American Medium

Brenna Murphy @ American Medium, Oct 16 – Nov 16

16 October 2014

American Medium is hosting Brenna Murphy‘s latest solo exhibition, titled skyface~ TerraceDomain and running at the Brooklyn’s space from October 16 to November 16.

With a string of new prints and sculptures created from her virtual objects and spaces, Murphy borrows from very material image-making traditions around the world to design works that exist both materially and virtually, or perhaps less directly and more accurately put: works that communicate in both languages.

With echoes of Buddhism that combine with the near-future aesthetics of the digital realm,  skyface~ TerraceDomain comes as an existential meditation on the real, or the modern understanding of it, with photographs of 3D rendered scapes forming complex labyrinths of human perception and sense of consciousness.

See the American Medium exhibition page for details. **

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Jake Dibeler @ American Medium, Oct 11

9 October 2014

Artist Jake Dibeler is coming to NYC’s American Medium for a one-night-only performance titled GOODBYE (Billy) on October 11.

This comes as Dibeler’s second performance at the Brooklyn art space, and, as the press image shows, his performances are always hysterical and often controversial.

Composed of a patchwork of pop songs, spoken word, choreographed movement, and improv acts, there’s a consistent theme of “nudity, blood, object play and pop culture” throughout as he “performs his lust, fear, regret, depression and joy”.

See the Facebook event page for details. **

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Rare Angel @ American Medium, Sep 4 – Oct 4

3 September 2014

American Medium is hosting Rare Angel, a two-person exhibition featuring Debo Eilers and Brian Kokoska, running at the Brooklyn space from September 4 to October 4. 

Featuring a series of sculptures by Eilers and new installation works by Kokoska, the exhibition takes the notion of the ‘spacious soul hole’, as introduced by Gerardo Contreras of Preteen Gallery‘s written piece accompanying the exhibition’s press release.

Echoing questions of the body and its embeddedness in Western power relations heard before in our interview with Hannah Black, Rare Angel explores the fate and trajectory of ‘post-human soul’ within the “contrapuntal progressions, pervasive meditations, and ever faster, increasingly interactive schizo-systems” of the modern world. 

See the American Medium exhibition page for details. **

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Wicker Girls @ American Medium, Aug 1

28 July 2014

American Medium will be hosting Wicker Girls, “a Lammas Day reading of poems” at their Brooklyn space on August 1.

The event comes in celebration of Lammas (Lughnasadh), marking the beginning of the harvest season, as well as the release of R. Lord’s self-published collection of poems titled Seven Year Itch.

Alongside readings from R. Lord, Wicker Girls will also feature those by artist-poets Deanna HavasBunny Rogers, and Ryder Ripps.

See the American Medium FB event page for details. **

"Navsegda" (2013) by Bunny Rogers. Image courtesy artist,
“Navsegda” (2013) by Bunny Rogers. Image courtesy artist.
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In Its Image @ American Medium, Jul 19-Aug 24

18 June 2014

American Medium presents a new exhibition at their Brooklyn space titled In Its Image and running from July 19 to August 24.

With a selection of artists known for their digital work and supported by a multi-media and digitally-friendly platform like American Medium, In Its Image exists as a cross-section of contemporary art arising out of the new sociological realities of the medium.

And the exhibition features the works of a slew of rising artists, including Harm van den Dorpel (central in the recent Art Post-Internet exhibition), Bonus Material-featured artist Jasper Spicero, as well as Kareem Lotfy, Zachary Davis, and Hayley A. Silverman.

See the exhibition press release for details. **

"Is-That-So Network" by Zachary Davis. Image courtesy artist.
Is-That-So Network by Zachary Davis. Image courtesy artist.
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Ann Hirsch @ American Medium reviewed

30 May 2014

On stepping into the newish Bed-Stuy space of New York’s American Medium gallery for Ann Hirsch’s first solo exhibition Muffy, Britney Spears’ ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’ is playing out of a child’s cubby house made of blankets. It’s facing two plush toy teddy bears, touching paws, while screening AOL chat windows out of their bellies and standing next to a large-scale painting reproduction of a crumpled paper ode to adolescent angst and histrionics in ‘My Starving Public 1998’. The teen poem reads “so I am dirty. I am hated. I did lie”, while the breathy high voice of Britney fades out to Hirsch’s in the cubby house as she explains, “I’m already 11-years-old. I peer down at my naked body and my huge bush pulls back and forth beneath the water”.

Ann Hirsch, Muffy exhibition view. Image courtesy American Medium.
Ann Hirsch, Muffy exhibition view. Image courtesy American Medium.

There are four small screens in the makeshift quilt fort ‘Slave For You/ My Spank Bank’ featuring scenes from Aladdin, Star Wars, Cinderella and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, each with their own references to submission, oppression and exoticism. The viewer is forced to crawl in to watch as Disney’s Jasmine and Jafar, Cinderella and her Ugly Step Sisters, interact between the dunes of George Lucas’ Galactic Empire and the Sheriff of Nottingham’s intended rape of Maid Marian –viewed from beneath and on all fours.

Outside and along the walls are naïve pencil and pastel drawings of a balding and bushy eyebrowed ‘She Devil Jew Lady’ and ‘Truly Exotic’ green-skinned profile of a woman with one tentacled eyeball, while two Hirsch proto-selfies, ‘Photos for jobe #1 & #2 1998’ are obscured by a flash. They’re flanked by more hand-drawn grotesques of ‘Sexy Baby in Repose’ and the three-boobed nude of ‘Reclining Slutty Grandpa’. Meanwhile the AOL chat window projected from the ‘My Big Man’ plushie doll across from it features case insensitive quotes of Nirvana and Matchbox Twenty song lyrics. There’s that, and the puerile online flirtation-via-homophobic slurs between “JoshyWoshy” and “bUrKe13” as everyone ignores ‘Lilac098’’s unassuming “hey every 1”.

Ann Hirsch, Muffy exhibition view. Image courtesy American Medium.
Ann Hirsch, Muffy exhibition view. Image courtesy American Medium.

“I climb the pole at recess to get this feeling. Does anybody else know what I’m talking about? I’m afraid to ask,” says Hirsch through the speakers of her indoor cubby house. Part of me wonders whether it should be ‘I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman’ instead of ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’ playing at intervals between spoken word excerpts, recreating the charged inconsistency of repressed sexual development in a teen girl. But apart from being a bit of an obvious choice, it would also preclude the role of the desiring body being realised (“I won’t deny it, I’m not trying to hide it”) as well as the wider mythologised margins Muffy nudges to, well beyond binary gender.

All this plays out via the anonymous attention seeking of an online screen name and the blue-penned sketch of a computer in ‘My Starving Public 1998’: “Words fired at me to make me remember. Make me hurt. Make me feel dirty + loathed all over again”. Behold, the direct emotional results of the internet interactions of the Scandalishious artist’s formative years, their consequences being as real but equally as disregarded as a preteen sexual awakening. **

Ann Hirsch’s Muffy is running at New York’s American Medium until June 26, 2014.

All images Ann Hirsch, Muffy. Courtesy American Medium.

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Looking forward by looking back at Appendix

22 February 2014

The end is as good a place to start as the beginning, especially when it comes to American Medium. It’s an until recently nomadic online and offline project that’s been running for two years, now settling in BedStuy, Brooklyn, and extending its operations to a permanent exhibition space, “office, garden sanctuary and outdoor artist’s studio”. There’s a kickstarter campaign, ending February 28, to help fund it and it’s run by two of the past six curators of art space anomaly Appendix. As key members of the renowned and now defunct suburban gallery in Portland, Travis Fitzgerald and Josh Pavlacky (along with Extra Extra’s Daniel Wallace) have plenty of experience in creating a  supportive environment for interesting artists to work within.

A collective and an art space that established itself at the forefront of the drive to grasp “the divide between the physical and the digital”, as American Medium continues to do, the Appendix retrospective and elegy to a dynamic bygone era, was conceived by some of its core members and published by Container Corps on the gallery’s close in 2013. Starting at its end, the book becomes a document deconstructing documentation and a presentation of art that interrogates ideas of framing and interpretation through its own resulting abstraction.

Appendix. Image courtesy Container Corps.
Appendix (2013). Image courtesy Container Corps.

As Fitzgerald flatly puts it in the Kevin Champoux-led interview ‘It’s a Garage, Not a Gallery: Appendix at 5 Years’ –including past curators Fitzgerald, Pavlacky, Zachary Davis, Maggie Casey, Ben Young and Alex Mackin Dolan –the space was nothing more than “a garage in a house”. Maybe so, but as said Google Hangouts conversation reveals, what began as a naïve foray into a project begun by a bunch of recent graduates who “really didn’t know anything”, Appendix became one of the most vital hubs of what you might call the ‘post-internet’ conversation (“Net art merging with formalism? It’s hard to say”).

It’s in this ordinary house “that smells vaguely of three men cohabiting in little rooms” with its two car garage-come-gallery glowing “like a television set” –according to David Knowles in ‘Full Spectrum’ –that artists like Bunny Rogers and Darja Bajagić became some of the last exhibitors in 2013. It would take a highly supportive and independent space, driven on intuition, that would make something like Bajagić’s You Ve Been A Naughty Boy [C55]
1.e4 e5 2.♘f3 ♘c6 3.♗c4 ♘f6 4.d4 e×d4 5.0-0 ♗c5 6.e5 d5 7.e×f6 d×c4 8.♖e1+ ♔f8 9.♗g5 g×f6 10.♗h6+ ♔g8 11.♘×d4 ♗×d4 12.c3 ♗f5 13.c×d4 ♘×d4 14.♘c3 ♗g6 15.♖e8+! ♕×e8 16.♕×d4 ♕e5 17.♘d5!!, 1-0, exhibition title fit the pages of the Appendix ‘Exhibition History’. Also listed are Tabor Robak, Justin Bland and Brenna Murphy in the early days; Sean Joseph Patrick Carney’s Boyz Night Out, Dump.fm and The Jogging at its satellite sister-galleries Hay Batch and Little Field. Iain Ball and Katja Novitskova making appearances online.

Jasper Spicero, Bea Fremderman, MSHR, Brian Khek and Micah Schippa also make up just a fraction of the exciting artists to show through those garage doors between 2008 and 2013, for a short residency meant as a place to sleep and support a practice in the isolation of suburban Portland. Andrew Norman Wilson swung an Apple mouse by its cord around his head while dancing to Jackson Browne’s ‘Doctor My Eyes’, according to Gene McHugh’s collaborative short story ‘Andrew Norman Wilson at Appendix Project Space’. Daniel J. Glendening took time for an atomic description of a rotating rock at the exhibition on which ‘Daniel Baird, This New Ocean’ is based –all the while submitting to that realm that Knowles describes as where “rumor and memory begin their work”. Knowles compares galleries to tombs where “acts of life and labor end”, while Amy Bernstein’s incredibly evocative stream of thoughts on “the collective voice of expressive peoples giving form to contemporary experience” in ‘When the Walls Are White’, is underpinned by a question recurring throughout Appendix: “what if the new norm was that the documentation WAS the thing?”

In the context of the Appendix book –conceived by the art space curators, curating documents of exhibitions they already curated –it’s both interesting and overwhelming to consider the infinite  interpretations and abstractions of an artist’s work and the ‘creative degradation’ that happens within that. After all, Appendix the book is first hand experience, bound, framed and formatted through text and photography. Those exhibitions, in turn were the product of intense critique and conversation between artist and curator, constructing a unique exhibition tailored to the dimensions of a unique space. Even this very overview on this particular website is framing the book, the gallery, and the work in a way that is specific to its relevance to the continued and evolving ‘net art’ conversation at American Medium. It’s for this reason that perhaps the most thought provoking piece comes from Lisa Radon’s closing ‘APPENDIX’ (or Appendix appendix, Appendix appendix appendix, even). It’s a fascinating deconstruction of communication as embedded in and limited to its lexicon, building on Bernstein’s initial question: “when we look back at this time in art history what will we remember?”

Appendix. Image courtesy Container Corps.
Appendix (2013). Image courtesy Container Corps.

Equal parts enlightening and indecipherable, across computer coding, Finnegan’s Wake footnotes and seemingly endless postscripts, ‘APPENDIX’ interrogates Appendix as both art space and idea, through Minecraft, CSS and the history of the American residential garage. “Do you remember a time before things were so codified, ossified?” Radon asks, in relation to the visual signifier of “the ransom note typography of the Sex Pistols” that a Finnish punk band, also called Appendix, borrows as its logotype. Rózsa Farkas questions historicity in ‘Five Years’, outlining the progress of DIY gallery movements of the past to illustrate their effects on the present and leading to the conclusion that artist-run spaces “now have to deal with the marketability of art that older movements brought about”.

Hence, the vitality of Appendix and now American Medium, self-funded and caught in Knowles’ “looping progress of time”, where artists and curators return to carry on and build upon “the full spectrum suspended present available to us immediately and always”, within these realms of net art now contained within the walls of a space in Brooklyn. It’s here that one wonders whether this new more permanent space, with its defined public function, will no longer be the dynamic hinterland only a re-purposed residential garage “stuck somewhere between lost histories and unimaginable futures” could be, but the “relic, a piece of evidence” Glendining outlined in his fetishistic examination of a rock. There’s really only one way to find out. **

Appendix was a gallery based in Portand, Oregon. The kickstarter campaign for funding American Medium’s  new space in Brooklyn is running till February 28, 2013.


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