Even Robarts: from the series “popsicles”

Open Source is proud to present Evan Robarts and James Moore.
A collaborative installation opening on Saturday, February 11th, 2012.

Responding to their environment, Evan Robarts and James Moore will be presenting two site specific works intending to activate the space into a different dimension based on their work’s energies. Both artists work is characterized by formal and conceptual experimentation with material and a desire to transform thoughts into objects. An exchange and interplay of notions ranging from platonic ideals, semiology, biomimicry and nostalgia influence and infiltrate one another changing the original context of their individual pieces while its interplay creates a new understanding to the larger work as singular whole.

Evan Robarts’ work stems from an attraction to material and form as a means to capture the ideal and eternal. Reaching back to his childhood, he incorporates nostalgic memories, colors, and objects in his work. “Youth is central in my work, I relate very strongly to the evocative pull of the mysticism and unencumbered joy of childhood.” says Robarts about his work.

James Moore experiments with industrial objects that symbolically resemble organic matter, such as foam as tree sap, electrical circuits as a human nervous system, and modern, architectural spaces with life forms and bodily matter seeping from the cracks. “I often inject what I see as a mutating, extraterrestrial, and psychedelic life force into my work in order to resurrect or rebirth a space in contrast. ”

At Open Source Evan Robarts shows a variation of the series “popsicles”. He covers the concrete floor with (melted) popsicles. In juxtaposition to Evans nostalgic installation, James Moore will install a single light sculpture that leaks a primordial ooze out of the bulbs, reminiscent of the office light at one’s day job, or factory. As if it had a mysterious visitor channelling through it from another world.

Performance
March 2nd, 8PM

Brooklyn-based artist, composer and musician Sara Bouchard returns to Open Source for a special combined performance and exhibition of her recently completed song cycle and series of works on paper “The News: Monday-Friday.”

The two parts of “The News” each consist of five songs that Sara wrote in five consecutive days. Each day, from Monday through Friday, Sara collaged lyrics from words and phrases cut out of that day’s newspaper and used her background in American roots music to interpret the corresponding melody and instrumental accompaniment. Sara carried out this rigorous exercise during a week in 2010 to create Part 1 and again in 2011 for Part 2.

Through this process, a modern American folk tale emerged. A community, uprooted from their homeland by a natural disaster, is forced to migrate into the unknown and adapt to their new surroundings. A kaleidescope of characters parade by: a mysterious religious leader, a haughty politician, a mourning mother, a stranger with bright ideas… It remains up to the listener/viewer to weave the pieces together, but an underlying concern emerges: how can we maintain a permanent home when the waters keep rising?

Sara will perform the songs on guitar, mandolin and autoharp amidst an exhibition of mixed media works on paper. The visual works are transcriptions of the songs in which collages of the lyrics are presented alongside Sara’s alternative system of musical notation, which she devised to emphasize visual patterns in the melodic line.

In addition to the debut of Part 1 of “The News” in 2010, Sara has exhibited and performed several times at Open Source, including her recent work “Songs of Lewis & Clark,” the group show “Associated” and the two-person show “Urban Plant Research.” “The News: Monday-Friday” was largely realized at the residency program chashama North in 2010 and 2011. Sara earned a B.A. in studio art from Yale University in 2003 and performs regularly in the Americana string band Union Street Preservation Society.

http://sarabouchard.bandcamp.com

“Karl Spörk, Another Meeting” is part of “The Meeting”, an exhibition in honor of the life and work of Karl Spörk at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, ISCP.

The name of the show is based on the late, Austrian, artist Karl Spörk’s work from 2000 titled “The Meeting.” This video lasts 63 seconds and is essentially a conversation between the artist (Karl) and the great Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Set in a darkened room each sits in a separate chair with their back to the camera facing a television, the video depicts Karl’s animation of Durer’s anatomical figure studies in which the arm moves to touch it’s own genitals. Reminiscent of a psychotherapy session there is a long period of silence until Albrecht praises the artist on his manipulation, Durer: “I like it” Spörk: “I am glad you like it, Albrecht.”
A lot of Karl Spörk’s work, his personality and his life as well as his death has captured us. Nick Kline and Monika Wuhrer are curating a show that brings together numerous international artists and curators reflecting the intensity of Karl Spörk’s life especially filtered through his artwork.

Karl Spörk, Another Meeting at Open Source will project the “hen and hare”, a video by Karl Spörk. Spörk’s father, a butcher by profession, instructs the artist how to slaughter animals. Monika Wuhrer calls for a podium discussion inviting butchers to explain their jobs from their point of view and talk about the perception of the profession within their family, their friends and the public.

Participating artists at the ISCP
Margrethe Aanestaad, Lene Ask , Jane Benson, Songul Boyraz, Caterina Czepek, Tomas Eller, Gerald Freimuth, Andi Gut, Peter Höll, Christoph Girardet, Christopher Ho , Nick Kline, Else Leirvik, James Leonard, Michael Lobgesang, Ole Martin Lund Bø , Josh Mueller, Marcus Langender, Stefan Olah, Hans Schabus, Diana Shpungin, Karl Spörk, Monika Wuhrer

Crators: Nick Kline & Monika Wuhrer
Text: Ute Meta Bauer, Andreas Stadler, Annette Sudbeck, Kristina Tieke
Catalog: Schlebrügge, publisher (forthcoming)

Sponsors:
bmuk, Austrian Cultural Forum, Steven and Nancy NYC, International Studio and Curatorial Program, Der Kommissar

Between Mountain is an exhibition project by the Norwegian artists Margrethe Aanestad, Else Leirvik, and Ole Martin Lund Bø, which will take place in March 2012 in New York.

Between Mountain is a project about giving and taking space, starting with how personal space is affected by the nature and culture one is coming from. Between Mountain’s theme deals with space, distance, intimacy, personal borders and human interrelations. The artists’ different encounters while in New York will affect, lead to new work and give unforeseen directions and results. The results will be brought together in the final exhibition. The artists will do smaller interventions in the private apartments. The use of private residences have several implications and concern all the project’s factors concerning space such as personal borders, distance, and intimacy. This is what the artists will explore; how do the artists, the residents and the audience respond to the change of norms that showing art in a private space implies?

The Project is partially funded by OCA

The curtain “One Day This Will All Be Yours” was inaugurated on November 30th, 2011 and will be on view until April 2012 unless otherwise announced during certain exhibitions. (No viewing during Leigh Davis’ show: Jan 14th – Feb 8th)

One Day This Will All Be Yours is a winter curtain. A fabric installation specially conceived for Open Source Gallery. It’s main objective will be to serve as a heat insulator during the cold months of winter and also as a visual and conceptual background for other projects to be produced and displayed in the exhibition space during the winter of 2011-2012.

The piece is part of a series of works made out of fabric-panels that hang dividing and organizing space. Part of a larger and ongoing project these panels must be considered as a flexible and adaptable idea, one that materializes differently depending on the context in which it is set. The project focuses on the notion of temporary architecture as a critical and fragile fabrication of space. The situations Felipe Mujica create aim to catalyze encounters, moments of collaboration: between people, people and space, people and art objects and finally between people and systems of communication.

The title of this exhibition is taken from a song by the English band The Wedding Present and it has been used by Felipe Mujica in two previous projects, as the title solo exhibition in Chile and as a title of a piece in a group show in New York. The repetition of the same title is intended to create a unifying element for three different projects, which represent the three main bodies of work developed by the artist (wall-curtains, silkscreen prints and ephemeral sculpture).

Felipe Mujica (born in Santiago, Chile in 1974) studied art at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Just out of art school, in 1997, he co-founds with Diego Fernández and José Luis Villablanca the artist run space Galería Chilena (GCH), which operated between 1999 and 2005, first a nomadic and commercial art gallery and later as a collaborative art project, a curatorial “experiment”.

In early 2000 Mujica moved to New York City where he currently lives and works. He has exhibited in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, having solo shows at Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago; The Shop – Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing; Message Salon -Perla Mode, Zürich; Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago and Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne. Recent group shows include “Critical Complicity”, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; “The Nature of Things – Biennial of the Americas”, Denver; “Third Guangzhou Triennial”, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou and “Linea de Hormigas”, at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro.

One day this will all be yours, , 2011, Drawing/Collage, 8.5 x 11 inches