CURRENT & UPCOMING EVENTS
(Scroll down to see all M55 Art events)Location: 44-02 23rd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
Hours: Wednesday - Saturday 12-6pm
"Circulation" Michele Kong + Yosuke Ito
January 27 - February 11, 2012Opening Reception: Thursday, Feb 2, 6 - 8pm
With upheaval spreading around the world, what can we make of our current global situation? Like looking in a mirror every morning, we may check numerous sources of information. On one hand, in Japan we witnessed that everybody could experience weakness, loss and suffering from unexpected circumstances – the great earthquake and tsunami. More recently we saw the Occupy protests spreading from Wall Street to locations all over the world. They seem to cry out for recovering some common ground, both material and spiritual.
These incidents show images in a mirror that is not always stable and flat. Fact was not reflected in the mirror, more perhaps somewhere between the incidents and the reflections. If the mirror that we look into each morning does not reflect fact, then is the mirror even real? Now, everything is in interconnected, circulating on a global scale and has the possibility to be upset.
Art has a function to rouse people to look at the structures of the current world and show something in between. This two-person show creates a dialogue and exchange of ideas between artists Michele Kong (NY) and Yosuke Ito (Tokyo).
This light-based exhibition is best viewed after sunset.
Michele Kong
For several years, Michele Kong created large-scale sculptural installations inspired by structures in nature and focusing attention on things found in plain sight. Such works have been included in exhibitions at a variety of art venues including: PS 1 Contemporary Art Center (NY), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (NE), Arlington Arts Center (VA), Maryland Art Place (MD), Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DE), to name just a few. In 2009, Kong expanded her artistic practice and began experimenting with narrative in short video projects. Several fellowships including the Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and other programs supported this new body of work. Additionally a 2009 Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship, awarded by the Japan-US Friendship Commission/NEA, contributed to the production of collaborative works including the work on view in this exhibition, The Space Between.
Photo: The Space Between, 2010
Video stills from forthcoming two-channel installation (17 min., HDV).
Yosuke Ito
A Tokyo-based artist and international exhibitor, is interested in the mechanism of self-reflection. He refers to this process as a connection between gaze and glance to memory and record. As Artistic Director of the international exchange project, Puddles, Ito has collaborated with intermedia artist Phill Niblock, a Minimal sound master. The inspiration from these collaborations has broadened Ito’s work, reaching beyond the visual to include other senses. From 2009 at M55 Art, Ito develops his ideas into a visual narrative. The dispersal of light is transferred to the circular motion of propellers powered by solar cells, suggesting the far-reaching implications regarding current global environmental issues.
Photo: Lighting Loop 2010, M55 Art, New York
Paintings by Kim Sloane
February 15 - March 3, 2012Opening Reception: February 15, 6-8pm
The work in this show is all a product of the imagination. The imagination is fed in three essential ways. One is the study of nature, drawing from the human figure or landscape, two is the history of art, and the third is poetry.
The art that has informed these paintings includes Minoan pots and larnake (sarcophagi), Greek pottery painting, Romanesque painting and sculpture, medieval and Persian manuscripts, and the moderns for whom all these were also compelling sources.
Themes are sometimes conceived in advance, and sometimes only emerge in the process of a painting. Often they will change as a painting develops. At other times they are unknown, and only reveal themselves after the painting’s completion. The image is a long time coming, and is never predetermined. It undergoes constant, often radical change.
Themes included in this group of work include the swimmer, or the body in suspension, and Herakles and the Lion, or struggle. The painting “Tuneless Numbers” is an image of Cupid and Psyche, inspired by the ode of that name by John Keats. “Pale Flower” was Shelley’s epithet for Keats in his elegy on the death of Keats, “Adonais”. This is an example of a painting whose theme became known to me only after its completion. Both the figure and the pale flower were there before I recognized my subject.
Somewhat more complex is the theme of the figure and the bear. The bear is the bear that visits my yard daily in early summer, but it is also the beast of the earth from the Book of Revelations who spits demon frogs from his mouth. He is angry at our destruction of his domain; we offer doves in supplication, knowing full well it is not enough.
Lovers, Boy Meets Girl, and Kissed by a Bird are celebrations of mysteries of love and of life.
Mr. Sloane has shown in New York and around the country in solo and group exhibitions. His work has been shown at, among other places, the New York Studio School, Dartmouth College, Maurice Arlos Gallery, Sideshow Gallery and the National Academy of Design Museum where he has twice won the Mikhail and Ekateryna Shatalov Prize. He is currently Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of Foundation at Pratt Institue. More information on the artist can be found at his website www.kimsloane.com