This holiday season Project For Empty Space is printing limited edition greeting cards, which features the work of our current artist-in-residence Alex Callender.
Choose from 6 different designs of 5 x 7″ folded cards, each from our current installation at 181 Stanton Street. Customize the inside of your card with Holiday Cheer and signatures for no extra cost. Each set of cards comes with blank white envelopes that are also customizable
Cards are printed on 100% Recycled Paper thanks to our friends at VISTAPRINT!
ALL proceeds are Tax Deductible and go to support Project For Empty Space’s 2012 Season in NYC and DC!
What better way to send someone special a one of a kind card and support the work PES does for communities and education through interactive public and socially engaging art practices?
Quantity of 10 Cards with 10 Blank Envelopes: $25.00 ($2.50/card)
Quantity of 20 Cards with 20 Blank Envelopes: $45.00 ($2.25/card)
Quantity of 50 Cards with 50 Blank Envelopes: $70.00 ($1.40/card)
Quantity of 100 Cards with 100 Blank Envelopes: $120.00 ($1.20/card)
(Standard Ground Shipping is included on all orders within the United States)
We are excited to have PES listed in Creative Time’s ‘What We Love’ section on their newsletter! Here’s the snippet!
‘Living As Form’, their current show closes today but their archives hold absolute treasures in the world of socially engaged practices so check them out at www.creativetime.org!
What We Love
Opening Info
Here’s a look at the body of work of our Artists-in-Residence for PES:NYC and PES: Bogota 2011.
PES:NYC:
Artist: Alex Callender
I work with charcoal, graphite, stencils and erasure to create various size drawings that explore atomic and electronic light sources acting upon naturalistic scenes, as a way of playing out the physical tensions that exist in our ecosystem, at once organic and artificially constructed. I make imagined forests and landscapes to narrate the tenuous places between absence and presence, glare and shadow, stillness and motion, the everyday light-bound binaries that govern our lives and evoke our cosmologies. Deer, birds and trees serve as the main characters in these scenes and act as agents who reveal in tableaux-like space, relationships about causality, environmental dependence and temporality.
Phantom Limbs, Drawing
Hold on to the Wind my friends, Water Series, Photograph
Crossing the Meadow, Installation
PES:Bogota:
Artist: Carol Sabbadini
Video Still from piece titled, The Tower
“I am my language. Until I can take pride of my language I cannot take pride in myself.” G.Anzaldúa
The Tower
At the beginning they had one language and they were one culture, but now only the same story makes them overcome their differences and converge as if they were the same.
Stills from piece titled, Earth
Llévala contigo
Earth Bilbao-Spain (Bilbao Termibús Station)
It is an installation that was born from the quotation of Gloria Anzaldúa “We are our land”, which aims to remind people that part of our identity is given by the land where we come from, to which we are going and where we are in that certain moment. In this case through the earth, the public and the confluence of identities the station acquires an identity and becomes a place where the I and the we are transformed between themselves.
Stills from piece titled, Let Me Explain You The Function
“The I is deviated, disrupted and displaced by the interruption and interval of another story” I.Chambers
Let me Explain you the function
Three artists of different nationalities, speaking three different languages (without a script) try to communicate and to discuss about the function of art for them.
It becomes a metaphor about the difficulty of comprehends a language that you don‟t speak, in this case the “language” of art.
Artist: Julian Santana
Stills from American and Colombian popular culture that will be part of Santana’s installation at LA48.
Artist: Ivonne Villamil
To see Villamil’s work please see: IvonneVillamil
All Images Copyright to the Artists.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
July 9th, 2011
Project For Empty Space in collaboration with LA48 is pleased to announce Bogota- based artists Carol Sabbadini, Ivonne Villamil and Julian Santana as the artists-in-residence for PES:Bogota, 2011. The projects will open officially for public interaction on September 15th, 2011. The residencies will also include a series of workshops, presentations and conferences through the months of August and September. Specific dates will be announced shortly.
In keeping with our commitment to forging relationships with communities across the globe through art in vacant spaces Project For Empty Space is proud to be collaborating with LA48 to launch PES:Bogota, 2011. This collaboration would provide an opportunity for a cross – cultural dialog between the simultaneous projects taking place in New York and Bogota this year. LA 48 is one of the newest independent spaces dedicated to art in Bogotá, Colombia. Located in a historical district of midtown Bogotá, it was originally the home of a local artist who gathered, for more than forty years, a large collection of the most unlikely objects, between urban drifts and artists’ meetings. These objects now serve as materials for the residencies that aim to connect local community with art practices and with the space itself.
Bogota-born Carol Sabbadini is a young artist working on the many intersections of communication, cultural translation, language and cronotopical issues. She holds a BA in Art Restoration and Conservation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy, and a MA in Visual Arts from Universitá degli studi di Bologna, Italy. After completion of her studies and several residencies and exhibitions in Europe, she had just returned to work in Colombia. While having an extensive portfolio in video and installation, she now proposes an approach to the issues of public space and art practice through sound. Her PES:BOG proposal “parts from the idea of stressing the dichotomy between the public and the private space”. The intention is to generate new sensations, questions and curiosities through sound, which turns the space into a container where the public and the private realms blend and coexist. The installation will consist of camouflaged sets of mp3 devices and speakers throughout the first floor, hidden in furniture and other found objects around the house. Sounds will be obtained by merging everyday sounds from the neighborhood, the streets and from inside the house.
Ivonne Villamil is a Bogota-based artist, researcher, curator and art director. She combines her work in curatorial projects, research and documentation with the direction of InSitu Foundation, from where she promotes artistic projects with a social impact. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Bogota Art Academy (ASAB), and is currently finishing her MA in Visual Arts and Education in Barcelona, and upon completion she will return to Bogota to participate in PES:BOG. Moving through different roles gravitating the display and exhibition of art projects, now Ivonne proposes an artistic approach to the curatorial practice. Using the many objects collected through decades and stored in LA 48 Cultural Center, she plans to conduct a series of experimental practices, where object will be reorganized, framed, photographed, hanged, etc. to create dynamics of an exhibition, which she understands as a process that transforms the social and cultural significance of objects and space. Interventions will last for a short amount of time and then changed. Along with the construction of a discourse and narrative, she plans to create tours as well as video registry of the process and that material will take part in the final exhibition of the projects.
Holding a BA in Visual Arts from National University of Colombia, Julian Santana is a young artist from Bogotá that empowers his artistic discourse through iconic images and stories from the collective imaginaries. Parting for the study of his everyday environment, he is particularly interested in the idea of “social suspension”, a state of collective hope in which people is permanently immersed, waiting for a “magical” solution or a “messianic” event that may bring solutions to the problems from their social environment: issues involving security, education, health systems, etc. He states that this suspension state should also be intervened by equally magical situations to create a sense of irony and confront social alienation.
In this opportunity, his proposal parts from “default memories”, that is to say, the common usages that the houses from the district of Teusaquillo (where LA 48 is located) have had through time, how they passed from being an upper class enclave in midtown Bogota, to a mid-class sector whit many of the houses turned into family businesses such as restaurants, coffee shops, variety stores, bakeries and stationery shops. He plans to create a small-scale model of LA 48, and in its walls, to project a series of videos from Colombian and American visual culture, creating stylistic, historical and literary links with the house. Combined with video mapping in the different walls and structures of the house, the idea is to make a reference to the spectral presence of the former inhabitants and usages of the house.
PES:Bogota will see the production of a multi-lingual publication {em_rgencia}}, a live webcast for the purpose of conducting real time panel discussions, real time video streaming of the work-in-progress, workshops and other local programming involving the community and schools around the project site in New York and Bogota.
For Immediate Release
June 24th, 2011
Project For Empty Space is pleased to announce that Alex Callendar, New York based artist, will be the 2011 Fall Season Artist-iN-Residence at 181 Stanton Street. Ms. Callendar will be installing her large scale interactive work from mid-August through the second week in September. The project will open officially for public interaction on September 13th, 2011, at 6PM.
Using the empty space provided by Project For Empty Space, Callender will construct a dual wall installation that depicts a large-scale migration of some of New York City’s former inhabitants; deer as they travel through a corridor in the Lower East Side in search of habitat.
Callender’s current work focuses around dislocation, and the duality of absence and presence in ecosystems, as our present environmental crisis becomes more persistent and our ability to sustain the need of populations more fragile. Deer populations exist on the periphery of our expansion in this country and their habitation and population are often tethered to the ebb and flow of our development, expansion and industrialization dictating where and how they live and what they adapt to. This same precarity haunts many of the world’s inhabitants. Callender uses deer as agents that offer a narrative about change. Once, they where the occupants of this area, now us, and at point some in the future other entities will presume the main narrative in this given space.
Callender explains “When I started reading about deer as symbol I found that in almost all cultures, both indigenous and modern agricultural societies, deer are described mythologically as transient creatures that can be followed by humans and hunters to where the realm of life meets the world of the dead. The fiction life of these animals enchants me and has become a central thread in my work, allowing me to draw deeper allusion to the events of climate change and environmental frailty. I work with landscape because I find an immediate connection between the abstract quality of developing an illusionistic space from composite marks and surfaces, and the abstract language of nature itself. “
Alex Callender is an artist and educator from Brooklyn, NY, who currently uses Drawing as her primary medium. After attending Mass College of Art for graduate school she returned to New York, and now teaches drawing and painting at Westchester Community College. Alex works with community-based art and activist groups to help run weekend art and bike adventures with kids in Brooklyn.
Here’s a look at some of Alex’s work. And welcome to the PES Family, Alex!
All Images Copryright: Alex Callender
