Common Frequency, press release
October 5 – 28, 2012 / opening reception: Oct 5, 6 – 9 pm
Radiator Arts gallery, 10-61 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11106
Curated by Daniela Kostova
Artists: Adam & Eve Bailey, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Boryana Rossa & Oleg Mavromatti, Yana Dimitrova & Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria
Press release, excerpt:
Concepts of balance and coordination are intricate parts of Eve Bailey’s work. Shoulder Path occupies the center of the exhibition space, raised on a platform evoking desire. In this piece, and in the video Work Force, the artist uses her body as a primary tool and experiments with equilibrium through physical, mechanical and conceptual means. Skin of Our Teeth, a collaborative photograph by Adam and Eve Bailey, shows the two artists wearing each other’s smiles, in a sequence resembling a photomaton.
Press release, full text:
Common Frequencies is a showcase of four artist couples. It is focused on each pair’s creative practice, in a daily reality where art and life are often inseparable, as an example of a micro-system and of a complex set of negotiations.
The exhibition represents a landscape of synched voices and their evolution in-to common artistic languages. It consists of works across the mediums that are the outcome of both collaborative and parallel strategies. Thus it raises questions about authorship, the power dynamics of a shared space, personal boundaries, gender roles and cross-cultural challenges. If in some cases individual voices are highlighted, in others two become one and, taken further, even “another” one.
Piñata Portrait by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy welcomes the visitors?with a potential promise of both destruction and reward. Exemplifying the?tendency of the McCoys to include autobiographical references in their projects,?here the piñata becomes an image-cliché of the battling married couple and the fragility of the collaborative model.
Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti show a large-scale mural incorporating photography, text and video. Developed over years of collaboration their work presents a critical examination of gender stereotypes. Vitruvian Body is a female embodiment of the “ideal proportions” of the human body as defined by the Roman architect Vitruvi, while Before and After is a performative expression of the ultimate bond, where two bodies become one but in imperfect balance.
Concepts of balance and coordination are intricate parts of Eve Bailey’s work. Shoulder Path occupies the center of the exhibition space, raised on a platform evoking desire. In this piece, and in the video Work Force, the artist uses her body as a primary tool and experiments with equilibrium through physical, mechanical and conceptual means. Skin of Our Teeth, a collaborative photograph by Adam and Eve Bailey, shows the two artists wearing each other’s smiles, in a sequence resembling a photomaton.
Yana Dimitrova and Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria create a dialogue employing symbols and text. Yana’s project I Don’t Think That’s Funny taps into issues of cross-cultural communication while hinting at the underlying ideological implications. Eat Faster is a work of embroidery, which functions as an acknowledgement of time in connection to labor and notions of success. Sebastien’s text-based drawing series Natural Calls, shown parallel to Yana’s wall, is the outcome of a long process of observing each other in a domestic situation, which results in name-calling.
Entasis Dance, press release
Image © Adam Bailey 2012
Eve Bailey To Exhibit At Dumbo Arts Festival 2012
Eve Bailey has been asked to participate again this fall at the Dumbo Arts Festival – held between September 28th and 30th. Her new work, entitled Entasis Dance, was created specifically for the scenic Brooklyn Bridge Park Park (at Main Street), located at the base of the Manhattan Bridge.
Entasis Dance is primarily a performance art work where dancers will interact with three distinct sculptures that Bailey has shaped from nine foot columns. The columns began as cylinders, but Bailey has personalized each of them, carving recesses and curves and adding hand holds to make each sculpture sympathetic to human embrace. The resultant columns have a biomorphic sense to them in their own right, since in essence their contours are mirrors of the anatomy of the respective dancers.
As in last year’s entry to the festival, Intuit, Bailey creates in her work a wonderful stage upon which the performers can display their grace and precision of movement. Intuit used a monumental fulcrum balance where pairs of silent dancers had to carefully adjust their positions, keeping in mind the forces of gravity on each side of the center. In Entasis Dance, all movement revolves around the circular nature of the columns. Gravity again takes its toll, but now Bailey has added the extra complexity of swirling motion. Bailey has chosen to populate the present work with three sculptures and three dancers in order to foster, “a debate rather than a conversation.” For the 200,000 visitors to this year’s festival, this will be one “debate” not to be missed.
Performances of Entasis Dance will take place on Friday, September 28th at 6 PM and at the top of the hour on Saturday, September 29th and Sunday, September 30th from noon to 6 PM.
Costumes: Anna Finke (Merce Cunningham Dance Company).
Dancers: Jenny Campbell (Misnomer Dance Theater Company), Andrea-Jane Dispenziere (Danielle Russo Dance Company), Coco Karol (Misnomer Dance Theater Company), Lynda Senisi (Bennyroyce Dance Productions).
Between the Tongue and the Taste, press release
Between the Tongue and the Taste
September 1-15, 2011
Curated by Michael Merck.
Triangle Arts Association is pleased to present the work of two of our Artists’ Workshop alumni, Eve Bailey and Albert Pedulla. The exhibition opens Thursday, September 1, 6-9pm at 111 Front Street Galleries, Suite 222.
How does an artist’s mark derive its power? Using a variety of media, Bailey and Pedulla examine the relationship between body and mind from opposite ends of the spectrum.
Bailey employs the body as a “perceiving mechanical structure” that serves to “express the elegance of a gesture,” a device reaching beyond the physical products conceived of and executed by the mind. The works she makes are preparations that seek to instigate an opportunity for the body to complete them. Series of 1/4 Scale Maquettes is a sculptural document of her process to create a form upon which the body can perform a series of movements.
In other works such as Shoulder Path, Drawing Bailey records a series of movements by marking her body with paint. The resulting work serves as a blueprint of an abstracted moment in which the body has moved through space.
Conversely, Pedulla focuses on the mind seeking to form an “epistemology of the artist’s mark”. In Extracted Wall Drawing #3 (Path) a representation of a walk he took is rendered and then dissected. Remnants of his thought process are portrayed in intricate threads literally pulling apart the initial route moment by moment.
In Double-Portrait (Meg #1, #2, #3) Pedulla takes the process a step further by using the body as a space upon which the mind can make a mark. In this instance Pedulla literally burns an image onto a human body by creating a stencil and exposing it in a tanning bed. This process which he refers to as a “tanagram” is framed in a manner that excludes almost any indication that the image exists upon a human body but eerily aligns the subject’s naval with the mouth of the image.
Despite these seemingly opposite approaches, both artists’ processes converge around an underlying similarity. Bailey’s Work Force and Pedulla’s Public Rectilinear Form (Modernist-Post) share a conceptual space in which both artists entertain a state of being that exists beyond mind or body. In Bailey’s piece, a precarious if not dangerous sculpture is constructed that she then climbs atop and walks upon. A palpable tension is felt as she confidently but slowly traverses the structure. This tension between the focused concentration upon the act and the simultaneous disregard of its potentially harmful outcome incites the viewer to contemplate the meditative state necessary to execute this performance. Similarly, Pedulla’s piece creates a space in which to consider the conflicting notions of intention and intuition. By capturing the off-the-cuff gestures of passers-by and framing them within the context of a Modernist monolith Pedulla subverts the tradition of the over intellectualized artist’s mark by glorifying the purely instinctive human tendancy to express oneself.
Considering these works together, it becomes apparent that there is a state of being that neither the body nor the mind can rationalize. Perhaps another state exists between the physicality of the body and the relentless activity of the mind; a space where the actual mark is made and from which it derives its power of expression.
Review by Jeffrey Bussman in Title Magazine
Jeffrey Bussmann works at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently researching Brazilian cultural organizations for his master’s thesis in Arts Administration at Drexel University. He also writes for his blog Post-Nonprofalyptic.
Review excerpt:
“I felt most favorably towards Eve Bailey’s Shoulder Path, a sculptural piece and a photograph of a performance using the sculptural object. Bailey brings the sculpture alive, something like IKEA furniture crossed with a berserk pommel horse, as an apparatus for dissecting the stages of a back somersault. There is more than a bit of Eadweard Muybridge in Bailey’s plotting of locomotion, but a key difference is her costume and how its orange sleeves and markings align with the form of the apparatus. The shapes of her body frozen in motion play like a physical semaphore language. Looking back to the sculpture in the gallery I could appreciate how its design was dictated by her body rolling through space, as if she had left impressions in damp clay. Then again, it could just as seamlessly pass for a cutting-edge daybed in the home of some very design-forward person.”
Full review:
Before visiting Blur: Six Artists/Six Designers in Contemporary Practice I wondered, “Why this show and why now?” Nothing today could be more pertinent to explore than polymorhpic practice, which not only seems more prevalent than ever in the arts, but also in the creative sector at large. It is a challenge that everyone must navigate: excel at your specialty, but do not excel only at that one thing; invent other avenues and parallels. Curators Mark Campbell (of UArts) and Mary Anne Friel (of RISD and formerly the Fabric Workshop) are not preoccupied with categorizing the individuals they selected for the show: Eve Bailey, Laura Frazure, Todd Gilens, Andrea Gaydos Landau, Virgil Marti, Will McHale, Don Miller, Jenny Sabin, Anne Schaefer, Alexandra Ullrich-Schmidt, Silvano Sole, and Mika Tajima. In the gallery notes a short bio illuminates where on the art/design spectrum each one falls. Each of the twelve selected contributors has only one piece, or in a few cases two, spread over two galleries as representations of how they “blur” the distinctions between art and design. The work on display shows their cross-disciplinary métiers to varying degrees.
Before I saw the show, Campbell said that he and Friel view cross-disciplinary activity as firmly established in contemporary practice. If we take this view for granted, the curatorial basis of forming a show around “blurring” is generic—it becomes a standard group show that showcases people who are already within a curator’s circle of acquaintances, if not friends. However, I am not entirely of this mind. Blur functions as a chance to take stock of twelve artists/designers who are at all career stages, from emerging to firmly-ensconced, and who exemplify why “blurring” has become the new norm.
In our emails back and forth, Campbell reminded me that if the role (at least in part) of the contemporary artist is to comment on contemporary life, “design disciplines offer a number of interesting pathways, with their emphasis on social use and function, for the contemporary artist to be in the world, more centrally placed and actively engaged.” Conversely, the contemporary designer has enthusiastically assumed the challenge of appropriating and innovating formal expression, which may have once been seen as the visual artist’s dominion.
It is beyond the scope of a review for me to carefully examine each work in Blur, so I will begin with the individual whose career I know best and whose stately pieces are so often examined for playing with fine art versus interior design. Virgil Marti’s contributions to Blur bear the mark of his rummaging through Philadelphia Museum of Art storerooms for last fall’s Set Pieces at ICA. And as in the VIP Room wallpaper in Philagrafika 2010, his surfaces have a reflective, distorting quality. He has provided loaded titles, Nightwatch and Vesper, which call to mind a bevy of ideas: planet- and star-gazing, Greco-Roman mythology, Rembrandt, and Casino Royale. The design aspect of the pieces is overt; but my assumption as a viewer that these pieces are confounding mirrors was changed by the curators’ suggestion that they are “monochromatic paintings”.
An astral ambience in the gallery was reinforced by the sound bleed from Andrea Gaydos Landau’s One Night Sky. I know Landau (a former colleague) more for her skill as a project coordinator at the Fabric Workshop than for her own handiwork. I never fail to be fascinated by the comparison between how artists apply their aptitude to the work of another artist and what they do on their own. For example, at the Fabric Workshop Landau worked wonders with industrial felt to realize Tristan Lowe’s monumental Mocha Dick, which required great dexterity to manipulate the material into resembling a whale’s supple flesh. With One Night Sky, she gives lace-cut painted fabric a dry, fragile texture not unlike peat moss. What I liked best was how she intertwined speakers and earbuds into the latticework, weaving a constellation that mirrored the ethereal, tinkling soundtrack. Is it a painting, a tapestry, or an elaborate trellis for delivering sound?
I felt about Jenny Sabin’s work the way I generally feel about architectural maquettes and schematics: they encapsulate the ideas inherent to the design, but are listless when compared to the full scale structures they represent. Unless one is an architect, they are too technical to inspire wonder. Besides, the actual Greenhouse and Cabinet of Future Fossils is now constructed and on view at the American Philosophical Society Museum—why not see it there?
The inclusion of Mika Tajima’s video Today is Not a Dress Rehearsal gives off a similarly muted effect. For a performance that appears to have been so dynamic in the flesh, the video, which is simultaneously the documentation and the fruit of its high-production-value filming, is of feeble impact. Again, it is more instructive in its transparent aestheticizing (to an almost fetishistic point, reinforced by the droning New Humans soundtrack) of sets, equipment, lighting, and cinematic techniques than in engaging viewers as a piece unto itself. On a smallish LCD television, it reads like any competently made clip you might find on video sharing sites shot with widely accessible prosumer grade HD cameras. Across the gallery, Philosophers and Idlers offers a much more direct and engaging window into Tajima’s toying with modular units and Bauhaus design.
I felt most favorably towards Eve Bailey’s Shoulder Path, a sculptural piece and a photograph of a performance using the sculptural object. Bailey brings the sculpture alive, something like IKEA furniture crossed with a berserk pommel horse, as an apparatus for dissecting the stages of a back somersault. There is more than a bit of Eadweard Muybridge in Bailey’s plotting of locomotion, but a key difference is her costume and how its orange sleeves and markings align with the form of the apparatus. The shapes of her body frozen in motion play like a physical semaphore language. Looking back to the sculpture in the gallery I could appreciate how its design was dictated by her body rolling through space, as if she had left impressions in damp clay. Then again, it could just as seamlessly pass for a cutting-edge daybed in the home of some very design-forward person.
The stealthy strength of blurring boundaries allows an artist/designer to reach a wider audience and broaden their impact for a greater cause. Todd Gilens’ Endangered Species series, documented by photographs in the show, consists of San Francisco city omnibuses wrapped with photographs of endangered species indigenous to the Bay Area. Surely, these are meant to raise awareness of an environmental issue. More cleverly, though, Gilens subverts typical expectations of advertisement laden bus exteriors even as he juxtaposes tranquil animal life in nature with a manmade vehicle of mass transit spewing exhaust out its backside.
In all, Blur gave me pause to reflect: do distinctions between artist and designer, as well as their respective outputs, matter so much in contemporary practice? The title of the exhibition still enshrines those labels, almost pitting one against the other. But in viewing the show, even though it would be exaggeration to say that traditionally-held boundaries are obliterated, the ambiguity is thorough. So I return to my initial question: “Why and why now?” Does a show such as this tell us something that we already know, or does considering the ways that artists and designers “blur” point to further avenues forward?
Blur: Six Artists/Six Designers in Contemporary Practice, press release
The University of the Arts August 22 – September 30
Hamilton/Arronson Galleries, 320 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, 215-717-6000, www.uarts.edu
Reception: Thursday, September 22, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Mon. – Fri. 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Sat. by appointment, 215-717-6210
Shoulder Path Sequence by Eve Bailey, 2011, c-print, 30 x 20 inches
The University of the Arts is very pleased to present an exhibition BLUR: Six Artists / Six Designers in Contemporary Practice, curated by Mark Campbell and Mary Anne Friel. The twelve artist/designers in this project include Eve Bailey, Laura Frazure, Todd Gilens, Andrea Landau, Virgil Marti, Will McHale, Don Miller, Jenny E. Sabin, Anne Schaefer, Alexandra Schmidt-Ullrich, Silvano Sole and Mika Tajima.
This exhibition focuses on art/design dialogue in contemporary practice, drawing from a number of established disciplines, including painting, architecture, sculpture, industrial design, landscape architecture and performance. These artists/designers offer works in which the evolving principles of cross-disciplinary thinking are manifest, freely extending the range of creative activities outside traditional boundaries. Variations include “parallel activities,” with designers maintaining a concurrent studio art practice, both as exploration for client based work and as an end in itself, as well as artists drawing on the traditions of design for forms, contexts and contents, erasing the lines between the respective super-categories in the process.
The Common Mind, press release
June 25 – September 19, 2009, CUETO PROJECT, 551 21st Street, New York
Curated by Julie Boukobza, featuring works by Eve Bailey, Christina Kruse, Elinor Milchan and Tatyana Murray
Installation view at Cueto Project, Drunken Body sculpture (foreground left) and Shoulder Path drawing (background left)
Press release, excerpt:
“Eve Bailey conceives sculpture, performance and drawings at the measure of her body. A strong presence and fluid movements are perceived as innate within her mobile form, remains of the intensive practices of dance and martial arts. Hers is a body that finds itself confronted by the city and its industrial architecture, which above all seems to never let her out of its confines, and that sometimes, as in Bailey!s “Drunken Body,” melts into the structure of her constructions.”
Press release, full text:
When reading over an article in Frieze magazine about the British artist Eric Bainbridge, I came upon an inspiring note that accompanied his works during a previous show: art critic and curator Greg Hilty states “We don’t all choose our neighbors but they affect us. We don’t always choose our thoughts but they also have a bearing.”
The title of this text is “The Common Mind.”
This equivocal notion, characteristic of our times, which claims all and avoids responsibility, operates as an entryway into the exhibition of the same title at Cueto Project NY. It encapsulates all that simultaneously links and distances the four artists who show their works in Valerie Cueto’s art gallery. Elinor Milchan, Christina Kruse, Tatyana Murray, and Eve Bailey. Their work, exhibited together for the first time, presents a great Jungian lava that fuses the collective subconscious with the personal subconscious. The product is a common spirit that embraces multiple artistic discourses and processes. Here one can say that the collective subconscious plays the role of an excuse because what stands out is what differentiates these women. In no way does the fact that they all live in New York City, that they are of the same sex and from the same generation, or that they speak the same language interfere or provoke this dialogue of creativity in a range of artistic media.
Sculpture, performance, photography, installation, drawings: all mediums twisted, magnified, abused, and galvanized by the artists’ incessant energies. Elinor Milchan walks through luminous fields with her photographic works. With a technique that she developed herself, she brings her light to touch the observer whether the images are in larger-than-life format or closer to the human scale. The eye looses its familiar habits, taken away by opposing currents, colorful streams and sensual waves. Whether they are named “LightLands” or “UrbanLands” these abstract scapes urge the viewer to surrender to their grandeur.On the other hand, Christina Kruse cannibalizes her image. She photographs herself, moving between glossy and matte paper, in such a way that the particulars, the figure herself, are absorbed and lost. The effect is superposition works in which detached body parts are intruded by diagram, when the body becomes measure, and then is displaced beyond said measure. In “Weeds” and “Ghost Trees,” Tatyana Murray presents for the first time a series of installations that are luminous and evolving. Her works are memories of trees that disappeared with childhood, plants that are often equivocally despised, whether this scorn is rightful and merited or not. With this subject matter and the solitary cardboard pieces that she pierces, embroiders, and adorns with many refinements, the artist achieves the necessary work of a memoir of the natural world. Eve Bailey conceives sculpture, performance and drawings at the measure of her body. A strong presence and fluid movements are perceived as innate within her mobile form, remains of the intensive practices of dance and martial arts. Hers is a body that finds itself confronted by the city and its industrial architecture, which above all seems to never let her out of its confines, and that sometimes, as in Bailey!s “Drunken Body,” melts into the structure of her constructions.
Four artists who, during a long summer, rather than having a common discourse, summon the spirit of community.
-Julie Boukobza
Finger in my Brain, press release
10 Avril – 30 Avril 2009
