Brooklyn, NY —- Transparent Studio at Bose Pacia is pleased to announce the current artist-in-residence, Chitra Ganesh. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations seek to excavate and rewrite hidden narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. Her work is inspired by mythology, folklore, sci-fi, Bollywood, comic books and graffiti. During the month long residency, Ganesh will use the space to develop her wall drawings by exploring the use of sculptural elements, printmaking technique and collage ephemera. The public is invited to an Open Studio and Artist Talk on 11th July from 6-9pm. Please contact the gallery to arrange for a visit to the studio between June 18th and July 16th.
 
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Chitra Ganesh received her BA in Comparative Literature and Art Semiotics in 1996 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2002. Ganesh’s work has been exhibited widely at venues including PS 1/MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, the Asia Society, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Fondazione Sandretto in Italy, Nature Morte Berlin, ZKM in Germany, and the Gothenburg Kunsthalle. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Joan Mitchell Awards for Painting and Sculpture, and a John Simon Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship. Ganesh will be the 2012-2013 artist-in-residence at New York University’s A/P/A Institute with Mariam Ghani for their work, Index of the Disappeared. Ganesh lives and works in Brooklyn.
 
About Transparent Studio at Bose Pacia, NY:
Launched in January 2012, Transparent Studio is an artist studio program founded by Bose Pacia. Emerging and mid career artists are selected for the studio program through a submissions and nominations process based on project proposal and artistic merit. Residents are provided with a studio in the main gallery space for a 1-3 month period. By turning the transitional gallery space into temporary artist studios on the street-level in an active arts neighborhood, we are hoping to allow for an atmosphere of engagement and conversation around the creative process. During the program, the public is invited to interact with the artist throughout their creative process allowing exchange and collaborative relationships.
 
Studio hours are by appointment only.
For more information please contact:
 
mail@bosepacia.com (or) +1 212 989 7074

Chloë Bass
The Bureau of Self-Recognition
May 31 - June 30, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, May 31, 6 - 9pm
 
Events:
Friday, June 14, 7pm: Book Launch Party + Artist‘s Talk
Friday, June 21, 7pm: Free Consultations Post Mortem
Sunday, June 23, hourly 3 – 6pm: Closing Performance
 
The Bureau of Self-Recognition is a single installation capturing the results of an long term conceptual project. From October 2011 through December 2012, Chloë Bass performed as the Bureau of Self-Recognition: a business designed to track self-recognition as a process. The project attempts to define the nature of the “daily” as either fully formed within us or as a social construct. Bass conducted various exercises (with herself, with single participants in one-on-one performances, and with larger groups) that used various standardized lenses (a therapist’s office, a bank, a restaurant) as strategies to identify and modify habitual behavior. Individual works within The Bureau of Self-Recognition include Practice of the Daily, Everyday Interiors, Free Consultations, The Bank of Self-Recognition, and Tea Will Be Served.
 
At Momenta, Bass will be presenting phase four of the project. Previous phases examined the theory, practice, and dissemination of the work. Phase four involves both an installation and live performances, allowing viewers to take part in the Bureau both as an art object and as a lived experience. The installation will showcase photo, video, and found object materials produced and/or collected over the course of the full conceptual work. Bass will track three routes through the installation that encourage different experiential outcomes for each viewer. The exhibit coincides with the release of the Bureau of Self-Recognition monograph, published by am i human Press.
 
Friday, June 14, 7pm:
Book Launch Party + Artist‘s Talk
To document some of the experiential work of the Bureau of Self-Recognition, Chloë Bass produced an artist’s book with Jessalyn Wakefield and am i human Press (Portland, Oregon). The book includes essays by Esther Neff and Eric Heist, images produced both by Bass and other project participants, and text by Bass and Wakefield. This event will feature a discussion with both Bass and Wakefield about the art of turning a conceptual performance project into a story, and the collaborative processes shared between performance and book-making. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
 
Friday, June 21, 7pm:
Free Consultations Post Mortem
From July - December 2012, The Bureau of Self-Recognition held a Free Consultations program: one-on-one performances between Chloë Bass and individual participants. These performances took the form of therapy sessions, during which each participant was asked a standardized set of questions and then asked to complete a simple mirror exercise. Following the initial session, each participant was assigned a personalized exercise, which he or she then conducted for 30 days, sharing the results with Bass.
 
This discussion invites the participants in these performances to share their experience of working with Chloë Bass in a process both intimate and distanced. The conversation will be moderated by Esther Neff.
 
Sunday, June 23, 3 - 6pm:
Closing Performance
For the third and final event associated with the Bureau of Self-Recognition exhibit, Chloë Bass will reprise the private performance offered for the opening. In this performance, Bass will take on the docent's role and lead visitors through a guided tour of the exhibit. Tours will be offered on the hour, and will last for approximately 30 minutes.
 
Chloë Bass is a Brooklyn based performance and conceptual artist. She has received commissions from the Culture Project’s Women Center Stage Festival, the Bushwick Starr’s Bushwhack Festival, and 3rd Ward’s Moviehouse, and residencies from POGON (Zagreb, Croatia) and D21 Kunstraum/5533 art space (Leipzig, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey). Recent artistic work has been seen at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Exit Art, Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, ITINERANT Performance Festival, Glasshouse Project, Panoply Performance Laboratory, SCOPE Art Fair, Fountain Miami, Agape Enterprise, and the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City. Bass received her MFA (Performance and Interactive Media Arts) in 2011 from Brooklyn College and her BA (Theater Studies) in 2006 from Yale University. For more information: chloebass.com.

Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Daniel Zeller. In his sixth exhibition at Pierogi, Zeller’s drawings continue to oscillate between micro and macro views of invented worlds and organisms. Using only graphite or ink and acrylic on paper, he explores incredible nuances of texture and structure that develop into powerful extensions of perceived reality.
 
The language of mark-making and imagery in his drawings to date has been entirely invented based on his interest in satellite images, topographical maps, electron micrographs, anatomical drawings, among others. Recently, Zeller has begun adding to this language elements referencing actual man-made structures and natural phenomena. In one work, “Vatican / al Haram,” his abstract marks surround and coalesce into the footprint of the Vatican complex with a river-like form leading to the mosque structure. In another, “Tar Sands Woodlands,” the organically shaped footprint of the oil sands mining operation in Alberta Canada, is juxtaposed to the rectilinear shape of the Woodlands Church Fellowship Campus, a mega-church in Texas. In each work an actual site is referenced but, as Zeller notes, fact and fiction merge to become something else, and of primary importance is invention through the drawing process.
 
All documents, images, and ideas grow increasingly fictitious with the passage of time and distance from their original context. Fiction, like most things, encompasses a scale ranging from wildly outrageous, to that which can seem indistinguishable from fact. We are inundated with information, virtually all of it containing an unknown ratio of fact and fiction. Each of these drawings incorporates features which have their origins in specific factual information, culled from a variety of sources, satellite imagery predominant among them. While the embedded information acts as something of a scaffold or a seed from which the work develops, the process of drawing remains central and is what ultimately determines the result. (Zeller, 2013)
 
Zeller’s process is direct — a fluid series of spontaneous choices governed by self-imposed rules and conditions. The main rule is to respect what has already been put on the page, not to cross or obscure lines already laid down. A tension between spontaneity and predictability is central to this process, allowing for its inevitable evolution.
 
“A spectacle can be created from the most modest means…. Daniel Zeller manages with just pen and ink, and sometimes just pencil. His drawings…are pulse-quickening, reason-defying wonders, testaments to the boundless potential of the human mind and hand.” He “…traces complexity itself, as a condition, a matter of connections, divergence, transitions and completions, the known and the imagined reconciled with extravagant finesse.” (Leah Ollman, The Los Angeles Times)
 
Zeller’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions and is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), the Albright Knox Museum (NY), among others. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Light is to the Natural World as Abstract Space is to Geometry. —Robert Grosseteste, 1112
 
Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings by Mark Reynolds, his first at Pierogi. These drawings are passionately developed and result from many years of investigation into geometry. Reynolds describes drawing the various systems of geometric structures he works with as exciting, meditative, exhilarating, and humbling.
 
Since his days in art school, Reynolds was committed to drawing and visually constructing geometries, enough to make this his life’s work. Although he has great respect for and is aware that his work has elements of Geometric Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Minimalism, and other similar methods of drawing and painting, his work is more involved with the origins of geometry, how geometry works, especially with the human mind, how it builds things, and how it orders space and records the development of an infinite variety of choices and structures because of the ratios and relationships inherent in the system of geometric forms.
 
Many of the drawings in [this exhibition] “are taken from meldings of systems of geometry that are not related nor numerically commensurate, and attempting to make them so. I call these compositions, ‘Marriages of Incommensurables,’ and ‘Unions of Opposites.’ I am interested in the structures and the images – the forms – that result from these meldings.” (Reynolds, 2013)
 
“The nature of geometry is to compose. Each resulting composition is uniquely harmonic by the method in which it was drawn and what was chosen to be the unifying geometric principle for that drawing. Much depends on this original marriage, what specifically was being employed in the geometric construction involved in the union. Certain principles of geometry – ratios, proportioning systems, harmonic resonances or discordances – interface within the relationship. I make it visible by drawing the resulting geometric forms.”
 
These compositions are structures and spaces conceived by the nature of geometric form, and the interaction geometry has with a curious mind. Mark seeks to discover if this relationship is inherent in geometry, or within the mind as a construct a priori. More curiously, what is the relationship between geometric form and human thought?
 
Mark Reynolds is an artist, geometer, and educator. He has Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Art and Art Education from Towson University in Towson, Maryland. He also received an Andelot Fellowship to the University of Delaware for post-graduate work in drawing and printmaking. Additionally, Reynolds has been teaching courses in geometry and philosophical geometry to graduate and undergraduate classes at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for over twenty years and draws every day.

vimeo.com/64899161

ROBERT GRENIER
“Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970 - 2013”
May 18 - June 30, 2013
Reception for (& presentation by) the artist, Sunday, 19 May 4 - 6 PM
 
SOUTHFIRST is proud to present “Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970 - 2013,” a retrospective exhibition tracking (via notebooks, holographic & published texts, archival materials and works on paper) the evolution from early typewriter-generated forms to more recent four-color drawing poems in the work of American poet Robert Grenier between 1970 - 2013. The show will be on view from May 18 – June 30, 2013.
 
On Sunday, May 19, 4 - 6 PM, Robert Grenier will introduce the ‘idea’ for the show, and speak to/read from & provisionally ‘interpret’ certain of the materials set forth in the room.
 
Over the past 40 years, poet/artist Robert Grenier (b. 1941) has constantly pushed poetry into new frontiers of practice and utterance. His handwritten poems, produced in the last two decades, cross the upper limit of inscription to be both writing and drawing. His works include Series (This Press, 1978), SENTENCES (Whale Cloth Press, 1978), Oakland (Tuumba Press, 1980), A Day at the Beach (Roof Books, 1984), Phantom Anthems (O Books, 1986), and OWL/ON/BOU/GH (Post-Apollo Press, 1997), as well as more recent online color drawing poem sequences like POND 1 and PENN SCANS. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, Grenier has received two NEA fellowships for poetry writing and a 2013 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An archive of his work is housed in the Stanford Libraries’ Department of Special Collections. He lives in northern Vermont.
 
SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Fri., Sat. and Sun. from 1 - 6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.
 
SOUTHFIRST
60 N6th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718 599 4884
www.southfirst.org