15 Sept 2007 to 14 Jan 2008
Gallery hours: Thursdays - Mondays: 12 - 6pm
Opening: Saturday, September 15, 2007, 6 - 9 pm
Dumbo Arts Center (DAC)
30 Washington Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 7186940831
m:
f: +1 7186940867
w: www.dumboartscenter.org
SEX IN THE CITY Curated by Dean Daderko with Marina Adams
Featuring works by:
A.K. Burns, Boris Torres, Chitra Ganesh, Donnie & Travis, Edie Fake and Dewayne Slightweight, David Humphrey, Jayson Keeling,Kathe Burkhart, Marilyn Minter, Marina Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Suzanne McClelland, The Third Leg, Ulrike Müller,Vanessa Chimera, Will Villalongo
"We make art, and in doing so, we offer our poetry - ourselves - to the world. It's a call-and-response, a dance, a seduction. Seduction and pleasure are nowhere more evident than in sex, of course. To paraphrase Gregg Bordowitz, sexuality is how you touch the world, and how the world touches you. We recognize our desires and send out a heads-up. I'm like you. Are you like me?
Along comes Lacan who tells us that desire is always the desire of the other. Another has an other, implicitly. Our desires are not our own. We’re momentarily destabilized. The center is off to the side. Our desires are the result of what we see, what turns us on. They’re molded by our environment and our culture. How do you decide what’s sexy, what’s hot? Here's that prism again: our desire a triangle – the desirer, the desired, and those that recognizes this want, our community. Desire is collective. Sex surrounds us. We play with it, in it. Our jouissance. We send reflected rays out to the world and watch where they stick.
"Sex in the City" grabs at this feeling, laying its hands on objects of desire. It feels out contours of bodies and form, in skins made of paint and flesh and film. Let's see where it goes." - Dean Daderko, September 2007
DUMBO ARTS CENTER PROUDLY PRESENTS: THE 11TH ANNUAL ART UNDER THE BRIDGE FESTIVAL September 28 - 30, 2007 /// DUMBO BROOKLYN, NYC.
150,000 Art Lovers Converge in DUMBO Brooklyn
DUMBO, Brooklyn: NY August 28, 2007 - The 11th Annual Art Under the Bridge Festival takes place from September 28-30, 2007, in Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York. Dumbo Arts Center, the Festival’s Producer is anticipating over 150,000 visitors again this year. Sixty new art works will be scattered throughout the neighborhood, while 158 private studios will open to the public and exhibitions will run in sixteen different venues.
The event is the single largest urban forum for experimental art in the United States that transforms the distinctive waterfront neighborhood into a multi-sensory public art arena.
The Third Bridge by Osman Akan October 14, 2007 - January 14, 2008
“The Third Bridge” an artwork in fiber optics by Osman Akan, will be installed on the waterfront in the Brooklyn Bridge Park near the Manhattan Bridge from October 14, 2007 to January 14, 2008. "The Third Bridge" is Dumbo Art Center’s first solo commission and the pilot in a developing series, titled “Outer Space.”
“Life is a bridge,” the Eastern proverb goes. “Cross over it, but build no house on its span.” An invitation since time immemorial to ramble on, the idea of the bridge has served—literally and metaphorically—to connect where we are now to where we wish to arrive. Like the romance of the road, it is best considered as a means and not an end; to act otherwise invites arrested development, immaturity, dreams deferred.
Also a powerful metaphor for unity, the desire to build bridges is, by definition, a progressive urge. The driving force behind bridges propels the race toward improvements of both the material and metaphysical kind. Think of the telephone, the railroad and the multistory building, for example. Each of these, in its time, was a piece of cutting edge technology—a bridge linking ambition and achievement. Inventions like these made men dream and, just as importantly, improved the way they got their wares to market.
It comes as no surprise, then, that bridges—in their ideal form and as feats of engineering—have long inspired artists to sing their praises. From Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” to Hart Crane’s ecstatic canto to the Brooklyn Bridge to a recent documentary on the Golden Gate Bridge’s suicide appeal, bridges — especially the world’s more impressive structures — invite the mind to dream big, pushing the limits of the imagination toward new ideas beyond the established.
A new work of contemporary art that plays on the traits of these grandiose and useful monuments is Osman Akan’s “The Third Bridge,” a sculptural installation using unorthodox and volatile materials like light, wind and fiber optic cables. Sited outdoors on a walkway in Brooklyn Bridge Park, itself located on the East River waterfront — virtually beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges — Akan’s sculpture taps into the natural and man-made aspects of a landscape heavily trafficked by folks immersed in their most reflexive, meditative moments.
Not so much a demonstration of artistic innovation as a challenge to activate the mind’s trap and chutes in relation to its physical as well as its metaphorical surroundings, Akan’s “Third Bridge” uses prosaic if advanced contemporary technology — namely, the fiber optic strands that form the plumbing and architecture beneath and above our most routine daily exchanges — to comment on and render visible the vast networks of information that envelop our everyday lives. Planted in individual strands to form curving pathways of fiber optic “grass,” the imitation meadows pose a basic question about the environment of our 21st century information age — specifically, what is natural? A public sculpture that demands interactivity of the tactile and cogitative kind, Akan’s work also incorporates air into its artistic effects, swaying and bending with the wind, an anti-monument to the variable fortunes of human communication.
Located between two towering examples of 19th century “connectivity, ”Akan’s “Third Bridge” enacts a sculptural metaphor for our digitally dependent present. In this formulation, t he high-speed information transmitted by light impulses represents the bridge’s finished span. The sculpture’s fiber optic rods, for their part, stand in for the stone, mortar and cable work that does the heavy lifting for many of the globe’s most essential networks. The “grass” itself eschews monumentality as a site-specific expression of hidden networks and values begat by new technologies.
“I use fiber optics for many reasons, but most importantly because of their ability to form networks,” Akan has said, by which he means all such networks, from “the flux of information from late night television to surveillance cameras, from chat lines to stock markets, as well as cultural networks such as artist networks.” However invisible, Akan’s “The Third Bridge” suggests, fiber optics constitute the pathways that traffic in our most important symbolic and material values — information, linkage, trade, among others — even to the degree that they help reshape what passes for human nature today and in the future.
The artist, Osman Akan was born on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. He has lived and worked in the United States since 1995. Trained as a new media artist, Akan has been producing audio and video installations since 1999. In 2002, he started making prints of 3D modeled “virtual” sculptures. His growing interest in the tangibility of sculptural works in relation to virtual landscapes led to working with optical fibers in 2005. He installed his first fiber optics work in 2006 in Franconia Sculpture Park. In 2007, Akan received a NYSCA Individual Artist’s Grant to enable the realization of “The Third Bridge,” sponsored by Dumbo Arts Center. Until recently, Akan maintained a studio in Dumbo. A professor of advanced computer graphics, Akan lives in Brooklyn, New York.
