Remain Alert and Have a Safe Day
Opening on Thursday, June 14
6:00pm – 9:00pm
performance by sound artist Johann Diedrick at 8:00pm
June 14, 2018 – June 30, 2018
With works by Gabriela Salazar, Jennifer May Reiland, Johann Diedrick and Liene Bosquê
Curated by Joana Valsassina and Erica Petrillo
Public program:
Listening tour with Johann Diedrick on Saturday, June 16th at 2:00pm and at 4:00pm
Pliable Boundaries walk with Liene Bosquê on Saturday, June 30th (time TBD)
Please RSVP at remain.alert.show@gmail.com
The exhibition is part of the Emerging Curators Program organized by Local Project Art Space
Remain Alert and Have a Safe Day Catalog
Curatorial statement
Remain Alert and Have a Safe Day
If New York were a person, where would she come from? The city’s resilient nature and shifting social fabric escape categorization: anyone can feel both foreign and local, everyone is in transit, all experience some degree of integration and rejection. For NY-based artists and curators, engaging with ideas of foreignness, migration, assimilation, and alienation is not only a matter of social and political consciousness but also a daily exercise. Remain Alert and Have a Safe Day confronts these topics by embarking on an imaginary journey into the New York subway. The subway is a unique environment, defined by its transient and paradoxical nature. It allows for movement, while simultaneously forcing an enclosure. It can be painfully banal and oddly inspiring. It is at once familiar and outlandish; ever-changing and forever the same. The subway encapsulates the promise of the melting pot while exposing its fallacy. It is a place of passage, refuge, confinement, and estrangement. In short, the subway operates as a metaphorical and literal waiting room: an archetypal locus of foreignness and localness where passengers navigate a complex set of tensions and contradictions, while trying to make their way from A to B. In Remain Alert and Have a Safe Day, four artists with diverse backgrounds, practices and artistic sensibilities reflect on the themes of foreignness and diversity considering the subway as a particular entry point. Gabriela Salazar, Jennifer May Reiland, Johann Diedrick and Liene Bosquê have interpreted and challenged the subject matter along different conceptual, political, and phenomenological lines. Sculpture, video, sound, installation, and drawing populate the Local Project Art Space gallery, responding to the myriad of stories that inhabit any given subway car. Within this everyday limbo – literally at the crossroad between the underground world and the surface – the dynamics undergirding the fabrics of this complex and multifaceted city are exposed and complicated.
Curated by Joana Valsassina & Erica Petrillo
Gabriela Salazar’s work investigates changes in environment and material as frameworks for site responsive installations. Throughout her work runs a fascination with the phenomenology of the site and with the ways the built environment is repurposed by different needs and uses. Made for and by the hand, Gabriela’s graspable sculptures play on the uncertainties that permeate daily experiences and expectations. The works Improbable Support for A New Position evoke the metallic subway poles while contradicting their purpose, look and feel.
gabrielasalazar.com
Jennifer May Reiland strings connections between personal experiences and historical narratives. Her drawings are populated by a myriad of characters from different historical and mythical epochs that share ties with themes of sacrifice, violence, female oppression, roleplaying and voyeurism. With her sharp sensitivity to the gory and grim, Jennifer places her own feelings and memories into the context of the factual and mythical past. Built as a stratigraphic drawing, Astor Place, recounts personal and collective tales that imbue the place with (lost and found) layers of meanings.
jennifermayreiland.com
Equipped with an ad hoc mobile listening device, sound artist Johann Diedrick explores the hidden sonic layers of urban environments. His contraption amplifies subtle sounds that would otherwise go unnoticed, granting him access to the cracks and interstices of urban soundscapes. While working on Reflect / Refract, Johann’s focus turned to the unassuming presence of glass in the subway system. Experimenting with the physical and metaphysical properties of the material, the work explores its multivalent nature as (visual and sonic) mirror, aperture, and barrier.
johanndiedrick.com
Liene Bosquê is interested in the relationship between places and people. In her multidisciplinary practice she looks at public and personal spaces that hold memories and are imbued with meaning. Intrigued by the ever-shifting nature of New York City, Liene records subtle gestures of destruction and repair that hide in plain sight. Her video works LIC I and II, set at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, bring to the fore small human routines that sustain hefty urban forces.
lienebosque.com
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council