Exhibition

Presenting the final curatorial projects from MA Curatorial Practice fellows.

"Smells Like Home"

April 14 – April 27, 2022 

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 I 6:00 – 9:00pm 

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY 

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact macp@sva.edu. 

Artists: Zoe Cinel, Roshan Ganu, Gabrielle (Gatch) Gatchalian, Mark Sage (Clandestine Laboratories) and Xintong (Amy) Xiang

Curated by Emma Gasterland Gustafsson 

“Smells Like Home” is an exhibition and olfactory installation that addresses the question: “What does home smell like?” The project features artworks that explore themes of migration and building a sense of home with selected works by four artists. The installation exhibits perfume-oriented recreations of the smells of home described by the artists in conversation with the curator. The creation of scents for the exhibition is done in collaboration with Mark Sage of the Bronx-based indie perfume studio Clandestine Laboratories. Each artist hails from a different part of the world, and for one reason or another has chosen to build a home and an artistic career within the borders of the United States. Defining home as a collection of memories and senses built over time, this exhibition utilizes smell, which has the closest connection to memory, to create a portrait of memories defined by each artist’s personal sense of home.

"Para Figurations"

April 14 - April 27, 2022  

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 | 6:00 - 9:00pm  

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact macp@sva.edu. 

Artists: Carlos Franco, Lee Gilboa, Kenji Yamada, Lucas Yasunaga and Rafał Żarski

Curated by Katelynn Dunn 

"Para Figurations" brings together artists whose works explore subjectivity and representation on a quest for understanding in our ever technologically mediated, globalized, yet differing social realities. The exhibition addresses significations created through collective interaction, reciprocity and refusal through the lens of performance. These sound works present perceptions of otherness as well as cooperative arrangements produced by the artists to fathom knowledge of common social agency and legitimization. 

This project is supported and co-organized by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

"Maestro Blanco: The Many Phrases of a Broad Vocabulary"

April 14 – April 27, 2022 

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 I 6:00 – 9:00pm 

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY 

Artists: Wilfredo “Eloy” Blanco and Joseph “Sep” Blanco

Curated by Ash Cortes 

“Maestro Blanco” invites audience members to look, touch and potentially break the archives and artworks of two autodidactic artists, Wilfredo “Eloy” Blanco and Joseph “Sep” Blanco. This exhibition speaks in a language such that it is always actively learning; it uses every point of contact as an opportunity to strengthen its voice and message. It is an experiment meant to tease out how the practices of Sep and Eloy, and those of many other autodidacts, differ from those embedded in institutionalized forms of knowledge production.

The exhibition derives its overall shape, structure and content from a file box of donated materials from Eloy’s archive, located at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. “Maestro Blanco” comprises multiple reproductions from this box, mixed with original artworks and reproductions from Sep’s archive. Looking at what might be considered the byproducts of their practices, we can learn how they acquire knowledge, aligning their procurement of it with methods of creation as being the same. “Maestro Blanco” is an artwork, an archive and a unique experience unveiling these artists’ remarkable means of producing knowledge as autodidacts.

ashcortes.com/Maestro-Blanco 

"Into the Valley of Despair"

April 14 – April 27, 2022 

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 I 6:00 – 9:00pm 

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY  

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact macp@sva.edu.

Artists: Florian Aschka & Larissa Kopp, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Kim Kielhofner, Julian Louis Phillips, Mia Raadik and Anna Witt

Curated by Carina Martinez 

This showcase of six artists’ practices contemplates the overlapping territories of psychological discomfort and truth-seeking. The exhibition’s title refers to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a graph developed in psychology that demonstrates a type of cognitive bias in which a person’s overestimation of knowledge of a given subject corresponds to a sense of overconfidence. The bottom of the sharply dipped curve is labeled “the valley of despair,” indicating the point at which one may become disillusioned by the realization that they know very little about something they once believed they understood. The "un-selfing" quality of the works in "Into the Valley of Despair" suggests that, rather than turn away from the destabilizing truth of one's limited purview, embarking on a winding journey through the valley with openness—waiting, listening, experimenting—might be the most profound path that one could take in pursuit of sustainable knowledge and transformative justice. Paying attention to the contradictions that exist within and around us, the exhibition intends to consider how the valley of despair can reinvent itself as an oasis of repair. 

For more information, please visit https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/itvod

"On Transcending Numbness"

April 14 – April 27, 2022 

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 I 6:00 – 9:00pm  

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY 

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact tkhasanova@sva.edu. 

Artists: Golnar Adili, Niki Afsar, Yan Cynthia Chen and Steffani Jemison

Curated by Tamara Khasanova 

"On Transcending Numbness" is an exhibition supported by a small publication that gathers four artists whose works expand on the questions around the language’s psychological and physiological limits of articulation. Language—in its verbal as well as non-verbal manifestations—takes a toll on one’s capacity to convey endured experiences. The inability to articulate in a world that values established conventions of clarity and expression becomes an endemic source of distress, particularly for those who live in a constant state of transition. "On Transcending Numbness" offers to challenge the limitations embedded with language’s structures and to address the relationship between the bodily condition of numbness and the imaginary space of language. 

"Reparo" 

April 14 – April 27, 2022 

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 I 6:00 – 9:00pm 

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY 

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact macp@sva.edu. 

Artists: Elinor Carucci, Jingyao Huang, Lee Kai Chung, Ziqin Min and Wandering Eyes

Curated by Yuan Shi 

"Reparo" is the name of a charm in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which is used to seamlessly repair broken objects and works on almost everything. Yet it could only be used on inanimate objects, or it would cause serious scarring. The exhibition “Reparo” borrows the spell as a metaphor for methods of individual and social repair. Psychological repair involves perceiving and reflecting on memories and experiences, rather than repressing them, and requires the internal motivation of victims and external attention from those who would help. The exhibition’s artists offer a panoply of visions addressing means to face and overcome both personal and collective traumas, with ramifications for each of us and for communities and nations. “Reparo” will include artworks presenting processes and methods of individual and social repair in different contexts and narratives.

"Séance Fiction" 

April 14 – April 27, 2022 

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14, 2022 I 6:00 – 9:00pm 

Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY 

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, please contact macp@sva.edu. 

Participating Artists: James Beckett, Beatrice Glow, Hsu Chia-wei, Hu Huanzhe, Zai Nomura and Iris Touliatou 

Curated by Kevin Wu

Consider a weird symbiosis: a spirit possessing a machine. As the former’s will overwrites the latter’s programming, the apparatus is now blinking morse codes with LED lights and drafting paper talismans with robotic arms. Contact has been made between our reality and the spectral past—or is it a long-abandoned future? The ghost remains elusive and unnamable, but through this symbiosis, its virtual influences are given shapes, sounds and scents—a material presence. And the machine, finally free from the burdens of calculations and extractions, finds itself in the strange landscape of memories and dreams. 

"Séance Fiction" is a project of invocation that reimagines technologies as (artistic/psychic) mediums. In a more literal sense, many of the featured artworks attempt to grant agency and voice to the deceased or the “supernatural.” On a more abstract level, the artworks, through speculative pieces of technologies, propose ways to reconcile with the spirits of lost pasts and futures—cosmologies, ideologies, faiths and aspirations crudely swept aside to make way for capitalism’s advance—and to fulfill their potentialities.