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.
02.20 2016
ELAND WARD// on view through February 25th
http://www.theartblog.org/2016/02/eland-ward-unsettling-scenes-daily-life-space-1026/
02.07 2016
Block Print Workshop
If chocolate and songs don’t work, block print for their affections! Carve your design and print your own Valentines and love notes. Ages 8+, children must be accompanied by adults. Materials provided and sweets included. $10
Register online here!
02.04 2016
ELAND WARD// A series of rather large drawings
Opening Reception // February 5th 7-10 p.m.
Space 1026 presents new work by Brooklyn based artist Eland Ward. Join us for this exhibition of large scale works on paper! Atmospheric and meditative, these studies explore the tension between the mundane activity that constitutes the majority of our waking hours and under the daily conditions of production and consumption. Ward succeeds through process to reclaim the quiet space from the always connected, yet simultaneously fragmented digital world in which we share.
01.22 2016
Own A Piece Of Art History
TRANSISTOR SECT ANIMATION SHEETS FOR SALE ON STORE 1026 . COM
In 1998 Space 1026er Andrew Jeffrey Wright was hired to animate Ed Templeton‘s art for Toy Machine‘s ‘Jump Off A Building’ skate video. The animation was drawn and colored at Space 1026 .
See the animation HERE
See the drawings HERE
01.20 2016
Food Show With The Kids
Who likes watching food be prepared? EVERYBODY DOES! Watch this new video made by Andrew Jeffrey Wright and a bunch of kids at the Kensington Library. CLICK IT—>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfEotZYxXc8
THANKS!
