CCS Bard Announces 2011 Upcoming Exhibitions and Project Series

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Beginning in March, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) will present 13 exhibitions and projects, including work by more than 25 leading and emerging contemporary artists at the CCS Bard Galleries and curated by second-year students. Presented in two groups, these projects focus on diverse concepts and themes and represent an international body of artists working in a variety of media. These exhibitions are the culmination of the students' work for the master's degree.

The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Wednesday through Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public. Limited free seating is available on a chartered bus that leaves from New York City for the March 27 and May 1 openings. The bus returns to New York City after the openings. Reservations are required; call 845-758-7598 or email [email protected].

The first of two series of exhibitions and projects opens on Sunday, March 27, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., and is on view through Sunday, April 17. The exhibitions are: Break My Body, Hold My Bones, curated by Nathan Lee; The action of things, curated by Manuela Moscoso; Taking Pleasure for a Ride, curated by Dylan Burritt Peet; We Have The Technology, curated by Laurel Ptak; and Harboring Tone and Place, curated by Clark Solack.

The second series of exhibitions and projects opens on Sunday, May 1, with a reception from 1:00–4:00 p.m., and is on view through Sunday, May 22. The exhibitions are: The Object of Society Is, curated by Nova Benway; Thinking About Flying, curated by Karin Campbell; Not Necessarily in that Order: Curatorial questions about The Barnes Foundation's move to Philadelphia, a publication edited by Orit Gat; Dear Pratella, what do you hear?, curated by Michelle Y. Hyun; Counter-relief (CCS Bard) 2011, curated by Kelly Kivland; Double Session, curated by Natasha Llorens; (Re)Move/(Re)Frame, curated by Courtney Malick; What's Past is Prologue, curated by Julia Paoli.

Student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and by the Center's Patrons, Supporters, and Friends. Additional support provided by the Monique Beudert Award Fund.

For additional information, call 845-758-7598, email [email protected], or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.

Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition, education, and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day. In addition to the CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art, the Center houses the Marieluise Hessel Collection, as well as an extensive library and curatorial archives that are accessible to the public. The Center's two-year M.A. program in curatorial studies is specifically designed to deepen students' understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating contemporary art. Exhibitions are presented year-round in the CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art, providing students with the opportunity to work with world-renowned artists and curators. The exhibition program and the Hessel Collection also serve as the basis for a wide range of public programs and activities exploring art and its role in contemporary society.

CCS Bard Upcoming Thesis Exhibitions, Group One

March 27 – April 17, 2011
CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Break My Body, Hold My Bones

Artists: Malcolm Lomax and Daniel Wickerham (DUOX)
Curator: Nathan Lee
Questions of queer embodiment in a "post-AIDS" culture are posed in a multimedia installation by the Baltimore-based collaboration DUOX (Malcolm Lomax and Daniel Wickerham). What are the forms, affects, capacities, and connections of the queer body? How does it respond to the legacy of AIDS — no longer experienced as an overt crisis in the gay community, but no less constitutive of its practices? How does queerness inhabit the landscape of online avatars, social networking, viral video, and multiple forms of digital being? Merging digital and analog technologies through a practice informed by performance and appropriation, DUOX presents an environment that reflects on and embodies an emergent sensibility: the becoming-viral of the digital queer.

The action of things

Artists: Rubén Grilo, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Cristóbal Lehyt, Trevor Paglen, and Jorge Satorre
Curator: Manuela Moscoso
"Things" are often understood as objects that neither carry agency nor affect the world. The action of things is a group exhibition focusing on work that investigates things and more specifically, stones and stars—aspects of matter that are so omnipresent that they can be considered global. The artists in this exhibition, Rubén Grilo, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Cristóbal Lehyt, Trevor Paglen, and Jorge Satorre, all look at inanimate materials and challenge their supposed passivity. This approach rejects the division between a world of the inert things, on the one hand, and a world of animate beings, on the other. Thus, it grants us the possibility of re-experiencing the world, as populated by things with potential agency. The exhibition considers temporary networks of relations between human and non-human actors. It investigates the ways that things mediate, construct, or sustain assemblies and, as a result, have agency similar—or at least comparable—to that of human beings. Their viewers are propelled into an uncertain universe that undoes taken-for-granted perceptions of nature.

Taking Pleasure for a Ride

Artists: Glen Fogel, Terence Koh, Laurel Nakadate, Jennifer Reeder, and Conrad Ventur
Curator: Dylan Burritt Peet
Taking Pleasure for a Ride is an exhibition of video works by Glen Fogel, Terence Koh, Laurel Nakadate, Jennifer Reeder, and Conrad Ventur that use camp strategies to create irresolvable tensions between good taste and bad, complicity and resistance, anger and love. Counter to the perception of camp as merely ridiculous, artificial, and indulgent, the exhibition takes as its starting point the following definition: camp is taking pleasure in purposely acting out a disaccord with heterosexist norms. In other words, camp is a set of strategies for performing difference, for enacting resistance. Variously sly, sexy, aggressive, and uncomfortable, the works in Taking Pleasure for a Ride challenge the possibility of stable notions of taste, desire, and identity.

We Have The Technology

Participants: Marysia Lewandowska, Konst & Teknik, Laurel Ptak
Curators: Laurel Ptak in collaboration with Stockholm-based design office Konst & Teknik
We Have The Technology is an internet platform in support of critical cultural production. Arriving online in a moment of post-technological fetishism and post-digital alienation, WHTT works with artists, designers, theorists, programmers, curators, academics, and other cultural producers to attend vigorously to the digital and networked potentialities for production, circulation, and distribution of art and culture in and beyond the browser. For this project, WHTT invites artist Marysia Lewandowska as inaugural resident to explore the intersection of intellectual property and art. Working collaboratively with CCS graduate student Laurel Ptak and Stockholm-based design office Konst & Teknik, Lewandowska will engage WHTT as a sustained platform for dispersed communication, research, and knowledge production online.

Harboring Tone and Place

Artists: Dennis McNulty, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain
Curator: Clark Solack
The works in this exhibition approach the context of time through its durational potentialities. Both present differing models of sensory perceptions by engaging with spoken narratives and a grammatical explication of words that enumerate striking visual structures. The works on display demonstrate ways that presumed comprehensibility might be deemed inadequate by suggesting unusual strategies for encountering language, sound, and the visual. Dublin-based artist Dennis McNulty works with various media including performance, sculpture, sound, and video, with a particular interest in architecture and urban spaces. Approaching Breezewood is a sound work that explores the relations between visual experience and words, and how sound can rearticulate a visual association with what we don't see. Paris-based artists and graphic designers Angela Detanico and Raphael Lain work with digital formats as a way to translate typographies into new, differently understandable configurations. Their work The 25 Brightest Stars is a superimposition of sine waves, one for each letter of the alphabet. This new typology is used to write the names of the twenty-five brightest stars. These words appear as floating orbs, articulating a new form of visual narration.

CCS Bard Upcoming Thesis Exhibitions, Group Two

May 1 – May 22, 2011
CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

The Object of Society Is

Artist: Jenny Perlin
Curator: Nova Benway
The Object of Society Is, an exhibition of newly commissioned work by Jenny Perlin, is comprised of a film and a series of letterpress prints, and results from a year's research on the writings of Eleanor Roosevelt. Perlin's work explores intersections between personal and social histories, and investigates the documentation and representation of cultural and social values. This exhibition is informed by a multitude of sources, among them the thousands of "My Day" newspaper columns Roosevelt wrote between 1935 and 1962, which reveal the mingling of her personal and political ideologies; John Milton's 1655 poem "On His Blindness" and the 1918 film "The Blue Bird," which Roosevelt referred to as inspirations throughout her life; and the copious annotations Roosevelt made to drafts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this exhibition, literary parables and early film combine with political rhetoric and Roosevelt's biography to comment on the ways in which a wide array of images and texts shape political discourse in America.

Thinking About Flying

Artist: Jon Rubin
Curator: Karin Campbell

For his first exhibition in the Hudson Valley, Pittsburgh-based artist Jon Rubin has conceived a new, site-specific project at the Center for Curatorial Studies that aims to catalyze a more direct relationship between the CCS and its local audience.  For Thinking About Flying, 10 homing pigeons will be housed in a “loft” located outside the CCS starting at the end of January 2011. During the exhibition, Bard College students, faculty, and staff will take birds home for several days and then release them to return to campus. By sharing the responsibility of producing and maintaining the artwork, the participants and institution contribute to the ongoing life of the project. At once poetic and practical, the temporary placement of the pigeons in audience members’ homes expands the space of the museum. As domestic spaces become temporary exhibition sites, the institutional space is cast as a home for the artwork’s physical components — the pigeons.

Not Necessarily in that Order:
Curatorial questions about The Barnes Foundation's move to Philadelphia.

Edited by Orit Gat
Not Necessarily in that Order is a publication that explores the curatorial implications of the Barnes Foundation's upcoming move from Merion to Philadelphia. Originally the private collection of Dr. Albert Barnes, the Foundation, located at his house in Merion, Pennsylvania, has been open to the public since Dr. Barnes' death in 1951. This publication looks into the museum's relocation as an opportunity to ask questions about the curating of collections, how contemporary curatorial methodologies could be useful for the Barnes at a time of change, and how the curatorial traditions at the Barnes could inform contemporary discussions about curating collections. Consisting of original research material, interviews, reprints of texts about curating and collections, images, and new texts written especially for this publication, Not Necessarily in that Order is an unbound publication whose contents can be arranged by readers according to their interests.

Dear Pratella, what do you hear?

Artists: Jacob Kirkegaard, Chris Kubick & Anne Walsh, and Hong-Kai Wang
Curator: Michelle Y. Hyun
Almost 100 years ago, Luigi Russolo wrote The Art of Noises in a letter to fellow Futurist and friend Francesco Balilla Pratella. The manifesto announced a total revision of aesthetic values towards the construction of a new model for sound/music with a critical impulse towards social and political change. Dear Pratella functions as an experiment that investigates the critical potential of sound-based art in various social, spatial, temporal, and discursive contexts. Each week, artists Jacob Kirkegaard, Chris Kubick & Anne Walsh, and Hong-Kai Wang present their work in different sites: the CCS Hessel Museum, the Rhinecliff Amtrak train station, and WXBC radio. The observation and analysis of each work will be recorded by a group of respondents. For more information, visit www.dearpratella.org.

Counter-relief (CCS Bard) 2011

Artist: Jimmy Robert in collaboration with Maria Hassabi
Curator: Kelly Kivland
Counter-relief (CCS Bard) 2011 is the first commissioned project in the United States by Brussels-based artist Jimmy Robert. For the commission, Robert will revisit and restage his live performance and installation work Counter-relief, 2008. Reflecting Robert's ongoing engagement with a range of mediums, Counter-relief combines 16mm film projection with choreographed movement, original text, and static objects. For this commission, Robert, a self-described "non-dancer," will collaborate with the New York City-based choreographer Maria Hassabi to revisit the structure and dynamics of the live performance. The collaboration will evolve through an intensive rehearsal period. Together, Robert and Hassabi will explore a new direction in the relationship between the moving body and the moving image in Counter-relief. The live performance will occur only once, after which the film projection, text, and inanimate props will remain in the gallery space for the duration of the exhibition. The movement of viewers' bodies through the installation will emphasize the ephemeral after-effect of the work. The performance will take place during the opening on Sunday, May 1st. A talk with Jimmy Robert and Maria Hassabi will occur on Monday, May 2nd.

Double Session

Artists: Mary Walling Blackburn and Douglas Paulson
Curator: Natasha Llorens
Double Session presents two public commissions initiated by Mary Walling Blackburn and Douglas Paulson. Walling Blackburn's project, Library in (the land of fuck), is a parasitic library. Its collection is immaterial, comprised of audio broadcasts on shortwave radio that investigate the twinning of utopia and dystopia. Paulson's In This Hello America . . . re-envisions the cultural space produced by Sasson Soffer's public art sculpture Hello America, 1980, (which resides on Bard College's campus) transforming it into a live/work project space — a collaborative platform for both production and reflection. The organizing concept of a "double session" is not a bracket or an opposition. It is rather, and simply, a temporal space of production that is intensified, doubled. Beyond the pairing of projects and the production of discourse, the double session insists on the task of analyzing the gap between iteration and repetition, the experience of social practice and the art discourse that frames it. www.doublesession.net

(Re)Move/(Re)Frame

Performances by: Brody Condon, Shana Moulton, and Yemenwed
Curator: Courtney Malick
(Re)Move/(Re)Frame presents a series of performances by Brody Condon, Shana Moulton, and the collective Yemenwed. Each performance will occur at a different time and place throughout the 22 day duration of the exhibition. Experimental engagements with documentary materials from each performance will be visible in the CCS galleries and online. The project explores ways that recent technologies offer new points of entry into events, performances, and exhibitions. To this end, the entire project will also be documented and expanded through audience participation. (Re)Move/(Re)Frame utilizes the physical space of the CCS galleries—which is at a remove from the scenes of action themselves— to explore not only how one accesses the meaning of a performance after the fact, but also how exhibitions are performative, temporal sites, the meanings of which are themselves in a state of flux.

What's Past is Prologue

Artists: A.K. Burns and MPA
Curator: Julia Paoli
In What’s Past is Prologue artists A.K. Burns and MPA present new projects paired with a selection of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, a private collection permanently on loan at the CCS. The artists chose these works in order to contextualize their practices individually and as collaborators, and to create a unique exhibition setting that informs their new projects, created with this situation in mind. A.K. presents a multi-channel video Touch Parade, while MPA presents a series of live performances using works from the Collection as a point of departure. A.K. and MPA’s projects, in conversation with their selections from the Hessel Collection, complicate commonly accepted understandings of their work and incite a discourse regarding contemporary genderqueer methodologies. Taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the title suggests a connection between the influences exerted by our past on our present and future. The work of both artists is commonly contextualized through a history of art informed by a feminist discourse, and while both are tethered to this history, What’s Past is Prologue suggests that neither is bound to it.

For additional information including related programming, call 845-758-7598, e-mail [email protected], or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.

Press Contact:
Mark Primoff
[email protected]
845.758.7412

CCS Bard Contact:
Ramona Rosenberg
[email protected]
845.758.7574

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This event was last updated on 04-15-2014

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