Untitled (As of Yet)

Opening reception: Friday, September 6th, 6pm – on
Exhibition hours: weekends in September, 1pm to 6pm, and during the week by appointment (contact christina@fluxfactory.org)

[EXPAND Click here for a full list of related events, at Flux Factory and off-site.]
September 6th, 6pm – on: Dillon de Give provides an exit strategy for the Untitled (As of Yet) opening reception in The Long Walks Goodbye.
September 8th, 1pm – 6pm: Chloë Bass will host her second open design charrette for Traffic Disruption Village in the Flux Gallery.
September 12th, noon: Douglas Paulson & Christopher Robbins will lead an adventure to an undetermined location (as of yet) in Meet Halfway Again.
September 12th, 8pm: A special edition of Flux Thursday, with presentations and performances by Untitled (As of Yet) artists Ander Mikalson and Alex Hayden, Christopher Ulivo, and Douglas Paulson & Christopher Robbins.
September 28th, time TBD: The drill for Traffic Disruption Village, by Chloë Bass, takes place in a Queens parking lot. [/EXPAND]

Consider the massive power outage throughout the northeastern United States in 2003, which prompted thousands of New Yorkers to walk home from work. At any given moment, individuals who may have passed each other every day without real interaction were sharing a new experience of the city together. With the usual metropolitan bustle subdued, conversations sparked, and missed connections had more than a moment to catch. Years later and across the Atlantic, a volcano erupted after 120 years of inactivity, leaving hundreds of flights canceled and even more travelers stranded. How many babies were born as accidental citizens of countries that were not supposed to be theirs?

Untitled (As of Yet) takes its point of departure from events that first appear to be disruptive, even catastrophic, but eventually open the door to new thoughts, practices, and opportunities. Many of the artists in this exhibition examine the responses to unfamiliar circumstances and the breakdown of routine, while others deliberately incorporate these disruptions as mediating parameters or catalysts for inspiration.

[EXPAND Click here to read about each artwork.]

Michelle Levante’s video work, Three Coping Mechanisms for Dealing with Fatal Car Crashes utilizes graphic imagery from the educational driving safety film “Signal 30,” featuring mangled accident victims. Levante counteracts the images of distress with the sounds of an orgasm, a preacher’s sermon, and a zen meditation, which later segue into the film’s audio of actual victims dying.

Realistic Fictions is an observation of artificial intelligence and survival priorities within “The Sims” video game. Disaster strikes during Angela Washko’s in-game performance, leaving the economically thriving family she has created in peril. By relinquishing control of her avatars’ actions and documenting their responses to grief, their artificial intelligence is forced to prioritize personal responsibilities in the wake of tragedy.

Christopher Ulivo’s shadow puppet play, Silent Witness Speaks, is a memoir told from the perspective of a fern who caused the K-T extinction 65 million years ago. During a special one-night performance on Thursday, September 12th, the fern will share his tale of living under the yoke of the brutal dinosaurs and how he caused their eventual decimation for his audience, a young knave.

In Score for a Cyclone, Ander Mikalson and Alex Hayden invite us to crank a wind machine, spin a bicycle wheel, yell into a bucket and throw things on the floor. Audience members become makers in this collective performance, utilizing abstracted musical notation and homemade instruments to form an unlikely orchestra. The absurd symphony is juxtaposed against a moment of revelation and recognition when it is revealed to be the soundtrack to an iconic Hollywood film.

Douglas Paulson & Christopher Robbins invite audience members to meet them halfway at high noon for a secret adventure, during Meet Halfway Again. The meeting spot, determined by triangulating the locations of each participant, is a geographic parameter that functions as social intervention. The collaborative exploration will conclude when they discuss their journey at Flux Factory on September 12th.

In fall 2012 following Hurricane Sandy, all subway, bus, and commuter rail service in New York City was temporarily suspended. During the superstorm, Louise Barry discovered how her relationship to the city had been shaped by the MTA and her reliance on the transit system. This experience made her acutely aware of the limits to her self-sufficiency and knowledge. Her video, What I’ve Learned, documents Barry’s experience of learning to ride a bike as an adult and her interactions with her teachers, as she abandons a familiar structure in search of a more flexible form of transportation.

Inspired by the functional temporary village that formed during China’s 100km long traffic jam in 2010, Chloë Bass asks us to consider what we would need to survive under the conditions of a mass stalled auto disaster. In an open design charrette for Traffic Disruption Village, participants worked on transforming automobiles into a resource for survival in dire gridlock, culminating in an orchestrated temporary traffic jam in Long Island City on September 28th and a toolkit for future traffic jams.

In Dillon de Give’s series of seasonal walks, Just the 2 of Us, strangers were randomly paired together to explore public space on foot. Over the course of a year, participants enacted dating cliches, came face to face with rival interests, and guided each other through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each walk presented an opportunity for cumulative misunderstanding, but instead revealed the impact of cumulative discovery.

Jan Mun’s Propagate creates a system for invasive plant species found around Flux Factory, questioning what caused the exile of these forgotten plants and the evolution of their social stature and role in the present ecosystem. The plant specimens were collected during walks around the neighborhood, adapted from natural methods of seed dispersal (wind, water, animals, gravity, and force).

Cristian Chironi’s Nothing is the physical manifestation of an entirely lost digital self. Two broken hard drives containing the artist’s personal and artistic data from 1998 to the present are connected to a computer that will inevitably fail in its data recovery process. The month-long memory scanning process is made visible as a meditation on permanence and the implications of failed technology.

Ryan Estep creates scenarios for slippage that play off the inherent tension of handling an object of perceived value. In Untitled he painstakingly silkscreens a set of four canvases using a mixture of sterilized dirt and Lidocaine, and then tasks himself with stretching the canvas onto frames. The local anesthetic takes effect while handling the material, causing total numbness, and resulting in a self-imposed loss of control.

Heather Kapplow’s contribution to Untitled (As of Yet) is a responsive publication that captures intentional and unintentional signals transmitted by the works in the exhibition and traps them within heavily processed fibers taken from trees and matrices of pixels taken from FAT32 formatted hard drives. Click here to view Untitled (As of Yet), the exhibition reader.[/EXPAND]

Participating artists: Louise Barry, Chloë Bass, Cristian Chironi, Dillon de Give, Ryan Estep, Michelle Levante, Ander Mikalson and Alex Hayden, Jan Mun, Douglas Paulson & Christopher Robbins, Christopher Ulivo, and Angela Washko, with a limited edition exhibition reader by Heather Kapplow. Curated by Sally Szwed and Christina Vassallo, with special thanks to Athena Denos for production assistance and Jesse Gammage for graphic design.

Untitled (As of Yet) is supported, in part, by National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. If you’d like to help support this project, please go to our Donate page.

Untitled (As of Yet) image courtesy Jesse Gammage.