THE ELEMENTAL SERENITY SERIES, PART ONE:  “THE ROSE THAT GREW FROM CONCRETE”

311 E11 Village Green & Gallery 151 present:
THE SERENITY SERIES
ELEMENTAL
A three part art/aromatherapy exhibition

ELEMENTAL explores the integration of art and wellness through an urban interpretation of the Chinese elements Earth, Wood, Fire, Water & Metal. Each show featured in the series will have it’s own essential oil blend that will be heated in the gallery space, acting as the scent of the show. The three part series is designed to help New Yorkers find serenity within the chaos of the city through a total immersion of the senses with visual art, aromatherapy, sound & dance.
Each part of the The Serenity Series will feature a free mid show lecture lead by celebrity acupuncturist/aromatherapist Bianca Beldini, who’s been featured on The Today Show & Fox 5 News. Bianca will explain the scent of the show & how we can use essential oils in our everyday life to raise our standard of living and health.

Please Join Us for the opening reception of:
EARTH:
“The Rose That Grew From Concrete”
Thursday February 25th
6pm-9pm
complimentary drinks & light food will be served

Featured artists: James Romberger
& Marguerite Van Cook

Mid Show Lecture/eco-mixer:
Thursday March 11th 7pm

All openings & lectures/eco-mixers are free & open to the public
Monday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday & Sunday 12-5pm
Sponsored by 311 E11 VILLAGE GREEN.
Exhibited on site at 311 East 11th St btwn 1st & 2nd avenue

CURATORIAL STATEMENT/ARTIST INFO:

THE ROSE THE GREW FROM CONCRETE

“Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong it
learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared. “
TUPAC SHAKUR

The first show in the ELEMENTAL series, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” explores our relationship with the earth from the urban experience. With more buildings than trees and cement replacing soil, it can be hard to maintain a relationship with the earth underneath the pavement. Hidden in the middle of long blocks stretching all across alphabet city are dozens of community run gardens where stressed out New Yorkers go to find a moment of serenity. In her lower east side garden Marguerite Van Cook planted the very flowers that she filmed, photographed and turned into the sublime art pieces you see today. Her Museum collections include the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Whitney Museum, NYC; Brooklyn Museum, NYC; Toledo Museum of Art and many more throughout the United States and Europe.

The juxtaposition of Marguerite’s sublime flower prints with James Romberger’s pastels of urban landscape represent the longing New Yorkers have for a greater balance and connection with nature. Living on the lower east side since the early 80’s James found inspiration within the urban decay that surrounded him. He has documented riots, the homeless, tenement fires, decaying structures and the grind/grime of the lower east side with his unique sophisticated pastel technique. The almost photographic quality his pastels have from a distance is startlingly real, and upon a closer look they have the ability to take the viewer into the life of his art & imagination. His drawings are in many private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Parrish Museum, the Newark Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

ELEMENTAL is an art/aromatherapy series which questions our relationship with the Chinese elements: Earth, Wood, Fire, Water & Metal. The purpose of aromatherapy in this series is to help open up the eyes through the stimulation of the sense of smell, creating a total experience that can lead to a deeper inner exploration of the art. The essential oil blend for Earth: The Rose That Grew From Concrete is “Believe” which was selected for it’s grounding nature, with the ingredients Balsam Fir, Rosewood and Frankincense each of which are extracted from trees. Take a moment to deeply breath in the scent, exhale your expectations and allow yourself to experience the power of serenity and stillness that lives inside of each of us, underneath the stress and chaos there is peace. “Long live the rose that grew from concrete”

-Laura O’Reilly, curator

JAMES ROMBERGER, artist statement

My work has long been about the East Village and Lower East Side, it is an area continually in flux.  Here, one can often see layers of time overlap.  One witnesses evidence of all the shifts of populations and usages of space in a prime piece of Manhattan real estate.  Expensive rentals and unrenovated rent-controlled apartments sit side by side within unstable tenements that were built with cheap, toxic materials, buildings built to be slums.  These structures will likely not survive the challenges of the 21st century, but should be replaced, using ecology-based design and architecture to create buildings similar to that in which this show is held.  Variations on this model could be applied to the homes and businesses of all New Yorkers.

 

JAMES ROMBERGER

James Romberger is a chronicler of urban survival. With a sympathetic eye to the details of everyday existence, Romberger captures the rhythm of our city with a photographic mind for detail coupled with an astute sense of light. His drawings are a marriage of frankness and compassion. Romberger’s collaboration with Wojnarowicz, the graphic novel “Seven Miles A Second”, was exhibited in the New Museum’s 1999 “Fever” retrospective and included in MOMA’s “Open Ends” in 2000. His drawings are in many private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Parrish Museum, the Newark Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

James Romberger’s pastels are like calendars of the day to day shift in human resilience under the blind eye of government.
-David Wojnarowicz, 1989

 

MARGUERITE VAN COOK, Artists Statement

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.  ~Tennessee Williams

“Oneness Revisited- Floral Sublimes “

My work rejects this minoritization of the aesthetic currency of flora, (as not merely pretty or even beautiful) and points to the multifaceted sublimity of its boundless possibilities. It alerts the viewer to new aesthetic potentials. This series owes much to Barnett Newman for his liberation of the “Sublime” from its traditional role in Romantic art. The works borrow his use of the famously termed “zip,” the strip of color that runs vertically through his often monochromatic paintings, which he believed offered a passage into the realms of the sublime or, the experience of human limits, notably the limits of rationality. Yet here, the convergence ends as my works in the series “Oneness Revisited” champion the potency and importance of flowers and the natural world.  In these pieces, “zips” reveal complexities that proliferate from the apparently simplest flowers and demand the viewer re-imagine the boundlessness of color, structural complexity and alterity. The images in the series “Oneness Revisited-Floral Sublimes “are all made from plants grown in my urban garden on the Lower East Side and particularly nurtured to appear in this series. In creating this series I wanted to intersect with minimalist ideas of seriality as it might relate to architecture, but with my own green take.  Our intricate and wonderful relationship with the natural world is vital.

 

MARGUERITE VAN COOK

British born artist Marguerite Van Cook came to New York with the punk band the Innocents, after touring with the Clash. She stayed, opened a gallery; Ground Zero and showed her own and others art.  Ms. Van Cook’s resume and experience span such mediums as a painter, writer, poet, and multimedia artist and has produced books and print projects. Her current body of work is created from still images from films and video shoots in from the Camargue and on the Lower East Side where she maintains an urban garden, which is a source of inspiration. Her Museum collections include the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Whitney Museum, NYC; Brooklyn Museum, NYC; Toledo Museum of Art and many more throughout the United States and Europe.  She collaborated on the ground breaking graphic novel, “Seven Miles a Second” with James Romberger and David Wojnarowicz, which was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Millennium Show. Ms Van Cook both makes and acts in films.  Ms. Van Cook completed Foundation Studies at Portsmouth College of Art and Design before moving onto Northumbria University (Newcastle, England) to study Film and Fine Art. She recently completed a BA in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and is currently enrolled in the M A program in modern European Studies, studying the place of the sublime in the arts.

 

 

 

Open February 25th-March 14th