CROSSING ART GALLERY -Queens
April 21st, 2012, 6 - 9 pm
136-17 39th Avenue, Ground Floor
Flushing-Queens, NY
Participating Artists:
Rachelle Beaudoin
Camila Cañeque
Amy Finkbeiner
Jil Guyon
Maya Jeffereis
Kanene Holder
Zavé Martohardjono
Negin Sharifzadeh
Chris Udemezue
Jess Whittam & Lorelei Ramirez
Directions:
#7 Train to Main Street, Flushing. Walk on Main Street to 39th Avenue. Next to TDBank Bldg.
Rachelle Beaudoin is an artist who uses video, photography, and performance to explore feminine iconography and identity within popular culture. She attended the College of the Holy Cross where she studied Studio Art and played ice hockey. She holds a Masterʼs degree in Digital+Media from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2007 Rachelle was named the recipient of an Award of Excellence from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited at Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance Goldsmiths London UK, the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi Finland and recently participated in Low Lives 3, international exhibition of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues.-UP-
Camila Cañeque was born in the city of Barcelona. After finishing her education in France, she began her professional career as a photographer and filmmaker, which led her to live in places like Buenos Aires, Alexandria and São Paulo. She progressively started to combine the visual arts knowledge with the embodiment of it. Her early performances such as Rojo, Rouge, Rosso, Rot, Piros, Rdeča, Roşu or Photo-Copy are already time-based and media-based pieces, a double face that characterizes all her works. Faced to the impossibility to change the status quo, Camila introduces herself in the frame of reality (through a very specific mise en scène) and alters the landscape, creating a fictional world around her. In her performances, Camila changes herself adopting personality traits of a fictional character of her own creation or even assuming behaviors of a particular concept. The metamorphosis/performance tend to be long term (24 hours a day for one or more months), decision due to the desire to understand and to assimilate her new identity, to turn into real what is fiction. During the transformation process she makes the recording in photography, film or video, modifying the ephemeral nature of it. After the long performance, she isolates herself. When she has recovered, she starts editing the footage and builds a text about the experience. -UP-
Amy Finkbeiner was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, lives in Brooklyn. She received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1990, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2001. She has attended residencies at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and the Carmelite Monastery in Indianapolis. Selected exhibitions venues include: in New York, Abrons Arts Center, Smack Mellon Gallery, Women’s Theatre Project, D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center, David Nolan Gallery, Autoversion Ltd. Gallery, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, and Invisible NYC Gallery; Galleri Niklas Belenius in Stockholm; Washington and Lee University Gallery in Lexington, Virginia; Good Children Gallery in New Orleans; and Samson Projects in Boston. Amy is interested in making things for ritual use, such as devotional icons, altars, votive candles, ceremonial vestments, tattoos, and talismans. Her work functions as a cult of worship and is based in my personal experiences. Much of what she makes is done in simple homage to her heroes. Her work has been greatly influenced by poets, mystics, musicians, and artists like Patti Smith, Julian of Norwich, and Hannah Wilke, to name only a few. -UP-
Jil Guyon’s multi-disciplinary performances have been staged in theaters and festivals throughout Austria, Germany, Japan, Canada and the U.S., as well as at various sitespecific locations, from New York City’s landmark nightclub Webster Hall to a monastery crypt. Her collaborative work includes appearances alongside Kiki Smith and Alvin Curran in Joan Jonas’s Variations on a Scene at “The Wave Hill Dancescape” in Riverdale, NY, and as a guest artist in Noemie Lafrance’s Agora II at the McCarren Park pool in Brooklyn. Film credits include Eyes, Nose, Mouth directed by Noemie LaFrance, Tales of Creation directed by Bob DeNatale, and H.U.G., by Julie Troost. She is also a regular performer with the satirical butoh group “Celeste Hastings and The Butoh Rockettes.” Guyon’s critically acclaimed multimedia theater piece, At the Borders of Eternity, based on The Diary of Anne Frank, starred celebrated German actress Elfriede Irrall and was featured on ORF television (Austria). It is currently part of the collection of the Kulturarchiv in Vienna and was the first theatrical work granted exclusive use of the diary. Jil is a recipient of the Magistrat der Stadt Wien Award (Austria,) and an Artward Bound Residency at the prestigious White Oak Plantation, funded by the Howard Gilman Foundation. She holds an MFA in painting and art history from Hunter College where she studied with Rosalind Krauss and Robert Morris. -UP-
Maya Jeffereis was born in Sun Valley, CA. She earned her BFA in Painting & Drawing and BA in Classics from University of Washington in Seattle, studied Performance Art at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College in Performance, Video, and Installation. She is a co-founder of the Hunter College MFA Program’s Digital Media Collective and Purple Jackets Performance Collective. Her work seeks to complicate the relationship between performer and audience through subjects of psychology, mythology, and phenomenology. -UP-
400 Years of Rrrrrrrrrr
Kanene Holder, is an educator and performance artist with grants from Franklin Furnace, Puffin Foundation, and others. She received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities focusing on Zora Neale Hurston, Bard College’s Difference and The Colin Powell Center for Policy Study focusing on education reform. An excerpt of her thesis “Funds of Knowledge: Urban Education and Parental Involvement” is published in an education advocacy book and her poems are published in various anthologies. Kanene performs and teaches her theatrical experiment Shock and Awe with a Political Aftertaste, highlighting the irony and lies of the media and the status quo. Interactive audiences and classrooms are galvanized into participants as cultural warriors. She has performed at Brooklyn Museum, La Mama ETC, Aaron Davis Hall, Symphony Space, University of Granada- Spain and elsewhere. Kanene is a proud Brooklynite, Howard University graduate and Harlem resident. -UP-
Zavé G. Martohardjono works in video art, documentary, performance and dance. His current performance and video series, "autogeography," uses interactive story-telling, mythologized self-portraiture and dream to remix personal stories and History. Trained in documentary filmmaking at the M.F.A. Media Arts program at the City College of New York, his work turned to experimental filmmaking and later to movement. He has worked in community-based arts with MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival, FIERCE, New Children/New York, Accidental Movement and Theater Transgression. In 2011, he completed the EMERGENYC program at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. He is now part of the Emerge Collective with alumni from the program. -UP-
Even Gray Feels Blue
Negin Sharifzadeh is a New York based artist born in Tehran, Iran. Growing up in one of the world’s most historically and socially complex regions in its wake, she is fascinated by the mechanisms and interplay of different natural, emotional, and political systems. Her work explores how these systems are composed; how information, energy and material are codified within them; and how bodies are impacted by and interact with them. She has explored these themes through multiple mediums including sculpture, performance, installations, and increasingly combining all of these mediums in stop-motion animation. She has shown work in New York at Gallery ELL’s transient landscape; performed in The Odyssey New York Project, performed in Chicago at DePaul University Museum as part of Iran Inside Out; performed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Goat Island Performing Summer School and the Abandoned Practices Performance Workshop; shown at Berkeley University as part of the Iranian Women Artists group; shown in Tehran as part of the Contemporary Museum of Art’s Sculpture Biennial, the Art Auction at the Niavaran Art Center, the Haft-samar Art Gallery and the Tehran House of Artists. -UP-
Untitled (Tar-Redone, Studio)
Chris Udemezue is an artist with a background in video and performance art. As a graduate from Parson School of Design (2008), Christopher has shown through out New York including the Envoy Enterprises and Dumbo Arts Gallery. With work focused of social political issues such as gender politics and ethnicity relations within the constraints and conditions of American Patriarchy, Christopher employs metaphors that open up dialogue for the viewer. Complex questions like "what it means to be a man" and "what it means to be black" are what he sets out to explore in his performance and video pieces. Self-reflection and introspection are at the forefront of his work as he relates these issues at hand to the context of what it indeed means to be an African – American man using his body as a tool for expression.
This is the Closeness of Us
Jess Whittam is a Brooklyn based artist working primarily in video, performance and sculpture. Before finishing her MFA at SUNY Purchase in 2011, she received the Dean's MFA Recognition Award, presented at the SUNY Graduate Research Symposium in Albany and was nominated for the Dedalus Foundation Award. Her work was recently exhibited in "It's not me, it's you." MFA Thesis Exhibition at White Box in New York, NY (2011) and GALERIA's "Queer Bodies" and "Genitalia" at Hombres Lounge, Queens, NY (2011).
Lorelei Ramirez is a New York based artist working with performance, video and installation. While in attendance at the School of Visual Arts she has received the Silas H. Rhodes scholarship and Fine art grant. Her most recent exhibitions include “Food Lust: Shock Candy” at Where am I Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2011) and “Axilectic Group show” at Free Candy in Brooklyn, NY (2011). -UP-
