| La Galleria Archive 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Recent Work by Tusay, Peter Cody and Leo Purdy June 12 - 22, 2008 Reception: Saturday June 14, 5:30 - 8pm
ahmed yacoubi A Retrospective June 5 - 8, 2008
Paintings from the private collection of Ellen Stewart and Hassan Ouakrim in the garden of one world a floral photography installation by Randy Gener and Nic Ularu May 17 - June 1, 2008
La MaMa La Galleria is pleased to announce the opening of a floral photography installation by the Filipino-American writer/photographer Randy Gener and the Romanian-born theatre designer/visual artist Nic Ularu. In the Garden of One World brings together theatre scenography, digital photography and installation art to create a conceptual space inspired by Ellen Stewart's famous dictum that theatre should "speak beyond words." At once a scenographic statement and a thematically organized exhibition, In the Garden of One World imagines a dream of a world garden. On display are more than 35 photographs of flowers and intriguing places taken in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Nevis, Panama, Romania, South Korea, Sweden and the United States. A playwright, critic and senior editor of American Theatre magazine, Randy Gener snapped these photos while he was on assignment abroad, delivering papers and lectures at international theatre festivals and congresses, or participating in a number of cultural exchange programs and international artists' residencies, including La MaMa Umbria International (the nonprofit cultural center and artists' residence and work center founded by Stewart in 1990 in central Italy). Designed by the Romanian theatre artist and scenographer Nic Ularu, In the Garden of One World reveals, enhances and re-stages the poetic and formal potential of these photographs through the metaphor of an abstract garden. Gener and Ularu are theatre artists whose professional careers have been nurtured at La MaMa E.T.C. In seeking to make unexpected links between disparate international experiences, their collaborative show attempts to visualize and embody La MaMa's dream of "many cultures, one world." Support for the international theatre travels, which made In the Garden of One World possible, was made by Ernst Aichinger of The Austrian Foreign Ministry, The Consulate General of Sweden, The Ford Foundation through the Institute of International Education, The Foundation of the American Theatre Critics Association, The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest and the U.S. Department of State.
Biographies Nic Ularu is an Obie Award–winning designer, painter and theatre artist. Hailing originally from Romania, where he established himself as an important visual artist whose paintings were represented in a series of national exhibitions of fine arts from 1980 to 1988, Ularu has held eight solo exhibitions as well as several group shows in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Brussels, Bucharest and Craiova. Besides writing and directing his own plays, Ularu has extensive design credits in the U.S., Sweden, Northern Ireland and Romania. He was the head of scenography at the National Theatre of Bucharest. Recent credits include: writer/director of The Cherry Orchard Sequel at LaMaMa E.T.C.; 2003 OBIE award for the Talking Band's Painted Snake in a Painted Chair; 2005 co-designer of the exhibit World Stage Design in Canada; and 2007 lead designer and curator of the USA National Exhibit at the Prague Quadrennial for World Scenography.
step up
April 16 - May 11 , 2008 Step Up has been organized as a platform for students at The Cooper Union's School of Art to present new work in a public setting. Four groups of students whose artwork engages a range of mediums and disciplines are featured in weeklong exhibitions on view from Wednesday through Sunday, beginning April 16. Every Saturday, the exhibition on view is punctuated by an afternoon of performances and a public reception. ***Daddy and Cyrus Siant Amand Piliakoff with Pony Gentile*** On view April 16 - April 20 ***Harold Batista, Sonia Finley and Andrew Francis*** ***Jenna Dublin, Tom Gardiner and Rich Watts*** On view April 30 - May 4 ***Tommy Coleman, Luke Janson and Kim Mullis***
The Paint Show March 13 - April 13, 2008 the Paint Show featurs ten seminal artists active in the phenomenal and highly influential East Village art scene of the 1980s. Participating in this unique survey are: Helen Oliver Adelson, Andrew Castrucci, EiLeen Doster, Glenn Garver, Max Henry, Portia Munson, Laurie Olinder, David Sandlin, Susan Strande and Jon Waldo. By juxtaposing two works from each artist, one from the time when they were exhibiting in the many galleries that characterized this neighborhood in the Eighties, and one from the present, curator EiLeen Doster balances our tendencies for nostalgia with a contemporary sense of how time marks not merely personal evolution but the individual quality of perseverance that each of these artists manifest in their committed studio practices. The twenty-year distance drawn between these artists’ works is the gap that defines the continuum. At once a tribute to the neighborhood as a historical center for creativity- formerly as a nexus of affordable rents, cultural diversity and accessibility for artists to live and work, now as the epicenter of a new wave of galleries and alternative exhibition spaces opening up to address the expanded audience for art around the New Museum- the Paint Show is as well a poetic registration of where contemporary art belongs in the greater lineage of painting itself. Much as the medium itself (painting we must remember was declared dead not so very long ago), the Lower East Side has proven remarkably durable and capable of regeneration according to the shifting spirit and energy of each generation. As a non-profit exhibition space founded in the 1980s to serve its community, La Mama La Galleria is the perfect venue for this innovative curatorial initiative. -Carlo McCormick
adriana farmiga
February 2 - March 9, 2008 Review in FlashArt Opening reception: February 2, 6 - 9pm Road kill has a funny way of putting things in perspective: humankind's imposition on the natural environment; the inevitability, even banality, of death; the curiosity of our morbid curiosities; and the rather surprising place we've come to occupy in the scheming grandiosity of things. Cutting through the tree line of a mountain in upstate New York, route 44/55 is as good a place as any to get an eyeful, if not a trunk-full, of the dubious relationship we humans have managed to get ourselves into with dear old Mother Nature. For the exhibition 44/55, artist Adriana Farmiga applies her cunning object selections/combinations and pinprick formal vocabulary to the havoc-wreaking travesty of the American Highway System. Drawing from the language of happenstance roadside sculpture, 44/55 butts playfully dark wit against the horrific realities of what we've done to our planet and the ludicrous ways we've gone about celebrating it. For example: a double deer garden statue split by a no-pass double-line road marking, or waiting patiently for death atop a scattering of playing cards, intones the burden our abstractions place on animal life, the pleasure - to the point of kitsch - we derive from representing the bucolic, and the dumbness of luck that makes the whole world kin. The road compresses the profundities of travel by generating an abstraction of the relationship of point A to point B. Farmiga's knack for coalescing wry humor and existential crises through smart scale shifts, punctuations of color, tense balance, and an adamant economy of means finds a deserving subject in the dialectic of 44/55. This body of spare work is anything but modest and goes a long way toward announcing the newly renovated La Mama Galleria as an art space to be reckoned with. -Alexander Seth Cameron
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