The Perception of the Artist in the United States
Tuesday, March 9, 6:30 pm
The Artist-Citizen
Tuesday, March 23, 6:30 pm
More than providing concrete answers, these conversations aim to bring to light the pressing questions and concerns faced by the creative community, and to encourage new modes for bridging gaps, brainstorming, and problem solving...
For Immediate Release
EFA Project Space announces Companion, an exhibition of artworks contextualized with the source that influenced their creation. Companion culls together cultural projects that draw inspiration from references mined from history, culture, and science.
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Altered States, Copyright Warner Bros. Pictures, 1980
Wednesday, July 29th, 7 pm
(Ken Russell, 1980)
EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.
EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Beth Campbell, as she chaperones the movie, Altered States (1980):
“I had many expectations while building my installation Following Room for the project space at The Whitney Museum. In short, I wanted to play on people’s perceptions and how we form our ideas about reality. Viewers assumed they were looking at mirrored reflections, but were actually looking at 12 individual rooms. Along with the multiplied realities, I implied the presence of the mirror’s planar surface with tubing and short false walls. Going in, I wanted to emphasize the perception of the physical space; what I didn’t anticipate was that the viewers would be compelled to reach out, to find out for themselves if a physical mirror was present. Over and over again, I learned how individuals would reach out to touch the solid surface of the mirror, only to penetrate right through the false membrane, “tearing” the whole piece wide open. I was instantly sent back to my memories of the movie Altered States released in 1980. I hadn’t seen it until it aired on HBO or Showtime, so I would have been about 10 or 11 — which can be a very transformative age — a time when consciousness of the self and a larger worldview start to emerge. I had been a good little Catholic, living in fear of Hell and all, until one day in CCD, I questioned the volunteer parent/teacher’s authority of faith. So began my intellectual life and pursuit into the experience of reality and the self. A few years later, I discovered my older brother was reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan. I emulated my brother and clumsily tried to read this wild, peyote-induced journey into the inner self and the primal soup of consciousness. I was totally out of my league; what little I could grasp of Castaneda was similar to my thought process while watching Altered States and developing a respectful fright, not of God, or scary murderers and ghosts, but of consciousness itself. I think these trippy, sci-fi psychological adventures really opened up my young yearning mind. I haven’t seen Altered States since the early ‘80s, so my memory of it and of one scene in particular could be, well… way off.”
Image courtesy the artist, Beth Campbell, and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
Beth Campbell is a New York-based artist originally from Dwight, Illinois. Her work explores the psychological and phenomenological conception of one’s surroundings through sculpture, installation, drawing, and video. Following Room, 2008, as exhibited in two variations at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Manifesta 7, Trento, Italy, is an optically jarring large-scale sculpture, whose subtle internal variation establishes an uncanny sense that a small, banal living room is seemingly reflected and multiplied many times over. Campbell has also created projects for the Public Art Fund; the Biennale Cuvee 09 World Selection of Contemporary Art; OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; and the 6th Mercosul Biennial, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Recent group exhibitions include shows at The Andy Warhol Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Andrea Rosen, White Columns, the Drawing Room (London), and the Tang Museum. Her work is included at the Whitney Museum, the MOMA, and in the New Museum’s Altoids Collections. She is represented in New York by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery.
EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.
The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.
Sponsorship provided by 
To see complete description and schedule for the Chaperone series, please click here.
For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151
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Desperate Living, New Line Cinema, 1977
Wednesday, July 22nd, 7 pm
(John Waters, 1977)
EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.
EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Kalup Linzy, as he chaperones the movie, Desperate Living (1977):
“For a long time, I was a fan of John Waters’ film Serial Mom with no familiarity of his previous work. Shortly after beginning the Conversations Wit de Churen series, I was accepted into the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. There, the faculty and my mentors suggested I look at early John Waters films. One film in particular, Desperate Living (1977), captured my imagination the most. Having first viewed Desperate Living a quarter of a century after its release, this classic film gave me the courage to freely and subversively explore subjects of race, gender and sexuality in my own video work — in particular, Conversations Wit de Churen 4: Play Wit de Churen and KK Queen Survey. In these particular works, psycho-sexually charged domestic drama, bad nerves, irreverent relationships, and characters who often could care less about each other’s feelings all reflect Waters’ influence.”
Image courtesy the artist, Kalup Linzy
Kalup Linzy is a video and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Stuckey, Florida, Linzy received his MFA from the University of South Florida in 2003, and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Linzy’s best-known work is a series of politically charged videos that satirizes the conventions of the television soap opera. His works have been included in exhibitions as far-ranging as Black Alphabet at The Zacheta National Museum in Warsaw Poland, and Frequency, Thelma Golden’s survey of new art by emerging artists of color at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Recently, Linzy’s work was included in Prospect.1 New Orleans, curated by Dan Cameron; Modern Mondays: An Evening with Kalup Linzy at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Glasgow International: Festival of Contemporary Visual Art, Glasgow, Scotland; and 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection, all in 2008. Linzy has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 2005, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2007, and, most recently, a 2008 Creative Capital Foundation grant, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, and an Art Matters Grant.
EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.
The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.
Sponsorship provided by
For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151
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Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduction, 1981
Wednesday, July 15th, 7 pm
(Ulrike Ottinger ,1981)
EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.
EFA Project Space welcomes the artist k8 Hardy, as she chaperones the film, Freak Orlando (1981):
“When I first watched Freak Orlando, directed by Ulrike Ottinger, I felt an urgent sense of connection with the film and her aesthetic, despite it being 20 years old. It blew my sense of time, political progress, and modern concerns wide open. The film was shockingly similar in its political and sexual politics to mine, and even more precisely, in a specific queer aesthetic that I thought had developed in the US Northwest in the mid-‘90s. It was like a surprise piece in a cultural puzzle that I had completed and boxed up. That box did not exist. The device of Ottinger’s film, a time-traveling liberated polysexual, is based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. However, in Woolf’s novel, the safety of the bourgeoisie enables Orlando’s transformations and sexual deviance to be unthreatening and eccentric. On the other hand, Ottinger’s film unabashedly and unapologetically displays multitudes of sexual deviants with no prospect of normalcy. What I love about the film is that it doesn’t attempt to normalize or make the audience feel comfortable with these societal outcasts, but rather to display the pleasures of their queer freak lives. Furthermore, Ottinger gives no credence to reality or chronology, but rather has fantasy guide the locations of the film. In Freak Orlando, I really connected with the shameless portrayal of sexual and physical freaks and Ottinger’s lack of a need to justify or explain her characters. She reifies the notion that freaks do exist, and that they do not need to be contextualized or normalized. It’s a political sentiment that disturbs our current ideology of identities — that we are all the same and unique at once. Moreover, I was exhilarated to see a feminist legacy that did not righteously reject an indulgence in excess and the aesthetics of representation.”
Image courtesy the artist, k8 Hardy
K8 Hardy is a video and performance artist, political activist, and eccentric fashion stylist. A real Grrrl, she co-founded the queer and feminist art journal LTTR with Ulrike Müller, Emily Roysdon, and Ginger Brooks Takashi. Determined to challenge the mass media’s obliviousness to queer issues and alternative political action, she is set on the task of the abstract expression of sexual politics. One of her most famous pieces, a collaboration with Wynne Greenwood called New Report, was performed at the Tate Modern in 2007. Hardy’s work has shown in several group exhibitions domestically and abroad, recently including Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video at the Brookyn Museum (2009); Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); The Way We Rhyme at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2008); Media Burn at the Tate Modern (2007); Uncertain States of America at the Moscow Biennial (2007); and Exile of the Imaginary at the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2007). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.
The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.
Sponsorship provided by
For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151
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Venom and Eternity, Copyright Jean Isidore Isou, 1951
Wednesday, July 8th, 7 pm
(Jean Isidore Isou, 1951)
EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.
EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Amy Granat, as she chaperones the film, Venom and Eternity (1951):
“Jean Isidore Isou (born I. Goldstein in 1925, in Botosani, Romania) was a writer of many published works, including short stories, novels, poetry and essays. He was also a founder of the Lettrist Movement. Isou wrote, directed, photographed, composed the music for, and acted in Venom and Eternity. In the film, which Isou refers to as a “revolt against cinema,” he attempts to discuss what was wrong with the cinema, and then goes on to show examples of what he thinks the cinema should consist of. Stan Brakhage, who viewed this film many, many times and used it in his classroom, describes Venom as “an extremely formal work, an extremely fine, balanced work.” Whether or not this film represents artistic expression will have to be the individual decision of each viewer. In the words of Jean Cocteau, “Is Venom a springboard or is it a void? In 50 years we’ll know the answer. After all, remember how Wagner was received. Today, no one objects to his outbursts. The day will come, perhaps, when Isou’s style will be the fashion. Who can tell?” When Venom and Eternity was first shown at the Cannes Film Festiva,l it caused a riot requiring fire hoses to be brought in. The film had its American premiere at Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and again caused a disturbance and a stomp-out. Brakhage and several other artists, including Robert Duncan, were at the premiere, and were outraged to learn that a Roman Catholic priest had been brought in to warn the audience of French decadence. According to Isou, “A film alone cannot assay the value of a system which embraces thousands of possibilities. In this work, I was more excited about the schism of image than about satisfying the demands of convention.”
Image courtesy the artist, Amy Granat, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich
Amy Granat’s work combines film, sound, performance, photography, and installation with distinctly poetic and formal juxtapositions. Drawing inspiration from early cinema, noise music, abstract painting, and beat literature, she embraces the culture of the past avant garde, reflecting and informing its future. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and received her BA from Bard College in 1994. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Eva Presenhuber Galerie, Zurich; Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers’ and Basis Art Center, Frankfurt. She has been featured in such recent group exhibitions as Stray Alchemist at UCCA, Beijing; Strange Magic at Luhring Augistine, New York; Bastard Ceature at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Born to Be Wild at Kunstmuseum, St.Gallen. She will show a new feature film at a solo exhibition at The Kitchen in New York City in January 2010. Granat lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.
The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.
Sponsorship provided by
For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151
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