03.30 2016
Drop Ceiling
Opening Reception Friday April 1 from 7pm to 10pm
Space 1026 is pleased to present Drop Ceiling, an exhibition of new animation, sculpture, and printed matter by Philadelphia artists Jacob Rivkin and Joshua Zerangue, on view from April 1—April 30, 2016.
To retrofit a structure is to fold time and progress. A drop ceiling, as a whole, functions by simultaneously conforming to and concealing the inner layers of a building through a system of standardized parts. If damaged by water, smoke, or mold—these long tiles can be easily swapped out by new ones. The drop ceiling is just as it was. When working on a damaged boat, wooden ship-builders claim as long as they keep one plank of wood from the old form in the new, then by proxy it is still the same boat. This process of doubling forms serves as a conceptual framework for the exhibition Drop Ceiling, where questioning the role of subsequent translations of meaning is paramount. Rivkin and Zerangue’s collective works examine distance, in both measured time and imaginary space, between the literal and figurative parts of language, narrative, and cinema.
Zerangue’s works symbolically and metaphorically obscure the interrelationships between sources by appropriating letters and symbols, motor parts, and text. By selecting source material, like a 1976 Puch 2-stroke engine repair manual, that has passed through several layers of translation (linguistically, temporally, and spatially), the larger cultural and historical implications of distance between viewer and original meaning become entangled and confused.
Rivkin’s animation forms a dialogue between digital and analog cinema to reconcile methods of creating wonder. The limited color palette of Rivkin’s animation emphasises both the subtle collapsed space, or joins, between the separate layers of hand-drawn animation and the dramatic intensity of the surrounding landscapes. This is juxtaposed in the installation by the chroma-key suits for future animation performances. These suits reveal, through their form the potential for playful gestures and unique movement, a connection to the animator’s close partnership to dance and choreography.
Each work embodies its own individual sense of rhythm, structure, and time–as they also reflect a deeper contemplation on the role of analog technologies within an increasingly digital world. Through converting three dimensional sculpture to animation and embedding digital video into a flip book, Rivkin and Zerangue’s works invite viewers to reexamine their own drop ceiling of engagement to the world of mediated information, objects, and images.
Jacob Rivkin’s animation work has screened at the Animation Block Party in Brooklyn, NY, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA, and the Peephole Cinema in San Francisco. His sculptures have been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC, the Arlington Art Center in Arlington, VA and Julius Caesar Gallery in Chicago, IL. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and the Weitzel Barber Travel Prize. He currently teaches animation and design courses at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joshua Zerangue’s animation work has screened at the Brooklyn Film Festival in Brooklyn, NY, Athens International Film Festival in Athens, OH, the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC, and at the Second Annual New Media Juried Exhibition, Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC. He currently teaches art and design courses at the University of Delaware and Drexel University.
02.23 2016
PLEASE COME IN
March 4th – March 27th, 2016
Opening Friday, March 4th 7pm – 10pm
PLEASE COME IN is conceived as a porous environment, in which visitors weave across boundaries between the work of art and the surrounding space, penetrate immersive interiors, and transgress frames. Featuring five artists – Keenan Bennett, Stephanie Elden, Olivia Jones, Daria McMeans, and Yue Nakayama – the exhibition is a web of things that alternately enclose the viewer and open onto their environment.
In her essay “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” artist and critic Hito Steyerl writes that “cinema has exploded into the world to become partly real.” In PLEASE COME IN, artists figure this explosion via screens that surround and interrogate as agents; surreal objects that make room for the viewer or impose themselves on lived space; and constructed environments that are brief alternatives to or escapes from apparent reality. While not all of the artists work directly with cinematic media, the featured videos, sculptural objects, and immersive installations all explore the confused distinction between our lives and their mediations.
Keenan Bennett’s research-based practice explores a nexus of concerns that include marginalized histories, monumentality, and youth subcultures. His immersive multimedia installations trace the cracks and silences of history and toy with the affects of absence and lack. Dense plays of light and shadow, symbolic imagery, and perceptual effects animate Bennett’s mythical, unlocatable situations.
Stephanie Elden’s “hoop house” characterizes her artistic trajectory, which foregrounds both the complex relationships and the innate tensions between natural and unnatural elements. In Elden’s artwork, manufactured space highlights dialectical processes between the artificiality of manmade materials and the organic fluidity of water.
Olivia Jones utilizes fabrics, wood, and steel, mining the aesthetic registers of industrial design and abstract art, to create works of art that fluidly combine architecture, sculpture, and painting. Jones’s alluringly tactile and formally rigorous objects unsettle their own visual appeal through odd contortions that evoke the uncanny.
Combining a minimal aesthetic with a near-documentary approach, Daria McMeans blends film’s stylistic classifications and opens up new relational modes by training the camera on herself and her own family. McMeans’s enveloping three channel installation provokes a range of emotions – from empathy to discomfort – as it mobilizes personal experiences and explores the possibility of conversations about race and lineage.
Yue Nakayama devises her visual literature based on her personal writings about politics, recurring ordinary or historical events, and mass media. Her images and performances are full of humor, an important trait in Nakayama’s art: firstly as an iconoclastic mechanism that challenges taboos against entertainment in contemporary art, and secondly as a disavowal of excessively deadpan topics.
PLEASE COME IN is the third exhibition in the Incubation Series, a curatorial collaboration between graduate students in the Fine Arts and History of Art programs at the University of Pennsylvania. The Incubation Series takes its name from the idea that graduate school is a laboratory where one can test out new ways of thinking. Fostered by Keenan Bennett, Haely Chang, Kirsten Gill, and Hilary R. Whitham, the program aims to simultaneously raise the profile of Penn Design’s MFA candidates by showcasing their work to a wider Philadelphia area audience, while also offering an opportunity for art history graduate students to expand their curatorial practices.
12.12 2015
Off the Blanket Sale
SPACE 1026′s ANNUAL OFF THE BLANKET SALE!
Prints! Zines! Books! Tshirts! Buttons! Calendars! Cards! Old Stuff! New Stuff!
From members of Space 1026 and Friends
Saturday December 19th, 2015
Noon to 6pm
1026 Arch Street 2nd Floor Philadelphia
12.12 2015
PROTO and PROCESS:
Proto and Process: History Truck Mid-Cycle in Chinatown/North
Opening Friday, January 8, 2016
5 p.m.-8 p.m.
This January, join the Philadelphia Public History Truck for a midyear exhibition revealing the process behind this mobile museum’s community-engaged curatorial approach. Since August, History Truck’s team has been collaborating with community members in Chinatown North to develop a mobile exhibition launching in June 2016 about neighborhood notions of home and the history of homelessness. During the Fall, Truck curator Erin Bernard led a class of Spark-Fuel-Ignite graduate students from the University of the Arts, String Theory Charter School, Science Leadership Academy at Beeber, and Hallahan Catholic School for Girls in design thinking and on the ground creative work at Asian Arts Initiative and the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission. During January, the Truck extends its conversation to Chinatown stakeholders through a Memory Potluck in collaboration with Space 1026 and the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation on Saturday, January 23rd at 6 p.m. Contribute and build with us as we ready ourselves for the research and fabrication!
11.15 2015
2015 Space 1026 Art Auction
Auction Friday December 11th
7PM Doors Open at 6pm
First Friday Preview
December 4th, 7-10pm
10.01 2015
OPENING FRIDAY 0CTOBER 2ND AT SPACE 1026
Pairing master printer with artists, the Philagrafika portfolio demonstrates all that is wonderful about the collaborative work ethic of Printmaking. Rarely seen together, this selection of prints dates from the first portfolio to its last.