The Stephen & George Laundry Line

a project in your backyard May 2015 - January 2017

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Yasue Maetake, A Fragment of Celestial Debris, steel, 2016.

On view November 20 - December 20, 2016 by appointment only.

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Stephen and George Laundry Line announces a new, site-specific installation by Yasue Maetake, titled A Fragment of Celestial Debris, on view November 20 - December 20, 2016. Maetake is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, fiber, collage, and video. Raw materials such as industrial steel, resin, natural pulps and wood are transformed through highly tactile processes - casting, welding, burning or oxidation by exposure to chemical, among other techniques. She often suspends component parts from the ceiling before affixing them together, allowing gravity and balance to directly influence their final compositions. Her titles imply an entropic existence, layering the physical and psychic states.

A Fragment of Celestial Debris is composed of recognizable salvaged steel, welded together as descending star fragments lightly attached to a string. This repurposing of industrial waste is at once a serious, while also whimsical attempt to illustrate a natural life cycle with old materials being reborn in the work’s new rectilinear spatial body. The work implies a gentle transferring of cosmic particles in a free, hazy fluidity as the particles descend downward from the heavens to the terrestrial. 

Maetake’s work has been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad at venues including Galerie Fons Welters Project Space, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York, NY; Espacio 1414, The Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Queens Art Museum, Queens, NY; and Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL. Maetake has been a resident artist in the studio of El Anatsui in Ghana; and has received awards and fellowships including from the Agency for Japanese Cultural Affairs. In the Spring of 2016, Maetake’s work was featured at Hometown, Brooklyn as part of a two-artist exhibition entitled Passing Index. Maetake earned her MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY; and studied at the Prague Academy of Applied Arts, Prague, Czech Republic; and the Toyoma City Institute of Glass Art, Toyoma, Japan. Maetake lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens, and is originally from Tokyo, Japan.

(image caption: Yasue Maetake, A Scene of Excited Anticipation (installation view at Hometown Art, Brooklyn, NY), 2016.  Forged steel, casted polyester resin, resin, coated soil on plexi-glass, drawing on found plywood)

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Kim Beck, "Barrier," safety fencing, 2016

On view October 17 -  November 16, 2016 by appointment only.

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line is excited to announce a new installation by Kim Beck, on view October 17 -  November 16, 2016. Beck’s work spans a variety of media from drawing to installation, looking at ignored landscapes - the outskirts, the suburban, the peripheral - and the changes that take place there. Her often large-scale but sometimes intimate works give a sense of exploration through an everyday environment. She has used skywriting planes to convey messages of a broken economy, made meticulous drawings of half-finished construction sites, life-size silhouettes of billboards, a field guide to weeds, and many other projects which reflect the human influence on the land.  

In this installation, Barrier, bright orange safety fencing is wrapped around the line, suggesting security and construction activities in the usual place of laundry. Here however the fencing is no longer functional. Instead this subtly transformed readymade material seems to have floated up off the street, allowing us to consider it as either a fence dividing space or as a layered abstraction. Overlapping grids of orange and silver morph into a painting of sorts forming a disorienting moiré pattern. Over the course of the installation, the weather will rip and tear at the grid, gradually changing piece and further pointing to it's failure as a fence.

Kim Beck is an artist who lives in Pittsburgh where she is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been shown widely, including at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Warhol Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Omi Sculpture Park, Hallwalls and on the High Line in NYC. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America and the New York Times among others.  She has been a fellow at such places as the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Art Omi, Cannonball, Helsinki International Artist Programme, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, International Studio & Curatorial Program, and Cité Internationale des Arts. Her work is included in the collections of Agnes Gund, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum among others. She has received awards from ARS Electronica, the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Pollock-Krasner, Heinz Foundation, Sprout Fund, Pittsburgh Foundation, Thomas J. Watson Foundation and Printed Matter.

image caption: Kim Beck, "Drive By," charcoal on paper, 6 ft x 16 ft. 2001

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Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell, “Object 55,” Laundry drying rack, fiberglass mesh, enamel paint, spray paint, zip ties, galvanized steel, 2016. 

On view July 29 - August 26, 2016

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line announces a new, site-specific installation by Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell on view July 29 -  August 26, 2016. Titled Object 55, this installation uses laundry drying racks as a foundation for hanging painted materials. As an über construction of domestic disarray, Object 55 plays with the everyday uncanny of household labor. Combining pop culture with entropic forms, Object 55 is a staged happening set to mimic not only interior labor, but also exterior surroundings, particularly the fire escapes of the neighboring buildings. Giving a sense of deflated materiality, Rocco offers a dissociated reference to the material function and seeks moments outside the studio when containers meet their limits and the boundary between inside and outside blurs.

In Rocco’s work he dismantles and reassembles objects, resulting in painted assemblages. Beginning with discarded domestic products and remnants of architecture, he collects commodities such as laundry hangers, futon beds, construction mesh, garden fences and rebar. He paints on translucent industrial textiles that resemble graphs without paper.  Splatters, stains, and spills are actions which counter the structural logic of the grid. He layers meshes and synthetic window screens, using repetition - grids on grids on grids- to extract wreckage from structure.

Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell is a Berlin based artist with a BFA from The Art Institute of Boston and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was born in Newark, NJ. In 2009, Rocco received a Fulbright Fellowship to research the history of informal architecture in Berlin since 1989. Past residencies include Skowhegan (2011) and Ox-Bow (2008) and exhibitions include a solo show at Gallery 400 in Chicago (2009). Ruglio-Misurell will be in a two person exhibition at LVL3 Gallery in August and will have a fellowship to Vermont Studio Center in September. Along with Carrick Bell, Rocco runs HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts in Berlin-Neukölln. HPFA is an artist-run project space an with the aim of providing artists, curators, and other project spaces the opportunity to extend or act outside of their existing practices.

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Rachel Leah Cohn, “Ghost Shop Float,” Acrylic on mylar, 2016

On view July 1 - July 25, 2016

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line announces a new installation by Rachel Leah Cohn on view July 1 - July 25, 2016. Ghost Ship Float attempts to playfully simulate a complicated Fata Morgana mirage of a ferry using a series of party balloons. These shape-shifting mirages, named for the sorceress Morgan Le Fay, are illusions of space and place, distorted images where portions may be inverted, stacked, compressed and stretched.  The piece is composed of a large acrylic painting on mylar and a series of inflated foil balloons floating above the laundry line, printed with the same image, shifting in the wind.

Rachel Leah Cohn is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, sculpture, video and performance. Her work often draws from her personal history, but explores collective experiences, human connections and shifting identities.  She values a sense of humor, experimentation and collaboration in trying to find new ways to describe the world around her.  Recent projects have included an attempt to study the inner life of oysters, the reenactments of memories for further investigation and a portable sauna powered by hot pot and tea.  Ghost Ship Float is the experimental beginning of a new body of work investigating illusion, hallucination and the mutable boundaries of reality that are common to daily life.  It brings together references from personal experience of traveling in the North Sea as well as a found balloon from the Qatari desert near where Rachel lives, two disparate geographic regions linked through the same optical phenomenon.  Struck by the relationship of these naturally occurring images to time based media, the balloons are analog stand-ins for pixels on a scrambled screen, creating a confused image of a boat that is both there and not.

Rachel Leah Cohn lives and works in Doha, Qatar. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recently, she was invited to create a site-specific installation and performance for the Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen, China. She also contributed a text to their forthcoming reader, The Aformal Academy: Re-learning the City. Rachel has exhibited in the US and abroad, including shows at Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Vermont, White Box Gallery, New York City, Ortega y Gasset Gallery, Ridgewood, NY, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond and Gallery Augusta, Finland. Her performance "Nonesuch Tales of Ardea Herodias," in collaboration with Laurids Sonne and Michael Ashley, was awarded best in show at 1708 Gallery's InLight Richmond 2013. She has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center (US); CAC Woodside (US); HIAP Suomenlinna (FI), Marpha Foundation (NP), Halka Art Project (TR) and Mildred’s Lane (US). Her work is held in many special collections.

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Janks Archive, Untitled (Banners: Swedish and Finnish), reflective fabric on polyester. 150 cm x 400cm, 2015. 

Finnish:Sinulla ei taida olla kaikki Muumit laaksossa English: Seems like you don’t have all your Moomins in the valley collected: Vaasa, Finland (12-17-2015) origin: common Finnish expression (based on a Finnish fairy tale) to say someone is dim-witted Swedish jank: Hon har nog inte allting hemma. nglish: She doesn’t have everything at home. collected: Vaasa, Finland (12-21-2015) origin: common Swedish expression

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line announces the newest installation by JANKS ARCHIVE, on view June 1 - July 1, 2016.

JANKS ARCHIVE is conducting an investigation of insult humor from cultures around the world. Insults are an ancient oral tradition embedded within the collective consciousness of a culture or region. How people insult one another differs from place to place, as does the word used to describe these jokes (the term “janks,” for instance, is what put-down jokes are called in Alabama). While the intention appears, at first, to be cruel, “janks” are in fact an integral aspect of human interaction, used as much to strengthen camaraderie as to establish dominance.

The project documents this tradition through crowdsourcing and field recording, in which participants recite “janks” from memory and the collective gathers contextual information in an attempt to trace origins. Since 2012 they have staged events in 11 cities in 7 countries, and material they collect is presented in an online video archive, as well as in art installations, publications, and screenings. For the Stephen and George Laundry Line, Janks Archive is installing two banners which were used for a recent collection event in downtown Vaasa, Finland.

JANKS ARCHIVE was founded in 2012 by Jerstin Crosby (Chapel Hill, NC), Ben Kinsley (NYC), and Jessica Langley (NYC), and they are currently exhibiting at the Queens Museum as part of the 2016 Queens International. This project grew from a conversation the three artists had in response to an historic audio recording made by the filmmaker, ethnomusicologist, and mystic Harry Smith. They began with an experimental event at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia in December 2012 and have since continued this investigation with a number of international events and exhibitions including: La Galeria de Comercio in Mexico City;  Kallio Kunsthalle Taidehalli in Helsinki, Finland; FIX13 Live Art Biennial, a program of Catalyst Arts in Belfast, Northern Ireland; and the 2014 Pittsburgh Biennial. They have presented video screenings and installations at the Internot Festival in NYC; Project 4 Gallery in Washington D.C.; Casa del Lago in Mexico City; POST Gallerie in Kaunas, Lithuania; KKC in Riga, Latvia; and the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

In Fall 2014 Janks Archive released a limited edition publication through Acid Rain Production, was featured on the “The Last Billboard” (a curated project by Jon Rubin) in Pittsburgh, PA, and presented at the conference “Unruly Engagements: On the Social Turn in Contemporary Art and Design” at the Cleveland Institute of Art. From December 2015-January 2016 they were artists in residence at Platform in Vaasa, Finland.

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April Childers, “Personal Account,” 2016

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April Childers, “Personal Account,” 2016

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line announces the next installation by April Childers, on view April 27-May 25, 2016 by appointment. Personal Account is drawing on perceived anomalies and suspicion both of the real and the fake, or the visible and invisible. Childers plays with mantras like “we are not alone,” “the truth is out there” in her recreation of a U.F.O. in her characteristic homespun aesthetic. She relies on the nature of our perception, both in the literal way we might view the work #personalaccount #ufo #report and the hopefulness with which we view something that may clearly be trash.

Childers recontextualizes objects that reference popular culture and simultaneously identifies popular culture at a distance, taking on the role of a taxed observer as opposed to a diligent engager. Her work stems from misunderstandings or misinterpretations of existing objects. Working with a variety of materials, she enlarges, overlays, remakes and alters objects to transgress roles of design, functionality, and ownership, shifting interpretations regarding perspective in the work.

She plays with language and its malleability through the subversion of it. As with her use of perspective, she sees language and physical form to be a type of psychological travel, exploring the possibilities between two points and how this transforms the environment that the work exists in. This environment becomes a stage and the work a prop that acts as a clue for narrative. Stilled lives act as a body where inside is a nomadic wanderer, improvising a performance.

April Childers was born in Strawberry Plains, TN. She received her MFA from the University of South Florida and her BFA from the University of Tennessee. Exhibitions include Regina Rex, NY, NY., New Capital, Chicago, IL., Field Projects, NY, NY., Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), NY, NY., The Front, New Orleans, LA., Bruce High Quality Foundation, NY, NY and White Projects, Paris, FR. April is part of the collaborative duo, Destineez Child, based in Miami, Fl. She is also co-director of L.O.G., an experimental exhibition space in Chapel Hill, NC.

www.aprilchilders.com www.logintolog.com www.destineezchild.org

Appointments available.

Contact: Jessica Langley via email: stephenandgeorge[at]gmail[dot]com

(image: April Childers, Caller and Zad, 2011)

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Alison O’Daniel, The Third Line of Sight, musical triangles, dimensions variable, 2016.

On view March 20 - April 16, 2016 by appointment only. Contact: stephenandgeorge[at]gmail[dot]com

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line is excited to announce a new installation by Alison O’Daniel on view March 20 -  April 16, 2016. Her piece for the Stephen and George Laundry Line, The Third Line of Sight, will consist of an arc of triangles, and a single hanging triangle which will touch the arc and make a tone with the wind.  Weaving narrative between moving image, live performance, experimental music and object-making, O’Daniel is building a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary through varying levels of access to sound, color and material. She utilizes visual musical scores, closed-captions, soundtracks, and storytelling as fluid modes of perception or as assistive listening devices that encourage the viewer to navigate between form, concept, object, sound, and narrative. Her recent work has developed with deaf and hearing musicians, skateboarders, marching bands, composers, athletes, actors and artists whom she invites to navigate, de-construct and re-imagine sound.

Concurrent to the O’Daniel’s installation on the Stephen and George Laundry Line is her solo exhibition with Art in General hosted at the Knockdown Center opening March 25, 2016. Room Tone will be a layered and immersive installation in the Maspeth-based institution.

Alison O’Daniel was born in Miami, FL and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. In 2010, she received her MFAfrom the University of California, Irvine. She holds a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and a Post Graduate diploma of Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College, London. She most recently presented Centennial Marching Band Forwards, Backwards, Pause, Silent, a collaborative performance with the Compton-based Centennial High School Marching Band at Art Los Angeles Contemporary (2016). She has been featured in solo exhibitions at Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles (2013) and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest (2015). O’Daniel’s feature-length film Night Sky premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in conjunction with Performa 11 as part of theWalking Forward-Running Past show at Art in General, and has been presented with live musical or Sign Language accompaniment at venues including The Aspen Museum of Art, MOCAD (Detroit), NYU, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and High Desert Test Sites. Writing on O’Daniel’s work has appeared in Artforum, The L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, and ArtReview. O’Daniel has received grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Art Matters, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and the California Community Foundation.

Appointments available.

Contact: Jessica Langley via email: [email protected]

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Heidi Hove, Nobody Sees the Trouble You See, light rope, galvanized steel, 13ft x 1 ft, 2016. 

On view February 19 - March 11, 2016  by appointment only. Contact: stephenandgeorge[at]gmail[dot]com

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The Stephen and George Laundry Line is pleased to announce a new, site-specific work by Danish artist, Heidi Hove, on view February 19 - March 11, 2016 in a backyard in Ridgewood, Queens. For a period of time, the neighbors will witness a big, homemade, luminous sign in their backyard. The sign is made of light ropes attached to a laundry line. It delivers the message: Nobody sees the trouble you see. During daylight hours the text will be slightly hidden, but as the sun goes down the more obvious the text will be and stand out from its surroundings.  Is it an attempt of making a particular personal outcry? Is it a call for revolution? Or is it just a simple slogan for yet another commercial that will get lost in the endless amount of announcements in a big city?

Hove is an interdisciplinary artist, who is primarily working in mediums as objects, site sensitive installations and interventions. In several works, she has used signs, texts and symbols with ambiguous aesthetics that thematises the identity of people, places and events. Isolation, dislocation or camouflage is used as a strategy to highlight a message or to make the works blend in with (and support) their surroundings. Simultaneously, the expression and execution of the works and actions are often being stylized and exaggerated to such a degree that the message becomes debatable.

Heidi Hove (b. 1976) lives and works in Copenhagen (DK). She graduated from California College of Arts (US) and Funen Art Academy in 2006-07. She has exhibited her works in various contexts in Denmark and abroad such as The Turku Biennial 2013 (FI), Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen (DK), The Art Laboratory Berlin (DE), Cultural Center CK in Skopje (MK), and the Lab in San Francisco (US). Besides that, she has produced a number of public artworks, such as a giant ‘welcoming’ light sculpture in the desert near Bledsoe, Texas (US), a social sculpture in the form of a memorial bench near the Factory of Art and Design, Copenhagen (DK) and a historical town gate for a thoroughfare in the heterogeneous neighborhood of Ålekistevej in Vanløse (DK). Awards and commissions include working grants from The Danish Arts Foundation (2012, 2013 and 2015), winner of the Turku Biennial 2013 (FI), performance at Horsens Gymnasium commissioned by The Danish Arts Foundation (2014) and a house-artist commissioned by Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde (DK) and The Danish Arts Foundation (2015).

Besides her individual practice, Heidi has been involved in different curatorial projects. She co-curated, along with Jens Axel Beck (DK) the award-winning exhibition, Lokal Global Plan in the public space of Vanløse (DK) in 2011 and since 2007, she is co-curating the international Deadpan Exchange series with Jonn Herschend (US). Additionally, she is the co-founder of two artist initiatives in Copenhagen (DK); Koh-i-noor (since 2004) and Exhibition Space Sydhavn Station (since 2012).