Sterling Crispin featured in "Does Art Have Any Relevance in the Age of AI"?

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“Among the artistic projects i used to illustrate the issue, i’ll only mention Sterling Crispin’s N.A.N.O. , B.I.O. , I.N.F.O. , C.O.G.N.O. because of the way it illustrates the tension between the grand vision and promises of the Silicon Valley and the fragility of a world that is increasingly shaken by contingencies such as the depletion of natural resources (energy, minerals, etc.) and climate change.”

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Art in America | The World in Flux: Virginia Lee Montgomery’s Playlist

In a First Look profile for our October issue, Wendy Vogel discusses how Virginia Lee Montgomery subverts the paternalistic expectations of the business world in her sculptures and videos. “Montgomery . . . travels up to three weeks a month for her job as a graphic facilitator, diagramming the flow of ideas at focus groups and tech conferences,” Vogel writes. “So it seems fitting that her art highlights disruptions in the smooth machinery of capitalism.” Here, the artist shares a YouTube playlist of videos reflecting her interest in uncanny natural phenomena. —Eds.

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Sterling Crispin in Garage's "Bitcoin is the New Birkin Bag"

Garage Magazine

Bitcoin Is the New Birkin Bag

Ten years after Bitcoin's launch, the coin’s scarcity has generated a market that's more luxurious than libertarian.

Link to the full article here.

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“I see Bitcoin as an exotic financial asset that rich people are using to make more money, which at times is similar to art.”

“In 2012, Crispin came up with an idea for a sculpture about the apocalypse—which at the time seemed nigh: The end of the Mayan calendar threatened universal extinction. The technological singularity, when humans would mesh with robots and we would upload our souls to the cloud, threatened the end of our species as we know it. And the rise of Bitcoin threatened financial, political, and social chaos. Crispin titled the sculpture Self-Contained Investment Module and Contingency Package. Inside its cubic, steel framework is a post-apocalyptic survival kit composed of an emergency radio, heirloom seeds, a filtration water bottle, and, most importantly, Bitcoin mining hardware.

When Crispin completed the sculpture in 2015, the price of a Bitcoin was $220. “If I had dedicated [the hardware] to mining for the three years I had it, and then didn’t panic and sell when the price hit $300, I would probably be a multi-billionaire right now,” Crispin says. He’s transformed this regret into a kind of perverse creative delight. “I love the idea that as a material within a sculpture, the cryptocurrency might become more valuable than the sculpture itself,” he says.

Crispin intended the sculpture to be tongue-in-cheek; like the rest of his work, it’s critical of technological utopianism. Yet it demonstrates how cryptocurrency has evolved from a financial tool into something more akin to a Louis Vuitton suitcase, a Cartier watch, or a Jeff Koons sculpture. “People are not only buying Bitcoin in order to make money; they’re buying Bitcoin to be the kind of person who holds Bitcoin,” explains Jay Owens, a futurist and research director at the London firm Pulsar. “It’s functioning as a brand name.” 

PERFORMANCE at False Flag | Sunday, October 28 | 2pm to 4pm

Performance

Altar: The Raising of a Colonized Child

Jana Lynne Umipig

Conversation

Camille Hoffman with Jana Lynne Umipig

Sunday, October 28, 2018 at False Flag from 2pm to 4pm

Altar: Re-memberings of a Colonized Child | Ag Pada Tayo - We are the Same

Altar: The Raising of a Colonized Child is a multi-media play that pays homage to the relearning of spiritual practices by women who were born in the US and have ancestral backgrounds that are indigenous to another land. Uplifting those who have maintained spiritual practices crucial to survival in the face of the cultural erasure and oppression of migrant peoples. These truths are told through the raising of a child by her grandmother.

Altar speaks to the corporeal relation of a young woman to her grandmother, and the notion that our ancestors inhabit our physical selves. The body is an Altar carrying remnants: fragments of ancestral being that are honored by recalling the memories of exchange between the young woman and her grandmother.

Written and Conceptualized by: Jana Lynne (JL) Umipig

Choreographer: Afaliah Tribune

Music: Blessing Ritual by Shant

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Jana Lynne (JL) Umipig creates transformative artistic experiences. She has dedicated her life to the use of art as a medium for healing, education, understanding, empowerment, and connection.

JL’s education is rooted in classical and physical theatre: she received formal training from New York University, The Claire Trevor School of the Arts at The University of California, Irvine and The Academia Dell' Arte in Arrezzo, Italy. Collaborative and experimental, JL’s practice addresses human spirituality, human rights advocacy, art therapy, and healing connected to the development of her work around "For the Movement Theatre" and "Theatre as Spiritual Practice."

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Camille Hoffman (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Yale University (2015), a BFA from California College of the Arts (2009), and was a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for research in Spain, and the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe, in exhibitions including Pieceable Kingdom at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2018), Lincoln Center, New York, NY (2017), Times Square, New York, NY (2017), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (2015), Nuit Blanche arts festival, Paris, France (2015), and Espai Cultural Biblioteca Azorín, Valencia, Spain (2008). Current exhibitions include Excelsior: Ever Upward, Ever Afloat at the Queens Museum (through fall 2019) and Rockabye My Bedrock Bones at False Flag Projects in Long Island City, NY (Through Nov 4, 2018). Hoffman has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2017), QueenSpace, Long Island City, NY (2016-17), Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2017), and Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School through the Yale University Office of New Haven and State Affairs, New Haven, CT (2015). Hoffman has also worked for over a decade as an arts educator and community organizer in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Haven, Brooklyn, and Queens. She currently lives and works in New York, NY.

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About the exhibition:

CAMILLE HOFFMAN || Rockabye My Bedrock Bones
September 21 - November 4

False Flag proudly presents Camille Hoffman’s first solo New York gallery show — Rockabye My Bedrock Bones.

Beachcombers, a 1956 painting by Hoffman’s late grandmother, hangs at the show’s heart — in acknowledgement of its role as the exhibition’s catalyst. As Hoffman puts it: “I developed this installation thinking about both my body and my landscapes as vessels of creative inheritance.” With her grandmother, Shoshannah (1921-1998), as lodestar, Hoffman reconfigures the gallery into a site of personal archaeology, expanding her landscape work in a matrilineal excavation. This conceptual approach is most strikingly applied to the previously all-white gallery walls: painted “the colors of my skin throughout the seasons and under varying degrees of light and pressure, to match the sand in Shoshannah’s painting and the papers, plastics, paints of my landscapes.” These paintings cover over 3,000 square feet of wall-space in a striated palette of browns, olives, and peaches. Enfolded in an infinite, fleshy ground, “the space wears you,” as Hoffman says. Her topographical paintings read as birthmarks, extending and punctuating the tones and textures of the walls. While honest, the work is never obvious: running across the gallery floor, Hoffman forms her “dunes” from the actual tarps used while painting the walls. Detritus is not simply relocated, nor is the show a literal facsimile: there are no props, no gimmicks. 

For Hoffman, “this show is an exploration of my landscape work as a form of creative and biological unearthing—an interior reinvention and reconfiguration of past ruins.” In a 1956 issue of Art in America, Shoshannah stated: "Painting, to me, is an extension of living, and interwoven into the life process, not a thing apart from it." Just as her grandmother—born Susannah S. Siporin in 1921—refashioned fragments of her given name to forge an identity of her own—adopting Shoshannah in 1943—Hoffman repurposes the physical substance of her life to similar effect. “Disposable things take on different meaning when one separates an object from its market value,” Hoffman explains. “How do I create value? Personal value, economic value—how do I support myself? I have to be resourceful. Everything matters.” By “laying claim to the space,” Hoffman forms a new economy: one in which material is measured by its inherent physical properties—a particular color, transparency, texture, visual effect or structure—rather than its transactional worth. The overlooked becomes valuable; the seemingly discardable earns respect. Hoffman’s bracingly honest approach reflects a fundamental aim of her practice: the reclamation of agency through confrontation and acknowledgement of her everyday experience. 

Grounded in accumulation, personal narrative, and historical critique, Hoffman describes her practice as “a ceremony of reconfiguration and critical reflection on the themes of diaspora, domesticity, and disposability.” Composing her work with material collected from her everyday life, Hoffman’s media range from medical records, credit card offers, calendars, plastic bags, tablecloths, found photos, maps, to paint. Hoffman draws on her family’s creative legacy, along with traditional painting techniques from her academic training, employing resonant visual and historical references: Philippine weaving, Jewish folk traditions, and influential American landscape paintings of the 19th century. Recontextualizing these figurative, nostalgic, and abstract cultural fragments, Hoffman forms layered, richly-textured geographies, charting new territory that is at once surreal and familiar.

The exhibition is on view from September 21 through November 4.

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Virginia Lee Montgomery in Art in America

Link to the full article here.

“SORCERY AND CORPORATE creativity don’t make for the most intuitive pairing, but Virginia Lee Montgomery unites them in her persona of Business Witch. This presence haunts the artist’s surreal videos, where, for instance, her Dewalt drill opens a portal to another dimension, and a three-foot-long ponytail from a blond wig (resembling Montgomery’s own long tresses) bounces through a business hotel room.”

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Queens International 2018: Volumes | Camille Hoffman & Asif Mian

Camille Hoffman and Asif Mian will present new work at the Queens International 2018: Volumes.

QI 2018 artists represent a dialog among Queens-connected producers of several generations, including for the first time artists who have exhibited in earlier Internationals. The artists’ works respond to sites throughout the entire museum and select Queens Library branches. They question and expand systems of knowledge production using both analog and digital strategies. They rethink histories and policies through embodied experience, redemptive archives, subjective abstractions, and intangible architectures. Via these methods, they explore the potential for a nonlinear progression of time and correspondingly, a fluid approach to space.

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Camille Hoffman will present work in the Watershed Gallery.

“In April 2018, I had the privilege of speaking with Two Clouds, a Ramapough Lenape tribal member and full-time water protector at Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp in New Jersey. Preserving the language, religion, and history of his tribe, Two Clouds is especially focused on indigenous rights while actively fighting against the Pilgrim Pipelinethat threatens New York and New Jersey waters. Our insightful and ongoing exchange around water as it pertains to deep cultural traditions, ancestral trade routes, and long-standing colonial violence on this land has prompted me to critically reexamine my own personal interconnection with water, consumption and transoceanic identity. Drawing from our conversations and responding to the Queens Museum’s 1939 World's Fair relief model of the New York City water supply system, I researched the colonial symbols pertaining to water and commerce emphasized in the New York state seal, ultimately reformulating them with my own found materials.”

Asif Mian will present new work in Skylight Gallery.

“I have been working with surveillance imagery and video since I was teenager. This started with collecting images of events and "portraits" from CCTV footage on the web. I was always drawn to its institutional method of raw capture—high angle, pixelated, and inherently disposable. I made many drawings based on these images, employing the same high-angle, isometric perspective. The attraction extended to making films using black-and-white pinhole surveillance cameras, remote-controlled CCTV cameras, and night vision cameras. An attraction to thermal (IR) cameras was inevitable.”

Asif Mian Awarded LMCC Workspace Residency

A nine-month studio residency program that focuses on creative practice development for emerging artists working across all disciplines, LMCC’s Workspace program offers space for experimentation and dialogue with peers and arts professionals, as well as career-advancement opportunities. Workspace encourages creative risk-taking, collaboration, learning and skill-sharing at a critical early stage of an artist’s career and serves between 15 and 20 individuals or collaborative groups annually.

False Flag and Pacific release "Jasper Johns Vs Brian Ramnarine" at Printed Matter's NY Art Book Fair

THE NY Art Book Fair

Preview: Thursday, September 20, 6-9pm.
Purchase ticket here.

Pacific | 3rd Floor
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Slated for release at the 2018 New York Art Book Fair, Jasper Johns Vs Brian Ramnarine is a facsimile publication comprised of partially-redacted evidence used by the United States Attorney’s Office to convict Ramnarine of multiple felonies in 2014. Included among the contents - all of which were obtained through a FOIA request - are fabricated correspondence between Ramnarine and Johns, fake letters of authenticity, and images of the artist’s work which Ramnarine forged and attempted to sell.