CALL FOR PROPOSAL | Un-Space Ground - Deadline: Nov. 27, 2011

 

College Arts Association Conference

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Ed Woodham of Art in Odd Places (NYC) and Deborah Oliver of Performance Exchange (LA) invite artists working with visual and performance strategies to propose projects for Un-Space Ground, a visual and performance event that is part of ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM, presented by ARTSpace at the 100th annual College Arts Association Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Saturday, February, 25, 2012. 

Projects selected will be part of Un-Space Ground:  The unvisited, unnamed, and uninhabited empty areas beneath the normally used parts of the urban landscape. We seek to program site-specific social and spatial interventions, performances, and new media that will activate spaces outside the Convention Center entrance and selected inside spaces.

The Un-Space Ground presentations will be coordinated with three panel sessions as part of the ARTSpace day long program  "ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM", which will explore themes of activism and intervention, the environment, eco-systems and sustainable practices. Plus the role of artists and designers as dynamic catalysts in social and civic life, and how they can “feed innovative ideas into the bloodstream of society” through strategies and processes that activate the public arena.

Photos of LA Convention Center can be found at http://caasitephotos.shutterfly.com/pictures/8

For application and full guidelines visit http://artinoddplaces.org/Unspace.php

Proposal Deadline: November 27, 2011 Midnight

Curators: Ed Woodham (AiOP) and Deborah Oliver (Performance Exchange)

YOU ARE INVITED | "Parts and Labor" opening November 4 at Abrons Art Center

Parts and Labor
November 4 - December 23, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, November 4 | 6-8pm

The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present Parts and Labor, an exhibition presenting the work of five New York City-based artists - Daniel Bejar, Cecilia Biagini, Juanli Carrión, Jonathan Durham, and Noah Loesberg. These artists allude to machinery, technology and architecture through a series of geometric and non-objective compositions, tracing back to the Suprematism and Constructivism movements by the Russian avant-garde at the time of the fall of the tsarist regime. Through the use of industrial materials and motifs the artists salvage the wreckage from a years-long global recession and explore a promise of utopia and utility.

The radical change following the October Revolution inspired a rational, social function for art, emphasizing the artist as engineer. This exhibition adopts those principles, referencing the calls for democracy and economic reform in the social uprisings across the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Formally engaging the Brutalist architecture of the Abrons gallery and adjacent amphitheater, the artists yield essence over representation and process over product.

In his Realistic Manifesto Naum Gabo saw the Revolution as the beginning of a renewal of human values. As demonstrations flourish in Manhattan's Wall Street and across the globe demanding economic reform, Parts and Labor looks to Constructivism and its examination of the fundamental properties of art and its place in the coming society.

Parts and Labor is curated by Adrian Geraldo Saldaña and part of the series Prized Vernacular, a platform for three exhibitions opening concurrently at the Abrons Arts Center that deconstruct a vernacular “everyday.” In light of the global economic recession, ordinary objects are presented as radicalized—prisms to a common unequally shared or realized. Reflecting cultural and economic difference, Prized Vernacular investigates this “new normal.”

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt St.)
New York, NY 10002
www.abronsartscenter.org