UTOPIA PLANITIA
Curated by: Kylin O’Brien
Featuring: Best Praxis (Tal Beery and Eugenia Manwelyan), Bon Jane, Aimee Cavazzi, Jennifer Coates, Cara Cragan, Carmen Delaney, Corey Escoto, Clarity Haynes, David Humphrey, Jason Clay Lewis, LoVid, Carolanne Patterson & Jonathan Schipper
Opening: Thursday, May 11, 6-8 pm
Dates: May 11-June 14, 2017
Field Projects is pleased to present UTOPIA PLANITIA, curated by Kylin O'Brien. Named after an impact crater on Mars, the show puts to the test a deep exploration of value systems and an inversion of the art market pyramid. Each embracing their own value-destiny, Utopia Planitia’s 13 artists have created 13 unique structures dictating the terms for the sale of their work. Seeking exchange systems beyond the monetization of their work, the artists have been free to include money in their arrangements, but only to tease out greater values. The result of this experiment, along with the 13 diverse works of art in the show, is a revelation of personal, social, and political potential. Utopia Planitia presents creative engagement as a catalyst for economic evolution and a conversation about our collective futures. More than anything, the show exposes the fluidity of value.
In the exhibition there are paintings, works on paper, sculpture, video and performances. Each artist’s work is available with its own agenda. David Humphrey offers his painting to a collector committed to beginning a cascading downfall of capitalism. Bon Jane invites participation in a ritual aimed at transforming transactions, forever. Clarity Haynes candidly proposes a straight-up barter. Jonathan Schipper presents an audacious contract for someone to sign. The variety in the show speaks as much to the human experience of value as the commonalities speak to our shared existence.
Kylin O'Brien is a New York City born, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. She holds degrees in Philosophy from Vassar College and in Contemporary Creative Practice from Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. Kylin has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has enjoyed solo exhibitions at Feature INC Gallery in New York and Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been a Brooklyn Arts Council, Awesome Foundation and Pro Arts award winner. Kylin’s art utilizes both current media and ancient concepts to contemporize enduring themes. She has created commissioned public work during Art Basel Miami and has had public work on display in Wynwood Miami, Brooklyn and West Oakland. In addition to both studio and consulting work, she is currently conducting multiple collaborations, presentations and workshops.
About the Work:
Best Praxis, The Reading Residency (2017)
Value: Survival
Currency: Intimacy
Like so much else, our financial system is an illusion, sustained through repetition and “real” only in the way things, when they are repeated like a mantra or incantation, are willed into being against all odds and evidence. Most of us are convinced value comes from money and money comes from jobs. Our efforts at work feel real and money feels real. It is a foundational belief, inextricably interwoven into how most of us survive. But there is nothing essential about this civilization, nothing particularly “true”. We are not living in a culmination of some linear process destined to bring humanity toward a dramatic apocalypse or utopia. Living is ongoing and tangled. We survive within an unstable system. As things around us change, die, and contort, we do as we have always done: observe, adapt, survive, and create. How do we adapt, if not together? What do we survive for, if not each other? We are at an edge, at the precipice of something new. In times like these, strengthening our capacity for togetherness, for sharing intimacies, is a matter of survival. For this exhibition we are offering our work, The Reading Residency. It is an observational practice and an exercise in ways of knowing a stranger. If you want to participate you must invite us into your home to read 7 to 10 of the most important books you own - books that somehow define you developmentally. We will spend the day reading and in the meantime, shower in your shower, cook in your kitchen, lounge around and nap wherever comfortable. In this process, the public and private will be quietly inverted. We will become familiar with the intimate spaces you have shaped and that shape you daily. What will result is a stronger network, new relationships, and a photographic portrait we will produce of ourselves inhabiting your space - an image, possibly, of another as yourself. For your generosity, for your sharing, you will also receive two archival inkjet prints documenting the experience. Images which may, we hope, reveal something new to you. Something you have never seen before about yourself.