Associated

Associated is an curatorial initiative based in Brooklyn. We aim to implement and foster unique associations between local artists, curators, collectors and writers.

Appear Here at BRETHREN

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BRETHREN
1820 Cornelia Street, Apt 1
Ridgewood, NY 11385

Chloë Bass • Liene Bosquê • Courtney Childress • Sessa Englund • Miao Jiaxin • Michael Marfione • Daniel Alexander Matthews • Dionis Ortiz • Anissa Lizette Rivera • Kurt Steger

Opening Reception Saturday, December 16 5-9pm
Ephemera on view by appointment through January 6


Appear Here is an exhibition investigating changing notions of belonging on an interpersonal and intimate scale with artworks that engage structures of power by way of collaboration, migration, race, local memory, appropriateness, and class.

Belonging is becoming an increasingly fraught issue as the tide of global nationalism rises. From Germany to Japan, The USA to India, Catalonia to Myanmar, the governments of imaginary geo-political spaces have become fixated on their aloneness: the boundaries between inhabitants of “their” land and the “other.” Perplexingly, as the spoken and unspoken constructs about which persons are allowed to constitute that aloneness we call a “nation” increase in conflict, the personal toll of those struggles recede from view. Appear Here is an exhibition providing space to artists working through these messy ideas of belonging. Each artist in the exhibition approaches the invisible distinctions between aloneness and togetherness, belonging and foreignness, both in real-time and within personal histories.

Sessa Englund will present a Swedish Fika environment with their iconic “crying face” mug series, coffee, and baked goods, encouraging dialogue in the comfort of the kitchen and living room adjacent to the exhibition space. Courtney Childress will present an arrangement of blank paper and laboriously constructed “crayon rocks” that are meant to be used by visitors for scrawling thoughts, confessions, or nonsense. Kurt Steger will be showing two sculptures from his Urban Stupa / Urban Structures series’ that use found concrete from the area around his former Brooklyn studio as jumping off points for miniature constructions that question our connections between the built environment and spirituality. In a similar vein, Liene Bosquê will be showing a panel from her Lower East Side Impressions series, a sort of collectivized and serendipitous map of a rapidly changing New York neighborhood. Expanding the map theme, Miao Jiaxin will be presenting his ongoing “Albert Bushwick” series which chronicles in the style of Google Street View his interactions with Young Lee, AKA Albert Bushwick, a living landmark, who can been seen standing at the same intersection on Bushwick Ave. and Lafayette in Brooklyn since 1971. Continuing the trajectory of personal architecture and micro urban narrative, Chloë Bass will be showing City Palette App, her new mobile based project for community self-documentation and reflection that allows users to interpret cities through color collections. By contrast Anissa Lizette Rivera will be showing a selection of video interviews about the familial struggles of non state sanctioned migration to New York from El Salvador. Dionis Ortiz will be exhibiting a series of portraits that capture moments of self reflection throughout time. These portraits both appear and dissolve to the viewer, encapsulating the fragility of human presence. Daniel Alexander Matthews will be showing part of a series of cast suitcases as part of his project, Fear and Nostalgia in Immigration, that transform the quotidian shape of a suitcase into a haunting relic of its interior and mobile past. Michael Marfione will also be presenting his short film Mumbai: Un Harem a translation of the infamous scene from Felini’s 81/2 to Mumbai, a work that creates jarring cognitive dissonances and comments not only on globalizing culture, but also its samenesses.

Refreshments will be provided by Associated, but viewers are requested to bring their generosity and cash for donations to Ridge to Reefs, an environmental organization working in Puerto Rico that providing support to the shelters and rural communities in need.