School 33 Art Center presents three new exhibitions on view Friday, December 7, 2018 through Saturday, February 2, 2019. The public is invited to a free opening reception on Friday, December 14 from 6pm-9pm.
Your silence will not protect you. (Main Gallery)
Curated by Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, “Your silence will not protect you.” presents five black womyn artists from across the country: Akea Brionne Brown, Alex Callender, Vickie Pierre, LaNia Sproles and Gracie Xavier in a group show about black womyn’s experiences in America—past, present and future. The title references Audre Lorde’s seminal essay on activism, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”“Your silence will not protect you.” addresses many silences, both historic and contemporary. This multimedia exhibition explores subtle variances and correlations across a broad spectrum of experience for black womyn today. Considering contemporary tropes concerning black womyn’s bodies, the commercialization of blackness and the continued haunting of the American past, the five artists presented content with the status quo both in broad social terms, but also within hierarchical art world structures. Here, past is more than present—it is consciousness.
Image caption: Alex Callender, “Beyond the Borders of New Space and Lost Time”
Nature As A Metaphor For Economic, Emotional And Existential Horror (Members Gallery)
“Nature As A Metaphor For Economic, Emotional And Existential Horror” by Stephanie Barber utilizes words as sculptural elements to contemplate the morphological state of language and nature. This third iteration of the project includes still photographs, hand lettered texts, vending machine sentences, viewfinder essays and a single channel video. Barber has created a diverse body of work in a variety of media. The poignancy of life, considered through small imagined biographies, playful and rigorous poetic essays, song-poems, screenplays or haiku-esque distillations of everyday moments is her most traveled terrain. Barber’s films have received solo exhibitions at MoMA, New York City; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco; National Film Academy, Prague; Lowenbraukunst, Zurich; Anthology Film Archives, New York City, among others. Her books These Here Separated… and Night Moves were published by Publishing Genius Press, and her collection of short stories All The People was published by Ink Press Productions.
Image caption: Images of works from “Nature As A Metaphor For Economic, Emotional And Existential Horror” by Stephanie Barber
Labor of Suggestion (Project Space)
“Labor of Suggestion” by Emily Culver is devoted to inhibiting and obscuring direct access. Evocative of shelving, food presentation and preparation, the works presented recall scenarios in which objects of desire are within view yet out of reach. Unlike a consumer ogling sweetmeats, the voyeur’s gaze in this space becomes obstructed by a thin film—a skin barrier that reduces both the silhouette and the detail of the contents inside to a fuzzy blur. Through the diffusion this visual information, the relationship between bodies in the space becomes one of pure speculative experience. Existing primarily as sculpture, objects, and jewelry, Culver’s work explores notions of intimacy, (non)functionality, gender, and identity through corporeal qualities.