new works in 'Home' show @ ArtSites, Riverhead, NY
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DARLENE CHARNECO
TED VICTORIA
May 2 - June 7, 2009
YC3
Collaborative project by
SHEILA ROSS + LAURA TEN EYCK
With
FLETCH, TODD KNOPKE, JOSE KRAPP,
TED MCGURN, GEORGE SCHMIDT, DERRICK WILSON
until October 18, 2009
Reception for both: Saturday, May 2, 5-7 PM
@ art sites
651 West Main Street (Route 25), Riverhead, New York 11901 T: 631- 591-2401
http://www.artsitesgallery.com
Gallery Hours: Thursday -Sunday, 12-5 PM.
HOME
The idea of home usually evokes a sense of nostalgia and family, but both artists look with fond, humorous, and critical eyes at habitation.
Darlene Charneco’s mapping series looks at people, networks, homes, and communities as part of a larger organism's growth stage. Clusters of houses sharing or sequestering resources and shorelines are pondered as sustainability experiments within imaginary petri dishes. Ms. Charneco’s works take wonder in ‘where we are’ while exploring mnemonic and technological tools that allow us to grow our networks and broaden our sense of community. She imagines humanity’s overlapping experiences and shared interests creating new interactive maps of possibilities- hopeful that vital local and global challenges can be more collaboratively solved. A resident of Southampton, she has shown and lectured at numerous museums and galleries, including Morgan Lehman in Chelsea, the Katonah, Parrish, Hunterdon and Hecksher Museums. Her works will be featured in CARTOGRAPHY: Artists + Maps, by Katharine A Harmon, published by Princeton Architectural Press in Sept 2009.
Ted Victoria’s constructions are a constant delight, while tinged with a shadowed image. His moving images are physical, the assemblages of a home-grown inventor, but culled from pieces of the work-a-day world. While using simple actions derived from the camera obscura, the interior of his pieces are 3d mazes of bulbs, wires, lenses, debris and familiar items. The image first conveyed to the audience is often a mysteriously simple tableau, unexpectedly invigorated by movement and juxtapositions of scale and meaning. Titles such as The Magic Chair, or Watching TV on LSD, give a sense of the inner, imaginative world that the shell of home encompasses. Ted Victoria is a native son of Riverhead, where he filled the storefronts with images of swimming sea monkeys. As well as being a printmaker and photographer, he taught painting at Kean University for thirty-seven years. He shows with the Shroeder Romero Gallery in New York City and has a large installation, titled “Infestation” opening October 31 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut.
YC3
YC3 an acronym for Yurt City 3, is the 3rd incarnation of a collaborative outdoor installation project to be installed this summer on the grounds at art sites. Co-ordinated by New York based Canadian artists Sheila Ross and Laura Ten Eyck, YC3, like earlier Yurt Cities, will consist of various prefabricated tents, yurts and handmade structures, in which guest artists will be invited to respond by adding artwork interventions to the structures.
The title and tent city aspect of YC3 are evocative of “Y2K” and a “back to the land” sensibility. YC3 also riffs on tent names - Eureka K 2 XT and Marmot Thor 3P3. For this installment of Yurt City, Ross and Ten Eyck have invited guest artists, Fletch, Todd Knopke, Jose Krapp, Ted McGurn, George Schmidt and Derrick Wilson to participate. As in previous installations, Ross’ colourfully embellished Yurt will serve as a meeting ground around which the other structures will be installed. Ten Eyck, in collaboration with guest artist Ted McGurn, is planning on erecting a trailhead that will serve as an appropriate point of entry into YC3, which will be dispersed across the 2-acre grounds of art sites.
Initially Yurt City was conceived in response to New York city’s current housing crisis of unaffordable rents and studio spaces. Both Yurt Cities were located in neighbourhoods currently undergoing a transformation of rampant development, displacing residents, including the local artist’s community. Yurt City is a response to this lack of space for artists to make and exhibit their work. Yurt City provides a venue for artists to participate, collaborate and foster a sense of community. The venue will serve as an outdoor laboratory for the development of temporary, ad hoc and vernacular architecture and adjunct forms in relationship to personal, practical and utopian notions of community and landscape. Yurt City also pays homage to the importance of the guest in Nomadic cultures, as the inclusion and participation of the guest artist is integral to the concept of this project.
Part camping experience, part tent city response to the urban housing issues, and part homage to Nomadic yurt dwellers of Central Asia, YC3 uses the architectural elements to reflect on different experiences of structure in the urban landscape. While indebted to the spirit of tent cities, or the shantytown phenomenon called Gecekondu, Turkish for “built in one night,” the structures of YC3, their modifications and additions will be built sturdily enough to remain for the several month duration of an exhibition. In keeping with the ad hoc spirit of the nomadic, temporary tent city or Gecekondu, YC3 will be transformative for viewers and guest artists alike.