Polaris
image by Ofri Cnaani
Polaris
Ofri Cnaani, Eric Corriel, Zachary Fabri, Mario Navarro, and Igor Revelis
Curated by Joey Lico
Exhibition: September 7 – October 15, 2016
Opening Reception: September 7, 2016 | 6 – 8 pm
BAXTER ST at CCNY is delighted to announce a group exhibition, Polaris, including work by Ofri Cnaani, Eric Corriel, Zachary Fabri, Mario Navarro, and Igor Revelis, organized by guest curator Joey Lico.
Lico invited five artists from disparate backgrounds to examine their relationships both experienced and witnessed, to their political communities. By bringing together these voices, Lico aims to provoke a larger conversation about the social engineering of inequity. Each artist’s work reveals these charged relationships as either indiscreet or discreet, but in all scenarios, ever present.
Beginning in the street outside and woven throughout the entire upstairs and downstairs, each area in the gallery is activated into the conversation. Systems of control are brought to the forefront though interactive video, sculpture, performance, and photography. Within Polaris, the artists have all confronted their personal, dynamic, relationships to things that are more subtly controlling such as, surveillance and architecture; to the more explicit inequalities of violence, immigration, and segregation.
On opening night, in the basement space, which typically hosts workstations for CCNY members, Ofri Cnaani will present ?D (Command+ Duplicate) – a participatory performance. The workstation and the printer she will use are symbols of a bureaucratic system that, contrary to it’s purpose, deepens a divide. By combining items from the audience’s personal belongings together with objects culled from the artist’s collection of found materials from the gallery’s Chinatown neighborhood, Cnaani will sit with each participant to enact the live creation of a personalized image. The print will be signed by the artist and given to the participant as a unique work of art. Cnaani refers to these works as “original copies” – a copy habitually just reproduces without change, but here, creativity and new dialogues between herself, the visitor, and the community of strangers replace that customary, unyielding, efficiency. Thus shifting the control of the unchanged systems through interpersonal exchange.
PRESS
Lico invited five artists,Ofri Cnaani, Eric Corriel, Zachary Fabri, Mario Navarro, and Igor Revelis, from disparate backgrounds to examine their relationships both experienced and witnessed, to their political communities. By bringing together these voices, Lico aims to provoke a larger conversation about the social engineering of inequity. Each artist’s work reveals these charged relationships as either indiscreet or discreet, but in all scenarios, ever present. Musée Art Out.
BIOS
Ofri Cnaani is an artist based in Brooklyn. In 2015 she presented a live video installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a newly commissioned piece for Inhotim Institute, Brazil and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Cnaani’s solo exhibitions and performances include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; PS1/MoMA, NYC; BMW Guggenheim Lab, NYC; The Fisher Museum of Art, L.A.; Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; and the Herzlyia Museum of Art, Israel.
After growing up on Long Island, Eric Corriel graduated from Cornell University where he received a Bachelors of Arts in Philosophy while also studying Fine Art and Computer Science. He later received a Diplôme National d’Arts Plastiques (National Diploma of Fine Art), from the École Régionale Supérieure d’Expression Plastique in Tourcoing, France. Currently living in Brooklyn, Eric takes the urban landscape as a medium in which to create site-specific video installations in the public realm. Corriel has been awarded grants by the New York Foundation of the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, and the Public Art Network. As a designer, he has received awards from the Webbys, Davey Awards, and W3.
Zachary Fabri was born in Miami, Florida where he received a Bachelor of Fine Art in graphic design from the New World School of the Arts. After moving to Harlem in 2000, he later received a MFA from Hunter College in 2007 in combined media. His multidisciplinary practice mines the intersection of personal and political spaces, often responding to a specific environment or context. Fabri’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Sequences Real-time Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland; the Nordic Biennale: Momentum, Moss, Norway; Gallery Open, Berlin; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Art in General, and the Bindery Projects. He has been awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in interdisciplinary work, and most recently The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.
Joey Lico (guest curator) is an independent Curator and Director of Programming at The Cultivist. Lico began her career at the New York Foundation for the Arts and later served at the Director level for Independent Curators International (ICI). At both ICI and NYFA she managed and expanded curatorial and development projects with both emerging and established artists across all disciplines of art. Lico graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University; received her MA from NYU’s Gallatin School; and her PhD in Art History from The University of Amsterdam. She serves as Co-chair for the Executive Committee for The Whitney Museum Contemporaries and as an Advisory Committee member for NYFA. In addition to her museum affiliations, she is working with The White House as an advisor on their ACT/ART Committee, bringing contemporary art back into the forefront of public policy.
Mario Navarro is a Mexican American artist based in New York City. Utilizing his formal training as an architect, Navarro’s practice, objects and architectures operate as nodes of meaning and conceptual signification within a broader system of relations. Therefore, he creates a metaclass of language that questions both architecture and the way we look at it. His work belongs to private collections such as the Frances R. Dittmer Collection (Chicago) and Fundación Colección Jumex (Mexico City).
Igor Revelis was born in Harkov, Ukraine and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. Influenced by his childhood emigration from the Ukraine to Israel, Revelis’ initial practice of tagging and graffiti were personal challenges to themes of diaspora. This urban tradition allowed him to take ownership of his surrounding and localize an often hostile and alienating environment, making his foreign settings, more familiar. As his works expanded to exhibitions and murals throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, Revelis began to integrate more complex traditions of art history and aimed to reach a broader political treatise by moving the intention of his work outside of himself and towards others and their relationships with—and concept of “home.”
[ngg_images source=”galleries” container_ids=”5″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_basic_slideshow” gallery_width=”600″ gallery_height=”400″ cycle_effect=”fade” cycle_interval=”4″ show_thumbnail_link=”0″ thumbnail_link_text=”[Show thumbnails]” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
This exhibition is part of a series of guest-curated exhibitions at BAXTER ST at CCNY resulting from an open call for proposals, and is made possible in part by generous support from public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
