Theresa Marchetta, Teddy Roosevelt’s Skin – Lion, 2011, acrylic on panel, 42 x 62”
August 5 – September 18, 2011
Opening reception: Friday, August 5, 7-10 PM
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 5 PM
Closed August 27, 28 and September 3, 4
196 Guernsey Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222
196 GUERNSEY is a group exhibition of eleven artists on view in a mid-19th century home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The idea for the exhibition began as a discussion about the domestic space, with a focus on ideas revolving around the inner relationships of a home, both public and private, and how these exchanges are negotiated. The works included offer both personal and universal approaches to the fundamental qualities present within most any domestic arena, such as the values surrounding human interactions, architecture, the history of a space, and material objects.
Sami Ben Larbi is a French/Tunisian-American artist who lives and works in Berlin. By stripping an environment to its barest elements in the installation for the exhibition, Ben Larbi seeks to provoke a strong physical and emotional response from the viewer.
Robin Cameron is based in New York and works in the media of books, print, sculpture and video. Her works focus on concepts of narrative, coded autobiographies and personal mythologies.
Sophie Beatrice Grant is based in New York and works with graphite and collage. She incorporates handmade dyed paper with detailed drawing to explore both formal and conceptual relationships.
Langdon Graves’ drawings and sculpture exist as anthropological explorations into various social scenarios of modern western culture. Her outdoor sculpture for this exhibition melds mid-20th century color and pattern associated with backyard and bathroom décor to create a non-functional yet familiar hybrid. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Charles Koegel’s multi-media work is a response to the environment of New York City and its predominantly architectural landscape. Based in New York, much of his work features geometric forms and aspects of architectural structures.
Sandra Eula Lee is a photographer and installation artist based in New York. She uses found materials to create wider meanings from the familiar, with a focus on gardens and the altered landscape.
Theresa Marchetta uses acrylic to explore Sagamore Hill, the Long Island home of Theodore Roosevelt. Using taxidermy and other decorative period elements, she comments on the mythologized American masculinity commonly represented at the turn of the century in the family home. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Alisa Ochoa is based in Brooklyn. She works in multiple media with an amassed archive of visual materials culled from old book clippings, junk mail advertisements and found photographs. Ochoa is interested in the fragments that we see all around us, the reworking of narrative structures, and the relations between part-bodies and totalities.
Julie Quon is a photographer based in New York. Her series of light, dust and passing focuses on her parents’ home in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By photographing the objects and spaces specific to their environment, Quon creates a kind of portraiture that bears witness to the passing of time.
MiYoung Sohn is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates sculptural works that are visual explorations of the everyday. Sohn uses common, everyday materials to translate her observations of the world and her surroundings by transforming their material function to create a new interpretation of her daily experiences.
Adam Taye is a conceptual artist based in Brooklyn. His works focus on belief systems particular to American society, such as sports and religious fanaticism, with overarching themes of self-determination and free agency.
The house at 196 Guernsey Street was constructed as a multi-family home for the workers of the USS Monitor, the first ironclad warship that was used in the Civil War, built on the East River in Greenpoint in the early 1860s. The most recorded event in the history of the home was the 1904 fire on the East River on the passenger ship General Slocum, which killed over 1200 people. One of the few hundred survivors was a resident at 196 Guernsey who lost nine family members in the disaster. The house has been a residence for both multi-families and single families over the past century and a half and has undergone - and continues to undergo - considerable renovations. Traces of the original interior architecture are evident in some areas, such as the entry-level closet space where Sami Ben Larbi’s work is installed.
196 GUERNSEY is curated by Ginger Cofield, Lauren Haynes and Sarah Thompson.
For appointments outside of regular hours, please contact Ginger Cofield at 804-852-6934.
