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Black & White Gallery

fiveseasons

2002–2007

Black & White Gallery

fiveseasons

2002–2007

Installations 2002–2007FA L L 2002 — S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2003

Entrada Bienvenito tony Stanzione

Driggs Sculpture Dewitt Godfrey

Lounge austin thomas

Untitled David Baskin

Melt Noémie lafrance

FA L L 2003 — S p r i n g 2004

New World Disorder Ben Parry

Pedazos (In Pieces) anita Glesta

Dressing roberley Bell

FA L L 2004 — w i n t e r / S p r i n g 2005

Picker Sculpture DeWitt Godfrey

Cold Storage tony Stanzione

Out, Maximum Volume tom kotik

S p r i n g 2005 — w i n t e r / S p r i n g 2006

Wave Michael krondl

My Brother’s Keeper Sook Jin Jo

Model Space Peter Frank & kathleen triem

FA L L 2006 — w i n t e r / S p r i n g 2007

At Play roberley Bell

Memory Fountain Michael Dominick

Nature’s Revenge rebecca herman & Mark Schoffner

Yard Sail lauren luloff

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A Specific Site

Space is New York’s number-one preoccupation. From the mythological square footage of old SoHo to the scarcity brought on by the real-estate boom in the 2000s, staking-out, using, talking about, and giving up space defines one’s time and place in city’s finite geography. It’s a physical and psychological necessity turned into a social fabric.

The desire for it drove a now-familiar story. Beginning in the late 1980s, the pursuit of inexpensive studio space led artists from the increasingly unaffordable East Village across the river to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a backwater of warehouses, working-class neighborhoods, and little else. But by the end of the next decade, studios carved out of industri

capital of any single location in the country. Before a choking demand and unchecked development once again sent artists looking elsewhere for studios, the migration generated exhibition spaces, workshops, screening rooms, artist-run events, a still-growing number of galleries, and many other thriving cultural outlets, all of which have left a lasting mark on the neighborhood.

It was that atmosphere that led Black & White gallery’s founding director Tatyana Okshteyn to Williamsburg in pursuit of a site for her first gallery. Although available industrial space in the neighborhood had already become difficult to find, she happened upon a former garage on Driggs Avenue. at North 10th Street—near Williamsburg standard-bearer Pierogi 2000—that met her needs. Perfectly suited to a gallery, the roughly 1,000 square-foot space was large enough to show ambitiously scaled installations but narrow enough to suit even small works on paper. It also had the unusual addition of an outdoor courtyard roughly equal in size to the main gallery.

Bounded on three sides by gray cinder-block walls with only the ceiling open to the sky, the courtyard is a far cry from a genteel sculpture garden. From the main gallery, sliding glass doors open onto a concrete floor with a drain at the center.

Five Seasons 2002–2007a Specific Site William Hanley

The walls rise one stunted but entrapping story and are capped by harsh exterior lights. The whole space feels like a concrete box, very much at one with the rough industrial surroundings of Brooklyn’s waterfront neighborhoods.

But for all of its grit, the courtyard is not a street-like space amenable to work that intervenes in public life either. In fact, ignoring the dirt and textured block, it begins to look like an outdoor gallery. It offers all the spatial control of a white cube with—unadorned walls, a straightforward geometry—and as an exhibition space, it functions as if someone had taken the project room at a typical gallery and simply lifted the lid. Since the gallery’s inaugural season in September 2002, 15 artists have created 18 site-specific works responding to it.

Unformed mAteriAl

In a city where it seems as if every square inch has been codified and spoken for, the outdoor project space is remarkably ambiguous, as if it remains somewhere between the neighborhood’s past and present. Not utilitarian enough to be a warehouse and not quite blank enough to be a gallery, it is a transitional and incomplete place too removed from the street to be a fully contextualized site but not sufficiently detached to lose its connection to the outside.

Rather than giving that under-formed material a shape on its own, the gallery has left it to artists mold the space into legibility, and the interpretations of the 15 who have created work there have varied greatly.

Some projects have faltered, swallowed completely by the incomplete quality of the space. Work installed as if in a conventional gallery is quickly overcome by the industrial architecture and harsh weather. Under snow or bright sunlight and the against cinder-block walls, traditionally installed painting or sculptural work does not hold the eye, let alone draw the viewer into the courtyard, and many projects that may have fit well in an indoor gallery have languished in the space like scattered groupings incongruous material. On the other hand, monumental pieces that treat the courtyard like a sprawling sculpture garden feel constrained and similarly at odds with the architecture.

The most successful projects seize on the amorphous quality of the courtyard from its structure to its relationship to the surrounding neighborhood and use it as a medium. Some artists have formed it into a bunker, others, a cathedral, and no fewer than two have presented variations on a suburban swimming pool, but the strongest work sketches a conceptual schema or a focused series of formal maneuvers that give shape to the unruly location while, at the same time, acknowledging its open-ended parameters.

Though the site resembles a gallery, it also has one omnipresent and routinely disruptive variable: the weather. Open to the sky, the sun scorches its concrete

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floor in the summer and in the winter, installations endure freezing temperatures and struggle to draw reluctant visitors out into the cold. Every project created there has had to contend with the elements, but the best have taken up the weather as a central component, using the work shape its relationship to the surrounding architecture.

Noémie Lafrance choreographed a piece entitled Melt in response to the enclosing walls and sun-exposed concrete. Substituting glaring spotlights for for an evening performance, dancers pinned to the courtyard’s far wall appeared to literally melt under the heat. Rebecca Herman and Mark Schoffner similarly tied the confining architecture to the elements with Village Green. Treating the space as a prison yard, they created a pillory at the center, evoking weather-prone forms of punishment and public humiliation.

On the other end of the seasonal spectrum, Tony Stanzione built a series of barrack-style bunk beds that seemed to strive to rise above the surrounding walls, but the piece relied on the winter cold to be completed. Outfitted with pillows made from cast ice, the skeletal frame of the structure was eventually coated in abstract layers of ice as the temperature dropped during the exhibition’s winter run.

Other artists have contended with the space by utilizing its unusual position both inside and outside the confines of the gallery, playing its architecture off the character and history of the surrounding neighborhood. Stanzione’s first project for the space drew on Williamsburg’s past as a landing point for immigrants, while Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem’s architectural model provided a counterpoint to the countless new structures that were then just beginning to dominate the neighborhood’s blocks.

For her Pedazos (In Pieces) installation, Anita Glesta treated the industry-shaped space as an archaeological site, building a collapsing ruin from handmade paving stones that nodded to the neighborhood’s history of physical labor. Austin Thomas also drew on the neighborhood’s industrial character, but created a contrast to it with her lounge-chair inspired works built for tea parties and other types of leisure.

fUtUre SeASonS

On the first day of summer 2006, some four years after the first exhibition in the outdoor project space, Black & White followed the path of many established neighborhood galleries and opened a second location in Chelsea. On the ground floor of the Chelsea Terminal Warehouse. Neighborhood fans of the outdoor space, however, feared that, like the many other Williamsburg galleries that made the Chelsea move before it, Black & White would shutter the original storefront.

But rather than closing the site, Okshteyn has instead combined the entire gallery—indoors and out—into a large project space, turning it over to a single artist or guest curator.

As the Williamsburg gallery’s program changes and artists no longer wrangle with the difficulties and possibilities of creating an installation for the outdoor space alone, this catalogue chronicles the projects that have taken place on the site during the last five seasons. Each work has taken the strange, weather-beaten concrete box in a surprising direction, pushing and pulling its unfinished spatial material into one of the most unique locations in the city.

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to coincide with the inaugural exhibition in the newly founded Black & White Gallery, tony Stanzione created the first installation for the outdoor project space in September of 2002. after seeing his work in the files at Socrates Sculpture Park, gallery founding director tatyana Okshteyn had invited the artist to produce an installation just a few months earlier, and the result was an appropriate opening work for the space. titled Entrada Bienvenito, a series of seven found wooden doors hung inside a 25-foot steel frame. Pivoted at the center, rather than the sides, the doors spun open and closed as people passed through them. conceived in the early 1990s shortly after the passage of the North american Free trade agreement, Stanzione had originally intended the piece to run along a political boarder, but had never found a venue. “it could go on forever,” he said of the work, “which is why i liked the finite dimensions of the outdoor space; it added shape and a sense of location.” Blowing in the wind and colored in shades of red, brown, and white reminiscent of the california desert, the doors created a monument to, in the artist’s words, “natural migration,” still a timely subject some ten years after the work’s original conception, and one fitting a new gallery in a neighborhood built by immigrants from other countries and—more recently—other boroughs.

FA L L 2002 e n t r A dA b i e n v e n i to / to n y S tA n z i o n e

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a classic architectural trope motivated DeWitt Godfrey’s first installation in Black & White Gallery’s outdoor project space. “in a spatial sense, the indoor gallery is like a corridor, and then you emerge into this courtyard that has all the qualities of an interior space, but it draws your attention to the sky,” he said. “it’s kind of like you’re in the ruin of an old cathedral; you enter, but then you’re both inside and outside at the same time.” rather than competing with that architectural drama, the artist’s series of three steel tubes—titled Driggs Sculpture after the gallery’s street address—responded to it. all three cylinders were made from strips of cor-ten steel, a weathering alloy that, despite its use in famously monolithic constructions, is surprisingly pliable in certain shapes. Godfrey built each tube as a perfect cylinder, but with a different thicknesses of metal. installed in the space, they leaned on the walls and sagged in varying degrees, creating an unpredictable structural system that took its shape from the courtyard. each piece had its own behavior and responded to the context accordingly. “Four weeks into the installation, we had a big, heavy, wet snowstorm, and the whole thing transformed a second time,” recalled Godfrey. “the moment was really exciting because not only were the structures dynamic in their initial placement, but they remained dynamic and had an ongoing relationship to the environment that was more sophisticated than their physical content.”

FA L L 2002 d r i g g S S c u L p t u r e / d e w i t t g o d f r e y

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the only artist to stage a performance unaffiliated with an exhibition in Black & White Gallery’s outdoor project space, Noémie lafrance’s work challenges conventions of dance, which commonly favor bodies moving in isolation from their surroundings. her site-specific choreography forcefully engages with the formal and psychological particularities of architecture. Presented on two evenings, her work in progress, Melt, tethered three female dancers to the back wall of the Williamsburg space, their bodies covered in a combination of bees wax and synthetic lanolin. as they performed a 15-minute piece, the wax melted under the heat emitted by the intense lighting, giving the impression that the bodies would disappear completely over time. “the piece was about bodies transforming into light,” said lafrance. “i wanted to have dancers attached to the wall as if for eternity in this dead-end space. it has no exit except for the sky, which kind of opens a lid on the space, and walking, you can’t go anywhere, but you can fly—or evaporate.” the performance was visually unforgettable, and it generated a significant amount of interest in lafrance, who went on to choreograph Noir, staged in a parking garage in conjunction with the 2004 Whitney Biennial, among other celebrated works. She most recently presented rapture on the facade of the Frank Ghery-designed Fischer center for the Performing arts at Bard college, and she is currently searching for a venue where she can realize a larger, complete version of Melt.

S u m m e r 2003 m e Lt / n o é m i l A f r A n c e

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a path of weathered and seemingly ancient paving stones formed a monument to the traces that everyday human activity wears into even the most monolithic architecture in anita Glesta’s work for the gallery’s courtyard. a “river of concrete,” in the artist’s words, the road stretched from the indoor gallery to the far wall of the space, where a small ramp led up to a pillar of stacked concrete bricks. On either side, steeper ramps formed pedestals on which sculpted feet were mounted like the remnants of long-forgotten figures. at first glance, the work seemed austere like a timeworn ruin, but small details that at once softened and enlivened the structure with traces of human hands eventually revealed themselves. literal hand and foot prints dotted the stones. the pillar seemed roughly formed—it was actually made from bread cast in concrete. and interspersed with the paving stones, small, red shapes of cast resin rested on the ground. Occasionally mixed with feathers or sewing thread, the objects resembled human hearts or large drops of coagulated blood. Set against a slab of blue sky and Glesta’s gray landscape, the tiny ovals created humble punctuations of warmth and color in the work. “i liked the concrete physicality of the space, and the sky really functions like the roof,” said Glesta. “even though it’s open to the elements, it’s a very controlled environment, where i was able to light and color like a painter.” the installation marked the first time that Glesta had created a floor piece, although it formed an important point of departure for her later work—so much so that an expanded version of it is now installed in her Brooklyn studio.

FA L L 2003 p e dA zo S ( i n p i ec e S ) / A n i tA g l e S tA

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roberley Bell had been working exclusively on site-specific outdoor installations when she created her first project for Black & White’s space. her work followed the model of a 19th-century formal garden designed as a series of outdoor rooms, or, in the artist’s words, “a landscape without a horizon and a house without a roof.” Bell takes that fantasy of perfectly domesticated nature to an extreme conclusion in her installations, which mimic formal gardens with brightly-colored plastic flowers, artificial turf, and other ersatz natural forms. For Dressing, she arranged gown-shaped urns around the outdoor space, two of which were tipped over, spilling pink flowers onto patches of sod. at the time, her work had always included seating elements that created specific sight lines, which took in both the components of the piece and the natural landscape surrounding it. in the concrete well of Black & White’s outdoor space, creating seating positions that related her faux garden to real nature proved to be a challenge, but her solution ended up introducing a formal element that would appear in later work. “When i was doing the piece at Black & White, i needed to make the sight line vertical, so i used mirrors in the small urns and within the spills to bring the sky into the space,” said Bell. “it was a subtle but really important aspect of the work for me that i went on to use again in my second piece at the gallery.”

S p r i n g 2004 d r e S S i n g / ro b e r ly b e l l

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DeWitt Godfrey’s second exhibition at Black & White marked the first time that a project was conceived specifically for both the gallery’s indoor and outdoor spaces. Building on the responsive structures of his first installation, but introducing a vertical scale that was new for the artist, the interior component of Picker Sculpture consisted of a series of variably sized cylinders made from thin strips of pliable cor-ten steel. Stacked on top of one another and compressed into the space between the gallery walls, they bisected the space with a wall of oval-shaped cells. climbing through the structure, the viewer emerged in the outdoor space, where an even larger version of the construction was squeezed in between the walls of the courtyard. “i wanted to break up the space even more with the second installation and create a series of both physical and visual experiences,” said Godfrey. Standing at the entrance to the gallery, the indoor component framed and was echoed by its larger outdoor counterpart, both of which resembled biological structures, but the scale of the outdoor piece only became apparent when the viewer physically passed through the first sculpture. “the cylinders are like a crude form of life that doesn’t have a structure until it’s in a relationship with something else,” said Godfrey. “i wanted to draw attention to their dependence on engaging with a physical space—any physical space—with the two different scales.” the work is now permanently installed at the Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, New york. Bounded by trees, rather than gallery walls, it has a radically different form.

FA L L 2004 p i c k e r S c u L p t u r e / d e w i t t g o d f r e y

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FA L L 2004 p i c k e r S c u L p t u r e installation views

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w i n t e r 2004 — 2005 c o L d Sto r Ag e / to n y S tA n z i o n echance played a large role in tony Stanzione’s second installation for the outdoor project space. “i was wondering what i could do with the elements back there,” he said, adding that his interest in renewable energy had led him to a windmill, among other possibilities. “i thought of the time period when it would be installed, and i finally had this vision of these ice flows hanging off bunk beds,” he said. “My mind was blown when it actually worked.” More than any other project created for the outdoor space, Cold Storage gave the single variable in the seemingly gallery-like enclosure, the elements, an active formal role in the final work. Made from a steel frame custom fabricated by the artist, tiers of six penitentiary-style beds rose in the middle of the space. a pillow crafted from molded ice rested on each, and a self-heating piping system sent a trickle of water up each of the supporting legs. On the night of the opening, the temperature had not dropped below freezing, and the stark, minimal frame stood inert in the courtyard. But on the first truly cold evening of that winter, Stanzione got late-evening call from the gallery saying that the trickle of water had frozen into an abstract shroud of icicles surrounding the beds. a loaded image to be sure, it evokes strings of political, economic, scientific, and alchemical references—in the month following the 2004 presidential election, reading the piece as a military barrack seemed unavoidable—but Stanzione prefers that it remain overdetermined, a highly associative form shaped in part by the natural conditions of its site.

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FA L L 2005 wAv e / m i c h A e l K ro n d l“When you walk in there, it looks like three-quarters of an empty swimming pool outside these Malibu-suburban sliding glass doors,” said Michael krondl of Black & White Gallery’s outdoor project space. “i thought, let’s put people at the bottom of the swimming pool and then put them under some kind of threat.” that threat turned out to be a two-story photograph of a breaking wave crashing through the back wall of the space. Printed on vinyl like a highway billboard, krondl calculated the cropping and dimensions of the image for maximum trompe l’oeil effect, dissolving the boundaries of the space like a Baroque ceiling painting and inspiring a sense of awe and even primal fear. krondl’s desire for an immediate and emotional response to the work relates to the role of nature in his larger body of work. he uses images that elicit an irrational reaction in order to counter strains of conceptual art that posit a rigid split between intellectual and emotional responses, claiming that the approach discounts humans’ connection to nature writ large. “your first reaction is not an intellectual reaction,” said the artist. “your first reaction is an animal reaction.” through his work, krondl attempts to undo the conceit that places humans above the natural world, a kind of arrogance that he insists leads to things such as global warming and rising sea levels. Of course, following an immediate reaction to the image, his work invites a string of political and ecological associations. Wave, in particular, was conceived shortly before the asian tsunami, and the exhibition opened in the wake of hurricane katrina. While the artist didn’t intend for the work to comment directly on either disaster—and was, in fact, wary of it becoming overly colored by those associations—both tragedies served to underscore the timeliness of krondl’s project.

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korea-born, New york-based artist Sook Jin Jo turns the brute material of found wood into spaces that invite meditation in her site-specific work, but her installation in Black & White’s outdoor gallery ended up taking an unusually personal turn. “it’s so unusual for a gallery to have a ceiling open to the sky, and i was originally thinking about winter and how to approach the season,” she said. “But i also wanted to make a work for my brother, who was in the hospital, and then, two weeks before the show opened, he passed away.” the artist often takes an intuitive and spontaneous approach to her site-specific work, tailoring nests of branches, banisters, salvaged molding, and other found wood to specific locations in situ. But her practice also has a thoroughly planned painterly side. She stains each of the elements that comprise a piece in natural shades, giving the entire work a coherent palette. With My Brother’s Keeper she added another dimension to the work, incorporating objects such as a wooden horse, a rusty roller-skate, a small bed, and other found materials resting or hanging among the wooden pieces. added on a whim, the artist included the objects to evoke the mysteries childhood and her brother’s family in a landscape that resembled an enchanted forest. “i make work to recreate experiences that i’ve had for other people,” she said. “there were many pathways that you could wander through in My Brother’s Keeper, and i wanted people to feel their way through the space, both physically and emotionally.” transforming the Brooklyn backyard into a silent forest in the dead of winter, the installation succeeded in creating a space for contemplation and a moving memento mori.

w i n t e r 2005 — 2006 m y b r ot h e r ’ S k e e p e r / S o o K j i n j o

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Spatial, conceptual, and experiential disorientation—of the kind typically elicited by the miniature world monuments of las Vegas, for example—drove f:t architecture’s work for Black & White Gallery’s outdoor project space. Principals Peter Franck and kathleen treim filled the entire courtyard with a 4:1 scale architect’s model of a house that they had designed for a site in Saugerties, New york. characterized by a smooth, white exterior, unusually angled walls, and site-specific landscaping elements, the model resembled a large museum exhibition set impossibly into the back of a commercial gallery. “the scale of the outdoor project space gave us contradictory messages,” said Franck of the partners’ decision to build the model. “it’s not an expansive space, but at the same time, when you get into looking at the cubic volume, it’s really quite large.” the architects used every inch of it for their project, which could alternately be viewed as a very small house or a very large model. the project also crossed disciplines as easily as it confused spatial conventions. as an architectural experiment, the work allowed Franck and treim to test a digital fabrication method essential to the house design. as an installation, the landscaping created an immersive experience. and as a curatorial venture—the architects are also curators of the Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, New york—the whole exhibition was arranged to draw viewers in while throwing off their sense of scale. the biggest challenge for the architects, however, was adapting their practice to installation work. “We have an established methodology for developing architecture projects, but we didn’t have anything in place for something like this,” said Franck. “and we never go forward on a project unless we both agree.” in the end, the recalibration of their collaborative relationship led to one of the most ambitious projects created for the gallery’s outdoor project space.

S p r i n g -S u m m e r 2006 m o d e L S pAc e / f:t A rc h i t ec t U r e