FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 22, 2015 ISCP Presents Group Exhibition Aqueous Earth Through January 22, 2016 Keynote Exhibition Lecture Timothy Morton: And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction January 12, 2016 at 6:30pm iscp International Studio & Curatorial Program 1040 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11211 t: (718) 387 2900 www.iscp-nyc.org [email protected] GALLERY HOURS Wednesday-Friday Installation image, Dylan Gauthier, What Wilderness: 9 Conversations on Ecology, Abstraction, and the Anthropocene, 2015, 12-6pm and by Sixteen-foot-long wood punt, participatory field trips, and digital video, Video duration: 32 minutes, Courtesy of the artist. appointment Artists included in the exhibition: Allora & Calzadilla, Lara Almarcegui, Brandon Ballengée, Dylan Gauthier, Brooke Singer, and Pinar Yoldas. Curated by Kari Conte. Aqueous Earth presents artwork that reconsiders humanity’s relationship to bodies of water in the Anthropocene era. ISCP’s close proximity to Newtown Creek—a channelized estuary that was once the busiest waterway in New York City—shapes the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Heavy industrial usage has transformed Newtown Creek into an ecological catastrophe; it was designated as a Superfund site in 2010. Mirroring the issues pertaining to the creek’s degradation, Aqueous Earth presents the work of artists who apply multidisciplinary and speculative research to their work. Through a confluence of research, action and optimism, the six artists in Aqueous Earth look beyond the bleak present, rethinking the way humanity entwines with nature. Artworks in the exhibition include Brooke Singer’s Toxic Sites US Project (2015 - ongoing), an online data visualization and media-sharing platform about the worst toxic sites in the United States, including hundreds of rivers, creeks and lakes that are Superfund sites. Lara Almarcegui’s Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River (2010), focuses on the “empty gaps”—urban ruins and detritus—found along most of the expanse of the four-mile Flushing River in Queens, New York. The artist’s guidebook and slideshow traces the history and redevelopment of this long-neglected terrain. An Ecosystem of Excess (2014), an installation by artist and researcher Pinar Yoldas imagines how amphibious species can biologically adapt their organs to metabolize plastic in the Pacific Trash Vortex, a floating mass of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean. In the project, Yoldas asks: “If life started today in the oceans of plastic, what kind of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?” In What Wilderness: 9 Conversations on Ecology, Abstraction, and the Anthropocene, For photographs Dylan Gauthier, taking on the role of an urban wilderness explorer, built a 16-foot plywood and further information please boat at ISCP and carried invited guests and the public down Newtown Creek to investigate contact Esther Hur: its industrial past and post-natural present. These early morning conversations have been [email protected] transcribed and excerpts are included in a new video work. In Ghosts of the Gulf (2014), 1 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE a photographic series by Brandon Ballengée, the artist looks at the BP Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill that happened in 2010, an epic environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that has severely impacted its marine life. In Amphibious (Login-Logout) (2005), Allora & Calzadilla depict turtles floating down the Pearl River Delta on a log, watching their habitat become increasingly industrialized and less hospitable to non-human life. UPCOMING PUBLIC PROGRAMS: Timothy Morton: And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction January 12, 2016, 6:30pm Timothy Morton will give the keynote lecture And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction in conjunction with ISCP’s exhibition Aqueous Earth. This will be iscp Morton’s first public lecture in New York City since 2011. International Studio & Timothy Morton is the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Curatorial Program 1040 Metropolitan Ave. Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach and Brooklyn, NY 11211 Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence t: (718) 387 2900 (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: www.iscp-nyc.org Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: [email protected] Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 150 essays on GALLERY HOURS philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He blogs regularly at http:// Wednesday-Friday www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. 12-6pm and by appointment Aqueous Earth Monday Readings ISCP will hold reading group discussions with Kari Conte, Juliana Cope, Dylan Gauthier and Ralph Ghoche. Participants will consider the confluence of ecology and art. Monday, December 14, 2015, 4-6pm, Muddy Thinking: Art and Ecology, Present and Past with Ralph Ghoche Monday, December 28, 2015, 4-6pm, Liquid and Land with Juliana Cope Monday, January 4, 2016, 4-6pm, The Rights of Nature with Kari Conte Monday, January 11, 2016, 4-6pm, On What Comes Next: (Re-)Presenting Nature with Dylan Gauthier PAST PUBLIC PROGRAMS: Past programs included nine voyages in Dylan Gauthier’s handbuilt wooden punt throughout October with Dylan Gauthier, members of the public, and guests including Mary Walling Blackburn, Una Chaudhuri, Willis Elkins, Sam Gould, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, Sto Len, Maureen McLane, Aviva Rahmani, Mark Read, Brie Ruais and Marina Zurkow. Programs also included Aviva Rahmani’s performance of the first three movements of Blued Trees, a five-part symphony that began with an overture in Peekskill, New York. For photographs and further information please contact Esther Hur: [email protected] 2 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Lara Almarcegui lives and works in Rotterdam. Her work deals with urban transformation and she has recently exhibited at the Museen Haus Lange & Haus Esters, Krefeld and the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Brandon Ballengée lives and works in New York. He has recently shown his work—which is a hybrid between art and science—in solo exhibitions at the National Academy of the Sciences, Washington, D.C. and the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette. Dylan Gauthier lives and works in New York, and is an ISCP alum. He is a member of the collective Mare Liberum, whose solo exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, iscp Harvard University, Cambridge ended in September. Aviva Rahmani lives and works in New York, and has been working for four decades on International Studio & issues related to environmental sustainability. Curatorial Program 1040 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11211 Brooke Singer lives and works in New York. She works across disciplines engaging t: (718) 387 2900 technology and science as an artist, educator, and collaborator. Her recent project La Casita www.iscp-nyc.org Verde has revitalized a community garden in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. [email protected] Pinar Yoldas lives and works between Durham, NC and Berlin. Her research explores the GALLERY HOURS intersection of art and biology. Recent solo exhibitions include An Ecosystem of Excess, Wednesday-Friday Ernst Schering Project Space, Berlin and AlterEvolution, Ekavart, Istanbul. 12-6pm and by appointment This exhibition and related public programs are supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, The Greenwich Collection, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Antonio Reynoso, Council Member, 34th District, and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). For photographs and further information please contact Esther Hur: [email protected] 3.