Take to the Water! A Discussion with Artist-Nomads on the Aquatic Open Field

The Floating Neutrinos, "Son of Town Hall"

Thursday, June 16

6:30- 8:30 pm

@EFA Project Space, 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor

In conjunction with the Sea Worthy exhibition, EFA presents Take to the Water! an evening of presentations and conversation focusing on three significant creative movements that involve the rejection of land-based conventions in order to establish platforms for new possibilities on the ubiquitous waterways.  Join us as Constance Hockaday shares stories of her work with the Floating Neutrinos, Swoon talks about her activities with Miss Rockaday Armada and the sea-borne Swimming Cities collective, and Mary Mattingly describes the vision and realization of the Waterpod project. Following the presentations, Sea Worthy curatorial team member Dylan Gauthier will lead a discussion and talk-back with the artists.

About the Participants
Constance Hockaday is a nautical artist and lecturer. She is a member of a tribe known as the Floating Neutrinos. Headed by modern nomads Poppa Neutrino and Captain Betsy, they have built more than twelve rafts, largely from salvaged and recycled materials - one of which has crossed the North Atlantic Ocean. The Neutrinos have been a major influence in many of the artists in the Sea Worthy expedition series and to radical boat-builders everywhere.

Mary Mattingly is a New York-based artist and founder of The Waterpod, a self-sustaining inhabited barge containing living quarters, a farm, and performance space which floated from port to port in NYC during the summer of 2009. The Waterpod, a major collaborative effort by a team of artists, engineers, and architects, was envisioned by Mattingly as a model structure that could be “adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment.”

Swoon is a well-known street artist and founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada, Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, and the Swimming Cities of Serenissima, floating along the Mississippi River, Hudson River, and the Venice Lagoon, respectively. Swoon's array of rafts built from salvaged materials has been a floating home to more than 30 artists, crossing hundreds of miles of water while stopping periodically along the water's edge for performances.

Dylan Gauthier is an artist, writer and educator, and a co-founder of Mare Liberum (thefreeseas.org), a boat-building and publishing collective based near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.  He has been organizing this Summer’s Sea Worthy project, alongside Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Michelle Levy, Georgia Munster, Kendra Sullivan and Sally Szwed.

Acting the Words is Enacting the World

May 17 - May 28, 2011
Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6pm - 8pm
Public Viewing: Friday, May 27 - Saturday, May 28, 2011, 12pm - 6pm

Led by: Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong 

Acting the Words is Enacting the World is a two week-long experiment in radical modes of education. Working with a group of young people aged 16-20, Truong and Ngo will conduct a series of intensive workshops that explore the economy from a perspective of philosophy, history, and art. This project approaches collaborative art-making and radical education through Augusto Boal’s theater techniques, using performance as a mode of knowledge transfer through an activation of spectators as actors.

With Acting the Words is Enacting the World, EFA Project Space begins a series of projects built around the concept of the Artist / Organizer. This series will highlight the activities of individuals who, through the act of organizing, pioneer the evolution of our creative landscape. Artist / Organizers are artists by nature who feel compelled to organize - to readdress / refresh / change the framework through which we experience artistic expression.

Click here to view the press release for this workshop. For more information please contact projectspace@efanyc.org

Playing to the Senses: An Evening of Food and Discussion with Elizabeth Thacker Jones

Friday, April 29, 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Organized in conjunction with the Prolonged Engagement exhibition, and inspired by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’ Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium*, Elizabeth Thacker Jones addresses the link between performance and food as it relates to the growing interest in local and regional food systems, and specific artistic practices that revolve around ideas of prolonged engagement and sustainability.  To ground the conversation, Jones and curator Erin Sickler will provide a dinner made from locally sourced ingredients.  The event is $13 per person and BYOBeverage; seating is limited.

*In Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium, folklore and performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett draws several parallels between food and performance.  First, that they are both executed, using various tools, actions, and materials; second, that they both behave, as governed by laws, customs, and habits; and finally, that they are displayed, requiring participants to understand these products as aesthetic objects.  In relation to artists’ interest in food as a medium, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett asks: Since cooking techniques, culinary codes, eating protocols, and gastronomic discourses are already so highly elaborated, what is there left for professional artists who chose to work with food as subject or medium to do?  By inserting the undeniably sensual experience of eating into the rare, abstracted discourse of art, artists are able to reframe both the nature of food and the nature of art by highlighting their respective roles as historical, social, and phenomenological elements.

To RSVP please contact michelle@efanyc.org

Elizabeth Thacker Jones works to understand our relationships to food systems. Her focus is on programming for emerging educators and designers to address access to healthy and sustainable food. She is currently a Nutrition Educator in New York City Public Schools in collaboration with Studio in A School, NYC Greenmarket and Columbia Teachers College. She is known for her pies and vast knowledge of sustainable caviar. She received her BA in Visual Art and French from Oberlin College (2002) and is pursuing a Food Studies MA from New York University. Elizabeth lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Artist Talk with Jesal Kapadia

 Where the sound is outside the ear, the ear can hear the sound. Where the spoken word is outside the speech, one can speak about something.

Friday, April 15, 6:30pm - 8pm

Prolonged Engagement artist Jesal Kapadia will discuss her most recent work titled 'a history of doing,' and elaborate on the process of working with images that document radical women's movements in India from the turn of the last century until now. Continually inspired by the writings of Gayatri Spivak, as well as her experience as Art Editor for Rethinking Marxism journal, Kapadia asks the questions: what does it mean to be 'an engaged feminist individual,' and how might one re-arrange desires, rather than locate needs?

For more information please contact projectspace@efanyc.org

Jesal Kapadia is an artist from Bombay, India, now living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work frequently blurs boundaries between pedagogy, art and life through subjects of the avant-garde and revolution, people's movements and feminist struggle. Her role as Art Editor for the journal Rethinking Marxism, and her collective work with members of 16beavergroup, an artist community in downtown Manhattan, have shaped and influenced her overall art practice. Kapadia's work was shown locally and internationally, at the Guangzhou Triennial in China, Experimenta Film Festival in India, Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn, the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, and the MIT media lab in Cambridge, MA. She recently completed a residency in the Humanities Institute at Northwestern University and currently teaches at the Eugene Lang College at the New School University and International Center for Photography NY. She previously taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union School of Art and CUNY College of Staten Island, NY.

I Like the Art World: An Evening of Performance and Creative Advice

Clockwise from upper left: "The Estheticist," "Dr. Lisa Levy's Ego Challenge for Artists," "Buck Naked from How's My Dealing," Man Bartlett's #24hLike"

Thursday, February 17th 6:30 pm                                                                                                         

Representatives from the How’s My Dealing? blog will give the inside scoop on New York galleries.  Who doesn’t pay their artists?  Who sleeps with their interns?  Who “loses” artwork?   

Man Bartlett embarks on an entire day of liking the art world (and, more specifically, liking I Like The Art World And The Art World Likes Me) in #24hLike.  Bartlett will live at EFA Project Space for 24 hours, broadcasting his “likes” via Twitter and a live video stream.  

Lisa Levy will analyze members of the audience in Dr. Lisa’s Ego Challenge for Artists.  Participants will have their egos judged on a scale of 1 through 10 and receive a prescription for personal and career success from Dr. Lisa.  

Pablo Helguera, author of The Estheticist, provides, “a free ongoing service of art consultation around practical, philosophical and ethical issues around the visual arts profession.”  He will be answering viewers’ questions about how to navigate the art world.

Please write to The Estheticist!

The Estheticist is a free service and advice column for the visual arts profession. Questions may relate to professional dilemmas (how can I approach a curator?), ethical issues in the art world (should I curate myself into a show?), conflict of interest-scenarios (should I curate my boyfriend into a show?), basic skills questions ( how does one enter into the biennial circuit?)  practical matters (should I move to Berlin?) or serious theoretical issues (what is the function of art today in society?)
        

Write us with your question to estheticist@aol.com or drop them off at our mailbox at the EFA Gallery. WE WILL RESPOND TO EVERY SINGLE INQUIRY.  In exchange participants questions will be included anonymously in future publications of the Estheticist as a tool for art professionals (if you want to be acknowledged with your real name, please specify this in your inquiry).You can visit the blog here: http://pablohelguera.net/2011/01/the-estheticist-issue-7-january-2011/

Artist Bios:

Man Bartlett has made work in many media, but most recently has focused on performance art, drawings, and installation art. Currently he is an artist-in-residence at Flux Factory in Queens, NY, and has a studio in Brooklyn. Bartlett He has exhibited professionally nationally and is included in private collections in many American cities, as well as in the flatfiles of Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, ebersmoore in Chicago, and OneWay Gallery in Narragansett.

Lisa Levy is a conceptual artist, self-proclaimed psychotherapist, performer, comedian and advertising art director. Lisa has exhibited widely at venues such as White Columns, Artists Space, Printed Matter, The New Museum and the Scope Art Fair. Her other performances include "Psychotherapy LIVE!" where she plays shrink to the audience and "Red Carpet LIVE!" where she is a red carpet host.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. Helguera’s work is in the collections of MoCA Chicago, El Museo del Bario, and the Weatherspoon Museum.