Virtually since television’s invention, artists have used its form, content, and media to create artworks whose intentions range from homage to critique. Your Content Will Return Shortly is a group exhibition that explores how contemporary artists harness the in-between moments of our television experiences. By taking their cues from the physical and functional qualities of television and a variety of elements associated with broadcasting, they touch on phenomena that include: advertising; laugh tracks; the affects of VHS, DVD and remote control devices on viewing habits; public service announcements; and nuanced observations of the relationship between spectacle and cable news. The exhibition is on view from January 24 – March 24, 2013, at Franklin Street Works with a free public reception on Thursday, January 24, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. Exhibiting artists include: Christopher DeLaurenti, Eric Gottesman, Jonathan Horowitz, Sophy Naess, Jeff Ostergren, Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, Catherine Ross, Emily Roz, Carmelle Safdie, and Siebren Versteeg.

Catherine Ross, IFO, 2006, video still, courtesy of the artist

With Your Content Will Return Shortly, television is explored as both medium and subject. “Early exhibitions such as TV as a Creative Medium organized by gallerist Howard Wise in 1969 posited that video could be art, and that televisions would become as important to contemporary exhibitions as paint, canvas and other traditional materials,” says the exhibition’s curator Terri C Smith, “This show was inspired by a desire to connect my own research on historic video exhibitions and readings in media theory — including texts by David Joselit and Marshall McLuhan — with observations of our own contemporary relationships with ‘television,’ which for many is streamed at will via a laptop, bypassing the TV set altogether.”

Siebren Versteeg Prop, 2009 50 in plasma TV (7’), single channel DVD Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Rather than taking a comprehensive view of television as inspiration in contemporary art, Your Content Will Return Shortly, as the title implies, explores contemporary works that highlight televised elements tangential to the main narrative arc — our “stories”. This exhibition brings to light the physical, stylistic, and economic elements that surround the narrative arcs of situation comedies, melodramas, news features, etc. Exhibiting artists Jeff Ostergren and Martha

1Rosler focus on advertising in their works. With Global Taste, Rosler creates a three-channel work that brilliantly appropriates food advertisements from the 1980s. In Jeff Ostergren’s two-channel video Stimulus, pharmaceutical ads are deconstructed shifting focus to specific components such as health warnings. Ostergren asserts that the commercials are in fact the true content of our television experience, writing, “Advertisements are vehicles of capital. Despite our understanding of them as the filler surrounding our programming content (news, sporting events, sitcoms), in reality, commercials ARE the content – the programming they surround are sublimated by the lurking capital that funds them, that relates to the content, that is geared towards a target audience, a focus- group-determined viewer.”

Emily Roz, Presidents, 2006, 20 Polaroid prints, courtesy of the artist

Artists Jonathan Horowitz, Sopy Naess, Catherine Ross, Emily Roz, and Carmelle Safdie pull from specific and seemingly unimportant elements from televised narratives, reminding us of the devices such as laugh tracks, physical comedy, and repeated plot motifs that are interwoven throughout. In Roz’s work Death by Mel the artist takes Polaroid photographs of the TV set to capture scenes where actors are killed by Mel Gibson, “Archiving images from films into sub-groups strips them of their original meaning within a narrative and places them into reliable and familiar categories,” writes Roz, “An image of a president immediately brings to mind an entire genre without specifying any one film. Grouping many similar images reminds us of what we come to expect from certain genres and how those devices signal the moviegoer to understand and accept certain pretexts without question.” Similarly, Catherine Ross, who often uses old sitcoms as her material, feels that “Isolating the movements of humans and/or objects, ! create new sequences that reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound ! movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes our vulnerabilities.”

Christopher DeLaurenti, Lucy Raven and Siebren Versteeg pay close attention to the physical and operative aspects of television. With Prop, Versteeg seems to “prop” a plasma screen on the wall with a long stick. The video on the monitor features someone spelling words in the sand with a stick. The first impression of the television is that it’s a sculptural element, followed by its role in conveying a moving image – with this Versteeg actively reverses the viewer’s usual dynamic with the television set. In Remote DeLaurenti’s 2002 performance employs a television remote control and TV set to create an audio work, flipping channels in order to make random sound patterns. Listening to the piece eleven years later, the antiquated sounds of an older technology are surprisingly audible. Mining the history, geography, and mix of commerce and community in cable access, Lucy Raven invents a public service announcement that elucidates the journey from taping to broadcast, including shared land use and other economies. In her work 4:3, a scrolling text reads in part, “The exchange is asymmetrical: images and sound travel from the production studio to the home and into the TV via copper cable wire, and money from the couch potato travels to the cable company via US mail. You can check if your payment went through by turning on your television.”

As Raven’s text implies, Your Content Will Return Shortly looks beyond the screen and asks questions about the cultural circuitry surrounding television as well as its relationship to daily life and contemporary art. Using videos, photographs, Internet, and sculptural elements, the artists in Your Content Will Return Shortly provide insights into the structures and languages of television, reminding viewers that their relationships with the commerce, programming, and operational structures of TV are multifaceted and extend far beyond the living room

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Franklin Street Works presents the original exhibition Working Alternatives: Breaking Bread, Art Broadcasting, and Collective Action, on view from October 27, 2012 – January 13, 2013. The exhibition looks at three threads of alternative art space histories and examines how engaged, inclusive strategies are still being used to break down perceived barriers between contemporary art and its audiences. The themes covered in Working Alternatives are conviviality and food, artists who use media (newspapers, television, and radio) as platforms for artworks, and artist collectives in the US, explored through an open archive gathered specifically for this exhibition.

Chris Sollars and Jerome Waag, Voting Booth Assembly, 2006, courtesy of the artists

Originally Working Alternatives was designed to be the backdrop for our first annual fundraiser, but Franklin Street Works is postponing that event until the spring so the indoor/outdoor extravaganza will coincide with warmer weather and have less proximity to long-standing regional art events. If you saved the date for our fundraiser, however, don’t despair and keep Saturday, October 27, on your calendars – there is still a party! Working Alternatives will open October 27 with a free, public reception from 5:00 -8:00 pm. The evening will include a lively performance of San Francisco artist Tom Marioni’s “Beer Drinking Sonata (for 13 Players)” where thirteen people will create music by blowing into beer bottles based on Marioni’s score.

Tom Marioni, The Museum of Conceptual at the San Francisco Museum of Art. 1979 (free beer) installation

For Working Alternatives, curators Mackenzie Schneider, Terri C Smith, and Jess Wilcox explore three threads of alternative art platforms and production: conviviality and food as components in alternative art space programming and mission (Wilcox); artists using media such as radio, television, and newspapers as alternative venues for presenting work (Schneider); and artist collectives presented in a living archive with weekly changing exhibitions using archive materials (Smith). In addition to historical examples, the exhibition also includes original artworks by contemporary artists that reflect and expand on the showʼs themes. Working Alternatives’ artists include: Paul Branca, Jaime Davidovich, ESP TV, Group Material, Ann Hirsch, Alison Knowles, Tom Marioni, Anna Ostoya, Legacy Russell, Chris Sollars and Jerome Waag. Artist collectives involved will constantly evolve and grow, they include:  Basekamp, Conflict Kitchen, Fierce Pussy, Howling Mob Society, JustSeeds, M12 Studios, Paper Tiger, Philly Stake, The Pinky Show, Second Front, SubRosa, Temporary Services, and W.A.G.E.

Franklin Street Works is also excited to collaborate on several off-site artworks, including the live radio broadcast of an Ann Hirsch performance on WPKN, Bridgeport, and collages by Anna Ostoya in the Stamford Advocate via four, monthly ads during the show’s run.

More on Working Alternatives’ thematic sections

BREAKING BREAD

In the upstairs gallery next to Franklin Street Works’ café, curator Jess Wilcox presents creative and alternative projects that involve gathering and communing with food and beverages. This “Breaking Bread” theme imagines the kitchen table as an alternative space, presenting contemporary participatory, culinary art projects in juxtaposition with several 1970’s food art projects. According to Wilcox, “This thread of the show traces conviviality as a key characteristic that emerged from and continues to be central to alternative art practices.  These artists use food’s dual nature as something that both equalizes and distinguishes as means to explore ideas of collaboration, collectivity, individuality, and community.  Food unites us as humans in need of sustenance, but also divides and marks us culturally and politically.”  Paul Branca, Tom Marioni, Legacy Russell, Chris Sollars and Jerome Waag take on these ideas through works that incorporate food and drink with performance, sculpture, and interactive installations. There are also several collaborative food-related events in the works. Check out Franklin Street Works’ website in November and December for updates.

ART BROADCASTING

Chris Burden, Chris Burden Promo, 1976

The “Art Broadcasting” segment of the exhibition is curated by Mackenzie Schneider and takes a look at artists that have used media as a way to distribute their work. Local newspapers, radio, and cable access have served as alternative spaces in and of themselves, allowing for the exhibition of work that offers alternative perspectives from the regularly scheduled programming. Beginning with a brief history from the 1970’s to today and then leading to works commissioned by emerging artists, the exhibition will explore media as an unexpected venue for art. Historic examples in the exhibition include videos by Chris Burden, cable access broadcasts produced by Jaime Davidovich, and New York Times newspaper inserts by Group Material.

The contemporary segment of “Art Broadcasting” will include three artworks placed into the Fairfield County region via newspaper, radio, and television. Brooklyn performance artist Ann Hirsch explores the contemporary portrayal of women in the media by inserting herself into popular culture through reality TV shows, Twitter and YouTube. For this exhibition Hirsch will perform on public radio for the first time thanks to Bridgeport, Connecticut’s, independent radio station, WPKN.  For the television component, a video shoot featuring ESP TV will take place at Franklin Street Works.  Slated for November 10, ESP TV will tape an installment of their nomadic showcase of contemporary and experimental art presenting music, performance, and video art in front of a live audience. Bringing print media into the mix, works by Anna Ostoya will be carried in the Stamford Advocate.  Ostoya will create a monthly collage in the newspaper using elements from the newspaper itself, simultaneously responding to and inserting herself into the local context.

COLLECTIVE ACTION

Not for Sale PAD/D’s project against Displacement, PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution) poster, from Gregory Sholette’s Dark Matter archive: http://www.darkmatterarchives.net

For the “collective action” component of Working Alternatives Franklin Street Works’ team put out a call for materials from artist collectives working today as an informal exploration of that landscape. There are relatively recent examples of exhibitions and projects that overlap in some ways with this archive/alternative space concept, consequently, curator and FSW Creative Director, Terri C Smith, sees this project as one addition to a layered, ongoing investigation – as one exploratory moment that reflects the pulse of creative collective action today. Materials will be presented in an open archive that visitors can explore as part of an immersive installation that includes changing, weekly exhibitions drawn from the archive’s materials. This section of the exhibition was inspired, in part, by Gregory Sholette’s book Dark Matter and PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution).  PAD/D was an activist art group whose stated purpose was, “To provide artists with an organized relationship to society, to demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making, and to provide a framework within which progressive artists can discuss and develop alternatives to the mainstream art system.” The installation will, consequently, also include reproductions of documents from the PAD/D archive as an informative, historical backdrop for the contemporary materials collected by Franklin Street Works.

Franklin Street Works programming includes on and off site collaborative projects. We were excited to be asked to collaborate with ArtSpace New Haven on a project as part of the City Wide Open Studios alternative space on October 20 and 21!

On view October 20 and 21 at the New Haven Register Building at 40 Sargent Dr., New Haven, Connecticut, Another Crystal Land is a group exhibition curated by Terri C Smith. The show simultaneously explores the crystal’s structural characteristics/behaviors and its history within contemporary art. A starting point for the exhibition is the work of conceptual artist Robert Smithson, who was inspired by crystals, especially salt crystals, leading to his ambitious earth art work, The Spiral Jetty, 1970.

Debra Baxter and Margot Quan Knight

For the exhibition Another Crystal Land artists bring contemporary attitudes, technologies, and approaches to the mix of science/ science fiction references, shamanistic voices, and conceptual art making that Smithson explored in his work, making the crystal their own. Artists include: Debra Baxter & Margot Quan Knight, Ben Goddard, Chris McIntyre, Lucy Raven, Rob Smith, and Robert Smithson. A reading room of Robert Smithson books as well as poster-sized reproductions of critic/writer Ann Reynolds’  ”Crystal Land” text from her book Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere will further contextualize this two-day exhibition, which is organically arranged throughout the industrial newspaper production site. This is a collaborative project between ArtSpace, New Haven, and Franklin Street Works, Stamford, Connecticut.

VHS The Exhibition: September 6 – October 14, 2012

Free, public reception, Thursday, September 13 from 5:00 – 8:00 pm. Gallery Walk Through, Thursday October 6, 6:00 – 6:45 followed by cocktails in the cafe.

(Recommended Reading for this show: Stamford Advocate article by Scott Gargan;  VHS The Exhibition Catalog, also available on site; and Rebecca Cleman’s article “Ghosts in the Machine” on VHS and the horror film genre. Click HERE to see installation photographs)

The black VHS tape, a brick-like relic of the pre-digital age, is a dark talisman of analog video culture.  Now a mysterious and outmoded technology that necessitates a physical ritual of loading the tape into the jaws of a temperamental VCR, the widespread marketing of a home video system of video cameras, recording decks, and cassette tapes in the 1980s represented a sea change in how individuals engaged with television.

Trevor Shimizu, "Final Analog Broadcast," 2009, 48 min, color, sound, courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, NY.

VHS The Exhibition, which is the brainchild of guest curator Rebecca Cleman, will explore the use of this format for artistic experimentation.  The exhibition will include works by Robert Beck, Sadie Benning, Dustin Guy Defa, James Fotopoulos, and Trevor Shimizu. Artworks will be accompanied by ephemera from ‘80s-era home video culture, such as the glitchy computer-generated, anti-corporate corporate spokesman Max Headroom, to give a broad perspective on the cultural shifts created by this technological phenomenon in entertainment, life, and art.

Artists have used video for personal ends since the release of the first consumer-grade video cameras in the 1960s.  This equipment gave them a way to intervene and critique the hegemony of television, often by focusing on themes and subjects that were excluded from mainstream broadcasts.  For many of these artists, it was important to characterize these interventions as alternative modes of professional production that could subvert the matrix of corporate television.  A later use of amateur home video equipment could also be described as anti-television and countercultural – but the innately low quality of VHS, related to its mass-market appeal, further illustrates how artists self-reflexively work with antiquated technology to provoke art mythologies of value, authenticity, and permanence.

Dustin Guy Defa, "Family Nightmare," 2011, 10 min, color, sound, courtesy of the artist

More than being formalist explorations of VHS’s inherent qualities, the works in this exhibition engage the psychological associations of the medium, especially those that reflect the fragility of institutions, whether of self, family or society. The ability to watch TV shows on one’s own schedule or to forego the broadcasters altogether to watch self-procured or self-produced content made the experience of television more private and interactive.  Cleman adds, “As an alternative to sanctioned broadcasts, home video enabled the broad distribution of unwholesome entertainment, marking the VHS tape as a carrier of ungovernable, possibly even corrosive content.  The ominous VHS tape of dubious origin, referenced in dark-themed films like Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, David Lynch’s Lost Highway, or the forthcoming horror film V/H/S, evokes an unconscious confusion of sex, violence, and death.”  Drawing connections such as these, Cleman positions VHS The Exhibition as an exploration of the cultural impact of home video on both a public and personal front. The exhibition will be on view from September 6 through October 14, 2012. A free, public reception is scheduled during the show’s second week, Thursday, September 13 from 5:00 – 8:00 pm.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Rebecca Cleman is the Director of Distribution of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. She has programmed screenings for the New York Underground Film Festival, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives and the Migrating Forms Festival among other venues.  In 2010 she co-curated the media content for Amnesia at Andrea Rosen Gallery. She has most recently organized two programs within the VHS series at the Museum of Art and Design, NY, and published an essay on the subject of horror movies and home video for the Moving Image Source.  Cleman lives and works in NYC.

These Transitional Spaces is a group exhibition organized around contemporary art objects whose representational imagery crystallizes the temporal. The exhibition is curated by artist Seth Kelly for the not-for-profit art space, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, Connecticut. The art in These Transitional Spaces was chosen for its ability to simultaneously represent the time of its making and suggest the impossibility of a specific time and space being fully captured. These qualities allow for the works to serve as visual thresholds within the gallery, prompting viewers to imagine alternative spaces and histories. Artists include Matthew Buckingham, Matt Ducklo, Ilana Halperin, Dana Hoey, Adam Putnam, Karsten Krejcarek, John Miller, Matthew Ronay, and Aura Rosenberg. The exhibition is on view June 30 – August 26, 2012. The free, public reception is Saturday, June 30, 5:00 – 8:00 pm.

Can representational visual systems evoke presence and absence of space transforming it in the same ways that abstract works using light, color, and shape do? These Transitional Spaces proposes spatial transformations that expand beyond an abstract game of the senses.  Everyday scenes, objects, and shared histories act like a distorted mirror that transitions viewers from actual time/space to imagined eras, interiors, and worlds via videos, sculptures, and photographs. These works alter our sensory and psychological relationships to physical environments, including those of exhibition spaces themselves.

With Matthew Buckingham’s The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E. the grand symbolism of a nation’s leaders, fathers in stone, is transported into the future through photo manipulation, sparking viewer imaginations and challenging them to cognitively contextualize an unforeseeable future. Ilana Halperin, on the other hand, evokes the past via new, cast objects made of the mineral composition found in cave formations such as stalactites. In both, the past and present are shifted through suggestions of other times and places.

The real and imagined take a more whimsical, sometimes satirical, turn with the inclusion of Dana Hoey’s Rainbow Painter – the photo features a romanticized, lounging artist and his muses; a floating plastic pear that is John Miller’s sculpture Pear Ubu; and the plastered smiles and stiff styling of Matt Ducklo’s WTVY Dothan, 2011, from The Newscasters series. These works suggest other spaces through the inclusion of set-like elements. With Ducklo’s photograph, characters that usually enter our homes from the virtual dimension of television in the form of light and sound are frozen, waiting for their cue. In Hoey’s photo, a “rainbow painter” and two young women recline by a tree, framed by a rainbow painted onto a concrete wall. The painting within the photograph is made in a style that straddles trompe l’eoil and street art. Its artifice is obvious and a bit out of place, creating a tension in the photograph between the urban and pastoral, between the earthly and the heavenly. With Pear Ubu, the humble plastic pear escapes the fruit bowl and gravity itself, simultaneously becoming a mental prompt and a theatrical prop in the gallery.

These Transitional Spaces also expresses its spatiotemporal concerns through the visceral. With Adam Putnam’s live video feed of an architectural model, the breathing “bones” of a building’s interior anthropomorphizes domestic space, creating a “living” room from a static object using a “live” video feed. The location becomes the subject, sexualized, yet devoid of human bodies — a place of projected space and fantasy existing silently on its own.  In The Astrological Ways, Sagittarius, by Aura Rosenberg, inverted silhouettes of paint on canvas float within the field as the canvas floats on the wall. Like a pear hovering in the gallery or a rainbow painted on cement, these white bodies drifting in black space are plucked from any typical living situation and are then aligned thematically with a heavenly pseudo-science through the artwork’s title. Also grounded in black and relating to the figure, Matthew Ronay’s Cloak of Tears is a collage painting on black canvas that references ceremonial dress, transforming the wearer into a sign of cosmic totemism. Finally, a disembodied voice hovers over the art space’s threshold, a location symbolizing transition between architecture and the world, in Karsten Krejcarek’s Nueva Era de Santo Daime. In this sound piece, a voice calls to the woods from a fictional time in the future. With Nueva Era de Santo Daime, time, space, and body coalesce in a fictitious, time-bending narrative that aids in transitioning the visitor from exterior to interior as they enter the gallery.

The venue of Franklin Street Works is an exhibition space with a history of physical alterations. A nineteenth-century house with elements of the interior organized by the Bauhaus line via recent renovations, this location offers a unique setting in which to highlight the shared nature of these artists’ concerns surrounding the spatiotemporal.  The art space’s transitions, whether historical through use and renovation or from room to room as visitors travel the building itself, create a metaphorically rich environment in which to examine art’s aptitude for transitioning our space via imaginative conjecture, subject, and compositional structures.

Stamford Advocate Article/ It’s Relevant Video/

House Arrest is a group exhibition where artists intentionally challenge assumptions about the comforts of home. Works feature everything from Corin Hewitt’s disquieting still life photographs to Elizabeth Demaray’s upholstered rubble couch to Martha Rosler’s

Martha Rosler, Lounging Woman, 2004 Photomontage. Courtesy of Mitchell-Inness & Nash

politically charged collages. The result is a crosscurrent of alternative meanings and meanderings that flip the domestic on its head, exploring the complex relationships between daily life and everyday objects.  The exhibition is on view April 5 – June 10, 2012. A free public reception will be held April 5 from 5:00 – 8:00 pm.

House Arrest is curated by Terri C Smith whose approach to the installation will significantly alter the physical qualities of the space’s three galleries, creating living rooms of artworks that are informed by the history of Franklin Street Works’ Victorian row house buildings — originally working class homes –as well as the makeshift domestic situations at recent political protest sites such as Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park.

Participating artists are: Hector Arce-Espasas, Francis Cape, Alex Da Corte, Elizabeth Demaray, Stuart Elster, Marley Freeman, Jared Haug, Nate Heiges, Sean Hemmerle, Corin Hewitt, Rachel Higgins, David Horvitz, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Justine Kurland, ROLU, Martha Rosler, Heather Rowe, Penelope Umbrico, Se Young, and Helen Zajkowski.

Hector Arce-Espasas, Sheltering Sky, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

House Arrest also features a curated shop and zine by Talisein and original publications curated by David Horvitz in collaboration with several independent publishers: andreview, Dominica, Fillip, and Triple Canopy. The exhibition features a PDF catalog that includes an interview on curating with ordinary objects between Taliesin and Bodhi Landa, an exhibition essay by Terri C Smith and Lisa A Porter’s essay on Zuccotti Park from a material culture perspective.

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CATALOG / INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS / REVIEW IN THIS IS TOMORROW / RECEPTION PHOTOGRAPHS /

Franklin Street Works presents a series of video exhibitions titled Heavy Rotation. The exhibition will be on view from February 24 – March 16, 2012.

Reception: March 1, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Karsten Krejcarek, "We Believe in Everything"

Through multiple, short-lived, thematic shows, Heavy Rotation aims to provide an adrenaline rush of shifting contexts, fresh curatorial perspectives, and highly varied technologies. The show’s fluid structure also asks us to imagine an exhibition as a series of changing visual events, rather than a static installation.

In Heavy Rotation‘s roster, one grouping includes artists who harness specific elements from nature (including rocks, water, snow, and a snail) as imagery while simultaneously foregrounding a handful of unique approaches to “process” in the act of art making. Love and interpersonal relationships inform another show, which explores romantic communications, desires, and miscommunications via a variety of platforms and situations, including Chat Roulette, Craigslist singles ads, and public display of affection.  A third installation maps psychological and sociological landscapes that engage the viewer in privately-informed, off-kilter narratives situated in culturally specific, mentally imaginative, and geographically peripheral environments. Finally, New York-based curator Anthony Thornton rounds out the schedule with a selection of videos that explore the public inevitability of private performance within our increasingly connected world.

Grant Worth, "Unbirthday Alice for Philip"

Participating artists:  Bobby Chirila, Petra Cortright, Tim Davis, Keith Edmier, Lindsey Eskind, Don Evans, Jesse Fleming, T. Foley, Alexa Gerrity,  Matteo Giordano, Ilana Halperin, Seth Kelly, Noriko Koshida, Karsten Krejcarek, Camille Laurelli, David O’Reilly, Ariana Page Russel, John Pilson, Cheryl Pope, Joshua Seidner, Rbt. Sps., Brent Stewart, and Grant Worth.

Installment Dates and Artists:

Naturally / February 24 – 29 / Keith Edmier, Jesse Fleming, Ilana Halperin, Seth Kelly, Cheryl Pope and Brent Stewart. Click HERE for more on Naturally‘s theme and artist bios.

Let’s Talk About Love / March 1 – 4 / Lindsey Eskind, T. Foley, Noriko Koshida, David O’Reilly, John Pilson, Joshua Seidner.

Peripheral Landscapes / March 8 – 10 / Tim Davis, Don Evans, Alexa Gerrity, Karsten Krejcarek / Rbt. Sps., Grant Worth

INTO-ME-cy curated by Anthony Thornton / March 11 – 16 / Bobby Chirila, Petra Cortright, Matteo Giordano, Camille Laurelli, Ariana Page Russell

Slipstreams: Contemporary Artistic Practice and the Shaping of Time

The perception, measurement, and manipulation of time in our everyday lives is a performance, both personal and shared. We agree on the indications of clocks and calendars, yet often disagree on the length of collective experiences, such as prayer or a television program. Language also influences how we “feel” a moment’s passage. Phrases such as “running out of time,” “wasting time,” and “on time,” cause us to feel hurried or relaxed, even responsible or irresponsible. Rituals, both societal and self-made, do the same. READ MORE

Dates: September 22 – November 13, 2011

Artists: Trisha Baga Lukas Geronimas, and Mads Lynnerup

Curator: Terri C. Smith (see more on the exhibition at curator’s blog)

For Fernando, artists Trisha Baga, Lukas Geronimas, and Mads Lynnerup collaborate with curator Terri C. Smith to develop an exhibition that is informed, in part, by Franklin Street Works’ location in the city of Stamford, Connecticut, and its unique position as a new alternative art space. Preparations for Fernando began this summer with Baga, Geronimas, Lynnerup, and Smith embarking on a two-day orientation in Stamford that included: tours of the Avon Theatre and NBC studios; discussions about Stamford’s downtown revitalization and historic architecture; and visits with civic leaders. Through ongoing exploratory approaches, the artists will continue developing deeper understandings of Stamford’s communities, organizations, and infrastructures as their original projects unfold. The exhibition’s structure promotes surprises and flux, fostering situations that welcome improvisation and experimentation.

VIDEO WALK THROUGH OF FERNANDO

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 22, 5:00 – 8:00PM

City Saturday event: Saturday, October 22, 12:00 – 6:00PM/Trisha Baga’s “Garden Party” 

Click on the categories below to view documents from the exhibition:

INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS / INTRODUCTORY TEXT/

PRESS RELEASE / EXHIBITION ESSAY /EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

LINKS: Terri C Smith; Trisha Baga; Lukas Geronimas; Mads Lynnerup