Artist Talk: Open Sessions 8

James Mercer, People Looking at People Looking at Condoms, ink on paper, 18 × 30 inches, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.
James Mercer, People Looking at People Looking at Condoms, ink on paper, 18 × 30 inches, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.

In conjunction with Open Sessions 8: Planes and Corridors, please join us for short artist talks with Byron Kim, Dread Scott, AMBOS and Keith Ford from Green City Force, on contested landscapes, migration, revolutionary enactments and geographies that are game changers.

Open Sessions 8: Planes and Corridors is a group exhibition which considers drawing as a shifting outline around narratives of alienation, proximity and distance. Featuring artists ruby onyinyechi amanze, Eric Ramos Guerrero, Nsenga Knight, Lei Lei, James Mercer, Edwin Torres, and Ezra Wube, the exhibition explores real and imagined landscapes, whose fluid borders and disorienting geographies reference issues around migration and a complicated topography of the everyday. Including work that features poetry, drawing, and miniaturized land, Planes and Corridors responds to drawing as an open equation where the strange and ordinary meet.

Presenters:

AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) serves as an idea lab for international creative collaboration in the Baja/Alta California transborder region. Through artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity, AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness in the border region. This landscape expands and contracts with the movement of people and objects, sparking critical engagement with issues of migration, informal economies and the construction of collective identities.

Artist Byron Kim will present a work in process for his Real DMZ project. The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) splits the Korean peninsula in half, creating a buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea. It’s the most militarized border on earth. The artist will speculate on an intervention, with architects David Leven and Stella Betts (LEVENBETTS), to create a frame for seeing the sky and the birdlife of the region.

Green City Force is an AmeriCorps program that engages young adults from low income communities in national service related to the environment. Keith Ford will present the vision of this inspiring model for citywide Clean Energy Corps in New York City, speaking about personal experience in the program and how it engages young people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, inspires passion for sustainability and service, stimulates the demand for green services, and creates ladders to careers in the green economy for young people living in poverty.

Artist Dread Scott will speak about the largely unknown history of a 19th-century New Orleans slave uprising—one of the largest of its kind in the United States. In 2017, Scott will organize a small army of reenactors in historical costumes to walk the 25-mile path of these rebels, who were headed to New Orleans. The walk will take a path through not only gated communities but also strip malls, trailer parks and a “petrochemical corridor” that has given rise to so much illness as to be dubbed “Cancer Alley” by the media.

James Mercer,People Looking at People Looking at Condoms ink on paper, 18 ✕ 30 inches, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.