Greenpoint Open Studios

JUNE 10 – 11, 2023

FEATURED ARTISTS
Reuben Lorch-Miller, prints and sculpture
Radical Documents, limited edition vinyl
Land and Sea, artist books

ALSO ON VIEW
Earmark, selected works from the collection of artist editions
GUI/GOOEY, online group exhibition in our favorite browser :)
Laura Splan, selected works

Project Space: Featured Artists

Plexus Projects at Greenpoint Open Studios featured selected works by Greenpoint artist Reuben Lorch-Miller including sculpture, collage, and artist books. To accompany his artworks in the project space, Lorch-Miller curated a selection of limited edition vinyl releases by Radical Documents and editioned artist books published by Land and Sea.

Reuben Lorch-Miller is a Brooklyn, NY based artist, educator, and mental health counselor. His studio practice encompasses sculpture, collage, photography, artist books, music, and performance. He approaches his work from a perspective of curiosity and experimentation, understanding that meaning can be found within the process of doing. He has often exhibited at DIY art spaces, participated in artist-run residencies and produced multiple self-published zines and artist books.

Radical Documents was started in 2017 by artist Matthew Clifford Green. Originally based in Los Angeles, they moved to Chicago in the spring of 2021. The label focuses on unique, experimental, and obscure sounds from a wide range of artists spanning the globe. Land and Sea is a small press based in Oakland, California, run by Maria Otero and Chris Duncan. Land and Sea began in 2009 and has consistently been publishing small editions of books and records by artists from the Bay Area and beyond. Under the same moniker, Chris and Maria organize gatherings that celebrate the collectivity of the artistic and wider communities they are part of. In 2014, they opened a storefront studio in Oakland to host sound and art events, performances, art shows, and other happenings that combine visual, sonic, performance and literary arts, as well as pop-ups for other small publishers and cultural facilitators.

Earmark: Selected Works

Earmark, is a curated collection of editioned print and sound publications including artist books, catalogs, zines, ephemera, and vinyl projects. The collection includes artists using a variety of printing processes ranging from laser cutting to Risograph to photocopy techniques. Artists in the collection include Katie Garth, Candace Williams, James Bascara, Jess Woods, Shane Smith, Brett Wallace, Dawn Light Blackman, Paul Shortt, Fritz Welch, De Kwok, Becca Albee, Chris Duncan, 57 Cell, Nathan Brown, Laura Splan, and others.

GUI/GOOEY: Online Exhibition

on view on a computer in the project space

Plexus Projects is pleased to present GUI/GOOEY the first in a series of online group exhibitions exploring technological representations of the biological world. The exhibition includes artworks that examine notions of “life” and “nature” with computational, digital, and virtual tools. The selected artists reflect a range of perspectives with international representation from thirteen countries. Together they simultaneously interrogate liminal sensations and materialities of membranes and interfaces, bits and bodies.

ARTISTS
Abraham Homer US; Alt23 MT; Andrea Mikyska DE; Anni Garza-Lau, Yunuen Vladimir, Hugo Escalpelo, Lilianha Dominguez MX; Brian Zegeer US; Cezar Mocan PT; Derzu Campos MX; Dexter Callender III US; Diana Scarborough UK; Dylan Rundle US; Elaine Whittaker CA; Electric Skin TR/FR/US/ES; Ellen Bjerborn SE; Finn Dugan US; James Bascara US; Jeff Thompson US; Josh Urban CA; Katina Bitsicas, Rachel Strickland US; Keaton Fox US; Kimberlee Koym-Murteira US; Lolo Ostia US; Lizz Thabet US; Mark Ramos, Ziyang Wu US/CN; Morgan Green, Andrew Bearnot US; Nina Sumarac CY; Reid Arowood US; Ryan Woodring US; Sarah Buckius US; Yousif Alzayed, Ben Glass, Yimei Zhu US

Front & Back Studios: Laura Splan

Laura Splan selected weavings, prints, and animations

Monday, January 20, 2020 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Miho Shimizu & Øyvind Renberg. Möbius will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note projections are viewed from the sidewalk. The project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours.

Möbius. By engaging in a one-person board game, a shepherd leads a flock of sheep, a gang of banana juggling sailors and a party of rococo styled hedonists up a tower evoking the shell of an ammonite. When they reach the top on the tower’s spiraling steps, they tumble to the ground, forming new seabed sediments. Through split screen editing, the film explores how a life narrative can be told through a range of associations, memories and perspectives.

Miho Shimizu and Øyvind Renberg were born in 1976 in Tokyo and Oslo and have collaborated since graduating from Goldsmiths College, London, in the early 2000s. Their work forms an ongoing, visually eclectic universe of paintings and sculptures. This extends to meticulous and imaginative costumes and set pieces in films that explore choreography, rhythm, color and narrative structure.

Sunday, January 19, 2020 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Gabriela Saucedo. InsectBody will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note projections are viewed from the sidewalk. The project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours.

Gabriela Saucedo’s InsectBody is a work of Ecological Mythology. In this chapter, a posthuman reality is speculated where vertebrates and invertebrates are irrevocably linked. By integrating motion capture data from the artist own body with the hybrid body, the InsectBody is made carnal. Following the last life cycle of this creature, the relationship between humans and insects is under scored to serve as a warning for a disconnected future.

Gabriela Saucedo is an artist and writer based in Chicago. She works in 3D modeling, virtual installation, and web-based forms, concentrating on cognitive/spiritual impact of new ecologies and technology. She is currently pursuing her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sunday, January 12, 2020 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Matthew Lax. Fabricated in the Actual Arctic (after Nanook) will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note projections are viewed from the sidewalk. The project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours.

Matthew Lax’s Fabricated in the Actual Arctic (after Nanook) is a silent essay that considers several key details of the production and legacy of Robert Flaherty's seminal 1922 documentary, "Nanook of the North" (also known as, "A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic"). An image by an Inuk artist is discovered “missing” from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) collection.

Matthew Lax (b. Baltimore, MD) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer currently based in Los Angeles, CA. His moving-image work and writing focuses on the intersection of politics and everyday life, with particular attention to issues of labor, queer histories, and the construction of language and cultural systems. His film and video works have been screened and exhibited nationally and internationally with the Viennale (Austria), IHME Contemporary (Helsinki), MIX New York (New York, NY) and MIX Brasil (São Paulo), Rencontres Internationales, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), LA Film Forum (Los Angeles), and Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin). Curatorial projects include those in partnership with the Torrance Art Museum (CA), Acud Macht Neu Collective (Berlin), Human Resources (Los Angeles), the Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles), and Anthology Film Archives (New York). His writing has appeared in print and online publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), ArtPractical (San Francisco), and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA). He recently published his first exhibition catalog for artist Jonathan Molina-Garcia's "Bethesday Brotherhood," with Lawndale Art Center, Dallas.

Sunday, January 5, 2020 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Hunter Cole. Dancing with Light will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note projections are viewed from the sidewalk. The project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours.

In Dancing with Light dancers dance by the light of bioluminescent bacteria with three themes involved in bioluminescence including communication, predator-prey relationships and mating. Music is based on DNA and protein sequence in the bioluminescent bacteria.

Internationally recognized, Hunter Cole’s art includes paintings, photography, digital art, and living art using bioluminescent bacteria. Cole is a member of the faculty of Loyola University New Orleans.
More recently, she has expanded the application and use of bioluminescent light to more complex works including figurative compositions (portraits; dancers). Some of her newer work depicts a keen interest in surreal imagery and symbolism.

Sunday, December 22, 2019 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Olive Ouyang. Virtuality of Absence will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note the project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours. Projections are viewed from the sidewalk.

Between the ubiquity of digital imaging and the frenzy of building/rebuilding of our cities, we live instant and fragmented existences. Memories – recorded by digital devices, stored in the Cloud, accessed via social media – paradoxically last both forever and moments only. Holograms become the new urban fantasy; we seem to no longer believe in ghosts. Within this context of digital impermanence, Virtuality of Absence meditates on a post-digital narrative where 3D scanning and motion-capture technologies are used to generate immersive virtual landscapes for rituals of mourning and remembrance. The remembered, experienced, and imagined transport us from the corporeal to the virtual, constructing palimpsests that carry a multiplicity of histories. Traces of the past, present, and future become inextricably intertwined, destabilizing any binary opposition between “real” and “unreal.” If we could understand how virtuality produces phantasmatically attainable spaces that transcend Euclidean geometries, can we move beyond the false polarity of the authentic memory vs. technological mediation? Can we recognize and reconcile with the virtuality that deeply penetrates our collective consciousness, and allow it to bear witness to our grief?

Olive Qi Ouyang is a Chinese-born designer, artist and writer. Her work engages the realms of the ephemeral to examine our collective fear of the disappearance of physical spaces, and in parallel – the active architectural production and proliferations of virtual landscapes. Olive received her Master of Architecture with an emphasis in Interior Architecture, and certificate in Historic Preservation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the First Prize Winner of the 2018 Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Colleen Marie Foley. Cartographic Evidence that My Mother is the Ocean will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note the project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours. Projections are viewed from the sidewalk.

As I map the poetic connections between memories and words, a population of images forms its own ecology. My hand traces threads of meaning between personal stories and environment as a gesture of curiosity and humility. —Colleen Marie Foley

Colleen Marie Foley is an interdisciplinary artist and video maker. Her work focuses on the psychological/physical relationship between sublime landscape and the body and the porousness of the membrane that separates them. Video, with its capacity to encompass a multitude of media, allows her to explore these themes via music, poetry, installation, performance and digital special effects. Colleen received her BFA in painting from BU and her MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University. Her work has been exhibited and performed in Boston, Buffalo, New York, Miami, North Carolina, Chicago, and internationally in Italy, Iceland, and France. She is also a member of Thorn Collaborative, an ongoing creative partnership with artist Erin Ethridge.

Monday, December 16, 2019 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Ben Snell. Bamboo Forest will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note the project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours. Projections are viewed from the sidewalk.

LIDAR is a range-sensing technology typically employed by the government and military to survey land from above. In Bamboo Forest, Ben Snell takes it out of the context in which it normally belongs in order to better understand how it sees the world. Under the cover of darkness in a bamboo forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Snell engages in conversation with the device. The artifacts produced through the process of capture, including the bounce of the artist’s gait, the casting of shadows and the existence of black holes, reveal a deep interconnectedness between observer and observed: a quiet window into the introspection of the machine.

Ben Snell is an artist based in New York. His practice investigates materialities and ecologies of computation. Using contemporary techniques in dialogue with traditional motifs, he situates technology as a mirror to reveal the self as a computational being. He holds a B.A. in Experiential Art and Design from Carnegie Mellon University and was recently an Artist in Residence at Pier 9 Autodesk. Earlier this year, his sculpture 'Dio' was the first AI-generated sculpture to sell at auction. His work has been featured in Artsy, Artnet, and other major publications.