Speechbuster Residency: The Clemente

November 5, 2014 – May 30, 2015

Opening Reception: November 5, 2014, 7PM

Activating spaces through a series of conversations, screenings and events

Storefront for Art and Architecture, in collaboration with The Clemente presents the Speechbuster Residency, a spatial project that inserts Storefront’s public debates through a performative table and a series of conversations, screenings and events addressing contemporary issues related to the built environment.

 

The Speechbuster, commissioned by Storefront with the support of the Rauschenberg Foundation and designed collaboratively by architect Jimenez Lai and artist Grayson Cox, is a performative table with 99 seats made of rearrangeable parts.

 

Negotiating between the performativity of the Speechbuster and the space it occupies, the SB Residency brings artists, architects, designers, writers, policy makers and citizens to discuss their spaces of inquiry and practice as well as their public impact.

 

The audience, always a participant, is invited to activate the table by modifying the position of the pieces and constructing their own scenario – from a theater to a pavilion to a discussion table.

 

The Speechbuster, in its journey through a series of stimulating spaces in New York City, is currently in residence at The Clemente. We invite you to enjoy the piece, take your shoes off, relax, think, treat the piece and your interlocutors with care and broadcast your thoughts.

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#speechbuster #storefrontnyc

 

 

Events with The Clemente

 

Opening Reception: November 5, 2014

 

On November 5, artists with studios at The Clemente activated the Speechbuster by rearranging the piece in different configurations and hosting 7-minute presentations and performances of their work. Artists included Arts for Art (Patricia Nicholson and William Parker), Itziar Barrio, FELT, Linda Griggs, Rebecca Howard, Michael Katchen, Alexis Neider, Erick Sanchez and Miguel Trelles. A few highlights include: 

 

Arts for Art  (Patricia Nicholson and William Parker) presented a performance of music (ngoni) and dance

Itziar Barrio shared images and a video of a current project.

 

Linda Griggs presented drawings from her story-painting series, “The First Times Is Not Like Porn.”

Rebecca Howard presented a short, silent video accompanied by a narration.

 

FELT presented a 7-minute performance of a work in progress.

 

Michael Katchen projected images and defined the parameters and goals of a specific visual project in production.

 

Erick Sánchez presented a new series of paintings based on the book “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. These artworks are his depiction of Santiago’s journey.

Watch the video:

 

 

About the Artists

Arts for Art is a collaboration of Patricia Nicholson and William Parkter. Patricia is a dancer, poet and organizer of movement, music and causes, has developed her work within the aesthetic of free jazz.  Her use of composition and improvisation is influenced by this consistent relationship. Her work has been presented at festivals in Sweden, France. Spain, Hungary and Italy as well as in the US.  William born and raised in the Bronx, and living in the Lower East Side since 1975, has been a key figure in the NY creative jazz scene.  Renowned as a composer, a bassist and multi-instrumentalist, Parker is also an educator and author. He is prolific artist, with over 150-recorded albums and countless celebrated stage appearances. He is the recipient of awards including ‘musician of the year’ in 2007 in Italy, and most recently the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.

 

Itziar Barrio’s practice interlaces music, film and other disciplines to tackle the signs and symbols deployed in these mediums’ creation of realities, affect and identity. Barrio is interested in the locus where language becomes knowledge; by analyzing the dynamics of this intersection, her work manipulates our attractions and positions us in a different encounter with our usual behaviors and cognitive associations.

 

The Fantastic Experimental Latino Theater, Inc. (FELT) was founded in 1994. Its mission is to strengthen and develop artistic and cultural awareness of Latinos in New York City. With its thought provoking, multi-media theater production, FELT reaches a multi-ethnic and inter-generational, diverse audience, representative of the nation’s cultural tapestry. Through its written Lab, FELT develops original work of emerging and professional playwrights. It also has an Educational Program, which captures the voice of today’s youth, and provides an opportunity for theater and film related initiatives.

 

Linda Griggs has been exploring Narrative Art since 1992.  Her current series, The First Time Is Not Like Porn, deals with the disparity between sexual expectations based on pornography and the awkwardness of the first sexual experience.

 

Rebecca Howard is an artist and producer from the U.K. Working across mediums such as printed text, spoken word and sound, her practice seeks to explore notions of dialogue and interaction. Much of Rebecca’s work aims to create scenarios, which combine elements of reality and fiction in order to underline tensions and play between the two. Her work has been shown internationally and her texts featured in various publications.

 

Michael Katchen is a visual artist who uses collage, photography, printmaking, and mass media images to comment on the visual language of contemporary society. He assigns personal meaning to generic representations and transforms the disposable image into a vehicle for personal expression. Additionally, Mr. Katchen serves as the Senior Archivist for Franklin Furnace, an alternative arts organization in Brooklyn, works as freelance photographer, and teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

 

Alexis Neider is a painter, print-maker, and NYC public school teacher. Her work uses domestic tropes and feminist theory to examine the deconstruction of conventional forms–such as cake–in order to address questions of gender, domesticity, and abstraction. No longer is cake an object for consumption; through re-encoding the familiar, it becomes a vehicle to illuminate as well as challenge the complexities of a traditional domestic sphere. Alexis has exhibited widely in NYC and beyond.  She recently completed a residency at Can Serrat and looks forward to her first solo show at Bija Gallery.

 

Erick Sanchez  is a painter and sculptor living and working in New York City. He was born in 1973 in Ponce, Puerto Rico. His work is akin to that of an alchemist exploring the binding of pigments and minerals in novel combinations.

 

 

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The Speechbuster was commissioned by Storefront and made possible by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Program, which supports fearless and innovative collaborations in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg.