinger and Stephen Zacks, and has been supported by the Queens Museum, ArtBuilt Mobile Studios and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation with a residency at the Studio In The Park program, and has worked in partnership with Amplifier Inc., RadiatorArts, and the Newtown Creek Alliance.
Exhibition Dates: October 8 – 30, 2016 Opening Reception & Walkthrough with Curators & Artists: October 8, 2pm – 4pm Participatory Workshops and Public Performances: October 16, 2016 Chance Ecologies Symposium: October 23, 2016
Curated by Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger
Artists: Joianne Bittle, Daniel Campo, Laura Chipley, Nate Dorr, Maya Edelman, Edrex Fontanilla, Dylan Gauthier, Dillon de Give, Ellie Irons, Chris Kennedy,
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Anne Percoco, Edmund Mooney, Matthias Neumann, Natalia Roumelioti (ntilit), Raphaele Shirley, Marisa Tesauro, and Sarah Nelson Wright.
We are excitedthat our new project series Gone Wild,wild flower interventions in to cultural rituals such as the public workshopWild Flower Boutique, is part of the exhibition Chance Ecologies: Queens at the Queens Museum, which features new works, artistic gestures and research projects engaging with the undesigned and wild growing landscapes found in post-industrial sites, landfills and other liminal spaces around Queens. This exhibit brings together creative works from a large group of Queens and Brooklyn-based artists, who have explored three of these sites around the borough over the past two years: Hunter’s Point South, the Newtown Creek, and the Flushing River. Each of these places has its own unique history and landscape, but all three are united by a shared legacy of industrial pollution and human intervention.
Chance Ecologies: Queens includes a diverse array of artworks, from video installation and new media to sculpture and drawing, the results of collaborations between archaeologists, architects, filmmakers, urbanists and naturalists with community members of all ages and backgrounds. To expand the dialogue around this exhibit, Chance Ecologies will present a day of participatory art projects and public performances along the Flushing River on October 16th, and a symposium of authors, artists, academics and community groups at the museum on October 23rd. More information on those events will be announced at the Queens Museum website.
Chance Ecologies was created in 2015 by Catherine Grau, Nathan Kensinger and Stephen Zacks, and has been supported by the Queens Museum, ArtBuilt Mobile Studios and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation with a residency at the Studio In The Park program, and has worked in partnership with Amplifier Inc., RadiatorArts, and the Newtown Creek Alliance.
ÄŒesky:
Vazeni pratele dovolujeme si Vas pozvat na nasi umeleckou prezentaci v tranzitdisplay v Praze ve ctvrtek 8.zari od 18:30h, kde budeme mluvit o nasi praci a nejnovejsich projektech. Tesime se na Vas!
Dear Friends we would like to invite you to our artist talk at tranzitdisplay in Prague on Thursday, September 8, 6:30pm, where we will be talking about our work and recent projects. Please note that the talk will be held in Czech language only. Looking forward to seeing you there!
tranzitdisplay cordially invites you to an artist talk by Kristyna and Marek Milde, Brooklyn based Czech artist tandem. The artists will talk about their latest projects, which engage alienation of diverse forms of modern lifestyles from nature and the wider environmental context. In their works, Mildes examine themes that include domesticity, food and cultural rituals of daily reality offering the public an active role in various actions and situations allowing to reframe given cultural norms and stereotypes. In their practice, the artists use multidisciplinary forms, which include situationist interventions, workshops, and installations that serve as a platform for an environmental experience.
Willow Lake (entrance at 72nd St and the Grand Central Parkway), 1pm
and Studio In The Park adjacent to the Queens Museum, 3pm-6pm
Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens
Photo from the Pat Dollan Trail around the Willow Lake in the Flushing Meadows Corona Park, courtesy of Nathan Kensinger
On Saturday August 13th, the artists and curators of Chance Ecologies invite you to a final day of public events at their studio residency, Chance Ecologies: Flushing River. This six-week-long artists residency is located at the Studio In The Park, adjacent to the Queens Museum located on its right side if facing it from the Unisphere.
Please join us for our workshop Wild Flower Boutique at 3pm at the Studio in the Park,
Wild Flower Boutique is our ongoing project researching the culture and rituals of flower giving, engaging local plants and wildflowers, examining possibilities to utilize wild and roadside plants, considered as weeds, in decoration and bouquet giving as alternative to their cultivated counterparts. In this project we explore model of flower giving that can educate and teach about nature and ecology, synchronizing important events of life with the seasonal cycle. It is a window into the overseen beauty in the chance ecologies that surrounds us.
The participants are encouraged to bring wild uncultivated plants, weeds and flowers of choice to the workshop. Please respect the property of others, while gathering.
While giving the wild flowers is certainly the oldest way, less common today, in our project we question what is conventionally understood as beauty, confronting the wild flowers with the formal traditions commonly following sentiments such as love, respect, gratitude and grieve. While flowers function as a social mediator we think using them in the wild form instead of cultivated may bring different light in to our rituals, bringing them closer to honesty, allowing to express emotion and sentiments without refinement and pretense in a more candid way. As wild flowers today rarely find a place in to the vase on table, our project proposes a model of flower giving that can educate and teach about nature and ecology synchronizing important events of life with the seasonal cycle. In traditional cultures their utilization connects to natural knowledge and sensitivity to environment necessary to survival, in the Wild Flower Boutique we are interested to explore ways of using wild flowers to bring awareness to the nature that surrounds us and to contextualize our modern lifestyle.
PROGRAM SCHEDULE:
1pm to 2pm: The Contradiction of the Urban Wilderness (Daniel Campo) & Seed Collecting Walk (Ellie Irons and Anne Percoco)
Daniel Campo, author of The Accidental Playground, will lead the first part of a walk through the Willow Lake Preserve, exploring the headwaters of the Flushing River, which are located in a man-made “natural†landscape where the Parks Department has planted over 13,000 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 66,000 herbaceous plants.
The second part of this walk will be led by collaborating artist Ellie Irons and Anne Percoco, who have been creating a seed library of weedy species from various chance ecological sites, where wild growing plants reclaim post-industrial spaces. They will share their insights into different plant species and how to identify them, and invite participants to contribute to their seed collection.
Please Note:
This walk will begin at 1pm at the western entrance to the Pat Dolan nature trail, at 72nd St and the Grand Central Parkway. The closest subway station is 75 Ave on the E/F line. After the walk, we will collectively commute to the Queens Museum to attend the following events. The nature trail is not a paved road, and we advise you to wear sturdy, waterproof shoes, long pants and insect repellent.
3pm – Wild Flower Boutique (Marek and Kristyna Milde) Join artists Kristyna and Marek Milde at the Studio In The Park for an interactive workshop on the culture and rituals of flower giving, engaging local plants and wildflowers, where participants will be able to create their own wild flower bouquets or arrangement. This event is a window into the overseen beauty in the chance ecologies that surrounds us.
4pm – Sound and Light Performance (Raphaele Shirley)
Artist Raphaele Shirley will present a sound and light performance based on her week of research at the Studio In The Park, collaborating with musician David Watson. The performance is a smaller version of “3 trees and 100 pink smoke flares,†which she is developing for Chance Ecologies’ exhibition at the Queens Museum in October. This performance is part of the artist’s series creating S.O.S. signals for endangered landscapes.
5pm – Chance Ecologies: Flushing River Closing Ceremony
To close their six-week-long artists residency at the Studio In The Park, Chance Ecologies curators Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger will highglight the projects and research that have been realized as part of this summer’s creative investigation of the Flushing River. We invite you to join in a discussion about the past, present and future of this waterway and other similar sites in Queens.
We are excited to participate together with other Chance Ecologies artists in the Studio in the Park – Residency #3 Chance Ecologies at the Queens Museum curated by Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger in the unique space of the ArtBuilt Mobile Studios adjoining the museum in the Flushing Meadow Corona Park organized in collaboration with Queens Museum and New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. During the residency we explore the relationship between the urban and the natural, un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites surrounding the park and the Flushing River, culminating with Chance Ecologiesexhibition at the Queens Museum in October 2016.
Please check queensmuseum.org/events in the coming weeks for updated information on studio open hours and the project’s public programs.
About Chance Ecologies
Chance Ecologies, led by curators Catherine Grau and Nathan Kensinger, is a curatorial framework for artistic gestures and research projects exploring wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post Âindustrial sites, and landfills in New York City. The main trajectories of this project are to create research and discourse around the value of wild, unmanaged spaces in the urban environment and to creatively articulate visions for the future of native and non-native species. In 2015, Chance Ecologies engaged a group of 20 artists to create a series of public projects within the wild landscape of Hunter’s Point South, Queens, before it was leveled for a major housing development. These projects included artist-led walks, workshops, a seed library, an archaeological dig, and a pirate radio station.
About ArtBuilt
ArtBuilt Mobile Studios are small mobile workspaces that allow artists, social-service providers and micro-businesses work in new ways and in new places. ArtBuilt is a non-profit organization which works to support the creative sector by helping individual creative workers. Formed in 2015 through the merger of established arts-support nonprofits ArtHome and Artopolis Development, ArtBuilt focuses on financial literacy and business training, home-ownership and other forms of asset-building, access to credit, economic self-sufficiency and micro-enterprise support. ArtBuilt provides innovative solutions by leveraging existing solutions and expertise from other sectors to benefit their arts constituency.
About Queens Museum
The Queens Museum is an art museum and educational center located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York City. The museum is housed in building built for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and later hosted the United Nations General Assembly. The Queens Museum has focused on outreach and access for a wide range of audiences, and is known for international contemporary art exhibitions that reflect the cultural diversity of the borough is dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse, ethnic, cultural, and international community.
Elia Alba, Jonathan Allen, Torkwase Dyson, Stacy Fisher, Tracey Goodman, Gordon Hall, Nicolas Holiber, Erin Hudak,
Benjamin Keddy, Hilary Lorenz, Erin Markey, Raul Martinez (DETEXT), Jillian McDonald, Ander Mikalson,
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Victor E. Morales, Jim Skudil, Jenna Spevack, Katie Torn, Claudia Weber
Sitings, digital photography, 2016 Sitings, clay model, 2016
As part of our participation in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program, we are pleased to invite you to see progress of our newest project Sitings at LMCC’s Open Studios, which is presented as part of River To River Festival 2016. This will be the final open studios of the residency before it comes to a close at the end of June after 4 months of intensive work. Come and spend a summer afternoon visiting the Governors island and the studios of our fellow 20+ Artist-in-Residence in the former army warehouse turned LMCC’s Arts Center, where you can see a variety of in-progress and completed visual, literary, and performing art works by LMCC artists-in-residence. An exhibition by Michael Richards will also be on display in the front gallery adjacent to the studios. This event is free and open to all!
Also as part of the day:
Michael Richards: Winged (on view), 12pm – 5pm Location: Gallery at LMCC’s Arts Center
Open Studios with Eiko, 1:30pm – 2:30pm Location: LMCC’s Arts Center, Rehearsal Space B
Open Studios with Kaneza Schaal, 2:30pm – 3:30pm Location: LMCC’s Arts Center, Lower Level
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) missions is to to create a fertile and nurturing environment for artists and arts groups, enlivening public spaces with free programs in the visual, performing, and new media arts, and to provide leadership in cultural planning and advocacy. It empowers artists by providing them with networks, resources, and support, to create vibrant, sustainable communities in Lower Manhattan and beyond. In 2015, LMCC awarded approximately $500,000 in grants, provided 500 individuals with professional development skills and access to business leaders and arts professionals, placed 100 individuals and arts groups in our studio residency programs, as well as presented over 60 days of free cultural experiences for the public to enjoy.
PopCorn Rock, 2016, site-specific project in New Jerusalem PA, petroglyphs on stone, 45″ x 100″ x 80″
Join us on June 4th at 2p for the opening of a group curated show EXQUISITE CORPUS: THE MAIZE at the ART IN THE FIELDS site, a29 acres old farm property of woodland, fields, pond in New Jerusalem, PA presented by the Holes in the Wall Collective. Seven artists / artist groups engage in an exquisite visual dialogue inspired by the immediate landscape, its history and the role of CORN. Each participating artist /artist group is invited to install an environmental installation during a one weekresidence at the Holes in the Wall Collective cabin that investigates the questions – What is our relationship as humans to the land and what are the consequences of that relationship? What are the ecological, political, economic, and cultural implications of these consequences?
The show is featuring our new site-specific projectPopCorn Rock, stone covered with petroglyphs, which explores the cultural narrative of our most prevalent staple food, corn. Pop Corn Rock is a granite boulder covered with petroglyphs depicting ornamental images, symbols and human figures carved in to the rock appearing on the first encounter to be messages from the past. By using the ancient technique of petroglyphic art, Mildes chiseled into the stone an engraving, retelling the story of corn, and its significance and cultural role seen from the contemporary perspective.
Maize, cultivated and celebrated by the first Natives of America, given to the colonialists and part of our heritage of Thanksgiving, has a rich and complicated history. Today US corn produces 1/3 of all corn in the world on 96 million acres of land. Of that- ethanol, feed and high fructose corn syrup are the main products, none of which directly feed people. Yet corn itself is a heavy feeder of resources and fertilizer, and when used as a feed crop, can be intensive on land and soil and devastating to natural waterways. It is also a local economic bedrock. These somewhat competing interests make for a dynamic canvas for artistic interpretation and conversation.
HOLES IN THE WALL COLLECTIVE bridges together PEOPLE – IDEAS – MATERIALS curating new experiences of form and content through UNEXPECTED ENGAGEMENT. We are inspired by collisions of ideas, and the heightening of our senses. We curate EVENTS, CONVERSATIONS, HAPPENINGS with artists / thinkers / makers / doers. Holes in the Wall Collective curates experiences that are open to the public and PUSH THE ENVELOPE.
CAMPING: For those traveling from out of town, we invite you to camp on the land on Friday, June 3rd, and stay for dinner, and than join us on Saturday, June 4th for a special viewing of the works with the artists in the morning. $20 per person for dinner and camping– Bring Your Own Tent. Pick-ups and drop offs available.
Saturday, May 28 – Sunday, May 29 from 12:00-5:00pm
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Elia Alba, Jonathan Allen, Torkwase Dyson, Stacy Fisher, Tracey Goodman, Gordon Hall, Nicolas Holiber, Erin Hudak,
Benjamin Keddy, Hilary Lorenz, Erin Markey, Raul Martinez (DETEXT), Jillian McDonald, Ander Mikalson,
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Victor E. Morales, Jim Skudil, Jenna Spevack, Katie Torn, Claudia Weber
As part of our participation in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program, we are pleased to invite you to the LMCC’s Open Studios on the Governors Island during the Memorial Weekend 2016 May 28-29 to meet the Artists-in-Residence and learn about the work taking place there. As part of the event, there will be a performance on Saturday as well opening of 2016 exhibit in the LMCC Gallery: Michael Richards: Winged. Michael Richards (1963-2001), emerging visual artist, who tragically died during 9/11 while working in his LMCC World Views studio on the 92nd floor of World Trade Center, Tower One. This is the first weekend when the Governors Island opens again to the public. Come to enjoy the ferry ride and the island.
The event is free and open to all! No RSVP necessary.Click here for the Governors Island ferry schedule, directions and fees.
LMCC’s Open Studios event is a window into the process of making our newest project Sitings, a series of site-responsive sculptures functioning as furniture exploring the phenomena of unconventional domestication of public space. During the residency we explore and study non-conformist behavioral situations of diverse individuals such us workers on break, homeless people, tourists, children etc. creating unique and personal forms of interaction with architecture and public space by sitting, lying, reading or eating in undesigned places. The project Sitings replicates sites and specific places found in use for sitting or lying in the form of sculptures functioning as chairs and couches that incorporate architectural fragments such as street corners, stairs, and pavement. While Sitings questions the limits and conventions of the private and the public it amplifies the gesture of choosing freely, where to sit as a creative, performative act transforming the highly defined urban environment.
The project Sitings extends a body of our work, in which we explore the activity of sitting and furnishing as a means to experience broader social and environmental issues such as Homescape (2014), Looking for a Home (2011), In Loving Memory (2011) etc. The project Sitings is aiming to activate environmental awareness and further provoke discussion on how to deepen integrity to the environment starting in our immediate surroundings.
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) mission is to create a fertile and nurturing environment for artists and arts groups, enlivening public spaces with free programs in the visual, performing, and new media arts, and to provide leadership in cultural planning and advocacy. It empowers artists by providing them with networks, resources, and support, to create vibrant, sustainable communities in Lower Manhattan and beyond. In 2015, LMCC awarded approximately $500,000 in grants, provided 500 individuals with professional development skills and access to business leaders and arts professionals, placed 100 individuals and arts groups in our studio residency programs, as well as presented over 60 days of free cultural experiences for the public to enjoy.
Home in a Home, 2016, installation view, wallpaper – digital print on vinyl, molding, furniture, project’s survey, 12’ x 10’x 9’
Peekskill Open Studios in Peekskill, NY, June 4-5, 12-5pm features our project Home in a Home as part of the exhibition Word at Hudson Valley Contemporary Art Center (HVCCA).
We will be present at our installation in HVCCA on Sunday afternoon June 5. Come to enjoy the Downtown Peekskill filled with artists’ studios, boutiques, and art venues opening their doors to the public. Over 100 artists participating; opening their studios, in group shows and exhibiting in galleries.
Exchange Library, Kristyna and Marek Milde, 2016, installation view at BHQFU, 6 x 7 x 9 ft
Interactive mobile library installation, books, shopping cart, garbage bins, household objects, shopping bags, cardboard boxes, table and a chair, library diary
Artists expand boundaries and provide alternatives to expected norms by catapulting innovation over protocol. By bringing tools, skills, and ideas from a myriad of backgrounds into the world of art, these creators find themselves between two worlds, giving them the freedom to make work that changes the way audiences approach both art, and dystopian futures.
New York’s Freest Art School, BHQFU, is pleased to announce Calm Before/After the Storm, an exhibition curated by the 2015-2016 Foundation University Gallery (FUG) Fellows.
We are living in a contradictory time, waiting for an event that might influence collective action. Or perhaps it is an event that has already occurred, which has created instability that affects us all. The visibility of these events are made ever more opaque as they become routine. These artists work with a nuanced form of time, with practices that push boundaries to recognize new alternatives to art making.
Dystopian futures, both projected and dangerously near, saturate our imaginations and realities. Individuals working in organizations engineered to fix these problems often seem to be caught within the walls of their domains. Overwhelmed by the standards and expectations in their fields, those who try to create outside of given boundaries may find it difficult to gain recognition and audiences for their new approaches.
Art, however, like other creative fields, allows creators the flexibility to present alternatives to contemporary ways of thinking and doing; alternatives that may not have been possible within their disciplines. It is for this reason that more and more creators are turning towards art to present alternatives. The Bruce High-Quality Foundation University Gallery (FUG) Fellows find this a pertinent time to present the work of artists who not only work between two domains, but do so in an effort to change the course of ecological, social, and political norms.
The Exchange Library, by artist tandem Kristyna and Marek Milde, is an interactive platform for sharing and redistributing discarded books. The project explores possibilities to access, exchange and save books that for various reasons are unwanted, rejected or thrown away. The Exchange Library installation takes a form of a movable library, utilizing a supermarket-shopping cart with various containers attached to its main structure that function to store and organize books into collections and genres. The system of categorization is inspired by the esthetic and logic used by the garbage scavengers and homeless people, who often build elaborate storage and organization systems on their carts to create a resource for a variety of valuable objects from the trash collected on the streets, including books. The project is open to interaction and encourages the participants to take and donate books following the Exchange Library Rules.
BHQFU is New York’s freest art school offering a full curricula of critique courses, studio residencies, and special events from our headquarters at 33 34th St, 6th Floor, Brooklyn, NY. Our educational programming is enriched by a rigorous exhibition series at our university gallery, FUG. Find out more at www.bhqfu.org
Exchange Library, Kristyna and Marek Milde, 2015, 5 x 6 x 9 ft Interactive installation with books, garbage bins, shopping cart, household objects, shopping bags, cardboard boxes, and umbrella
“Each of the more than 70 works in “Word†incorporates text: isolated letters, bold words, enigmatic phrases, provocative sentences or fragments of stories…Lines of text create diamond patterns in the wallpaper in Kristyna and Marek Milde’s living-room-like installation, “Home in a Home” …Word†features 55 artists, who range in age from their 20s to their 80s. displayed alongside pieces by established international artists including Ms. Kimpton, Ann Hamilton, Oscar Murillo, Stefan Brüggemann, John Mellencamp (yes, the musician) and Robert Indiana, whose iconic “Love†towers eight feet tall.” Read the full article.More about the Home in a Home Project.
Sunset views of Lady Liberty, in house spirits and tasting room bar at the Industry City Distillery. Sliding scale donation $5 to $25. All proceeds from the night will go towards housing the artists, a stipend for each artist group, materials, and production of the show.
This summer Holes in the Wall Collective presents a group-curated show Exquisite Corpus: The Maize. Seven artists/artist groups making an exquisite visual dialogue inspired by the immediate landscape, its history and the role of CORN.
Beginning with the theme of corn and 15 acres of woodland and open fields in New Jerusalem PA, Holes in the Wall Collective invited Kristyna & Marek Milde, who invited fellow environmental artists, who then invited fellow environmental artists to create a group-curated show in dialogue with the land and the artist(s) who precedes them. Each artist/group will have one week in residence to install/create/enact their work before the next artists arrives… It’s an elaborate game of telephone away from telephones.
Join us for the show opening on Saturday, June 4th in New Jerusalem, PA.
Help us fund the show by making a donation here, through Brown Paper Tickets donation sales, and look out for our future invitation to the opening of Exquisite Corpus: The Maize.
All proceeds will go towards housing the artists, a stipend for each artist group, materials and production of the show.
Artists: Fafnir Adamites • Paula Apkan & Harriet Evans • Victoria Arakcheyeva • Elizabeth Arnold • Paul Arts • Robert Barthelmes • Carly Blais • Mati Bracha • Jo-Ann Brody • Stefan Bruggermann • Robert Brush • Collective Settlement • Valeria Clark • Beatrice Coron • Kathryn Frund • Jeffrey Gibson • Sally Gil • Nicolae Golici • Dylan Graham • Inguna Gremzde • Ann Hamilton • Erica Hauser • Robert Indiana • Carla Rae Johnson • Lance Johnson • Laura Kimpton • Job Koelewijn • Carole Kundstadt • Nestor Madalengoitia • Jean-Marie Martin • Barry Mason • John Mellencamp • Kristina & Marek Milde • Bernard Mindich • Patricia Miranda • Oscar Murillo • Basha Ruth Nelson • Adam Niklewicz • Robert Olsson • Pamela Pearce • Emma Rivers • Lucas Rollins-Page • Gina Scalza • Bill Schuck • Mike Seri • Dusty Simi • Julie Sittler • Tom Smith • Willie Wayne Smith • Kristin Thielking & Keven Brunett • Justin Randolph Thomson & Bradly Dever Treadaway • Les Von Losberg
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 27th 5 to 7 p.m.
On view: February 27 – December 17, 2016
Home in a Home, at HVCCA, 2016, detail from the wallpaper pattern, digital print on vinyl, dimensions variable
Home in a Home, at HVCCA, 2016, installation view, wallpaper – digital print on vinyl, molding, furniture, project’s survey, 12’ x 10’x 9’
We are very pleased to announce new installation project “Home in a Home†at Hudson Valley Contemporary Center for the Arts (HVCCA) in Peekskill, NY, presented as part of the group exhibition “Word”. The project resumes our ongoing research about domesticity and things we collect. Please join us for the opening reception at HVCCA on Saturday, February 27, 5-7PM.
The installation project Home in a Home explores the identity of collectible objects important in creating the personal and psychological space of a Home. Home in a Home is a project based on the research of the culture of dwelling, it takes the form of a furnished living room functioning as a lounge and laboratory for exploring the concepts of domesticity. The walls of the installation are covered with organic diamond-patterned wallpaper, designed by the artists, created entirely of texts, which tell the stories of the things people collect and bring into their home to create their personal space and transform the white, blank boxes we inhabit.
The visitors can use the installation as a lounge to contemplate what constitutes their personal space, while they may actively participate by completing a questionnaire about the unique non-functional objects in their homes. Over the last 4 years, several hundreds of participants from around the world have responded to the project’s survey conducted by the Mildes, sharing the narratives of personal objects they own and collect. In Home in a Home the artists transformed these statements into a room of stories in which the words became patterns on the wallpaper, revealing the intangible layers of the fabric of a Home inside the physical space we live in.
The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, located in Peekskill, NY, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts and education organization founded by the Marc and Livia Straus family. The Center is dedicated to the development and presentation of exhibitions and interdisciplinary programs that enrich our understanding of contemporary art, its contexts, and its relationship to social issues. HVCCA is also committed to the enrichment of Peekskill, a multicultural community that has recreated itself as a major arts destination. HVCCA operates a 12,000 square foot exhibition space and is the primary sponsor of the Peekskill Project, an annual, city-wide exhibition of site-specific artwork.
View from the Process Space Residency at Governors Island
We would like to announce that we have been awarded the prestigious LMCC Process Space Residency at Governors Island in New York City. Process Space residency is comprised of exclusive, concentrated time from up to five months in dedicated space for project development. The residency provides intensive, project-based studio, including opportunities for audience development, for mid-career and established artists and arts groups working across all disciplines. Process Space is committed to addressing a unique need artists have, at a more established career-stage, for dedicated space to develop projects at home in New York City. Across disciplines, artists have sought out development and rehearsal spaces as well as resources in other cities and countries around the world, causing them to take their artistic practices, collaborations, and innovations away from New York City. With these conditions and matters in mind, Process Space specifically supports artists who are developing work for performance, exhibition, or publication at a New York-based presenting venue, gallery, arts organization, or press.
The residency is located at Governors Island, in a former Army warehouse (Building 110) embedded in the midst of picturesque landscapes, expansive waterfront views, and unique historic architecture. The Arts Center at Governors Island includes 20 studios for visual artists, two rehearsal spaces for performing artists, and a Gallery space. From March to December, the Arts Center functions as a shared, multidisciplinary space where artists can experience a retreat-style residency just a short ferry ride from the frenetic buzz of the city. While on the Island, artists develop their practice and create new works, drawing inspiration from the unique location, as well as the community of fellow artists-in-residence that forms in the space.
During Governors Island’s public season (Memorial Day Weekend and the end of September), LMCC and artists-in-residence welcome visitors into the Gallery to enjoy an annual exhibition and, during Open Studios events, into the studios to meet the artists and learn about the work taking place there.
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) mission is to to create a fertile and nurturing environment for artists and arts groups, enlivening public spaces with free programs in the visual, performing, and new media arts, and to provide leadership in cultural planning and advocacy. It empowers artists by providing them with networks, resources, and support, to create vibrant, sustainable communities in Lower Manhattan and beyond. In 2015, LMCC awarded approximately $500,000 in grants, provided 500 individuals with professional development skills and access to business leaders and arts professionals, placed 100 individuals and arts groups in our studio residency programs, as well as presented over 60 days of free cultural experiences for the public to enjoy. The combination of LMCC’s investment in individual artists and small arts groups, our robust network of partners in the public and private sectors, and our integrated approach to fostering local neighborhood efforts aims to spark public imagination as well as inspire personal attachment and investment in NYC’s communities.
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Natural Cleaners, 2015, video still from single channel video,6:50 min
Phytophillic video series curated by Ellie Irons, featuring our video Natural Cleaners, is having another screening. This time it at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space, a nonprofit art space, located in Dunedin, New Zealand on February 20th. Phytophillic is a curated program of contemporary video art and archival footage focusing on the photosynthetic among us. Organized by Ellie Irons and presented by Zina Swanson, Phytophillic was originally screened at 1067 PacificPeople (Brooklyn, NYC) in September 2015.
It features work by:
Tega Brain
Rob Carter (UK)
Ellie Irons
Angela Dittmar Posey
Patricia Dominguez
Kristyna and Marek Milde
Mary Ivy Martin
Kara Schmidt
We are participating in the A-Z West, which is a residency project located on thirty-five acres in the California High Desert next Joshua Trees National Park. A-Z West is creative, research hub and an open-air sculpture park in the dessert founded by the artist Andrea Zittel. The Wagon Station Encampment serves as a living base consisting of twelve A-Z Wagon Stations, Zittel’s signature futuristic living pods that look like compact trailers from Mars. Zittel, a longstanding international art star who is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York and Regen Projects in LA, among others, describes her work as “encompassing all aspects of day-to-day living: home, furniture, clothing, food, all become the sites of investigation in an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs.†Andrea Zittel is also the founder of the adjoining High Desert Test Site, a non-profit organization that supports intimate and immersive experiences and exchanges between artists, critical thinkers, and general audiences, which is helping to realize land art project in the California high desert area and beyond.
Exchange Library, Kristyna and Marek Milde, 2015, 5 x 6 x 9 ft.
Interactive installation with books, garbage bins, shopping cart, household objects, shopping bags, cardboard boxes, and umbrella
The Exchange Library is an interactive platform for sharing and redistributing books outside of the regular market place that explores possibilities to access, exchange and save books that are for various reasons unwanted, rejected or thrown out. The project follows the narrative of the book’s life, in which knowledge, ideas, and culture undergo similar destiny as our personal stuff and household objects, spinning in the consumerist cycle. It points out the impermanence and the interchangeability of things as well as ideas we desire and deem for permanent, but in fact, its ownership is relatively short-lived period followed by gradual obsolescence and ambivalence, leading to its final rejection and disposal.
The Exchange Library installation takes a form of a movable library made out of a supermarket shopping cart with various containers attached to its main structure that function to store and organize books into collections and genres. The system of categorization is inspired by the aesthetic and logic used by the garbage scavengers and homeless people, who often build elaborate storage and organization systems on their carts to resource variety of valuable objects from the trash on the streets, including books. We are fascinated by the mobile designs of these sometimes very large structures, which their users maneuver through the dense city traffic, and think they present an interesting example of intervention in the system while bringing up the resourcing strategy of the hunter-gatherers. We consider the use of the cart as a significant symbolic gesture, since the supermarket shopping cart, the ultimate tool and symbol of consumerism, repurposed here to function on the other ends of the commodities cycle, is slowing down its speed by saving and redistributing valuable things destined to be discarded.
Directions: Temple Contemporary is located on the first floor of the Tyler School of Art, which is on Norris Street between 12th and 13th Streets on Temple University’s main campus.
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Salt over Gold, 2015, step and repeat wall, red carpet, bronze stanchions, 8′ x 10′ x 4′
FoodShed: Art and Agriculture in Action at CR10Arts near Hudson, NY, on view till September 5, 2015 curated by Amy Lipton is the second edition of the exhibition project first shown at the Smack Mellon Gallery in DUMBO in 2014. The Exhibitionfeatures artists and works dealing with the topic of food and agriculture.
FoodShed presents our new installation project entitled Salt over Goldthat explores the unglamorous but essential components from the story of food happening out of sight of average consumer by focusing on farming. The project adopts the esthetic and corporate language taking form of an official VIP celebrity entrance with red carpet and step and repeat wall to bring up and examine the key elements of the process that produces our daily essentials in contrast to ever present pop and corporate culture, while contemplating on value and worth and role of sponsorship involved in the “Event of Lifeâ€.
In the Travel and History Series Toulava Kamera on August 2, 2015
The TV show features Renaissance Chatteau Trebesice near Prague that contains prominent contemporary art collection of Alberto di Stefano and Eugenio Percossi, that includes permanent installation In-Tree-Net by Kristyna and Marek Milde.
Please join us for the screening Phytophilic: Why Look at Plants? an evening of plant-attuned video shorts organized by Ellie Irons in collaboration with 1067 PacificPeople founder Andrea Haenggi, this event is part 1067 PacificPeople’s “Art after the Anthropocene†series and will be featuring our video Natural Cleaners. Admire the weeds in all their late summer glory, and enjoy a program of contemporary video art and archival footage focused on the photosynthetic among us. Plant-themed beverages and snacks!
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Natural Cleaners, 2015
video still from single channel video,6:50 min
Join us for a demonstration of Cabinet of Smells and an artist talk about our projects revolving around the theme of domesticity. The installation Cabinet of Smells (2015), a scent laboratory at the Elisabeth Foundation, explores the idea “What is the smell of a home?†It engages our relationship to smells inherent to our daily surroundings that encompass our bodies, homes and living environments.
Using collected scents from home environments, we will walk visitors through the process for distilling “perfumed scents of home.†Please bring items from your household that has a particular scent unique to their home. Examples could be dust, toys, books, food, cleaners, cloth, etc.— bring anything you don’t mind parting with.
Cabinet of Smells examines the boundaries between aroma and odor, and the cultural norms that define the pleasant, odd and acceptable. Modern tools produce a constructed landscape of artificial smells such as perfumes, cleaners and air fresheners, and their function to blur the distinction between natural and artificial. While the perfume industry attempts to construct fictional scent identity, the Cabinet of Smells revisits what the real smell of a home actually is.
Space is limited. Please RSVP to megang@efanyc.org to reserve your spot by Friday, March 27th.
This event is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Double Visions on view through March 28, 2015 at the EFA project Space.
In its seventeen years, The Armory Show, America’s leading fine art fair devoted to the most important art of the 20th and 21st centuries, has become an international institution, bringing artists, galleries, collectors, critics and curators from all over the world to New York every March. Armory Arts Week strives to take advantage of this yearly convergence of the world’s top collectors and art enthusiasts by proudly consolidating and promoting a diverse selection of our city’s own cultural offerings.
In celebration of New York’s unparalleled artistic communities, Armory Arts Week works to highlight the distinct non-profit cultural organizations of our city’s multiple neighborhoods and boroughs. Throughout the week of The Armory Show, we promote a different neighborhood each day with cultural events for all levels of visitors.
This concept of a week of non-profit arts-related events was born out of the festivities and widely-felt excitement generated by The Armory Show, and was formalized with the support of the city in 2009. Since then, Armory Arts Week has continued to expand its reach throughout all five boroughs of New York. From elaborate benefit parties to interactive public programming, The Armory Show hopes that Armory Arts Week will continue to enrich the public through the promotion of New York’s exceptional arts-related events.
323 West 39th Street, New York (between 8th and 9th ave) Tuesday, March 3, 2015, 5pm – 9pm
As a part of Armory Arts Week, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts invites the public to our Open House to view over 60 artist studios, the EFA Project Space and EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. EFA Studios Member Artists work in a wide range of media and artistic sensibilities, creating a vibrant and diverse community. RBPMW will be open for tours from 5pm to 9pm; “This Color is you” curated by Bill Carroll will be on view in Blackburn 20|20, 5th floor, from 6pm to 9pm; “Double Visions” will be on view in Project Space, 2nd floor, from 5pm to 9pm.As a part of Armory Arts Week, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts invites the public to our Open House to view over 60 artist studios, the EFA Project Space and EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. This year, The Armory Show is paying special attention to non-profit visual and performing artsinstitutions within the five boroughs – further enhancing their mission to highlight the vibrant arts community in New York and encouraging visitors to explore the city’s cultural offerings. Each day features a different geographic location.
This year, The Armory Show is paying special attention to non-profit visual and performing artsinstitutions within the five boroughs – further enhancing their mission to highlight the vibrant arts community in New York and encouraging visitors to explore the city’s cultural offerings. Each day features a different geographic location.
ON VIEW:
Project Space will be open from 5pm to 9pm featuring the exhibition,
Artists: Louise Barry, Andrew Beccone, Fay Chiang & Sidd Joag, David Court, Kristyna Milde & Marek Milde, David Rios Ferreira
Organized by: EFA Project Space and participating artists
Please join us for the opening reception of the group show Double Vision at the EFA project Space organized as part of the SHIFT residency, where we are presenting new projects evolving around the theme of smell and cleaning in the domestic environment.
Natural Cleaners (2015) is a two-channel video documenting performance made in various natural and forest environments. In the project we engage in the activity of cleaning normally reserved to the realm of domesticity here misplaced in to the nature involving cleaning trees, stones, grass and riverbank while using domestic tools such as brooms brushes mops etc. We are interested in how the cleaning taken from its context is reduced to a very basic gesture with an edge of absurdity but at the same time it represents elemental mechanism of claiming and controlling space. Natural Cleaners looks at cleaning as a form of primeval cultural statement, that draws on the premise of declaration of a space by selecting and eliminating.
While culture is built on principles of elimination the cleaning in the nature becomes clearly an act of intervention in the environment, a force disturbing natural progress of things. Cleaning or removing of traces equals removing connection to context and continuity a step representing separation, disconnection and state of artificiality.
The installation Cabinet of Smells (2015), explores idea “What is the smell of a home?†It engages our relationship to smells inherent to our daily surroundings that encompass our bodies, homes and living environments. It examines the boundaries between aroma and odor and the cultural norms that define the pleasant, odd and acceptable. It presents the modern tools that produce constructed landscape of artificial smells such as perfumes, cleaners and air fresheners and their function to blur distinction between natural and artificial. While the perfume industry attempts to construct fictional scent identity that usually covers the actual context the Cabinet of Smells engages revisit the idea seeking what actually the real smell of a home is. The project includes laboratory station, which is used to distill scents of various household objects such as old books, socks or debris etc. Our attempt is to produce a perfume that would represent its origin and identity of a place inclusively.
The exhibition is part of the SHIFT residency, formerly the Residency for Arts-Workers as Artists, was launched in August 2010 to provide an unprecedented opportunity: studio space and peer support for practicing artists who also work as arts professionals (administrators, curators, directors, and others). This program honors these individuals with a unique environment to build on their own art practices. Seven residents are selected from nominations based on their outstanding contributions to the art community plus their potential for artistic growth in a shared interactive environment.
The artists in this show all share a double life, balancing their practice as artists, with their commitment to being arts workers. Over the past five months, this motley group has been meeting regularly in homes and studios, over home cooked food and drink, to identify the issues that surround their work and their practice.
This is the story of many of our meals. We pace aisles, snag this and that from shelves, hand some cash to the cashier, and make our way back home to roast, fry, braise, or microwave. But even a home-cooked meal is far from homegrown, and the modern agriculture industry in Western capitalist society has distanced us from the origins of the food that keeps us alive
While walking alongside the Brooklyn Bridge, I came across several shopping carts repurposed. The carts carried a bounty of potted plants. In place of prices, ingredients blooming out of the carts were tagged with growing times. I stopped to snap a few photos, noted the name of the project, and went home to research further.
à la Cart, a participatory workshop and installation, was a project of Kristyna and Marek Milde, two Brooklyn-based artists raised on the uniform food of communist rule in Czechoslovakia. “It always appeared to us that in the West there was a universe of choices; however, here the unification and monopolization is clearly happening too—for different reasons but with similar results,†Kristyna noted. For the Mildes, food is an inherently political vector, representing both “the powerful weapon or tool of self-reliance†and the act of eating as “agree[ing] to [the] highest degree [by] making the subject part of our body.â€
To the Mildes, this political significance amplifies the already intense emotional role food plays in our lives. Created as part of Smack Mellon’s exhibition FOODshed: Art and Agriculture in Action, the project was focused on community and human interaction from the outset:
We have started by inviting members of the local community in DUMBO Brooklyn, inexperienced in gardening, to actively engage in the process of growing ingredients for a single dish of their choice. Each participant adopted one supermarket shopping cart filled with soil that served as [a] garden bed, and attempted to cultivate ingredients for his/her favorite recipe. The development of the project was documented and the participants were asked to take notes about the experience. . . . The project took place in the growing season of 2014 starting in May and was finished in late September with a public event presented at the Dumbo Street Festival that featured the harvest and a gathering of the participants, who met to eat and to share their experience and ideas about the urban gardening and sustainable food production. The idea of à la Cart is to serve both as a living sculpture and a platform for growing food. It is not meant to be a farm or a professional gardening course but rather a playground encouraging new experiences while reconsidering the limits of consumerism. …………..Continue reading
LPR: Could you please describe the arc of à la Cart? I’ve seen a list of instructions for participants, and I saw the carts, but is it being documented and if so how? Do you think of this piece as having an end? Will participants’ experiences be distributed to each other or an audience in some way?
KM: Project à la Cart is a participatory, edible workshop experiment, which started with the initial question, “If we are what we eat, who we are if we don’t know the origin and the context of the production of our food?†It was originally created for Smack Mellon’s exhibition FOODshed: Art and Agriculture in Action, curated by Amy Lipton. We started by inviting members of the local community in DUMBO Brooklyn, inexperienced in gardening, to actively engage in the process of growing ingredients for a single dish of their choice. Each participant adopted one supermarket shopping cart filled with soil that served as a garden bed and attempted to cultivate ingredients for his or her favorite recipe. The development of the project was documented and the participants were asked to take notes about the experience. A formation of six carts functioning as the garden was parked at Old Fulton Plaza in a public space. The project took place in the growing season of 2014 starting in May and was finished in late September with a public event presented at the Dumbo Street Festival that featured the harvest and a gathering of the participants, who met to eat and to share their experience and ideas about the urban gardening and sustainable food production. The idea of à la Cart is to serve both as a living sculpture and a platform for growing food. It is not meant to be a farm or a professional gardening course but rather a playground encouraging new experiences while reconsidering the limits of consumerism.
Browsing your history of projects, I’ve noticed that food and agriculture are pervasive themes. What has drawn you to these themes? Did you have any salient intellectual or emotional experiences that pointed you in this direction? This is a similar question to what I ask from contributors to our blog’s “What You Eat“ series, trying to draw out narratives from our community’s formative experiences with food.
There have been several motivations for our interest in food. In our art practice we explore environmental contexts of the culture of living. The theme of food extends to projects in architecture and design in which we examine the cultural relationships of the constructed reality and natural world. Food, of course, is an important element in the environment at large and is very personal too, because to experience it means to internalize it. To follow the taste is for us a simple way to start exploring the complexity of food production. There is always a question why something tastes great while something else is just awful. While taste is a personal preference, 1[my husband and I] both agree on one thing: highly processed chain- or factory-made food usually tastes bland, dull, and uninteresting while artisan or homemade food made with farm fresh produce always causes us excitement. We share similar experiences from early childhood of eating highly uniform and tasteless food in school versus the food made at home in the family and friends circles.
The Fall is falling and for us who planted it’s a harvest time! Please join us this Saturday, September 27, from 3 – 5 pm for an informal gathering around our project à la Cart at the Old Fulton Plaza in DUMBO to harvest and sample some very local goodies, meeting the participants and sharing ideas about the urban gardening and sustainable food production. Our gathering will take place as a part of the DUMBO Street festival 2014 that is happening all around Dumbo this weekend. The project à la Cart, started in May 2014 and will finish this weekend. If you happen to be close don’t miss the last chance to see it !
Project à la Cart is a participatory, edible workshop experiment, which started with the initial question: “If we are what we eat, who we are if we don’t know the origin and the context of the production of our food?†For this project, we invited members of the local community to actively engage in the process of growing ingredients for a single dish of their choice. Each participant submitted his/her favorite recipe and has cultivated all their ingredients in one of the 6 shopping carts filled with soil parked at Old Fulton Plaza. Originally created for Smack Mellon’s exhibition FOODShed: Art and Agriculture in Action, curated by Amy Lipton, à la Cart serves as both a living sculpture and a platform for growing food. It is not meant to be a farm or a professional gardening course but rather a playground encouraging new experiences while reconsidering the limits of consumerism.
Special thanks to: Smack Mellon, Anthill Farm, DUMBO Improvement District, 7 Old Fulton Street Restaurant and all the participants involved.
Andrea Reynosa’s “John Street Pasture,†a public project at 1 John Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn,
in collaboration with Brooklyn Grange, Alloy, & Smack Mellon (photograph by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of Smack Mellon)
While food culture has shifted to local production and sustainable farming, there’s also a vein of art taking these issues into projects that mix agriculture with activism. FOODshed: Agriculture and Art in Action, curated by Amy Lipton, opened last month at Smack Mellon in Dumbo, has 14 New York-based artists examining what we eat.
In collaboration with Smack Mellon’s FOODshed, Alloy real estate development, and Brooklyn Grange, artist Andrea Reynosa planted a 6,000-square-foot field with clover that is sprouting red flowers alongside the Manhattan Bridge. The space was formerly a parking lot. The flourish of vibrancy is temporary, but Reynosa is planning that through the clover, a site that might otherwise be an empty construction lot will have life that will in turn ameliorate the soil before a condominium moves in.
Similarly, much of the work in FOODshed is about improving the balance between urban and natural, while accepting that places like Brooklyn aren’t going to return to farmland anytime soon. Another of the neighborhood projects is from Brooklyn-based artist team Kristyna and Marek Milde. Called À la cart, the artists corralled some shopping carts into vegetable gardens at Old Fulton Street, and in Smack Mellon are coordinating food workshops focused on what can be grown collaboratively on the city streets.
Some of the projects are more whimsical, such as Jenna Spevack’s “domestic microfarms†that transform furniture and a record player into apartment-scale growing spaces. More conceptual is Rochester-based Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s “OS Fermentation: Collaborative Hacks, with Fruits, Vegetables, and Microbes.†The EcoArtTech duo’s project has custom computer sensors monitoring the fermentation of organic material in realtime to show color levels, pH, and oxygen, generating a digital relay of the biological processes we often forget. Staten Island-based Tattfoo Tan, meanwhile, takes it to the extreme with his “NEAKA (New Earth Apocalypse Knowledge Advancement),†preparing for a devastating disaster by examining processes of dehydrating food waste into new material. (An accompanying giant metal catamaran arrived after my visit, emphasizing the scale of peril.)
Kristyna and Marek Milde, “à la cart†outside Smack Mellon (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
This Wednesday, Smack Mellon is hosting a panel discussion on creativity in urban and rural farming with some of the artists and members of the sustainable food community. As part of the current art and ecology trend, there is definitely a chance here for community engagement with agriculture in New York City with the diversity of projects and public programs. However, the strongest piece is still outside the gallery, that stretch of clover by the bridge offering some fleeting beauty in a reclaimed space before the high-rise, perhaps the best tact ecology has in a city that will not stop developing any time soon. Yet as a collaboration between real estate, park, and artist, it definitely offers hope in how greenery can be a component of the urban landscape.
(John Street Pasture by Andrea Reynosa will close on July 13th.)
Artists; Joan Bankemper/Black Meadow Barn; Joy Garnett; Habitat For Artists Collective (Simon Draper, Michael Asbill, Carmen Acuna, Dan McGinley, Brandon Cruz, Jessica Poser, Lisa Breznak and Sean Corcoran); Natalie Jeremijenko; Kristyna and Marek Milde; Peter Nadin/Old Field Farm; Leila Nadir + Cary Peppermint (EcoArtTech); Andrea Reynosa, Brooklyn Grange and Alloy; Bonnie Ora Sherk; Jenna Spevack; Susan Leibovitz Steinman/Mona Talbott; Tattfoo Tan; Elaine Tin Nyo; Linda Weintraub
FOODshed: Agriculture and Art in Action focuses on sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, and artists’ use of food as subject matter or medium. The exhibition and programming include 14 exhibiting artists in the gallery at Smack Mellon, 3 public projects in the nearby DUMBO community, as well as public workshops in collaboration with the artists in the exhibition. The gallery exhibition features artworks and inventive projects around agriculture and food that address farming as both activism and art form. Many of the artists in this exhibition are known for bringing community-specific issues into their work and are exploring the real-world implications of small-scale farming and raising community awareness about our food systems. Their varied practices include growing food, cooking food, raising animals for food, and engaging communities around local food production as well as instigating new artist-based economies.
The artists working in New York State today in the realm of food and farming coincide with a larger cultural awakening regarding the ills of our present system, such as the distances food travels to supermarket shelves and the effects of shipping and transport on climate change. Brooklyn has become the epicenter for food activism and culinary explorations. Artists have joined food activists in focusing on environmental problems such as lack of biodiversity in mono-cultural farms, the loss of top soil and nutrient-poor soil, the abuse and poor conditions of feedlot and factory raised animals, the conversion of farmland into housing, and the waste of un-harvested crops. Artists are now farming not only to raise their own food in order to become self-reliant and to eat more healthily, but also to offer alternative and sustainable approaches within their local communities.
For the artists in FOODshed, the acts of cultivation, growing, and by implication educating have evolved to a deeper level of activism where the boundaries of real world and art completely disappear. Their projects present new paradigms regarding the growing, production, distribution and consumption of food. The artists in this exhibition advocate for an organic, regional and local approach, which they are manifesting in their own lives.
À la cart, Kristyna and Marek Milde, 2014, site specific installation at the Old Fulton Plaza in DUMBO, Brooklyn, 6 shopping carts, soil, vegetable plants, tarp
Please join us this Friday, August 1, 2014 at 6pm-8pm for the Open House and Private Viewing of the artists’ work in progress, which concludes the first part of our participation in SHIFT Residency at EFA Project Space in Manhattan, which will be followed by a year of meetings, shows, and activities.
Please come to celebrate this occasion with us and our fellows Louise Barry, Andrew Beccone, Fay Chiang, David Court, and David Rios Ferreira. During the Open House we will present our new evolving project titled Corner Lab.
Please RSVP to lauren@efanyc.org by Thursday, July 31, 2014 to attend.
at Manitoga, The Russell Wright Design Center in Garrison, NY
Homescape, 2014, at Manitoga, NY aluminum, insulation material, soil, moss, grass, ferns and stones, 29 1/2″ x 64″ x 32″ and 29 1/2 x 32″ x 32″
We are thrilled, that our installation Homescape will be on a long-term view at the Manitoga, The Russell Wright Design Center in Garrison, NY, since July 2014. Homescape is a lounge environment created with moss and ferns transplanted from the forest at Manitoga that we made for our show Hills and Valleys of the Sofa Wilderness at the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Bronx. We highly recommend visiting, as the site is a natural and architectural gem and allows for hiking as well. The close proximity to NYC makes Manitoga ideal for a half-day trip. The lounge is located close to the Russells Wright house, which you can visit on a tour. For direction and tour reservation check the Manitoga website.
Homescape, at the exhibition Hills and Valleys of the Sofa Wildernes at Wave Hill, NY
2014, aluminum, insulation material, soil, moss, grass, ferns and stones, 29 1/2″ x 64″ x 32″ and 29 1/2 x 32″ x 32″
Kristyna and Marek Milde’s art examines the effects of architecture, design and interior space on how we see and relate to the outside world. In their practice, the Mildes create objects, situations and events that use both organic and artificially constructed elements to confront cultural views and fantasies about nature. Their projects often take the form of do-it-yourself home improvements, revisiting the role of furnishing and decorating. They believe that the interior-based culture prevalent today creates boundaries between the man-made and organic realms, producing a removed perspective of the world. To counteract this disconnect, the artists explore methods for transforming built spaces in ways that reconnect people to the larger environmental contexts of culture, geography and nature. Their work creates a shift when plant material from outdoors is placed inside the gallery space.
At Wave Hill, the Mildes create a lounge where visitors can experience the natural landscape from the comfort of the domestic interior. Their Sunroom Project, Hills and Valleys of the Sofa Wilderness, transfers a piece of woodland floor into containers that are shaped like a couch and a chair and filled with transplanted ferns, moss, grasses and stones from Manitoga in Garrison, NY. Visitors are encouraged to sit down, as they would in the forest, and experience the forms, texture, smell and feeling of the organic materials. While deconstructing the traditional use of plant motifs in interior design, Hills and Valleys amplifies the contrast between outside and inside, provoking questions about how to engage with the natural world in the isolation of urban dwellings.
Kristyna and Marek Milde from the Czech Center New York (CCNY)
Interview by Felicity Hogan
This month, IAP highlights the comprehensive and prolific activities of the Czech Center New York, interviewing Program Manager Kristyna Milde and Production Manager Marek Milde, who also collaborate as part of their artistic practice. In light of an upcoming exhibition at Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space, opening on May 23, we took theopportunity to learn more about both the CCNY and Kristyna’s and Marek’s collaborative process, with a focus on how each influences and interacts with the other.
Can you tell us about the mission and activities of The Czech Center New York?
The Czech Center New York (CCNY) is the official cultural institute of the Czech Republic, dedicated to promoting Czech art abroad and fostering interaction between Czechs, Americans, and the wide international community in New York City. The CCNY, established in 1995, is part of an international network of Czech Centers supporting artists, professionals, and cultural exchange in 23 countries on three continents. CCNY is located in the recently redesigned Bohemian National Hall (BNH) on the Upper East Side, on E. 73rd Street between First and Second Avenues, which is a five-story building, built in 1896. It is a rare survivor of the many social halls built in the nineteenth century for New York City’s immigrant ethnic communities. Our facilities include a gallery, cinema, performance hall seating 300 people, and a rooftop terrace.
Our team of four people creates programs of about 80–100 events per year. We host a wide range of mostly free events showcasing contemporary Czech art, together with international collaborations in music, fine art, and design, and feature annual film festivals and seasonal rooftop screenings.
We focus on presenting contemporary artists and projects, which are committed to engaging cultural discourse and addressing relevant cultural- and social themes. While we provide a platform for interaction and dialogue of Czechs with local and international artists, we encourage production of new works and are presenting concerts, screenings that are North American- or world premieres, and site-specific installations in our gallery.
Can you tell us about the mission and activities of The Czech Center New York?
The Czech Center New York (CCNY) is the official cultural institute of the Czech Republic, dedicated to promoting Czech art abroad and fostering interaction between Czechs, Americans, and the wide international community in New York City. The CCNY, established in 1995, is part of an international network of Czech Centers supporting artists, professionals, and cultural exchange in 23 countries on three continents. CCNY is located in the recently redesigned Bohemian National Hall (BNH) on the Upper East Side, on E. 73rd Street between First and Second Avenues, which is a five-story building, built in 1896. It is a rare survivor of the many social halls built in the nineteenth century for New York City’s immigrant ethnic communities. Our facilities include a gallery, cinema, performance hall seating 300 people, and a rooftop terrace.
Our team of four people creates programs of about 80–100 events per year. We host a wide range of mostly free events showcasing contemporary Czech art, together with international collaborations in music, fine art, and design, and feature annual film festivals and seasonal rooftop screenings.
We focus on presenting contemporary artists and projects, which are committed to engaging cultural discourse and addressing relevant cultural- and social themes. While we provide a platform for interaction and dialogue of Czechs with local and international artists, we encourage production of new works and are presenting concerts, screenings that are North American- or world premieres, and site-specific installations in our gallery.
While primarily supporting Czech culture, the organization is also open to ideas around current cultural or social themes and international projects. Can you point to recent examples of this?
While Czech Center New York’s mission is to Czech culture, it seems that in the interconnected world of today, the cultural presentation based solely on the national origin is fading. We think the art today, rather than present itself, needs to communicate and be aware of the international discourse. We are pleased that in the recent past ,we have be able to organize series of international collaborations in which the Czech was not just the label of the country of origin, but rather an element of driving cultural force.
CCNY is a member of European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC), which includes European Cultural Institutes in New York, and representatives from the cultural departments of European Consulates and Embassies in NYC. We collaborate on events and festivals throughout the year. For example, the European Film Festival, which the Czech Center established 6 years ago, grew from a small collaboration of a few countries to a large 2 week festival with about 20 participants now called Panorama Europe. This year we partnered with the Museum of the Moving Image to enable the festival’s expansion.
Another recent example is an art criticism conference, which we organized together with Finnish, Polish, and Spanish cultural institutes and AICA International on April 27, called “Walking in the Air: Art Criticism in Europe.†We had five speakers talking about the current state of art criticism in their representative countries, and Hrag Vartanian as a moderator, who is the editor and co-founder of the influential arts blog Hyperallergic. We are hoping to establish this conference as an annual event as well.
Coming up at CCNY on May 27 at 7:00 PM is the US release of Mariusz Szczygieł’s newly published book, Gottland, translated to English, that deals with the Czech history from the Polish perspective and world premiere for a Czech film based on the same book. The event will include excepts from the film and is a collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute and Melville House, the local publisher.
Artists Sol LeWitt, Kristyna and Marek Milde, Occupy Oakland, William Powhida, Lisa Ruyter, Catherine Tafur, and B. Wurtz.Organized by Kristian Nammack
ACTIVATE NY explores the relationship between art and activism, by facilitating a number of participatory events and by displaying relevant works of art in the gallery spaces. The first floor small gallery will host an installation called New York Exchange Library by artists tandem Kristyna and Marek Milde. It takes a form of a free library, where visitors are encouraged taking and or bringing their own books to exchange exploring the concept of knowledge as a free resource versus a commodity.
ACTIVATE NY will hosts series of participatory events in the Abron’s Galleries including the launch of the100 hour Challenge, Artis Talk on Tuesdays at 7pm- pairing artists in the exhibit with activists relevant to the topic, Book Club on Wednesdays at 7pm led by art critic Andrew Russeth and open Discussion on Thursdays at 7pm facilitated by Kristian Nammack.
Artists: Jiřà David, Tomáš CÃsaÅ™ovský, Tomáš Džadoň, Kristyna and Marek Milde, Karel NepraÅ¡, Kristina Norman, Martin Mainer, Daniel PeÅ¡ta, Jasanský a Polák, KateÅ™ina Å edá, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tallervo Kalleinen, JindÅ™ich Å treit Martin Zet, Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others.
The exhibition “Where Is My Home?†is dealing with the subject of home in its various meanings – home as a place, a town, a land, a region, a country. The project’s name, consisting of the first words of the Czech national anthem, contains a moment of doubt, personal as well as collective inquiry, which today is once again a topic due to the fact that today’s society is rife with uncertainty, dissatisfaction and feelings of frustration. If the idea of home is traditionally connected primarily with the feeling of certainty and security, it is logical that growing uncertainty and frustration from public life lead the public in no small affairs in creating a wider, shared home a city, province or region.
As part of this exhibition we show a project called “Home in a Homeâ€, which is a site specific installation consisting of text on the wall and an office table with questionary. It is part of our an ongoing research project, where people are asked to list nonfunctional objects they have collected along with their stories, which create for them the personal layer of a home . The project, which works with the narratives of objects, started at our presentation and workshop Thoughts on the Living Room at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2012 and continued as part of our solo exhibition Homescape in the Karlin Studios in December 2012. The visitors the exhibition Where Is My Home in DOX are encouraged to further contribute to the project with their ideas on the subject.
Permanent installation at the Chateau Trebesice, Czech Republic, 2013
as part of the contemporary art collection curated by Alberto Di Stefano and Eugenio Percossi
The site-specific installation In-Tree-Net at the Trebesice Chattou is made out of trees and branches attached to the walls with hardware fixtures to resemble pipes and wires of engineering systems that bring vital functions into the building. The installation spans vertically three floors of the castle and continues horizontally across the top third floor leading to a room, where it branches out as a tree top.
In-Tree-Net critically approaches culturally conditioned understanding of nature, which produces the perspective that nature as such has borders, beginning and end, similar to the architecture and urbanism. Nature here is an element that penetrates not only the walls, but also crosses artificial borders, that divide landscape without a context, cutting through the mountains and rivers. In the In-Tree-Net the organic systems represent an idea of bringing nature closer and the way of its estranged perception, implying a reconnection of a fragmented environment to a whole.
Since 2003 Czech and international artists have been invited to stay at castle Třebešice near Kutná Hora, Czech republic, in individual or group residences, from a few weeks to some months, they are invited to create artworks and site specific installations.The art collect
ion at Třebešice is always growing and there are already approximately 80 artworks accessible to the public inside the castle and gardens. For guided tour please make reservation in advance.
a visual art exhibition examining life as commodity
The Center for Strategic Art And Agriculture
Opening July 4, 2013 from 3 to 8pm in conjunction with CSAA’s Fourth of July Garden Party,open until August 4th, 2013
11 Stanwix Street at Bushwick Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, located in the North Garage of Silent Barn.
Plant Sale features work by Claire Wood, Cnaan Omar, Christina Kelly, Jason Gaspar, and Kristen Barry,
Kristyna and Marek Milde and more.
On July 4, 2013 from 3 to 8pm at the Center for Strategic Art and Agriculture is pleased to present Plant Sale, a group visual art exhibition that examines how we perceive plants in a contemporary context. It asks, who are we if the basis of our of food chain is an invisible commodity, patented sold on the stock market in the form of electronic data? It explores the commodification of life, its effect on our society and ourselves.
The opening of Plant Sale coincides with CSAA’s Fourth of July Garden Party with performances by award winning Americana guitarist Glenn Jones and D. Charles Speer and the Double Helix. ($10 at the door.)
POISON GREEN
Examines themes, concepts and cultural fictions
dealing with environment and ecology
CZECH CENTER GALLERY
321E 73RD STREET, BET. 1ST AND 2ND AVENUE
JUNE 26, 2013 – SEPTEMBER 2, 2013
OPENING: JUNE 25, 2013, 6:30PM – 8:30PM
Participants: Matej Al-Ali (CZ), Silvina Arismendi (Uruguay), Mark Dion (USA), Petr Dub (CZ), Mathias Kessler (USA), Tomas Moravec (CZ), Because we can (USA), Anne Percoco(USA), Katerina Seda (CZ), Klara Sumova (CZ), and Slavoj Zizek (Slovenia)Dinner Garden: Vita Chase, Slavka Petrova, Marek Soltis, Filip Trcka, Nicole and Jan Zahour
Curated by Kristyna and Marek Milde
The exhibition project Poison Green interrogates and study the complexity of our environment. Rather than painting green and romanticizing nature, the artists and concepts, presented in the exhibition, examines the consequences of the urban, post-industrial, and virtualized reality we live in. It seeks to demystify the ideologies inherent in our understanding of nature, reflecting on conventions and stereotypes, and looking for possible environmental models socially integrated into our daily lives and culture.
The exhibition Poison Green is incorporated in a series of installations and visuals that extends from the gallery of the Bohemian National Hall to its rooftop, where a community garden project Diner Garden accompanying the show is installed. Here participants and visitors have the opportunity to experience the process of how to grow food just enough food for one dish.
Keil Borrman, Mike Estabrook, Jamie Isenstein, Vandana Jain, Richard Jochum, Athena Kokoronis, Radka Kovacikova, Michael Merck, Kristyna and Marek Milde, Natalia Porter, Danielle Pottberg, Petra Valentova, Jan and Nicole Zahour
Curated by Kristyna and Marek Milde
An edible and participatory exhibition project examining the concepts and the culture of eating, cooking and food production as a realm in which identity and relationships to the environment are established.
If we are what we eat, who are we if we don’t know the origin and the context of the production of our food?
While today convenient and easy access to an abundance of food seems a matter of course, the source and the mechanism of its production remain largely out of sight. The glossy and uniform food packages seem to provide necessary information, however the product data put together with stories written about authenticity; endorsed by seals and marks, seem to divert one’s attention from the context and process of its creation, therefore making the modern food industry fit into genres such as mystery, ideology, sci-fi or political thriller.
“We Eat, We Are†presents a series of installations and events about or made with food. The makers of the project explore nourishment and engage awareness for the ways and methods of growing, cooking and sharing food, together with its social rituals inherently embodied in the community and culture.
Cleaning and destruction can be seen as two basic principles within the duality of Apollonian and Dionysian, yin and yang. The key interest of this show is the transmission from one to another: from order to chaos, from serenity to uncontrolled passion. In Herman Hesse’s writings, these principles are often personalized, depicted as opposite forces, such as the rational Narcis and the emotional Goldmund, two monks in a medieval monastery, both in their own way longing to find the essence of life. While one decides to explore the realm of ratio within the safe fences of his sanctuary, the latter follows his urge to give in to his passions and live on the edge of life and death, beauty and horror. However, as the author explores further in his Steppenwolf, these characteristics rather meet in a single human mind, together with a number of other “souls” or principles that cannot be simply categorized. We are both rational beings and wild beasts, and while we often need to clean up the mess we made, we also long (or can’t help) to create it at the first place.
Works to be featured in this exhibition are looking for certain “in-betweenness”, for order that is reversed by a simple act, which disturbs the original cleanliness and opens a window into “the other world” of illogic behavior, obscurity, deviation or even madness.
The show investigates on the field of domesticity how architecture and postindustrial reality influences the way of understanding nature. It engages the dilemma between nature and architectural structures and its impact on the current environmental issues. It follows a phenomenon of a new special kind of species: “Homo Interius” a contemporary human, who spends most of its life inside of a white cube separated from the influence of the surrounding environment ultimately resulting in his interior perspective of the outside. “The Homescape” presents parallels between artificial constructs and nature positioning the alienated interior environment in larger context of nature and landscape.
If possible please bring a handful of dust sweepings from your apartment for the workshop with you.Just sweep it in a plastic bag before you go!
Brooklyn based artists Kristyna and Marek Milde present their projects engaging culture of living and domesticity . Looking at what is “swept under the carpet,†their work investigates how the comfortable interior environment of our homes produces a culture of alienation from nature. Their projects often take the form of DIY home improvements, and revisit the role of furnishing, cleaning and decorating and its function inside of a white cube to produce the feeling of home. Their work explores ways of transforming our spaces of dwelling, revealing its connection to a larger environmental context of culture, geography and nature.Participants at MoMA Studio will have the opportunity to share their ideas about the elements that contribute to their sense of home. Additionally, participants are encouraged to be part of a Do it Your Self project called “The Color of The Home†a workshop in which a colored wall paint pigmented by ordinary household dust will be made producing a color chart. If possible, please bring a handful of dust swept up in your home in a plastic bag.
Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 (July 27–November 5, 2012), MoMA Studio: Common Senses is a multisensory environment at the intersection of education, design, and art that aims to foster our evolving relationships with nature, technology, and our everyday surroundings through community interactions and creative play. A series of drop-in activities, workshops, and ongoing projects for audiences of all ages integrates components such as light, nature, food, textiles, games, and technology. Artists, designers, and educators including Fritz Haeg, J. Morgan Puett of Mildred’s Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity), Karen Hewitt, Reggio Children, and others engage visitors in generative and sensory experiences from harvesting an edible garden and creating light-based scapes installations to engaging with an experimental school and playing with new and familiar toys and games. Visit MoMA.org/learn for more information.
“What is it that we need to learn in the 21st century?†J. Morgan Puett of Mildred’s Lane and the Mildred Complex(ity) poses this question to visitors of MoMA Studio in a series of events and a workshop space. Based in northeastern Pennsylvania, Mildred’s Lane is a working-living-researching environment made up of a community of artists interested in fostering new modes of social engagement with every aspect of life. From discussions to meals, interactions at MoMA Studio focus on our relations with each other and our environments, systems of labor, and aspects of holistic living as they relate to contemporary culture. Gleaning from her sense of aesthetics and design, Puett’s installation and living archive invites visitors to explore inventive forms of domesticity, tactile qualities related to textiles, and the natural states of food—gathered from Fritz Haeg’s Domestic Integrity Field Part A-1, also a part of MoMA Studio—while fellow artists invite the public to engage in their practice on frequent, impromptu visits.
These frequent visits by collaborating artists, writers, and critics at Mildred’s Lane invite the public to participate in collective tasks and discussions, from hosting food-related events to explorations of creative processes related to the visual arts, writing, biology, and more. All Swarmings take place at MoMA Studio: Common Senses on an impromptu basis during opening hours, unless otherwise noted.
QUEENS COLLEGE
ALUMNI ART + COMMENTARY | 1937—2012
75 YEARS OF THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
November 7 – December 21, 2012
Talks + Reception | November 7, 5-8 PM| Queens College Art Center
Please join us for the opening and talks at the Queens College Art Center
Talks + Reception | Wednesday, November 7, 5-8 PM
Curated by Suzanna Simor, Alexandra de Luise + Tara Mathison
Queens College Art Center|Rosenthal, Level Six | CUNY| 65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Flushing, NY 11367-1597|artcenter@qc.cuny.edu | 917.997.3770
Comprising art and commentary in all media contributed by Queens College alumni (the artists’ contemporary work drawing on their personal college history and recollection), this installation will speak to the school’s 75th anniversary, directly addressing what the Queens College experience has meant to students over three-quarters of a century.
Sponsors: Kupferberg Center for the Arts; Queens College; QC Alumni Relations Office; Art Department; the Libraries; Queens College Foundation, Inc.; CUNY; New York Community Bank.
Brooklyn is home to more artists than anywhere else in the United States, making it the creative capital of the art world.GO: a community-curated open studio project is a borough-wide initiative designed to foster personal exchange between Brooklyn-based artists, their communities, and the Brooklyn Museum.
During GO, Brooklyn artists will open their studios to the community, sparking a dialogue between artists and their neighborhoods. Newly informed by the artist about the artistic process, studio visitors will be empowered to nominate artists for inclusion in a group exhibition to be held at the Museum. Based on community nominations, Museum curators will create an exhibition to open on Target First Saturday in December 2012.
Organized by the Museum’s Managing Curator of Exhibitions, Sharon Matt Atkins, and Chief of Technology, Shelley Bernstein, GO is inspired by two established programs: ArtPrize, an annual publicly juried art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the long tradition of open studio weekends held each year in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, DUMBO, Gowanus, Red Hook, and Bushwick.
We would like to invite you to a workshop called Social Sculpture, we give at the Nurture Art on Saturday May 12th from 3-5 pm.
The workshop explores the consumerist cycle of disposal by reusing and redefining function of common household objects.
We will build furniture with reclaimed materials, chairs and furniture, which should later serve public as a sitting area outside of the Nurture art.
The space is limited to 10 people, so please RSVP now to get a placegallery@nurtureart.org
Please bring, if possible, some of the following items with you:
– found furniture pieces (such as chairs, pieces of chairs, tables, or anything which can be used for sitting)
– tools (such as a drill, saw, hammer, wood screws etc.)
This is to ensure that there will be enough materials to go around and that the workshop will not be slowed down if many people need to use the same tools at a time. NURTUREart has a limited tool selection, but will gladly share the resources available.
In-tree-net, 2012, detail form the installation at the Skylight gallery, trees, plumbing hardware, 24×10 feet
The Amplify Action team is excited to introduce our participating artists for Amplify Action: Sustainability Through the Arts. This exceptional group of artists, both local and beyond, will present works that engage with a diversity of topics related to community sustainability, inspiring audiences to question, discuss, and take action. Explore the artists’ work by following the links below.
As a prelude to Amplify Action, a panel discussion will be held as part of Pratt Institute’s Green Week to engage the audience in a dialogue on the power of art to influence community sustainability. The panel will feature Mary Mattingly, Kristyna Milde and Simonetta Moro, three of the participating artists in Amplify Action, discussing their work as an ongoing project of lifestyle change and as a campaign to shift perception toward sustainable practices.
Moderator:
Ann Holder, Associate Professor, History, Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute
Ann Holder, BA-Hampshire College, PhD Boston College, fields of specialization US Social/Cultural History, US Women’s History, African-American History, Gender/Sexuality Studies, Urban History, Cultural Studies, European Intellectual History; Current projects: Citizenship in the Post-Bellum South; Fellow: WEB DuBois Center at Harvard University. Former coordinator of the Critical and Visual Studies Program at Pratt. Courses taught at Pratt: World History, The Sixties, Families and Others, Representing the Real, The Story of Freedom in the United States, CritViz Colloquium and American Studies/Visual Studies
Artists:
Mary Mattingly was born in Rockville, CT. USA in 1978. She lives and works in New York City. Mattingly studied at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Parsons School of Design, and Yale School of Art from 1996-2002.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
Frontier, Galerie Adler, Germany 2007; Fore Cast, White Box, NY2006; Second Nature, Robert Mann Gallery, NY 2006; We Go Round and Round in the Night, Feldman Gallery, Portland, OR 2005.
Recent group exhibitions include:
Future Tense, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY 2008; Video Visionen, O eins, Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany 2008; Bivouac, Art Omi, Ghent, NY 2007; Other Worlds: Fact and Fiction, Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT 2007; and the International Center of Photography’s Triennial, Ecotopia 2006.
Recent publications/articles include:
Le Monde Magazine, Village Voice, ARTnews, Aperture, A Public Space, Artforum, C Photo, New York Magazine, New York Press, Time Out New York, Photography Quarterly Magazine.
She has co-curated interventions called Waterways alongside the Venice Biennial and with the Istanbul Biennial. Currently, Mattingly is working on a project called the Waterpod, a floating sculptural living structure that will showcase new ideas, simple and effective technologies for water desalinization and purification, clean energies, and sustainable, autonomous living. It can be easily prototyped and remade in different environments, and with different available resources. It will launch in May 2009, showcasing the work of artists, scientists, humanitarians, and geologists as part of the Hudson River’s Quadricentennial Celebration.
Currently, Mattingly is an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and an artist in residence at New York University. She just completed teaching a Master Class at the International Center of Photography.
Flock House, 2011, Photograph, 16 x 20
Exhibition Piece: Flock House is a migratory, public space that will be choreographed throughout New York City’s five boroughs to predetermined locations including: city parks, public spaces, and unused city-owned lots. Constructed of materials including recycled and reprocessed vehicles including airplane interiors, car bodies, bicycles, and boat hulls, the shape and form of “Flock House†is inspired by data patterns of current global human migration, immigration, and pilgrimage. Flock House promotes a city in which structures combine, separate, and recombine, reflecting the daily movements and relationships of modern metropolitan life. By augmenting and affirming local community resources through workshops, organized events, and online information, “Flock House†embellishes the etiology of civic folkways, offering new opportunities for collaboration, celebration, and invention.
Artist Statement: My work proposes a peripatetic world where populations depend on both migration and integrated communities. I focus on creating autonomous living/ traveling systems and the tools that accompany them, from wearable environments called Wearable Homes to water-based habitats that explore the intersection between autonomy and interdependence. In 2009, I completed a project called the Waterpod: a mobile, sculptural, autonomous habitat and collaborative public space atop a barge made to explore solutions for sea-level rise, lack of housing, and decrease of useable land. Docking throughout New York City, artists lived onboard and tested the social, ecological, and technological ecosystems for the project’s duration. Formally contingent on mapping worldwide human migration patterns, my current projects are itinerant, small-scale architectural interventions called Flock Houses. These capsules morph into preexisting underused urban structures, reflecting city dwellers’ movements while attempting to alter the autocratic effects of economic development.
Kristyna Milde, born in Prague, Czech Republic currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work deconstructs cultural meaning to question traditional boundaries between archetypes and stereotypes. She employs a variety of media including photography, sculpture, and installation. She received Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the Queens College, New York in 2007. Milde also studied painting from 1999 to 2003 at the Assenza Malschule, Basel, Switzerland. Kristyna Milde works for over a decade on a variety of interdisciplinary projects, on which she often collaborates with her husband Marek Milde. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and art centers in Europe and USA among others in the NURTURE art, Brooklyn, USA; Anna Wallace Gallery, New York, USA; Space Gallery, Pittsburg, USA; Futura, Prague, Czech Republic. Her work was featured in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, W+G News, Queens Tribune, Pittsburgh Tribune, BQE Media. She works as a Program Manager at the Czech Center NYC, a cultural institute of the Czech Republic.
In-Tree-Net, 2011, Site-specific installation made out of tree brunches mounted on the wall with plumbing hardware
Exhibition Piece (Kristyna & Marek Milde): The project In-Tree-Net engages the dilemma between systems of Nature and artificial structures. It investigates the influence of architecture on the understanding of Nature. The installation is site specifically made for the gallery settings out of tree trunks and brunches mounted on the walls with plumbing and electric hardware to resemble engineering systems of pipes and wires. Trees and their complex interconnection present in the ecosystem of the woods are here reduced to a rigid model of a machine representing the mechanistic approach towards Nature. Pipes which architecture usually attempts to cover in order to create an intact environment are here revealed to bring the outside inside pointing to the environmental dependency of the seemingly independent interior environment. It follows the phenomena of a new kind of “Homo Interiusâ€, a contemporary human, who spends most of its life inside of a white cube separated from the influence of the surrounding environment. In-Tree-Net critically approaches a culturally contingent understanding of the nature of Nature, which produces the perspective, that nature as such has borders, a beginning and its end, similar to architecture and urbanism. Nature here is an element that penetrates not only the walls, but also crosses artificial borders, that divide landscape without a context, cutting through the mountains and rivers. In the In-Tree-Net the organic systems represent an idea of bringing closer the nature and the way of its estranged perception, implying a reconnection of the fragmented environment to a whole. It is part of our larger body of work concerning themes of environment and mechanisms of culture creation.
Artist Statement (Kristyna & Marek Milde): Our work engages themes of environmental alienation and mechanisms of culture. We use daily surroundings and everyday places such as the home or a public space to explore themes of identity and personal integrity in the environment. For our installations we use a combination of natural and artificially constructed elements placed in situations where cultural forms are being confronted. We are interested to uncover the principles of how culture determinates itself and to question the removed and alienated cultural views.
Simonetta Moro, My work exists in the space of memory, in the interstices between the real and the imaginary, the present and the past, the detail and the overview. Places and architecture influence my practice; history informs the content. My drawings and paintings emerge through a cumulative, layered process that takes advantage of the translucency and texture of the materials, such as mylar or rice paper. These materials contribute to creating an allusive, dream-like quality, and give depth to the resulting image. Contrasting images are seen all at once, implying the simultaneity of perception and the suspension of time.
Photographic processes also play an important role in composing the initial image on canvas or paper. Used more or less literally, reproductions are re-contextualized and transformed to respond to the particular situation I construct.
Representation and abstraction coexist in my work – often situated at their edges. I see the map-form as a synthesis of these two modes, a metaphor that allows me to expand on the politics and poetics of places, and to evoke the idea of journey. A personal history of wandering made me investigate issues of placement and displacement. As tools for traveling, maps can either transport us into other worlds, or make us aware of the unseen details of our current world.
Signs of Growth/Mobile Gardens map, 2009, ink on paper, 11×17″
Exhibition Piece: Signs of Growth/Mobile Gardens map – Collaborative project by Simonetta Moro, Eve Mosher, Tattfoo Tan and students of Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts
Artist Statement: Signs of Growth: Urban Food, is a site-specific installation/ performance that took place in October 16 -18, 2009, in the context of Art in Odd Places festival, organized by Simonetta Moro, Eve Mosher and Tatfoo Tan with students at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.The work entailed identifying and marking “green sitesâ€â€”or places that potentially might support locally grown food—with signs along 14th street, from Union Square to 10th Avenue. The sites are diverse, idiosyncratic, even fantastical, including everything from scaffolding to rooftops, intending to encourage passers-by to think about urban agriculture and under-utilized public spaces.
The street action employed Tatfoo Tan’s Mobile Gardens – carts and found objects that students, working in collaboration with the artist, equipped with greenery and paraded along 14th street, while distributing maps of the Signs of Growth sites and brochures about urban window box planting. An example of text in the map reads: “Did you know?… At least 6000 tons of food must be imported into NYC daily. Unemployment would decrease with local food movements/production. Produce coming into NYC often has to travel over 1500 miles. Urban farming uses 1% of water needed for traditional field farming and absolutely no pesticides. Rooftop gardens can insulate buildings.â€
In the exhibition that followed the performance, installed in the Skybridge Art Space at Eugene Lang College, a documentation of the public project was displayed along with maps, mobile gardens, a cookbook created by students, a greenhouse project, and an audio Soundscape.
This Month in Art October 2011
Kristyna and Marek Milde,â€In Loving Memory†by Trent Morse
WG Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts, October Issues 2011, pg 6.
Perhaps the cheapest piece of furniture that one can buy is the plastic garden chair. It is ubiquitous on porches and in yards throughout the world, especially among folks with little disposable income. And, at a few dollars a pop, the chairs themselves are pretty much disposable. Artistic duo Kristyna and Marek milde found one of these chairs on a Chelsea sidewalk and decided to put it in an installation.
“In Loving Memory†solved a practical problem for NURTUREart. The gallery had a huge roof deck but nowhere for people to sit, so the Mildes hit the streets on New York and brought back a clashing collection of ten discarded chairs, which they cleaned and restored to working order. The chairs alone are a ramshackle and hideous bunch, but plaque – much like the plates affixed to park benches in dedication to deceased loved ones – that elevates them to objects of conceptual intrigue. There’s a ratty green lawn chair inscribed as “In Loving Commemoration of the Obsolete†a rounded red chair honoring the “Awkwardâ€, a lifeguard chair memorializing the “Washed – Outâ€, and , of course, a white plastic garden chair for the “Uncoolâ€.
This project was meant to demonstrate how, with a little elbow grease, a piece of garbage can be resurrected as a perfectly usable throne. But it also shows that, by labeling an object as uncool, it suddenly becomes cool. Such is the power of irony.
Brooklyn Rail Article, September 2011, by Gail Victoria Braddock Quagliata
PERMANENT INSTALLATION AT NURTUREART
In Loving Memory, Kristyna and Marek Milde’s strangely sweet homage to the discarded, now permanently occupies NurtureArt’s rooftop space. Stepping out onto the gallery’s deck one scorching August afternoon and waiting for my eyes to adjust to the shocking sunlight, I initially thought this exhibition looked like any Brooklyn rooftop hangout, with mismatched, weather-beaten chairs strewn about the space in conversationally-logical groupings. My eyes adapted and I noticed, in a far corner, THE PANEL: that iconic, graphically subdued piece of common museum/government/historical site signage that screams “official informational document†or, plainly, “read this sign and understand why you’re standing here reading this sign.â€
In Loving Memory is an installation made of discarded outdoor chairs found in the garbage on the streets of New York.While the chairs serve their purpose as patio furniture on the roof of the NURTUREart, the installation addresses the issue of fast-paced cycles of the consumerism and the impermanence and the interchangeability of things, where actual ownership often represents a short-lived affair before rejection.Each chair has a plaque attached to its back. As memorial benches and chairs with inscriptions are erected to celebrate the honorable dead or living with a notion of monumentality, these plaques commemorate worn out, obsolete, and generally uncool characters recalling un-monumental aspects of everyday life. Whilst these may represent the reasons for the negation, together they create an inclusive monument questioning the mechanisms of the culture of disposal.
A year has gone by and we are again participating in the Bushwick Open Studios, a weekend of over 350 open studios and exhibitions in the Bushwick area. We are excited to host a show called 7+1 as part of this event, featuring Brooklyn artists Silvina Arismendi, Zeljka Blaksic, Juan Fontanive, Tom Kotik, and Allison Schlegel. The show will be open one day only, on Saturday June 4th from 12 -7pm. Immediately following the show, you are invited to an after party with a live music performance by Joseph Robinson at 8pm and music by DJ Nanoru. To top it off, there will be an outdoor screening in the garden after dusk. So get ready for a busy day, and please – BYOB!
In the directory you may find the locations of the open studios and there will be also printed map available throughout out the neighborhood, http://artsinbushwick.org/bos2011/directory
For anyone who has not heard – in a last-minute announcement, the MTA has decided to schedule an L-train service outage for BOS weekend. There will be no L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Luckily, we have more than one train that serves our neighborhood, and many convenient bus lines. So, if you were planning to ride the L train to BOS, never fear – there are many other ways to get here and get around on public transit, both from Manhattan and from other parts of Brooklyn.
Here is everything we know about the transit situation, and our recommended alternate routes to get to L train stops in the Festival area. Please help us spread the word – we are still open for business, even if the L train isn’t!
June 3-5, 2011 L Train Outage: BOS2011 Transit Options
SUBWAY SERVICE
– J train will run as normal – G train will run as normal – M train will have expanded service, so will run its full route (from 57th St to Metropolitan Avenue) throughout the weekend. M trains should run regularly except between midnight and 6am. – L train will be replaced by shuttle from Lorimer Street through all of the L stops in Bushwick. You can connect to the L shuttle via the G to Lorimer/Metropolitan.
BUS SERVICE
– BEST L-TRAIN ALTERNATIVE FROM MANHATTAN: Take the J to Marcy Ave (Williamsburg Bridge Plaza). Take the B60 bus. Stops at the Montrose and Morgan L stops, and on Wilson Ave a few avenue blocks from the Jefferson, Dekalb, Myrtle-Wyckoff, Halsey and Wilson stops.
RECOMMENDED ALTERNATE SERVICE BY L-TRAIN STOP
– Graham L: B43 bus. You can also take the B24 from Queens. – Grand L: Q54 bus or Q59 bus. – Montrose L: take the G train to Broadway, the B60 bus or the B43 bus. – Morgan L: B60 bus or B57 bus. – Jefferson L: B57 bus or B38 bus. – Dekalb L: B38 bus. – Myrtle-Wyckoff L: M train to Myrtle-Wyckoff or B54 bus. – Halsey L: B26 bus. – Wilson L: B60 bus.
There are other bus routes that will serve different areas of BOS. We suggest that you use a combination of mta.info (for Service Advisories) and Google Directions, which now have excellent public transportation information, to figure out how to get to specific locations.
Thank you for your continued interest and support. See you at the BOS2011
Kristyna and Marek Milde
Looking for a Home
Queens College Art Center
Thursday, March 24, from 5-8 pm
Please come to see our work in progress installation Looking for a Home at the Queens College Art Center thisThursday, March 24, from 5-8 pm as a part of the Express + Local Project. We are creating living environment over the period of one month from furniture we found on the streets of New York. Looking for a Home is a work in progress installation, so please follow its development on site and online on our new website: www.mildeart.com
Kristyna and Marek Milde: Looking for a Home is a work in progress installation, which concerns the themes of consumerism and the culture of disposal, recalling environmental awareness in the realm of domesticity. For one month the space is being populated with found furniture and domestic objects dumped on the streets of the New York metropolitan area. It will grow out of sidewalk finds that the artists make during their residency. The objects are categorized; the progress is monitored and then documented. The resulting piece will be a fully or partially equipped living environment, depending on the luck of the findings.
The March 1–31 participants all live in Brooklyn. Graphic designers Carl Gambrell and Rob Kimmel will physically explore Queens to create a map that illustrates their newfound understanding of the borough’s cartography. Photographer and web programmer Derek Vadala captures the decaying manufacturing areas of Queens. Czech-born artists Kristyna + Marek Milde explore issues of consumerism within their New York home. The sculpture of Howard Lerner, recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artists Grant, is made from local found objects.
For many New Yorkers, one’s zip code determines the pizza they eat, the baseball team they cheer, and their general attitude about life. But can it influence the art they make? By bringing New York-area artists to the Queens College Art Center in Flushing for a month-long residency, EXPRESS+LOCAL: NYC AESTHETICS explores the possible effect of locale on their works. Artists (Ellis Avery, Becky Franco, Carl Gambrell, Naomi Grossman, Erin Hanke, Rob Kimmel, Howard Lerner, Kristyna Milde + Marek Milde, Tommy Mintz, April Nett, Antonia Perez, Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Derek Vadala + Jon Wohl) from diverse disciplines and divided into three groups, will share gallery space for one month at a time (Jan. 28-Feb. 28; March 1-31; and April 1-29). The public will have the opportunity to view the works-in-progress and talk with all the participants during an Open Studio one night each month and at varied times during their residency. A free culminating exhibition (May 5-June 30) will showcase pieces created during their time in Queens and feature artists’ talks with the curator, Tara Mathison.
Depending on their chosen residency, the visual artists, writers, musicians, and curators will work separately or together within the gallery space to respond to the idea of place. EXPRESS+LOCAL aims to offer insight into the varied studio practices documenting their creative response to New York and specifically, the borough of Queens. While some of the artists are very familiar with Queens and Queens College, others have had no direct experience before the residency; EXPRESS+LOCAL may lead each artist to forge a new sense of place.
We are excited to reach the final stage of our project called Looking for a Home, which is a lounge area created solely with furniture found in garbage on the streets of New York collected over a period of one month.
Please join us for the Reception and Artists’ talk which will include also other projects of the EXPRESS +LOCAL: NYC Aesthetic
Thursday, May 5 from 5 – 8pm at the Queens College Art Center, CUNY
Address:
Queens College Art Center
Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library, Level Six
Queens College, 65-30 Kissena Blvd., Flushing, NY 11367-1597
Our installation is on the 3rd floor ( ground floor ), right behind the main entrance and the gallery is on the 6th Floor
Looking for a Home is an installation concerning the themes of consumerism and the culture of disposal. The public space is populated with furniture and domestic objects dumped on the streets of the New York metropolitan area, which the artists found during their one month residency. The objects are cleaned, repaired and categorized; the progress is monitored and documented. The resulting piece is fully equipped living environment, which the public is encouraged to use as a private working area.
The objects, which assumingly have been replaced by new commodities, are, in Looking for a Home, kept relevant by the artists’ discovery. This site-specific environment reflects the state of abundance and rejection and recalls environmental awareness in the realm of domesticity. While the sale of anonymously mass-produced household objects is encouraged by the supportive framework of fictional stories around the objects and designers, Looking for a Home focuses on the stories of the objects’ lives and their use, adding an enriching personal layer of a real story connected to specific people and their environment
Looking for a Home
is a part of the
EXPRESS +LOCAL: NYC Aesthetic
By bringing New York-area artists to the Queens College Art Center in Flushing for a month-long residency, EXPRESS+LOCAL: NYC AESTHETICS explores the possible effect of locale on their works. Artists (Ellis Avery, Becky Franco, Carl Gambrell, Naomi Grossman, Erin Hanke, Rob Kimmel, Howard Lerner, Kristyna Milde + Marek Milde, Tommy Mintz, April Nett, Antonia Perez, Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Derek Vadala + Jon Wohl) from diverse disciplines and divided into three groups, will share gallery space for one month at a time (Jan. 28-Feb. 28; March 1-31; and April 1-29). The public will have the opportunity to view the works-in-progress and talk with all the participants during an Open Studio one night each month and at varied times during their residency. A free culminating exhibition (May 5-June 30) will showcase pieces created during their time in Queens and feature artists’ talks with the curator, Tara Mathison.
Depending on their chosen residency, the visual artists, writers, musicians, and curators will work separately or together within the gallery space to respond to the idea of place. EXPRESS+LOCAL aims to offer insight into the varied studio practices documenting their creative response to New York and specifically, the borough of Queens. While some of the artists are very familiar with Queens and Queens College, others have had no direct experience before the residency; EXPRESS+LOCAL may lead each artist to forge a new sense of place.
KRISTYNA MILDE: CONVENTIONS, CONSUMERISM, ART AND WOMAN.
Kristyna Milde is a Czech multidisciplinary artist who owns a very genuine style and a huge plastic versatility. Her work explores several sources of creation and inspiration; consumption, mass culture, women image, the auto-perception into the world, the culture models… Reflective, critical, even incisive, but at the same her work accumulates magic and almost childlike sweetness: no doubt she attains her artwork by talking itself.
Q – Kristyna, would you please tell us just a bit about your career. How did you start in the artistic world?
A – I am coming from a creative family; my mother and my younger brother are both artists. My mother is a painter and she also writes poetry. My brother is a conceptual artist working with the theme of personalizing the urban environment.
I have been creating things since I was really young – drawings, paintings, sculptures. It was the most natural way of expression for me. I started to take various courses and finally decided to study painting. I went, along with my future husband Marek, to Basel Switzerland to study at the Assenza Malschule and spent four years there. After that, we moved to New York and went to the MFA program at Queens College, where we both graduated in 2007.
Q – Many of your works use Barbie dolls, Action men, or their accessories to be developed. Why do you use these tools for your creations? What are the meanings or intentions?
A – When I was little, there was still communism in my home country. The market was very limited. I played with simple toys, most of them made by my mother or grandmother. I also had some old toys. After the revolution in 1989 the market was suddenly overflowed with the western products I was shocked by the number of things and commodities, and the mechanisms of quick disposal. I mean, after the period of restriction, everything was suddenly allowed. People started to buy things, they could not even dream of before. Instead of one type of yogurt, you have 20. I guess people were also disoriented, they did not know what is enough. So on one side, you have this hyper-consumption and on the other side, you have the disposal of “old” things, which are not “god” anymore. And we end up in a cycle, which can’t really fulfill anything. I think that is why I feel still quite sensitive to the overpowering market production, and its effects on human behavior. In my view kids playing with toys are not just playing, they are learning and absorbing a specific perspective of reality given by the producer. Children project their self-image onto the doll in an attempt to identify with it, which often results in a so-called Barbie syndrome: the child longs for having the same physical appearance and social status as the doll. The plastic toys, especially Barbie dolls, in my opinion, symbolize the dark side of commodity exchange. By placing them in a different context in my artworks, I am trying to disclose the nakedness and emptiness of such things.
One of the inspirations for this part of my work is a book called “Momo†by Michael Ende. The girl Momo has the gift to listen to people in such a way, that they start to understand themselves better. She lives in an old amphitheater and has almost nothing, but she also does not need much. The only thing she really needs is friendship. There are Grey Men in the city, stealing time from people. Momo, who tends to spend time playing and listening to stories, gets uncomfortable for them and they are trying to get rid of her. First, they separate her from her friends by making them too busy to come and play with her. When she is quite alone, they come with a car full of stuff and give her the perfect doll. Momo tries to play with her, but the doll says the same things over and over again. She only wants to get more clothes and accessories. Finally, Momo gives up and gets bored, which never happened to her before.
I think that this story is quite significant as it says a lot about our social and cultural behavior today.
Q – Specifically in works like cUMENI or The Tribuna of the Uffizi, what do you try to transmit/denounce?
A –cUMENI combines two seemingly different approaches of depicting women: the history of European painting and modern pop culture. The word ÄUMENI, in the Czech language, plays with the words art and gaping. In this project, I critically examine how modes of representation distort our perception of women. The Barbie doll plays the role of historical icons in recreations of world-famous paintings. 
The presented ideal manipulates a woman’s concept of her body and creates an artificial identity. This model reduces a woman to an object of desire and visual pleasure and has a negative effect on her self-image. 

As traditionally recognized media; paintings sanction the male gaze, which would be considered voyeurism in other contexts. 
Using the historical painting as a stage, with a female icon represented by the modern Barbie, I want to show the similarities between stereotypical representation in the past and in the present time. I am also interested in how playing with artificial mass produced toys influences the youngest generation. What ideals are they identifying with? What consequences does it imply for their development? With cUMENI I want to inspire contemplation and reconsideration of the visual culture and its impact on the formation of identity and gender relations.
Q – And what about your work 1959?
A – 2009 marks the 50th anniversary since Ruth Handler designed the Barbie doll. I was thinking: How strange, that the doll did not age since then? She still looks as fresh as in the late 50s; a symbol of never-aging beauty. So I decided to confront the idealized image of the Barbie Doll, the symbol of successful consumerism, with the everyday reality. I asked myself how would a person, who would live the life of the character of â€the perfect consumer†s e in its fifties. I focused on the gap between the dream, the prefab ideal of consumerism, and the real process of aging and deterioration. There is a photograph in the 1959 series, where Barbie is celebrating her birthday with a huge cake in her apartment. In my project, she does not look like Cinderella, but rather as the middle-aged woman she is supposed to be. Her body is affected and transformed by the reality of her life. She is obsessively shopping and overconsuming the products of the never-ending sales and media spectacle. While obeying the rules to become the perfect consumer, she turns into an absurd character fulfilling the imperative to enjoy!
“Diet, injections and injunctions will combine from a very early age to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable and serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.â€
Q – There are many other artworks not related to Babies nor dolls, but with women. For example, Her Hair, where you show your creations developed with hair. Tell us a bit about this project.
A – In the project “Her Hair,†I have worked with female hair using various media such as photography, installation, and animation. It explores my identity in the relationship to the outer world. The perspective of my body and my personal experience is the starting point of my exploration. I use feminine attributes to deconstruct our images of identity and cultural conventions.
I see the hair as a mediator between my own body, the outside, and myself. The hair is part of my identity, something familiar, but it also has its own life. It is growing, expanding into space. In the project “Her Hairâ€, I want to stretch the possibilities of the physical limits of hair. The underlying content focuses on the psychological aspects of physical experience and the search for emotional closeness and connection.
The perspective of my body and my personal experience is the starting point of my exploration. I use feminine attributes to deconstruct our images of identity and cultural conventions.
Q – What are you currently working on? And are there any future projects?
A – One of the projects I am currently working on is “The Tribuna of the Uffiziâ€. I am recreating a painting by Johann Zoffany from 1772-8. It portrays the Uffizi Gallery in Florence with the major paintings and sculptures from Renaissance and antiquity. It is a very complex project; I am re-staging every single painting in the picture and afterward, I will recreate the whole piece in 3D. The final presentation will be a large-scale photograph. Zoffany’s painting can be used as an illustration of the eighteenth-century idea of the “masterpieceâ€. Zoffany is creating a conceptual framework to parallel the classical ancient and Renaissance tradition. He is trying to justify the idea of cultural continuity. By replacing the human figures in the paintings with contemporary toys, I am adding a new layer of reference to deconstruct the idea of a masterpiece.
Q – Your works are exhibited to the public in the flicker’s account from MILDEART, what is exactly MILDEART?
A –MILDEART is a loose name, which combines my and my husband’s work. It derives from our last name Milde. We are collaborating on most of our projects. Each of us has an individual art practice, but we are always conceptually and practically helping each other. We also have some projects where we are “officially†working together.
Q – Are currently any other exhibitions/galleries where we can find your artworks?
A – During this month my husband and I are participating in a one-month work-in-progress residence at the Queens Art Center in New York. We work on a project called Looking for Homeâhich deals with the theme of consumerism and mechanisms of disposal. We will create an apartment room furnished solely with furniture found during the period of one month on the streets of New York. It will be followed by a group show in May at the same location. I was also featured in the March issue of the Godele Magazine in Belgium. The article has 6 pages with large-size photos of my cUMENI.
Q – What is your personal opinion about the current situation of Contemporary Art and artist? How do you see the Contemporary Art market?
A- This is a very complex issue, with a wide range of angles. I had the possibility to get the know some of the mechanisms in the art market and I would say that the experience was rather controversial. I think that is very important to differentiate between the creation of art, the presentation, and the market. Each of them has specific rules and problems. It is a very competitive and selective system.
HOMESCAPE 
Mark Dion
Kristyna & Marek Milde
Kristyna and Marek Milde, Plantarium – Tea Garden, Flux Factory/Windmill Community Garden, 2018,
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)
LMCC’s Open Studios event is a window into the process of making our newest project Sitings, a series of site-responsive sculptures functioning as furniture exploring the phenomena of unconventional domestication of public space. During the residency we explore and study non-conformist behavioral situations of diverse individuals such us workers on break, homeless people, tourists, children etc. creating unique and personal forms of interaction with architecture and public space by sitting, lying, reading or eating in undesigned places. The project Sitings replicates sites and specific places found in use for sitting or lying in the form of sculptures functioning as chairs and couches that incorporate architectural fragments such as street corners, stairs, and pavement. While Sitings questions the limits and conventions of the private and the public it amplifies the gesture of choosing freely, where to sit as a creative, performative act transforming the highly defined urban environment.
This summer Holes in the Wall Collective presents a group-curated show Exquisite Corpus: The Maize. Seven artists/artist groups making an exquisite visual dialogue inspired by the immediate landscape, its history and the role of CORN.
The residency is located at Governors Island, in a former Army warehouse (Building 110) embedded in the midst of picturesque landscapes, expansive waterfront views, and unique historic architecture. The Arts Center at Governors Island includes 20 studios for visual artists, two rehearsal spaces for performing artists, and a Gallery space. From March to December, the Arts Center functions as a shared, multidisciplinary space where artists can experience a retreat-style residency just a short ferry ride from the frenetic buzz of the city. While on the Island, artists develop their practice and create new works, drawing inspiration from the unique location, as well as the community of fellow artists-in-residence that forms in the space.
-channel video documenting performance made in various natural and forest environments. In the project we engage in the activity of cleaning normally reserved to the realm of domesticity here misplaced in to the nature involving cleaning trees, stones, grass and riverbank while using domestic tools such as brooms brushes mops etc. We are interested in how the cleaning taken from its context is reduced to a very basic gesture with an edge of absurdity but at the same time it represents elemental mechanism of claiming and controlling space. Natural Cleaners looks at cleaning as a form of primeval cultural statement, that draws on the premise of declaration of a space by selecting and eliminating.
The installation Cabinet of Smells (2015), explores idea “What is the smell of a home?†It engages our relationship to smells inherent to our daily surroundings that encompass our bodies, homes and living environments. It examines the boundaries between aroma and odor and the cultural norms that define the pleasant, odd and acceptable. It presents the modern tools that produce constructed landscape of artificial smells such as perfumes, cleaners and air fresheners and their function to blur distinction between natural and artificial. While the perfume industry attempts to construct fictional scent identity that usually covers the actual context the Cabinet of Smells engages revisit the idea seeking what actually the real smell of a home is. The project includes laboratory station, which is used to distill scents of various household objects such as old books, socks or debris etc. Our attempt is to produce a perfume that would represent its origin and identity of a place inclusively.
Brooklyn based artists Kristyna and Marek Milde present their projects engaging culture of living and domesticity . Looking at what is “swept under the carpet,†their work investigates how the comfortable interior environment of our homes produces a culture of alienation from nature. Their projects often take the form of DIY home improvements, and revisit the role of furnishing, cleaning and decorating and its function inside of a white cube to produce the feeling of home. Their work explores ways of transforming our spaces of dwelling, revealing its connection to a larger environmental context of culture, geography and nature.Participants at MoMA Studio will have the opportunity to share their ideas about the elements that contribute to their sense of home. Additionally, participants are encouraged to be part of a 
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