Kimberly Young is a performer/choreographer based in Brooklyn.  She choreographs dances under the name the extra-sensory pedestrians, through which she has an ongoing collaboration with composer/sound artist Stephan Moore.  The ESPs have been presented in New York City by ISSUE Project Room, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Roulette Intermedium among others, and in association with Joyce SoHo. The Company has also been presented nationally by venues including SUNY Stony Brook’s Staller Center (Stony Brook, NY), Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy (Concord, MA) where Young received a Choreographers’ Project Fellowship in 2008, Free Form Mash Up (Princeton, NJ), and Studio 121 (Freeport, IL). As a performer, Young is honored to have worked with Tere O’Connor, Todd Williams, Jennifer Schmermund, Paul Singh and the Jen Mesch Dance Conspiracy.

Peter B. Schmitz has been involved in the creative and performing arts for over 25 years as a dancer, choreographer, and actor. As a professional dancer/choreographer, Peter has worked throughout the United States, Amsterdam, Germany, France, England, New Zealand and recently in Ankara, Turkey. He was a founding member of Dance Gallery, a small modern dance company, a member of Creach/Co in New York City for over 8 years, and has performed in the works of Wendy Woodson, Ann Carlson, Richard Colton/Amy Spencer. Peter currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.  He has choreographed for New World Theatre, Medicine Show Theater and Potomac Theater Project and is a member of Actors Equity.

Stephan Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, sound designer and curator based in Brooklyn and Pawtucket, RI. His creative work currently manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvised solo performances, sound installation works, scores and sound designs for collaborative performance pieces, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Evidence, his long-standing project with Scott Smallwood, has performed widely and released several recordings over the past decade. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught workshops and numerous college-level courses in composition, programming, sound art and electronic music. He is the president of Isobel Audio, a maker of custom loudspeakers, as well as the curator of the Floating Points programming at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he also serves on the Art Advisory Board. From late 2004 to mid-2010, he performed over 250 concerts with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, serving as their sound engineer and music coordinator, and as a touring musician. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the MEME program at Brown University.  He has been collaborating with Yanira Castro since 2005.

For 17 years, Kathy Couch has been designing and creating visual landscapes in performance and installation works. Primarily working in the mediums of light and space, Couch has designed over 300 performances in New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Australia, rbia and throughout New England. Creating installations and designs for a variety of traditional and non-traditional spaces, Couch’s artistic practice focuses on the vital role of the audience/viewer as active contributors to the work. Kathy Couch has ongoing performance collaborations with Kinodance, Candice Salyers, The Architects and Chimaera Physical Theater. As a member of the creative team for Yanira Castro’s Dark Horse/Black Forest, Couch received a 2009 Bessie Award. Most recently, she collaborated with choreographer and video artist Wendy Woodson in the creation of Belonging: Reflections on Place, a video installation for the Immigration Museum of Melbourne (Australia). Kathy Couch currently teaches Lighting Design at Amherst College and recently received an MFA in Visual Arts from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a founding board member of the Northampton Community Arts Trust that seeks innovative ways to preserve arts space in Northampton, MA and a member of the arts organization C3, a creative community collective.

]]> http://www.theinvisibledog.org/yanira-castro-and-cast/feed/ 0 http://www.theinvisibledog.org/new-york-times-2/ http://www.theinvisibledog.org/new-york-times-2/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:30:02 +0000 theinvisibledog http://www.theinvisibledog.org/?p=9954

INVISIBLE DOG, OFF LEASH AND REIMAGINED

By Melena Ryzik / September 2010 / Original Article http://nyti.ms/rfjCrr

A version of this article appeared in print on September 14, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Serendipity can strike at any time. In the 1970s a World War II veteran named George Zorbas took a trip to Europe and returned with a novelty concept that became a runaway hit: the invisible-dog leash. As a visual prank, it fit perfectly in the era of the pet rock. He brought the loopy idea back to his factory in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, where he already produced belts and jewelry, eventually employing as many as 150 people to churn out thousands of the stiff leashes and empty collars, 24 hours a day.

In the basement of the Invisible Dog Art Space in Brooklyn, Lucien Zayan brandishes one of the namesake props. But tastes change. Pet rocks and empty collars were relegated to attics and thrift stores, and fashion accessories were made more cheaply abroad. By 2005, the company was closed, and the space was a relic.

In 2008 Lucien Zayan, a French theater and opera director who was spending a few months in New York, happened by and saw the factory’s future — and his own. Or, as he put it: “By chance, one day, I met the building. And I immediately fell in love.”

Who wouldn’t? It’s a three-story, 30,000-square foot, 19th-century structure, steps from the bustle of Smith Street and on the same block as a subway stop. Mr. Zayan envisioned it as a multipurpose arts center, with room for studios, galleries and performances. He contacted an owner, Frank DeFalco, who had bought the building with two partners in 2007, and gave his pitch. It was, by the way, just after the financial meltdown.

“One of the first things he asked me was, ‘Do you have money to do that?’ ” Mr. Zayan recalled. “And I said, no. And he answered, ‘Me either.’ ” A deal was born.

Now the Invisible Dog Art Space is fulfilling its promise as a neighborhood hub of creativity. On Sunday, as part of Crossing the Line, the annual festival put on by the French Institute Alliance Française, it hosted thousands for Farm City Fair, a Brooklyn “county fair” theme event. Visitors sampled (surprisingly good) salmon pastrami cheesecake and baguette-flavored ice cream and learned about rooftop farms, while a brass band played outside. On Thursday, the black-box theater in the gallery’s basement will host its first production, a new play by a young playwright. Thirty artists fill the second-floor studios; the airy top floor serves as a desirable party space; and a multimedia installation by the artist Richard Garet is to open in the ground-floor gallery later this month. A shady courtyard offers both refuge and a neighborhood compost pile/environmental installation piece. Mr. Zayan is the building curator, deciding who can exhibit and work there. A year into its recession-era life, Invisible Dog is fostering connections and, even wilder, making money.

“It’s an amazing story, where you think, ‘Only in New York,’ ” said Lili Chopra, the co-curator of the Crossing the Line festival. She met Mr. Zayan last fall and was charmed by the gallery’s raw space and his do-it-yourself energy. “I just thought it was such a great labor of love,” she said, “and completely in the spirit of what’s happening in Brooklyn now.”

Though he’d had a successful career in France, Mr. Zayan had never worked here. But after getting the green light from the building’s owners — they’d hoped to turn the space into condominiums until the recession intervened — he sold off most of his possessions, left his apartment in Paris and moved to Brooklyn in April 2009. “My friends were stupefied when I told them, ‘I’m going to New York to create the Invisible Dog Art Center,’ ” Mr. Zayan said. “I was alone here, without any friends, without any contacts, just this building and nothing else.”

Searching for inspiration, he went to the Museum of Modern Art. (“Some people go to the church, I went to the MoMA.”) There he saw a retrospective of the German artist Martin Kippenberger, full of meticulously arranged objects. He returned to the Invisible Dog, scoured the basement, still stacked with belts, jewelry and other bric-a-brac, and opened a flea market.

From May to July 2009, he sold that inventory for a dollar or two an item. With $300,000 invested by Mr. DeFalco and his partners, he earned enough to open the space in October of that year, but barely made a dent in the leftover stuff, which is now being harvested as material for the building and its artists. Mr. Zayan pays $25,000 a month in rent, most of it coming from the studios and event space, he said. By his count, 32,000 visitors have passed through in the last year. “It’s a real ecosystem,” Mr. Zayan, 44, said in an interview last week at Café Pedlar, up the street from his gallery. “Everything works together.”

Ian Trask, a 27-year-old artist making the transition from a career in science, first came to Invisible Dog in November for a Recession Art show. At Mr. Zayan’s invitation, he spent three months scavenging in the basement. He turned coils of canvas belts into a three-dimensional painting, which now hangs over the building’s freight elevator. Another piece, a 162-foot cardboard worm, is stored downstairs.“Lucien’s been very kind to me,” said Mr. Trask, now Invisible Dog’s first artist-in-residence. “A lot of my collectors are friends of his. He’d bring people to the basement and say, ‘So-and-so wants to buy something.’ ” Gabriel Jones, a photographer who shot the cover art for Arcade Fire’s newest album and was one of Invisible Dog’s earliest tenants, said it was different from other studio spaces. “There’s always a party, show or an exhibition,” he said. “It’s a living space.”

Mr. Zayan’s landlords, too, are happy with the role the building plays in the neighborhood, where it can serve as an anchor for their other projects. “We’re having a blast,” Mr. DeFalco said at the Farm City event, which was so popular it opened an hour early and closed late. “I took a chance with Lucien, but he’s done everything that he said he would.”

Mr. Zayan, who has a charming accent and a neat salt-and-pepper beard and who favors spotless Adidas and pristine white shirts, says that — except for the ability to smoke indoors — he does not miss Paris. Save for an art student intern, he does everything at Invisible Dog himself. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s not too much work,” he said. He lives next door; for fun he gives haircuts in the courtyard — as many as five a day, upon request, though he likes curly styles best. He hopes to make Invisible Dog a hangout, “open six days a week, from 10 in the morning to midnight, with always something happening,” he said. And though his friends counseled him against the name, calling it stupid, he’s glad it stuck: “It’s the history, and history is never stupid.”

When he’s low on cash, he sells off a hundred invisible-dog leashes at $20 apiece; boxes of them still sit in the basement, a testament to the tenacity of far-fetched ideas. “That’s my treasure,” he said.

Love and Real Estate: “What Is the Where?” at The Invisible Dog        

By Lili Blau / November 2010 / Original article http://huff.to/cAR8z7

Location, location, location! It’s a real estate mantra, but it’s also the heart of an up-and-coming art world love affair, a show resulting from a ménage-à-trois among three curators and a building. The place is a one-year-old gallery, The Invisible Dog. In November of 2008, the major question for most New York art galleries was survival. But this was also the month Lucien Zayan stumbled upon the abandoned factory at 51 Bergen Street, three stories high and still crammed full of belts, jewelry, and, of course, that 70′s fad, invisible dog leashes. Zayan, a then 43-year-old French theatre producer, was only in New York on vacation. Six months later, he had moved to Brooklyn, with a visa and a deal with the building’s owners. Six months after that, he was open for business. “I fell in love with the building. It’s my real love story here,” says Zayan.

The whirlwind romance may sound like the sort of whim available only to the independently wealthy. However, Zayan was anything but. The gallery’s start-up capital came from the former factory’s leftover inventory, which the building owners had gifted Zayan with the lease, and that he then sold in a flea market on the ground floor.

 Zayan’s business plan for his art gallery is a lot like the concept of an invisible dog leash―the actual shows, just like the dog, aren’t necessary. The income for the space comes from the second-floor studios Zayan rents to artists, as well as events from cook-offs to fashion shows. This savvy idea of an arrangement―which was Zayan’s winning card with the building’s owners―gives him the freedom to choose only the art shows that move him.

 ”I’m not an artist, I’m a curator. I have to curate the building.” This way, he can share with the general public the enchantment he felt from the very first day. What better place, then, for the latest show by Recession Art, which is all about the magic of location?

Co-founded by sisters Emma and Ani Katz, Recession Art’s mission is to connect emerging artists with emerging collectors. The surroundings of the Boerum Hill neighborhood, and the white brick, window, and rough wood interior of the gallery itself, frame this collection almost too perfectly for its target audience. Who better than emerging Brooklynites? “Affordable art doesn’t have to come from Ikea,” explains Emma Katz, who is the small group’s managing director. Her mission was, in part, inspired by the empty walls of the Brooklyn apartment she and her boyfriend purchased a few years ago.  ”What is the Where?” curated by Recession Art’s first guest curator, Risa Shoup, is the young arts organization’s third show at The Invisible Dog. But it’s the first that directly explores the way art is affected by its surroundings. However, if you are not a nearby resident, this show, which runs until November 21, is worth a trip. The collection is unusually strong. Each artist has played on the theme of location, but the pieces don’t depend on the show’s concept for attention. Still, the poetry of it lends the collection a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers longer than its images.

“My whole adult life―whatever that means―” jokes Shoup, who is only 27, “I’ve been obsessed with the relationship between location, identity, and perception.” Her concept for this show beat out half a dozen other candidates for the position. Shoup admits that the intensity of her interest came from growing up in the homogeneous insularity of the suburbs. “It was being queer, but it was also just being different.” But embracing her identity and the people it has brought into her life has proved fruitful. It was Shoup’s girlfriend, Diana Glazer, who came across Recession Art’s search for a curator. It was also Glazer who introduced me to Shoup and turned me on to her work. Shoup’s personal experiences, though, were only a jumping off point for the show. And her artists have attacked the question of environment in very different ways.

Lawrence Mesich’s “At Work” is the most playful in its dealings with location. The piece is made up of aluminum pipes attached to five ducts, each with a different video inside of a man at a mundane job. Peering through the ducts gives the 90′s-movie pleasure of spying through the ventilation system. Meanwhile, there’s a meta-pleasure added by the gallery’s actual ventilation system, which crawls up the same wall.

 Ian Addison Hall’s photographic collages, on the other hand, create a haunting dream world. Hall has arranged 35mm cut-outs against drab beige backgrounds, nailing the essence of each location in a minimum of images, like a photographic haiku. There are no walls, only angles and perspective–windows and doorways gaping into nowhere.

Each of the fifteen different artists included in the show has been given generous space within the 4,000 square foot loft. Shoup’s desire with “What is the Where” was to create an environment that allows observers to absorb the works of art and form their own opinions. Though by 9pm the place is densely full, it doesn’t feel cramped. A DJ set up by the door underscores the party without music, just an ambient rhythm. The mood is festive but laid back. The crowd ranges from plaid shirts, facial hair, and draping sweaters, to colorful dresses and sports coats. Even the five-and-under have a few representatives running around.

“The thing that would break my heart,” says Shoup, “is if someone walked up to me and said I really don’t feel welcome here.”

Moments later, Shoup has disappeared into the crowd. Zayan and the Katz sisters are also hidden among the throngs of people. From the doorway to the stairs, all I can see are the walls of the gallery pulling all of them together, the leash around the dog.

OUR LOCAL, INTERNATIONAL, NOT-SO-INVISIBLE GALLERY

By Lisa Collins / March 2011 / Original Article http://bit.ly/qlN4qa

Our Local, International, Not-So-Invisible Gallery  I’m in a dark wooden room thick with fog and the sweet scent of fog machines. The fog is disorienting. In front of me is a shiny, translucent mother-of-pearl-like sculpture of a naked man, towering, lit brightly from within. The sound of a heartbeat gets louder and louder as the light progressively illuminates the naked man, and then goes quiet as the room goes dark. It’s a lot to take in, and I catch my breath. A young guy with a ponytail and a flashlight in his mouth is working in the corner on a machine; red lines across a screen and lots of buttons. Apparently, there’s an electrical problem with this light installation by Thierry Dreyfus, a French artist who has designed light installations for Calvin Klein and Yves Saint Laurent fashion shows, and installed beautiful sculptures in lovely buildings, such as the Grand Palais in Paris.  But this is The Invisible Dog art gallery, on Bergen between Court and Smith streets. A friends of mine said, “What? The Invisible Dog? I haven’t heard of that.” It’s high time everyone living in Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill and the surrounding area knows of The Invisible Dog. The cavernous, 30,000 square-foot gallery and exhibition space in a converted 1800′s factory, opened by Paris transplant Lucien Zayan, sort of burst onto the NYC arts scene in late 2009 with a packed schedule of exhibits, installations, group and solo shows, art and urban farming/sustainability festivals, experimental film and multi-media, theater and performance, art-making camps for kids and the like.  And while it is a community arts center, it’s not a “community arts” center in so many ways—most of Invisible Dog’s shows are reviewed in The New York Times and a host of other media including Wallpaper, New York Magazine, publications in France and elsewhere. It draws well-considered artists from all over the world. Between September and December, 32,000 people visited the gallery.  Nearly 700 people came to a science camp recently for kids and their parents, and 1,700 people visited the Dreyfus installation. I was going to recommend that you visit it, as well; but alas, in its last week, shortly after I was awe-inspired with fog and nakedness and disorientation, the structure blew a fuse and burned to the ground. Ah, the risks of electric art.  This weekend will be the perfect time to check out South Brooklyn’s gem of a gallery. The Invisible Dog is launching three new shows on March 5. For the first time, the 30 resident artists – including art stars from 12 countries, including Cuba, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Korea — will exhibit as a group on the large, 4,000 square foot, third-floor space. On the second-floor, the artists’ studios will open for tour.  On the ground floor, installation sculptor Chris Klapper and electrical engineer Jen Lusker have created an interactive light installation consisting of 2,000 hand-cast spheres spanning a 20-foot wall.  In the basement, installation artist Julien Gardair‘s Camera Locus 2 will be on view. Since January, the Brooklyn artist, born in Versailles, delved into the history of the old factory-turned-art haven to create a site-specific video installation featuring photographs, drawings, video and animations.   There’s a lot going on, and that’s just how gallery director Zayan likes it. Zayan is a quirky, charismatic figure who thinks big and likes large, airy, edgy exhibits–a luxury of space, and a fresh departure from more predictable gallery fare. He meets me on a Friday night to tour his massive space.  Zayan tells me the idea for Invisible Dog came to him in a flash. He says he never thought of opening a gallery until he was visiting New York and staying in the neighborhood, and walked by this huge abandoned warehouse on Bergen.  Zayan spent his life working in theater and opera, with the Aix-en-Provence festival and Paris’s renowned Théàtre de Odeon and Théàtre de la Madeleine, and, as it says on the gallery website, he “recognized the perfect mise-en-scène,” when he saw 51 Bergen. With the support of the building’s owners, who he calls the “perfect partners,” he decided to turn the space into an art center.  “The idea came to me at that moment. The project was inspired by the building. Two minutes before I thought of it, I had no idea of that.”  At that time, in 2008, the building was packed full of stuff and junk and furniture. All 68 windows were broken and needed to be replaced.  It was an old belt factory that in the 1970s was converted into a factory making “invisible dog,” leashes—a 1970s fad in which people walked around with a stiff leash that did not have a dog at the end of it.  I remember a day about a year ago, when dozens of people walked around Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill holding the leashes, and pretending like nothing was happening. Surely, Zayan’s work. When the Invisible Dog opened in October 2009, New York City was in the throes of the recession. Zayan’s concept was to use money raised from artists’ studio rentals, and renting the special event space, to pay the rent. “Nobody knows me here, so it was impossible to apply for grants,” Zayan says. The gallery gets zero grant dollars, or money from the city.   Since the Invisible Dog opened, there’s been a renaissance on Bergen. “Bergen was a scary street. It was empty. The subway is there. But now, there are much more people, two new restaurants, Fork + Pencil antique store, and the Laundromat across the street, that is essential. In one year, the street changed a lot.”  Zayan says his goal was to create a space that artists used for work and creation. Steven and Willliam Ladd built a chandelier hanging over the ground floor gallery using 10,000 belt buckles left in the warehouse. Artist Ian Trask built a permanent installation over the massive industrial elevator using belt material. An Italian artist painted the interior of the elevator shaft with text from Dante’s Inferno.  Zayan is a pied piper of sorts, and attracts all kinds of international artists to his gallery. While 30 artists rent studios, 50 people work at Invisible Dog on any given day, making jewelry, illustrating books and greeting cards, painting, sculpting, welding medal. Unlike most artists’ workspaces, Zayan selects residents only after viewing their work. Recently he had five spaces open; they rented within two weeks, he said.  Invisible Dog’s impressive roster of resident artists includes the incredibly-talented designer and illustrator Andre da Loba, whose work you will likely recognize from its frequent and prominent appearances in The New York Times, Time Out, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.  Da Loba, who is originally from a small town in Portugal, says he was one of the first artists to rent a studio at Invisible Dog. “For everyone, this is a job, so everyone is respectful,” da Loba says. “We do what we want, when we want.  You never know what to expect. Sometimes there will be a musician playing downstairs, a wedding upstairs, there’s always something going on, jazz concert, theater, film. It makes it fun.” The last time the Invisible Dog held an open studio, 500 people walked through da Loba’s work space, he said.  In another studio resides Chong Gon Byun, one of Korea’s most famous artists, and an art icon there. His shows pull fans from Korea, Japan and beyond.  Zayan takes me to painter Giles Lyon’s studio. Lyon says he was priced out of an artist’s studio in Dumbo, and stumbled onto the Invisible Dog Gallery when visiting the Muriel Guepin Gallery next door. Lyon says Zayan has a different way of running things. “I’ve rented studios for 15 years, and never had a landlord say, ‘Let me see your slides first.’ They just want your bank account.” “It’s a vibrant community, with lots of exchange and opportunities, and it’s very, very supportive,” Lyon said. Lyon shows me his window on the side of the building, which during the warm months displays a big tree and billows of lush honeysuckle. Down below, in the yard, an artist is making a huge compost pile that he uses to make artwork, on canvas.  When the vegetables dry, it leaves a design on the canvas, Zayan says. “He even made an American flag,” with it, Zayan said.  In summer, you can swing by and pick up compost for your garden, with a $1 or $2 donation.  Zayan says he’d like to create a “priest’s garden,” in the gallery’s lovely and sizeable back courtyard.Lyon says he’d like to grow mushrooms. “This is an excellent environment for mushroom, Shitake and Oyster. Mushrooms are not plants. They are animals. Mushrooms and humans have more in common than anything else.” I had not heard this before. Lyon shows me his sculptures, which are made with his wife’s hair and remnants of his meals: an olive pit, a tiny eel skeleton.    We head up to the third floor—a vast open space with big windows on either end, that Zayan rents out for weddings and special events. In coming weeks, he will host the fundraisers for PS 29, PS 58 and PS 261 there. “It all happens organically,” Zayan says. We sit down to chat. The gallery gets a lot of press in France, Zayan says, and so, about 10 percent of visitors are tourists. Some 30 percent are from Manhattan, and 60 percent from Brooklyn.  Zayan says people gave him a hard time about naming the gallery Invisible Dog, as it’s an unknown thing in Europe, where most of his contacts reside. “This is the history of the building. It is part of American culture,” Zayan says of the invisible dog chains, which are sold at the gallery for $25. “Everyone remembers that. It is even on the Simpsons, they have an invisible dog.”  When a gallery is buzzing with exciting art, now is the time to visit. Who’s to say if the Invisible Dog, with our ever-increasing property values, will stay in the hood. “It’s very, very important that we build an audience with people and the neighborhood, and a real relationship. Most important is to create a spirit. I don’t know what will happen in a few years. Maybe we’ll move somewhere else. It’s easier to travel with spirit than with luggage.”

ROBERT DESNOS’ GIANT ANT IS THE OF HEART OF A NEW YORK MIRACLE
French artist Xavier Roux created a 59 by 3 foot bug

By Sylvain Cypel, Correspondent in New York/ February 2010 / Original Article : non available on line /

Of course there is still a lot of work, but the whole thing is a miracle. The art center called The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn, New York, is exhibiting a 59’ long by 13’ high ant wearing a boater hat. “Why not?” asked Robert Desnos in his 1942 poem “The Ant” (“a 59’ long ant with a hat on its head, that doesn’t exist…”). French artist Xavier Roux created its body and gave it a soul. Its skeleton and legs made from a ton and a half of steel anchor four ultra-light polyurethane and nylon balloons, made to measure by a company that usually works for very demanding clients: the US army, or the operators of geostationary platforms… As if oppressed by the immensity of the surrounding space, the work spreads a mixture of innocent humor and monumental seriousness.

Xavier Roux says he has been “dreaming” it since he was 6. “The Ant is the first poem I learned”. Much later, when he found out about Desnos’ activity in the French Résistance, of his deportation to Buchenwald in 1944 in a 59’ sealed railway car, of his death from typhus in the Terezin camp, his attraction became an obsession.
Xavier Roux offered his ant to Lucien Zayan who replied “let’s do it” without any hesitation and who is now exhibiting it in his art center. Zayan arrived in the US in 2009. He had spent 10 years with Stéphane Lissner at the Aix-en-Provence Lyric Art Festival. He is the typical “mercurial” type as described by Yuri Slezkine in his recently published “Jewish Century” (La Découverte 2009). “My mother always told me: Lucien, don’t own anything, everything can always be taken away from you”. Like in a fairy tale, he transformed the Invisible Dog’s rubble into a unique space that left the landlord impressed: 7545 square feet on 3 levels – 2296 square feet on the ground floor with a 15’ ceiling for exhibitions and other events; the rest is subdivided into artist studios.  Roux is quite unconventional himself. Having graduated from the Haute Ecole de Commerce, he started with a big US headhunting company in 1989 with Wall Street as his objective. “On my 10,000th day (at age 27 years and 3 months), I knew this life wasn’t for me”. He dropped it all in 1997. A year later he was exhibiting his “see through paintings”.

In 2008, he participated in the exhibition of the Praxis group “Dreams and Possibilities” at the Whitney Museum. Before that he launched the Artist Studio Project with the Yahoo! research lab at UCLA Berkeley.
As for The Ant, they admit that Zayan’s enthusiasm and Roux’s talent would not have been enough “without Juan”. Juan Alfaro built Louise Bourgeois’ Spider for the Guggenheim museum. Zayan says he’s an “extraordinary craftsman. Xavier imagined the structure, Juan gave it life after he chanced upon the Invisible Dog when looking for a large space for his wedding. I swear it’s true”. Others supported the project. Amongst them Jacques Fraenkel who is Robert Desnos’ and Florence Delay’s executor. Xavier Roux had previously offered his Ant to the Paris City Hall in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the war camps’ liberation. “We first had to have it exhibited in New York to show them it was possible. Now we’re talking about taking it to France”.

EXHIBITION / MAY 12 – 27 / Holy River is a multimedia exhibition by the New York based artist Prune Nourry, and curated by Tatyana Franck. Sculptures, installations, photographs and videos will take over the entire ground floor of the Invisible Dog.

  The Holy River exhibition is the culmination of a three-year project on gender selection focused on India. Mirroring the Holy Daughters exhibition that took place in 2011 in Paris around the theme of Milk, the flowing theme of this show is water. It features a selection of works inspired by a performance Prune realized last year in Kolkata.

Dance and Sound Performances: May 12 at 7 and 8:30 PM, May 19 at 6:30 PM  Performances: dance curated by Simon Dove and performed by Preeti Vasudevan,  sound by Mitchell Yoshida, smell by Olivier Delcour, taste by Michael Hamilton

In August 2011, Nourry commissioned a team of artisans from Kolkata’s potter’s district to create a monumental (17 feet) hybrid sculpture inspired by the design of her earlier Holy Daughters, and made from Ganges clay in a traditional style. Then in October 2011, during the Hindu festival «Durga Puja», this imaginary deity infiltrated the procession of thousands of Hindu deity figures. She was carried through the streets until the Ganges bank, where she was finally returned to the river from which she was born. The Holy River sculpture juxtaposes the symbol of the woman and cow’s sacred fertility, with the holiness of the Ganges river – purifier and source of all life. Yet, similarly to the mistreated cows and girls, the river is highly polluted and taken for granted. The deity, fruit of Nourry’s imagination, not only encourages to reflect on sex selection in Asia, but also brings awareness to the growing lack of free, clean water, and the religious, social, political and ecological issues that arise through both these important subjects.

Conjoining with the diverse layers of Nourry’s art, performances throughout the exhibition will feature a special sensory experience in the artistic merging of dance curated by Simon Dove and performed by Preeti Vasudevan, sound by Mitchell Yoshida, smell by Olivier Delcour, taste by Michael Hamilton.

Curated by Tatyana Franck with the support of Sophie Ubald Bocquet.

Opening reception: Saturday May 12 from 6 to 10pm

Gallery hours:
Thursday to Sunday, 1 to 7pm
or by appointments: gaelle@prunenourry.com / +1 213 324 3023

]]> http://www.theinvisibledog.org/holy-river/feed/ 1 http://www.theinvisibledog.org/cine-club-ascenseur-pour-lechafaud/ http://www.theinvisibledog.org/cine-club-ascenseur-pour-lechafaud/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:53:10 +0000 theinvisibledog http://www.theinvisibledog.org/?p=10149 MOVIE / FRIDAY MAY 18 / 7.30PM / Florence Carala and her lover Julien Tavernier, an ex – paratrooper want to murder her husband by faking a suicide. But after Julien has killed him and he puts his things in his car, he finds he has forgotten the rope outside the window and he returns to the building to remove it…

Ascenseur pour l’echafaud [Elevator for the gallows] – 1958
Director: Louis Malle
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly…
Music: Miles Davis
88mn

Suggested donation $5

Drinks and Live Music

]]> http://www.theinvisibledog.org/cine-club-ascenseur-pour-lechafaud/feed/ 0 http://www.theinvisibledog.org/everything-is-index-nothing-is-history/ http://www.theinvisibledog.org/everything-is-index-nothing-is-history/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:26:22 +0000 theinvisibledog http://www.theinvisibledog.org/?p=10130 EXHIBITION / JUNE 2-17 / RECESSION ART / Everything is Index, Nothing is History explores a world chronicled by gestures and physical traces that establish a factual connection to the world independent of cultural codes. Nearly a century and a half ago, philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce defined index as a sign that is caused by that which it refers to. A footprint, a scar, the smoke of a fire—all are signs that simultaneously demonstrate what they signify. An index may attest to the immediate truth of a substance or physical state, just as fever announces illness, or it may depict the truth of time—both the sun dial’s reading of a minute and the dust pile’s accumulative presence. As our relationship to history and the present change in an expanding field of information, Everything is Index, Nothing is History presents works that point to physical realities and trace purported histories through archives, found objects, photographs, material states, and physical actions.

Presented by Recession Art, Curated by Melanie Kress and Natalie Bell

Kate Bonner, Eric Carlson, J and James Carpenter, Courtney Chappell, Sarah Crofts, Lizzy De Vita, Shannon Finnegan, Ben Garthus, Max Glaser, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Leah Raintree, Saul Melman, Peter Neu, Antoine Lefebvre, Hudson Lines, Sam Keller, Jordan Rathus, Yujin Lee, Nancy Woods

Opening reception June 2 from 6 to 10pm

recessionartshows.com

Boerum Hill is the subject of memoir, movie, and fiction, and home to artists of the page, stage, canvas and screen.  Our biennial house tour provides a cross-section of the homes and gardens – and creativity – that make up our neighborhood. Join us to experience Boerum Hill’s unique sense of history, diversity and community. See how we respect the past as we build the future.

• Eight unique spaces – homes, gardens, and the Invisible Dog Art Center.
• Visit them at your own pace, in any order you choose.
• The tour begins and ends at the Invisible Dog Art Center, located at 51 Bergen Street, near Bergen Street F-train station. (We are also close to the A, C, 2 and 3 downtown Brooklyn stations)
• Join us at the Invisible Dog Art Center for the post-tour reception with free food from local restaurants and shops.

Buy Tickets Now! $20 in advance, $25 on day of tour at the following locations:

*Exit 9, 127 Smith Street, 718-422-7720
*Gumbo, 493 Atlantic Avenue, 718-855-7808
*Blue Ribbon General Store, 365 State Street, 718-522-9848
*Sterling Place, 363 Atlantic Avenue, 718-797-5667

Or

Order online now and your tickets will be waiting for you at the start of the tour.

Proceeds benefit the work of the Boerum Hill Association. This event takes place rain or shine. No backpacks or photography or children in strollers please.

Both plays were awarded at the Lycée Français of New York’s annual festival “Première Scène” on March 2012.  “Nos Cousinailles” won the “Grand Prize” and “Anonyme” the “Prize of originality” and “Best Interpretation Prize for a francophone actress”.   “Anonyme” and “Nos Cousinailles” are two short stage productions that celebrate the great power of theater, uniting American, French, Russian and German 9-11 years old children beyond their differences of culture and language, while combining comic and absurd situations.

Both plays are written and directed by Stéphanie Fribourg,currently the artistic director of “L’Oiseau Bleu Theater Company”.  www.loiseaubleutheater.org

free donation

www.thelanguageandlaughterstudio.com