We’ve been busy getting our programming in place and yes, its been a little quiet out here. But that’s just the quiet before the storm so to speak!

We will be sending out our 3rd Open Call for proposals in June 2012. This year the direction we are exploring will be new and its got us pretty excited. Keep an eye out for this space and we hope to see a lot of proposals!

Best as always

Jasmine and Meenakshi

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?

 ORDER INFO

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)

‘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!

Opening Info

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. 

July 9^th,  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 15^th, 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.