Eve Bailey, Rachel Bernstein, Ryan V Brennan, Artists: Diana Heise, Roxanne Jackson, Coralina Meyer, Sono Osato, Malingering Uvula (Camilla Ha and Michael Merck) Gabriela Vainsencher.
 
Curated by Sarah Walko
 
The exhibition “The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague” permanently on display at the Kafka Museum was the impetus for this exhibition. Kafka’s relationship with cities through his surreal lens coupled with his imagination and during the context of his time brought the simultaneous nightmare/dreamscape of the budding technological age into the realm of the real in his stories, projecting super psyches onto our cities.
 
The artists in this exhibition are all exploring the surreal space of our time now. Large cultural and philosophical shifts due to massive environmental and economic challenges and the level of technology we are reaching and working with daily is all ushering in new branches of consciousness and new approaches to how we live. The artists, like Kafka did, address our current cosmic predicament in various ways; our relationship with nature, our relationship to self within today’s technological tools, and with objects of alchemical/shamanic ritual and ceremony. They are writing out the dreamscapes of our now and a vision of the future that lacks the pasts’ patriarchal aesthetic and imagines the opening up of a future with more feminine traits, including acts of reclamation and the healing of our past and ourselves within our cities.
 
About the curator:
 
Sarah Walko is a multimedia artist and writer. She is currently the executive director of Triangle Arts Association. El Cadaver Exquisito, a feature length experimental documentary collaboration film she created with with director Victor Ruano and Rossemberg Rivas, is currently in festival circuits and her second film Lux/Nox with collaborator Malado Baldwin is in post production. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published by While Whale Review Literary Journal and Hyperallergic Art Blog where she is a regular contributing writer. Her visual artwork has been published by The Dirty Goat, Redivider, Blood Lotus, Apple Valley Review, 2 River, A Capella Zoo, Awosting Alchemy, 5x5 Literary Magazine, Bathhouse, Cincinnati Review and Host Publications. Her recent exhibitions include Preternatural at the Museum of Nature, a science museum in Canada, Codex Dynamic in New York and Wonder Cabinet at Flux Factory in New York. She has participated in many artists residency programs including one currently at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York and she is working on new sculpture/installations, film and a novel.

Brooklyn-based sculptor Heather Rowe investigates the transitional space between architecture, sculpture, and installation through perspectival framing, formal inversion, and material deconstruction. Rowe‘s latest work, Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo), is a site-specific installation of mirrors, corridors, and spatial slices presented at Socrates Sculpture Park; it is her first outdoor public artwork.
 
Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo) inverts the routine relationships we have with our surroundings by restructuring the familiar and reimagining architectural experiences. While many experience architecture in a state of distraction, Beyond the Hedges invites us to focus beyond our current space. Rowe interprets the traditional gazebo or trellis—structures typically placed within a park to frame picturesque views—as a sliced and cropped dimensional space that, sandwiched between pieces of plywood, becomes the framed view. Inspired by Peter Joel Harrison’s illustrated book Gazebos and Trellises, the plywood shapes suspend fragile moments of the garden pavilion, frozen in precarious states of decay or undoing. Complicating the internal network of latticework are mirrored insertions, offering an active relationship to the natural surrounds and Park visitors.
 
Heather Rowe is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York who received her MFA from Columbia University. She has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Galerie Zink, Berlin, Germany; D’Amelio Terras, New York; Michael Benevento Gallery, Los Angeles; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; White Columns, New York; and Artists Space, New York; and in 2008, her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial.
 
Media Inquiries:
Katie Denny
kd@socratessculpturepark.org
718-956-1819 ext. 12

In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), Socrates Sculpture Park presents do it (outside), an exhibition conceived of and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. With historical antecedents in Dada and Fluxus, do it (outside) is a selection of artists' instructions interpreted by other artists, performers, community groups, and the public. The instructions and resulting works will be presented outdoors utilizing a site-specific design by Christoff : Finio Architecture, the NY-based architecture and design studio of Taryn Christoff and Martin Finio. In the last 20 years, versions of do it have been presented in over 50 venues worldwide, giving new meaning to the concept of the “Exhibition in Progress.”
 
do it (outside) at Socrates Sculpture Park will be the first presentation of the exhibition in New York City and the first to be presented completely outdoors in a public art venue. The opening of the exhibition on May 12 coincides with the launch of the publication, do it: the compendium (co-published by Independent Curators International and D.A.P.) from which the instructions presented have been selected.
 
do it (outside) sparks a critical conversation about the exchange and transformation of ideas by engaging a diverse group of people to create extraordinary works by internationally accomplished artists. At Socrates, over sixty published artist instructions will be brought into existence by artists, performers, community groups, and the public resulting in installations that range from the explicitly sculptural, to the performative, to the poetic or absurd. Socrates Sculpture Park will produce a digital publication to accompany do it (outside) to document the process and participants.
 
This 20th-anniversary show premieres a significant number of new instructions along with those from the first do it experiments. Artists’ instructions presented at Socrates Sculpture Park will include:
John Baldessari, Jerome Bel, Paul-Armand Gette, Joan Jonas, Ilya Kabakov, Alison Knowles, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, David Lynch, Betrand Lavier, Paul McCarthy, Yoko Ono, Clifford Owens, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Kazuyo Sejima, Gabriel Sierra, Andreas Slominski, Ai Weiwei, and Franz West among many others.
 
Media Inquiries:
Katie Denny
kd@socratessculpturepark.org
718-956-1819 ext. 12

Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League of New York are pleased to announce the selection of Toshihiro Oki architect for tree wood as the winner of this year’s “Folly” competition – an extraordinary opportunity for emerging architects and designers to experiment and build large-scale projects for outdoor exhibition.
 
Socrates Sculpture Park and the League launched “Folly” in 2012 as a residency and exhibition program to explore the intersections between architecture and sculpture. “Folly” has grown from a pilot initiative to a highly anticipated competition – submissions increased by 40% from last year - for emerging architects and designers to conceive, design, build, and exhibit original works in the public realm.
 
tree wood will be a rigid yet airy geometrical wooden structure placed within a grove of trees – a lush and dense area at Socrates Sculpture Park. Visitors will peer into the structure through the floor beams where a formal, ornate chandelier will be suspended. The installation creates a dialogue between built structures and systems with the irregular and organic.
 
Toshihiro Oki architect – consisting of team members Toshihiro Oki, Jen Wood and Jared Diganci - was selected from over 150 submissions by a jury of architects and artists who reviewed over 150 submissions, including Michael Arad, Architect, Partner, Handel Architects; Orly Genger, Visual Artist; John Hatfield, Executive Director, Socrates Sculpture Park; Granger Moorhead, Architect, Principal, Moorhead & Moorhead; and Billie Tsien, Architect, Principal, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
 
“Folly” is an interpretation of the architectural folly. Especially popular among the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, architectural follies are small-scale structures, which often have no discernible purpose, that are placed within a garden or landscape as a means to draw the eye to specific points or to frame a view. The folly is a perfect subject for architects to investigate materiality, spatial interaction, and concepts about our urban and natural environment.
 
Visit the Architectural League for more information on the winning project and detailing the competition process, including prominent architectural themes woven throughout proposals: Read more at www.archleague.org.
 
The winner of the 2012 “Folly” competition was Curtain, a project conceived by architects Jerome W. Haferd and K Brandt Knapp. Curtain, which closed on March 31st, combined minimal structural framing with a mutable plastic chain that bisected the landscape from multiple angles, creating a voluminous whimsical interior space.
 
SUPPORT
 
Socrates Sculpture Park’s Exhibition Program is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Mark di Suvero, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and Spacetime C.C. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
 
Special thanks to the City of New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall, City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, City Councilmembers Jimmy. Van Bramer and Peter F. Vallone Jr., and the Department of Parks & Recreation, Commissioner Veronica White.
 
Media Inquiries:
 
Katie Denny
kd@socratessculpturepark.org
718-956-1819 ext. 12