My Wallet's Back!

I lost my wallet this week but today I got it back with everything still in it! Good people really exists and I'm extremely lucky! Next week I'll celebrate with some shopping! NEW YORK I LOVE YOU!

MY FIRST EXHIBITION IN NY!

 

a group exhibition featuring Fluxers from this past year

 

Opening reception & performance: Saturday, February 16th, 6 pm – 9 pm
Exhibition dates: February 16th – 24th
Closing event, IRON CHEF FLUX: Saturday, February 23rd, 6 – 8 pm
Hours: open weekends, 12 – 6 pm or by appointment (call 413.441.6632)
Location: Flux Factory, 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, New York 11101

OH Flux. Flux Factory is a complex web that encompasses an artist collective, an international residency program, a non profit organization, a packed schedule of exhibitions, events, and educational initiatives, and above all, an expansive, intentional, ever-transitioning community. anything ANYTHING highlights Flux’s diverse composition and the exciting and tricky balance of all of its ambitions. This group exhibition features artists who have taken part in the Flux community this past year, showcasing the individual work of both residents and administrators in the gallery. At 7:30 PM, the audience is invited to participate in a group performance led by Maria Pecchioli as part of her project Plotting the Urban Body. We’ll also be putting our culinary abilities to the test in a live Iron Chef Flux battle, welcoming a new bathroom to the house by collaborating on a new installation inside. Come out to Flux and see all that happens under this roof!

 

 

Cæsar Serien #2

In Socrates Sculpture Park

In Socrates Sculpture Park

In Socrates Sculpture Park

In Socrates Sculpture Park

In Socrates Sculpture Park

In Socrates Sculpture Park

Jumping into the snow!

Queensboro Bridge

At Blue Note with Pierre

Yesterday, the same night when Aliya Bonar opened the show PowerSuit Camp, Pierre invited me to see bassist Ron Carter and his quartet live at Blue Note.

Ron Carter is a legend! He played with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock in the 60s, these are the two I know best, but the list of collaborators goes on! Ron Carter is old, very old.

This video is from 1967:

When we got to Blue Note in Greenwich Village I noticed the sign on the building, it said "Jazz Capital of the World", later I came to understand why.

At this night's concert Ron Carter played with pianist Renee Rosnes, Payton Crossley on drums and Rolando Morales-Matos on percussion.

 

When I got home I was overwhelmed with joy, what an amazing night!

About the Blue Note:

"Since its inception in 1981, Blue Note has become one of the premier jazz clubs in the world and a cultural institution in Greenwich Village. Owner and founder Danny Bensusan had a vision to create a jazz club in Greenwich Village that would treat deserving artists with respect, while allowing patrons to see the world's finest jazz musicians in a close, comfortable setting. (...) Jazz is undoubtedly America's music, and while Blue Note strives to preserve the history of jazz, the club is a place where progression and innovation - the foundations of jazz - are encouraged and practiced on a nightly basis. (...) Blue Note gives artists the musical freedom they deserve, and jazz fans get a chance to see the most unlikely combination of stars night after night on the Blue Note stage.
After twenty-five years of success, Blue Note continues to carry the torch for jazz into the 21st century in the cultural heart of New York, Greenwich Village.

Power Suit Camp

 

How would you look like if you for one day could become your own biggest dream?

 

 

 

 

Aliya is fascinated by the way we are able perform our dreams and get empowered through clothing. With the exhibition and social project Power Suit Camp at Flux Factory she generously facilitates a platform where a group of young girl scouts get a chance to face and engage with their biggest dreams while answering the question: What would your courage self wear, do and say? 

 

 

 

 

Over this past week Aliya, a team of other artists and the girl scouts have met every afternoon to explore their dream jobs in a fashionable and creative enviroment, created by Aliya. Together this team of girly forces have invented dance moves, made zines and designed personalized Power Suits. Power Suit Camp will open up to the public on Februrary 9th where the girl scouts will do a fashion show to show off their creations and most powerful selves. How would you look like if you for one day could become your own biggest dream?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a little girl I dreamed of becoming an artist and I spend most of my time in my room doing different drawings and creating my own imagenary worlds. For as long as I can remember my family pushed and pursued me to go in that direction. When I got older expectations grew taller while I continuesly grew smaller. At the time when I finished high school and was about to set out to conquer the world and pursue my dream job, I felt so little that I didn't have the courage to go after the dream that had shaped my life. Instead I went on a heartbreaking search for a new dream.
 

At a certain age you realize that dreams you keep close to your heart are not only good. They're build up around different personal, social and economic expectations, which makes them difficult to live up to in real life. Most people realize that at a young age. For me, that turn came pretty late in life.

 

 

 

 

2,5 years ago Aliya moved to New York to create a life as an artist. One of the first things she noticed was how easily social situations could turn into business and how strangers responded to her confident. In New York she became more aware of her self image and as time went by she realized that her confident was empowered through her clothing. She started playing with different costumes and dressed up in different suits in order to get a clearer understanding of how the life in a big city is structured and functions and how identity is created. This personal discovery is one of the reasons why she decided to do the exhibition and social project Power Suit Camp.

 

When I met up with Aliya and as we talked about dream job it suddenly occured to me, that this was the first time in what felt like years I had told someone about my childhood dreams. What had actually happened since that time I decided to give up my dream? How does my dreams look like today?

 

 

 

Besides being passionate about fashion and art Aliya is passionate about community. She has worked with Creative Time, Flux Factory, Elsewhere Collaborative, The Wassaic Project, the Laundromat Project, and the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute where she has taught workshops and produced events that engage everyday people in making authentic connections, which also is the case with Power Suit Camp.

 

The exhibition and social project Power Suit Camp adresses the issues and beautiful aspects of pursuing your dream job and dreams in general.  Power Suit Camp provides a vulnerable space where people can meet and share their stories, joys and sorrows. Power Suit Camp is not a one woman show, but it is inspired from her own thoughts, dreams and insecurities. Power Suit Camp is about accepting your own vulnerability by sharing it with others. After talking with Aliya I realized I'm really happy about where I am today. As it got harder for me to express myself in drawings, it became easier for me to write. I may not be an artist today, but I'm in a place where I'm close to the art, describing it and creating images with words.

What I have learned through this experience with Power Suit Camp is that we don't always need our dreams to come true. But we need our dreams in order to have something that pushes us forward and makes life worth living. So put on your best power suit, join the movement and face your dreams!

 

 

Conversation Project with Victor Valqui Vidal: E-mail #4

Last Friday I went to an opening where I received a tip: Jonathan Crary is currently teaching a course named ”Origins of Visual Culture” at Columbia University. I asked if it was possible to attend, when you're not student at Columbia. I was told ”yes, but he wants to meet you then”. Early monday morning I took the Q-train then the 1-train to Columbia University. I have studied and used Jonathan Crary's writings a lot during my master. Especially last semester where I did a video project followed up by a verbal and theoretical presentation.

My investigation was centered around the kaleidoscope as a way of seeing. I asked following question: How does the kaleidoscope influence on subjectivity, the human vision and our perception of reality?

 

A kaleidoscope is a collection of narrow mirror pieces that are put together inside a circular tube. In the tube and between the mirror pieces are loose beads and other colorful small objects. When the subject keeps kaleidoscope up to the light, looking through one end of the tube while rotating it, a symmetrical dynamic and imaginative patterns can be seen. The word 'kaleidoscope' comes from the Greek words 'kalos', which means 'beautiful', and 'eidos', which means 'form' and 'skopein', which means 'see'. So overall 'vision of a beautiful form'. The optical device was invented in 1816 by David Brewster and is today most often used as toys. At that time, the kaleidoscope was used as a tool for philosophical wonder and amazement. Since its birth the kaleidoscope has found its way into the language as a metaphor for an expansion of consciousness, which "Lucy in the Sky with Diamond" by The Beatles (1967) is an example of:

"Picture yourself in a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies / Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, / A girl with kaleidoscope eyes"
 

 

The words "kaleidoscope eyes" have later - and especially with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) - developed to describe the state you are in when you are high on drugs. The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) used the kaleidoscope as an image of modernity's emergence, where being a "kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness" was the goal for "the lover of universal life" (Crary (1992) 113).

The kaleidoscope as a visual form builds upon the mathematical concept of the Cartesian perspective, which has dominated the human vision and our ideas of perception since the Renaissance. In the Renaissance the visual arts became realistic, the surrounding physical world was rediscovered, religion superseded by science, and mathematics was available as a tool for the painter, why the Cartesian perspective was invented. With the Cartesian perspective the artist could create a window directly to reality through precise, mathematical markings. The same counts for the Albertian window and Dürer's grid. But the Cartesian perspective, the Albertian window and Dürer's grid also established an ideal towards the relationship between the observer (in this case often the painter) and his object with the observer placed in the center, totally focused on the object. Feminist theorists refer to this as 'the male gaze'. This kind of passivity has since been both criticized and challenged.

 

In the book Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary describes how these historical and technical changes in visual culture is inseparable from a major restructuring of subjectivity.

 

With my video project I wanted to examine how the kaleidoscope as both a visual form and a way of seeing affects our perception of reality, our self-understanding and behaviour. It was my hypothesis that the kaleidoscope provides a non-hierartic way of seing, which expands the human vision and decentralizes the human subject. As Jonathan Crary, I prefer to use the word 'perception' instead of 'the gaze' and 'beholding', since the word allow to involve other senses than vision.

 

The video project is called Let Him Eat Cake is pieced together from various fragments of personal memories.  Let Him Eat Cake is about unrequited love and the relationship between fantasy and reality, to re-use the image from The Beatles; being in love is like being on drugs.

What happens to my self-understanding and perception of reality when I'm both the observer and the observed and when I write a fictional text upon my own biography?

You can read the text which's being read aloud in the video here:

Sidst jeg var hjemme hos dig, havde du igen købt gulerodskage fra Netto. Det var den der med råhvid ostecreme og noget, der ligner knuste nødder eller ristede havreflager, drysset ovenpå til 18,95 kroner. Du havde kun spist lidt af den. Du ved sikkert ikke, at jeg bemærkede, at den lå på gulvet ved din seng og var pakket ind i plastik. Det gør ikke noget, at du ikke tilbød mig et stykke.

Gulerodskagen var af mærket Coolmore Foods. Den indeholder valnødder og hvedegluten og æg og mælkeprodukter og soja og cirka 13 procent revne gulerødder og bør opbevares i køleskabet efter åbning. Den var mindst holdbar til mandag d. 30. marts 2012.

Du havde en skjorte på med en, to, tre, fire, fem, seks knapper, som jeg knappede op.

Persiennerne var rullet ned foran det ene vindue, og der stod flyttekasser stablet ovenpå hinanden og ved siden af hinanden i det aflange rum.

Hvis mine øjne var en altan hvorfra du kunne stå og se ud på verden, ville du så være i stand til at se det samme som jeg kan se?

Jeg kan huske dine hænder og bilen og Museumsgade.

Jeg kan huske, at vi drak rosévin og Gyldne Damer på Dronning Louises bro i de sene timer i oktober, mens vi så på stjerner, der faldt.

Jeg kan huske, at du var træt af at blive sammenlignet med John Mayer.

Jeg kan huske brevet til Berlin og trusserne og citatet af PJ Harvey.

Jeg kan huske, at jeg sad bag på din cykel iført en kort orange kjole, og du var i Flower Power sæt med voldsom vidde, og at fuglene var begyndt at synge i parcelhuskvarteret i Århus, og dit dæk var fladt.

Jeg kan huske, at jeg lagde mærke til dig, og at du kom hen og spurgte, om vi skulle følges, og at vi stod af på Kottbusser Tor og delte morgenmad på et fortovshjørne på Oranienstrasse, og at vi senere kyssede på Mariannen Platz i 26 graders sol.

Jeg kan huske den nat i din opgang, og at det regnede med konfetti.

Jeg kan huske kjolen med lynlåsen.

Jeg kan huske de ord og de billeder, der voksede i min mave, da jeg kom hjem og lå i min egen seng den morgen, og at jeg manglede søvn, men at jeg ikke kunne finde ro.

Jeg kan huske, at jeg overvejede, om du ville have mig til at være en anden.

Jeg kan huske, at jeg tit har tænkt, at det er svært med den her slags situationer, og at jeg ikke ved, hvordan man bør forholde sig til dem.

Jeg kan huske, at du ikke ville kysse mig.

Hjemme hos mig er vinduerne åbne, og på bordet venter en gulerodskage med flormelis, drysset let henover den lune og fugtige overflade. Jeg har bagt den i tilfælde af, du nu skulle komme forbi.

Hvis mine øjne var en altan hvorfra du kunne stå og se ud på verden, ville du så være i stand til at se det samme, som jeg kan se?

Phuc Le: Forced Entry

Forced Entry features work from Phuc Le's three continuing projects: So Hip!, Grindr Tests,
and Expedition: Southwest.

So Hip! is an ongoing photographic series spanning from 2007 to present. In each photograph, Le dresses his father in an outfit from his own wardrobe in order to emulate youth fashion - mainly, ads and images from American Apparel, Vice Magazine, and similar sub-pop-media. The series evolved from commenting on cultural commodity to re-connecting with family and in its current state, he finds beauty in making these images as a chronological catalog of portraits, simultaneously, of both himself and his father.

To produce Grindr Tests, Le uses Grindr - the first phone-app of its kind that utilizes GPS technology to locate gay men who are, by chance, online at the same time in close vicinity to one another. Discovering the app through friends who are active users, he is interested in opportunities that this technology may bring to a community living on the fringe. With the approach of a fashion "test shoot", Le puts himself in the position of both participant and observer as he flows  in and out of his subject's bubble. The photographing session is almost always arranged for one to two hours in the late afternoon, and afterwards, a mini-date of sort continues either at a bar or a restaurant as compensation for the men's cooperation (instead of money exchange).

Expedition: Southwest came out of the notion that a new cultural identity is able to establish without assimilating to an existing group of people. For Le, the approval from the land holds more validity than the approval of any hegemonic group. As he journey out on road-expeditions in hope of understanding the regional landmass that he calls home and creating myths in the manners of Darwin and Lewis & Clarke, Le projects himself onto unyielding landscapes of the American Southwest.

Even though the three projects are seperate, Forced Entry is supposed to be viewed upon as a Whole - to be experienced in the same way you would with different tracks on a music album. His photographic works are as traditional as they are contemporary, combining family portraits and landscapes with fashion imagery to emulate mythological portraits of religious figures and pop icons. Exploring the roles of an anthropologist, a photographer, director, stylist, and even casting agent, his photographs start as a visceral viewing experience then slowly reveal the layers of interactions between himself and his subjects. Being part participant and part observer, he explores the limbo space between an insider and an outsider of cultures, gender, and systems.

Born in Vietnam (1985) and developed in Orange County and Los Angeles, he is currently living and working in New York as an artist-in-residence at Flux Factory. His residency and the exhibition Forced Entry is made possible in part by the New York Community Trust Fellowship.

Text by Mille Højerslev Nielsen in close collaboration with Phuc Le.