THE GRAND OPENING OF GALLERY 151 NEW LOCATION

NITEMIND: FLATLAND

Open to The Public: 11-6pm Monday- Friday through June 9th

Gallery 151 | NEW LOCATION: 245 West 14th Street New York City

“Nitemind’s aims with their installations have always been similar—they want to engulf you.” – THUMP

Nitemind’s newest multimedia project, Flatland, features immersive light and sculpture installations; challenging our perception of reality, exploring the possibility of multiple dimensions, and wondering what one might find there. This immersive exhibition is inspired by the ideas of inter-dimensionality pioneered by Edwin A. Abbott in his novel, Flatland.

Gallery 151 is New York’s premier pop-up gallery space with its latest opening at Alfa Development’s 245 West 14th Street in partnership with Wallplay. As part of a longtime collaboration with Gallery 151, Wallplay will curate an ongoing series of window installations and multimedia exhibitions, beginning with Flatland. The program is sponsored by Michael Namer & Alfa Development.

ABOUT NITEMIND:
Nitemind is a group of artists using technology and physical space to create immersive and interactive installations. Their work uses light as a medium, including laser beams, video-mapped LED, and software art in combination with ephemeral sculpture and site-specific installations. Nitemind has been instrumental in the development of exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA P.S. 1, Johannes Vogt Gallery, Red Bull Music Academy and many others.

Curated by Wallplay

For more information and inquiries, contact: gallery151@wallplay.com

PS122: CVRTAIN BY YEHUDA DUENYAS

***CVRTAIN HAS BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH JANUARY 19, 2017**

12-8pm Tuesday- Friday

Gallery 151 | 132 West 18th Street New York City

“THE JOURNEY LEFT ME EXHILARATED, AND EVER SO SLIGHTLY ALTERED.” – ARIEL KAMINER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

CVRTAIN is a virtual reality (VR) experience starring you. Placed center stage in a beautiful theater, the curtain parts to reveal an audience of thousands teaming with adulation. Do you freeze in the spotlight, or bow graciously? Every action produces a different reaction in your audience: thunderous applause, feet stomping, cameras flashing, or maybe even booing. An entire audience’s emotions are at your virtual command, but only until the curtain closes.

Emmy award-winning experiential director, Yehuda Duenyas, dives into his fascination of subverting the audience and performer relationship by putting viewers at the center of the CVRTAIN experience. Using a VR headset, sensors, and headphones equipped for haptic feedback, Duenyas draws on the tools of gaming and immersive theater in a personalized, celebratory experience for one.

Yehuda Duenyas’ CVRTAIN is commissioned by Performance Space 122 with an implementation grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for the Building Demand for the Performing Arts Program.

5-10 minute interactive experience
Tickets are individually booked in cycles of 10 minutes

Book your ticket here.

Gallery 151 and Wallplay present Natalie White: EXPOSED, an exhibition of work by artist and activist Natalie White, curated by Elyse Harary, consisting of a series of large scale polaroid self-portraits alongside an installation of embroidered canvases inspired by the Gadsden flag. Marking the completion of Natalie White’s march this past summer from New York City to Washington DC advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.), the work in this exhibition celebrates her ongoing dedication to social change through the platform of visual art as well as her commitment to educating individuals about the need for equal rights in America. Using herself as a subject and exposing her body as a means to propel her agenda, White’s work illustrates that when depicted by women, the female body has the potential to become a powerful weapon against the social constructs of gender.

This exhibition exists as the third in a series of shows in collaboration with Wallplay, dedicated to White’s fight for equal rights. Instant Gratification curated by Laura O’Reilly, founder of Wallplay, in the storefront space at The Hole in September 2015 which featured a daily performance piece by White, topless and enclosed in a plexiglass box in the front window with a sign stating that the E.R.A had never been passed, a fact that the majority of United States citizens are unaware of. In June 2016, Natalie White for Equal Rights was exhibited at Whitebox Gallery as a launching platform for White’s march to Washington DC in protest of the nation’s failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.

Natalie White: EXPOSED, presents a unique moment in White’s ongoing efforts to raise awareness and rally support for gender equality through her art. After the completion of her sixteen-day, 250 mile protest march in July, where White painted “ERA NOW” in red, spanning twenty feet of the capital steps, which resulted in the artist’s arrest. This exhibition marks a critical moment in White’s efforts, opening during the impending trial for her performative act of painting on the capital, attempting to symbolically write women into the constitution. White plans to defend her own case, using the courtroom as yet another discursive space to engage and educate yet another audience about the need for equal rights for women.

White continues to test the power of self-representation as a woman in her work. Through her exhibition series, she claims physical and artistic ownership of her body, securing her image as a figure of female empowerment, and uses her own image within American symbols and icons, as a literal stand-in for their lack of female representation.

This exhibition challenges the audience’s preconceived misconceptions of gender equality, in this country and in the art world. How would this work be understood had it been produced by a man? The particular works included in this exhibition, reveal the major gaps that exist in our national symbols of freedom and equality. By revising and recreating them with her own figure—embodying the star and stripes of the United States flag, or superimposing her body over the snake in Gadsden’s “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, or casting herself as a bronze memorial statue—White produces work that at once exposes the lack of female representation in this country, and imagines a world where every individual is accounted for and equally protected under the law. By using her body as a way to literally speak to her audience face to face, White exposes us not only to the preconceptions of traditional art-making practices and the status and representation of women in art but to the misconceptions and lack of presence that exists in our country.

Anton Perich

Painting in the Machine

On View: June 16 – September 1st, 2016
Opening reception: June 16, 6 – 8PM

Gallery 151 is proud to present “Painting in the Machine”, a solo exhibition by Anton Perich – displaying twelve large new canvases from this decade. In the recent paintings by Perich, additional element has convened through electricity and gravity – a drip.

Since the late 1970’s, the “machine paintings” are trademarked by their horizontal mechanized strokes, resembling a distorted analog screen. Perich sought out the high resolution effect in his work, as some sort of an enigmatic desire.

This is not the first time a drip reinvented the painting. The familiar examples of drip pioneers Norman Bluhm and Jackson Pollock come to mind. Yet, in this modernized example, the drip is the excess data dissolving and dripping off the canvas. Vanishing into the abyss. Perich candidly explores this age-of-information parable by leaving the canvas at a furious pace. The so-called flat screen promises of millions of colors, down the drain, so to speak. Meanwhile, the artist restrains his machine to produce only twelve colors. Less [information] is more.

Anton Perich’s electro-charged palette is prevalent in Eurydice and Emanation, similarly to the “drip paintings” by Ronnie Landfield and Dan Christensen – but more controlled. The less-automatic drips take elegant shapes (Arabic script or botanical tassels) as they dance through the static lines and then gently slide off, while some remain tucked in the crevices of acrylic paint’s texture. Viewer’s attention is held with a motionless traction in the musing figurative pieces such as Andrea, White and Dance Movement I, and the digital strokes appear to fade in & out — as though recollecting a vision. The artist-curated titles of the work present an unceasing quest for spirituality, mythology, fetishism, sensuality, among other supreme entities that eternally withstand the digital impact.

“Painting in the Machine” is curated by Wallplay and is presented in collaboration with Postmasters Gallery, New York. 

*Image: Electric painting machine and a primed canvas, studio of Anton Perich, 2016, courtesy of the artist

“Rooted Perspectives”

by Redefined Films

Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 7th  6 – 9PM
New York City premier of “Lenscapes” by Redefined Films

VIEW FULL EVENT CALENDAR HERE

                 Anne Vieux, Infinite Cube I, 2015, lenticular print, wood & microfiber, 15 x 12.5 x 15 inches

EMULATOR

Anne Vieux
Canyon Castator
Jonathan Chapline

Opening Reception: 6 – 8PM  April 14th, 2016
On View: April 15th – June 5th, 2016

SELECTED PRESS:
VICE -The Creator’s Project
Kill Screen

“…the screen is at once a surface and a frame — a reflective plane onto which an image is cast and a frame that limits its views.”

– Anne Friedberg, “The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft”

Gallery 151 is proud to present the group exhibition “EMULATOR”, a digitally informed exploration in painting. In computing, an Emulator is a hardware or software that enables one system, the host, to behave like another system, the guest. Anne Vieux, Canyon Castator, and Jonathan Chapline employ their own digital vernaculars to derail this methodology by creating an aporia of non-linear thinking in which the roles of host and guest, or physical and digital, constantly interchange. The digital is the reproducible and limitless. Shifts of space, content, and rendering link these artists in complex ways, and their bold color schemes shock and produce physical sensations similar to the aftereffects of looking at a bright, shimmering screen.

Hyper colored inkjet printing, digital processing, and physical manipulation repeat on loop in Anne Vieux’s work. Her paintings and sculptures create a maximal minimalism. The process of scanning reflective papers creates a gradient effect, similar to a Photoshop lens flare, and the boundaries between image and surface create a unique materiality of the image/object. Curved and striated grooves twist the light, and paintings ride waves of effects. The forms mimic a generative organic process, yet– the new-old to the new-new, results in a digital/analog double fakeout.

Castator and Chapline evoke distance and memory of a variety perhaps unknown to the pre-internet generations, but with a sense of color and composition that belie a deep understanding of art history. Unrestrained by the material and linear thinking of antiquated methods, Canyon Castator expands on traditional painting techniques digitally on the iPad. In these “Digital Finger Paintings”, Castator samples, dismantles and reconstructs source image leitmotif, reappropriating it into a visual “Memory Palace”. The paintings are then printed on canvas and coated in an oil varnish. While this process creates the texture, scent and appearance of an oil painting–perhaps earlier work by Christoph Ruckhäberle or Rosson Crow– the subtleties of the “draw” program are charmingly nude to the eye. 

Jonathan Chapline creates a fascinating oblique hierarchy reminiscent of certain Chicago Imagists, like a moody but less terrifying Ed Paschke — also a fan of the techniques of machine-use to create his pictures. Chapline’s compositions, while evoking the dissonance of the fractured digital, seduce with intelligent arrangements of objects and subtleties of color. The boundaries between image and surface create a unique materiality. Undulating organic forms contrast with sharp geometries, and we drift along the reticulated field until hitting the stark edge of the frame and returning.

–Andrea Magenheimer

For all exhibition inquires, please contact Anna Gritsevich: gallery151@wallplay.com

“Words for Women”, install view at Gallery 151, New York, 2016