BRIC Presents: Suné Woods, Jonathan González, and Na'ye Perez
BRIC House
647 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA
New York
40.68884670000001
-73.97905759999999
Description
Reserve a ticket for BRIC's Spring 2022 Contemporary Art exhibitions, Suné Woods: Aragonite Stars, Jonathan González: The Smallest Unit Is Each Other, and Na’ye Perez: What You Know Bout Love…
EXHIBITIONS ON VIEW:
Suné Woods: Aragonite Stars (Main Gallery)
February 2 - May 8, 2022
NOTE: This exhibition contains sexually explicit imagery.
In Aragonite Stars, Suné Woods evokes multidimensional states of existence with video passages of waterscapes, aquatic animals, mythological creatures, and other bodies immersed in water. Touch, intimacy, and connection are conduits to the spiritual, stirring emotion and conjuring the sensual. Oceans are believed to be the home of the ancestors, a realm in between the living and the dead, where many Indigenous and African mythologies are located. Woods sets this work in numerous bodies of water – natural hot springs, tide pools, the Los Angeles River, ocean waters of Southern California and near Wai’nae, Hawai’i, where dolphins tend to frequent, and river water of El Yunque, Puerto Rico’s rainforest. The sequencing of the videos in this immersive installation follows that of a fragmentary dream or the language of collage, using non-linear logic to speak to the interconnectedness of all that is physical. Mammals, in the form of humans, are not superior to other beings. Clothed in multicolored patterned fabrics, they appear as underwater creatures – embracing, tumbling, and reaching towards an unknown depth. As in Woods’s previous collage and video work, this watery dreamscape is liminal, the edges and limits of skin, body, energy, and what we understand as human, are ever attached to a boundless conception of time as these entities continue to yield themselves toward transcendence.
Foregrounded in Woods' work is the exploration of Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” and the demand to use sensuality and touch as healing modalities. With a soundscape created by Meshell Ndegeocello,commissioned for this iteration at BRIC, the pairing of video and sound provides a palpable sense of the power of intimacy – bodies are unclothed and caress, fingers and mouths touch, descending down in a gentle embrace. Woods offers this space to question how feeling, pleasure, and vulnerability with others can not only heal but shape and transform who holds and wields power.
Learn more about the exhibition here: https://www.bricartsmedia.org/art-exhibitions/sun%C3%A9-woods-aragonite-stars
Suné Woods, Aragonite Stars, 2022. Photo courtesy Sebastian Bach.
Jonathan González: The Smallest Unit Is Each Other (Project Room)
February 2 - May 8, 2022
Words made flesh, muscle and bone, animated by hope and desire.
-- Sylvia Wynter
Jonathan González is a Dominican-American artist, scholar, cultural organizer, and educator whose work centers on a transdisciplinary and collaborative dialogue with diasporic Black life and living. In The Smallest Unit Is Each Other, González juxtaposes original video content alongside archival ephemera, and invites the viewer to consider the smallest unit not as the individual, but as the community, understanding that we require one another for our survival. This concept is a creative directive, an organizing principle beyond the video through various media labeled SIDES A to I, each side made accessible to viewers through interaction highlighted in the choreographic scores below. The artist uses the term “sides” to reference the sides of cassette tapes: each side is only part of a whole, and the tape itself circulates through states of re-use and ownership in multiple, desired ways.
Inspired by Caribbean scholarship on humanism, González emphasizes the “archipelagic” interconnectedness of all living things. The artist draws from the teachings of Jamaican writer, dancer, and thinker Sylvia Wynter, who re-envisions storytelling as a radical exit from colonial preoccupations with the self, prioritizing culture as an art form for narrativizing otherwise social worlds. Poet Kamau Brathwaite’s insistence on breaking with the colonial pentameter, inspires the work’s surrealist assemblage, one that acts to unburden oneself from the comprehensible, and to tell differently what it is to be alive now. González choreographs these narrative possibilities across media considering all bodies, human and non-human, to describe the continuing impacts of racial capitalism, and its symptom of climate catastrophe.
Each SIDE in The Smallest Unit Is Each Other is made accessible for visitors with an attention to interaction, rest, and play. The following descriptions identify the SIDES and some choreographies for engagement:
Sides A-F: a 35:25 min film organized episodically in six ‘SIDES’.
Side G: Our Chair, a chair made available for sitting. The cushions are printed with the text, “Words made flesh muscle and bone animated by hope and desire.”
Side H: a controller automating the film to stop, play, pause, fast forward, rewind, start from the beginning, and randomize when more than one button is pressed. It is on the floor at the base of Our Chair.
Side I: a topographical model made of cherry wood sits atop its own legs adjacent to the chair and is made available for touch. The topography depicts the historic site of Cockpit Country, Jamaica, site of a community of Accompong Maroons (formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants).
Collaborators:Yemi Amu, Rena Anakwe, Rudy Gerson, Chazz Giovanni Bruce, Shannon Finnegan, Gil Sperling, Branden Kazon-Maddox
Jonathan González is a 2020-21 resident of BRIClab: Video Art, an initiative that offers New York based emerging and mid-career artists essential resources, mentorships, and opportunities to share their work. The residency aims to build a stronger and more diverse artistic community in Brooklyn by supporting long term growth and fostering relationships across disciplines.
Learn more about the exhibition here: https://www.bricartsmedia.org/art-exhibitions/jonathan-gonz%C3%A1lez-smallest-unit-each-other
Jonathan González, The Smallest Unit is Each Other, 2022. Photo courtesy Sebastian Bach.
Na’ye Perez: What You Know Bout Love… (BRIC House Hallway)
February 2 - August 28, 2022
Titled after the Pop Smoke song, this work can be viewed as an ode to the meteoric rise of the hip hop star and his recent tragic death at the age of 20, or a memorial to the many tragic deaths over the past two years due to Covid. Yet this large-scale landscape created by Cuban-Haitian-American painter Na’ye Perez is instead the backdrop, speaking to the overlooked, the everyday, the celebration of life and a community that gives rise to musicians like Pop and his Hip Hop style, Brooklyn Drill. Perez’s artistic process values close looking, the textures and details are remixes or samples of found materials like Ting wrappers, MTA cards, and sand from Coney Island; as well as gel transfers of Vibe and XXL magazines dating back to the 1990s. These coded materials and symbols of Black Caribbean culture are layered within the painted streetscape, revealing further depth underneath the blocks of color. A mix of the real and imagined, on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Duryea Place, What you Know Bout Love… is a call, a challenge to take the care and familiarity required to see.
Learn more about the exhibition here: https://www.bricartsmedia.org/art-exhibitions/na%E2%80%99ye-perez-what-you-know-bout-love%E2%80%A6
Na’ye Perez, What You Know Bout Love…, 2022. Photo courtesy Sebastian Bach.
COVID Protocol
Attendees of any BRIC House programming must show proof of full vaccination and photo ID for entry. Masks are currently required while inside BRIC House. If you have questions regarding this protocol, please email Safety@bricartsmedia.org. For our full BRIC House COVID-19 policy, visit: https://www.bricartsmedia.org/safety.
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Category
Galleries
Tickets
General Admission
0.0
USD
20
