IMPRESSIONS OF THE FLOWERS THEMSELVES Curated by Chiara Mannarino and Francesca Pessarelli Spring/Break Art Show, September 7th - 12th, 2022
This September, Curators Chiara Mannarino and Francesca Pessarelli present Impressions of the Flowers Themselves, which takes botanist and cyanotype photographer Anna Atkins’ deep connection and consideration for her botanical subjects as its point of departure. Alina Bliumis, Joseph Liatela, and Joey Rosin align with this empathic relationship to plants and, each in a different way, address the symbolic potential of flowers and their ability to evoke ideas of rebirth, transformation, and utopia.
Bliumis is a research-based artist who approaches historical and political moments through the lens of the natural world. In her series Endangered: Portraits of Flowers, Bliumis gives renewed life and agency to endangered and extinct flowers through portraiture. Hand-carved frames imbue these plants with a sense of personhood and reflect the histories and mythologies associated with them. Many of the flowers Bliumis includes in this series have medicinal or psychedelic properties – their healing and transportive capabilities often leading to their exploitation and extinction.
Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist who uses performance and sculpture to address trans and queer subjectivities and embodiment. His work considers the historical use of flowers in memorials and their inherent symbolism of death and rebirth. In his installation Untitled (Ascension), Liatela applies these concepts to the body, addressing the transitory nature shared by plants and humans and one’s ability to transform over time. His work serves as an altar upon which we commemorate the individuals and parts of ourselves we have lost while looking towards the infinite potential of the reborn self.
Rosin is a musician, sound healer, and budding scent artist. In line with Bliumis’ and Liatela’s exploration of ephemerality and loss, Rosin has created a four-piece sonic landscape entitled Bardo – a Tibetan word that describes the liminal space between death and rebirth. Also by Rosin is Altarpiece – a unique fragrance that will be diffused throughout the exhibition space. Rosin has poetically conceptualized these works as a metaphorical diptych. Harnessing the evocative nature of scent and sound, Rosin’s aim is to encapsulate the beauty of a natural world that no longer exists and will never exist again.
Born in the wake of the Age of Enlightenment, during which historically prevailing notions of the self came into question, Anna Atkins turned such inquiries to the botanical world as well, considering how flora, too, can constitute moral agents. Impressions of the Flowers Themselves seeks to blur and make arbitrary the line between human and botanical life, speaking to the impossibility of extricating ourselves and our ideals from the natural world and its mythologies. The exhibition will act as an altar, a memorial, a meditative space where we can imagine an alternate present, one in which we haven’t lost these literal and figurative flowers and the stories and values they carry with them.
BETWEEN TEXTS AND TEXTILES Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner 35 Walker St. NYC July 21 - August 31, 2022
Bienvenu Steinberg & J is pleased to present Between Texts and Textiles, an exhibition including eight international artists. The works featured stretch the fabric of reality, from text to textile, from pattern to language. What is presented is a gradual approach to painting, sculpting, weaving and writing by visual fusion of what might be called the textile sign. The works break the link between vehicle and destination: textiles to be read with no intention of being informed, texts with no plot and no point.
Language and text are at the tactile and metaphoric center of Ann Hamilton’s work. She uses common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. What are the places and forms for live, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world? In Shell, an homage to Joseph Beuys, in the form of a white felt coat, as well as in a groupof collagesonbookendpaper,therelationsofcloth,touch,motionandhumangesture give way to dense materiality.
In her re-reading of twentieth Century avant-garde practices, Fernanda Fragateiro frequently repurposes already-existing and symbolically layered material, in order to fashion delicate work criss-crossed by an intricate web of inner references to the history of art and architecture. Her ongoing Overlap sculptures are made of stainless steel supports and handmade fabric-bound sketchbooks. Overlapping is an important word to talk about the essence of all these works: overlapping of elements, overlapping of materials, overlapping of histories, and time overlapping. In a new series of paintings titled Poly-Grounds, Suzanne Song creates multifaceted dimensions that blur the boundary between illusion and reality. The paintings’ shapes are direct extractions of the marginal spaces delineated from previous bodies of work. The placement of shadows disrupts the flat picture plane and transforms the two-dimensional surface into an ambiguous field: are we looking at a painting, a very finely woven fabric or a polished surface?
Visions, inspired by dreams, surrounding life, or drawn from the unconscious, are at the heart of Mia Enell’s paintings. She plays with words through images, her figures of speech are free associations on canvas. Loosely Knit is a literal rendering of its title: a system of interconnected discrete units freed from instrumental utility or significance. Alina Bliumis’ text-based sculptural works, Concrete Poems, recall street wall scribbles, graffiti, and absurdist poetry. They consist of words literally inscribed on tablets of wet concrete. Border/Order; Textile/Tile; Lover/Over: the playfulness of crossword puzzles often leads to unexpected existential interrogations. Usingreadymadeexpressionsorrepetitionsofasingleword, ElvireBonduelle utilizes a repertoire of images and objects with apparently joyful potential. Made of words carefully calligraphed -in her own hand-designed font- over colorful wave patterns, Bonduelle’s paintings revel in their own obviousness.
Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself and the canvas as a medium rather than a support. Her methods such as unweaving paintings, laser-burning the canvas, molding forms or weaving paint through linen thread, remain central to her practice, as she continues to explore tangible materials in relation to the metaphysical properties of artworks. Julianne Swartz articulates an architecture of frailty. When viewed, her sculptures are activated slightly, at times, they even appear to breathe. Zero blanket is a silent tapestry, made from hair-thin copper wire. The tenuous lines from the irregularly weaved structure delineate and hold space until emptiness becomes substance. Zero Blanket embodies invisible presence and tangible absence, it engages a palpable vulnerability.
Alina and Jeff Bliumis CULTURAL TIPS FOR NEW AMERICANS Curated by Sozita Goudouna, Occupy Art Project, The French Consulate, NYC February 17 - March 9, 2022
Alina Bliumis, Jeff Bliumis
CULTURAL TIPS FOR NEW AMERICANS
2022, 110 objects, wood and ink
For the last years, we have been gathering tips on “how can immigrants blend in the American society“ using street questionnaires, handbooks, social media and public forums. Concurrently, we collected ethnic wooden souvenirs, which radiate a certain fetishization of otherness, from all around New York City and sandblasted these objects to remove their original decorations and uncover the wood underneath. The cultural tips are then written onto the wooden souvenirs in ink, causing them to become decontextualized objects, much like the immigrants to whom the cultural tips are addressed.
Alina Bliumis, IMAGINATION NATION Elma, NY October 23 - November 30, 2021
“First, there is the old truth that ‘In the beginning is the body,’ with its desires, its powers, its manifold form of resistance to exploitation. As is often recognized, there is no social change, no cultural or political innovation that is not expressed through the body, no economic practice that is not applied to it.’”
— Silvia Federici “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin” 2020.
Entering the gallery, a visitor met by a floor to ceiling colorscape, hanging under its own weight, a linen from the artist series “Bruise.” Alina started the series last year, responding to the violence and battered bodies on the news coming from her birthplace Belarus. On August 8, 2020 the nation came together in unprecedented unity to protest against the rigged presidential election of the man who has held power over the last 26 years, Alexander Lukashenko. Thousands of peaceful protesters looking for justice poured to the streets where they were met by authorities conducting indiscriminate beatings and brutal mass detentions, and dispersing crowds with truncheons, stun grenades, and water cannons. Over the following weeks, protesters made their battered bodies public to record the evidence of a human rights crisis in the country. Lukashenko claimed that the opposition fabricated the abuse and “girls painted their butts with blue color.”
“Bruise #16” (2021) watercolor on printed linen was created for this exhibition. Beneath it lies the text-based and site-specific work “Concrete Poems” covering the floors of the gallery. Alina brings together art historical references such as Dada and Brazilian “Concrete Art” and the literal interpretation of concrete poetry inspired by city scribbles, graffiti, and absurdism.
One of the poems reads Imagination, Imagination, Nation.
*installation view photos by Ege Okal
Alina Bliumis CARRYING THE WEIGHT, WAR LANDSCAPES curated by Sozita Goudouna The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker St. NYC July 13 - September 10, 2022
Carrying the Weight, War Landscapes is a series of watercolor-on-linen landscapes. The locations were selected based on their historical significance and metaphorical representation in contemporary culture.
Each landscape immerses the viewer in tranquil scenery: a palette of green meadows frames the shallow red waters of the Rubicon River, just south of Ravenna, Italy; a starry night shines into the sea north of Tsushima Island in Japan; a cool and ghostly morning mist fills a Waterloo field in Belgium; a florid orange sunrise floods warm light over the Berezina River in Belarus; the midday sun sends its beams over the rocky Golgotha hill near Jerusalem, Israel; a golden hour brings magical light to the sky over field-lines of Austerlitz in Slavkov u Brna, Czechia; Mannahatta blooms with foliage and dramatic pink clouds hang over Mahicantuck, on the Hudson River; and the dreamy landscapes of Andes lie still in the Catskills region in upstate New York.
No visual trace remains of the dramatic historical events that took place against these backdrops: no Caesar or Napoleon with armies in tow, no horses or warships, no crucifixions; no ravages of war, nor signs of revolt. Only the place-names call to mind these histories, inviting the viewer to imagine their personal battles in place of the old. One thinks of crossing a real-life Rubicon, or point of no return; of an encounter with one’s ultimate obstacle—a Waterloo, of sorts; of feeling unavoidably defeated, as if in the gloom at Austerlitz; of failure— “c’est la Bérézina,” one might cry in French; of an occasion of great suffering figured as Golgotha, or of a battle with the ghosts of memory, animated in Tsushima.
The Lenape people inhabited the land on which I work for thousands of years before the European settlers arrived. They named their island home “Mannahatta,” meaning “Island of Many Hills.” We use the term “Mannahatta” to refer to the island as it was in 1609, and “Manhattan” to refer to the metropolis of today. The river we call the “Hudson,” the Lenape knew as “Mahicantuck,” meaning “river that flows two ways.”
Behind the four landscapes of Andes, NY (where my studio is located), there is the story of the Anti-Rent War of 1839–1845, a collective revolt of farmers who resisted tax collectors and successfully demanded land reform.
SPECTERS OF COMMUNISM: CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN ART James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, NY, USA, 2015 curator Boris Groys
Boris Groys
Excerpt from Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art, The James Gallery and e-flux, New York
"Jeff and Alina Bliumis, a pair of New York-based, Russian-speaking artists born in Moldova and Belarus, respectively, also open themselves up to the potentialities of new landscapes in the work that produced an installation of thirty-nine 24 x 24 inch photographs at The James Gallery. For their long-term project A Painting for a Family Dinner (2008-2013), the Bliumis' traveled the world from The Bronx to China stopping in Italy and Israel, looking for hosts who would exchange a home-cooked meal for a small sweetly but primitively rendered painting. Their project, which is the only one in the exhibition that does not directly engage with Russia, is documented through photographs where they stand with their temporarily adoptive families and in a set of limited-edition books that trace the project's steps within each country. Reviving the barter system in the twenty-first century when our transactions have advanced to new currencies, like Bitcoins and devices like Apple Pay, the Bliumis' humble proposition is inspiring, even though its success is not guaranteed in the capitalist system. A Painting for a Family Dinner allows us to see a positive side of communism because it puts into practice the notion of equal and shared property circulating within an international codependent community".
