LUMINARY

A group show of artworks using light as a transformative medium.

July 17th - August 5th / Opening reception on Friday July 17th, 6-10 pm 
Gallery hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6 by appointment only. Email creative@brooklynfireproof.com, or call/text 646-491-1730 to arrange your visit.

Curated by Oliver Warden and Hazel Lee Santino for BFP Creative.

Featuring work by: [dNASAb], CHiKA, Melissa F. Clarke, Lindsay Packer, Christine Sciulli, Oliver Warden, Andrea Wolf, Natalia Zubko

Unsolicited Memories, by Andrea Wolf. A variant of this piece will appear in Luminary.

Bushwick, NY -- Brooklyn Fire Proof and BFP Creative are pleased to present a new group exhibition in Temporary Storage gallery. Luminary will run from July 17th to August 5th, 2015, with an opening reception on Friday, July 17th and a closing reception on August 5th. The opening reception will also feature a one-night-only interactive sculpture.

Luminary is a survey of some of the myriad uses of illumination in contemporary art. The eight artists included in the show-- [dNASAb], CHiKA, Melissa F. Clarke, Lindsay Packer, Christine Sciulli, Oliver Warden, Andrea Wolf and Natalia Zubko--utilize materials in their artistic practice that range from common light bulbs to high-tech projection mapping and interactive LEDs. The show is an opportunity for these artists, who require darkness to most effectively display their work, to be involved in the community aspect of a group show without the gallery-based compromises they would typically have to make.

In “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space,” Brian O’Dougherty detailed the “rules” of the ideal gallery: The space is white and artificial, unshadowed; the floor either dampens footsteps or reduces them to clinical clicks; bodies are not welcome, only minds. The sensory deprivation of a white cube gallery gives visual autonomy to the artwork, and the art and spectator are isolated from one another and given respective, defined roles. For Luminary, the gallery is unlit save for the ambient light of the artwork itself. The artwork redefines its own boundaries and the gallery space with its cast light, and that light incorporates the spectator into both the art and the room. Rejecting the standardization of the "white cube," the boundless, darkened space allows a metaphor for plurality and inclusiveness that is so often absent when experiencing artwork in contemporary galleries.

Luminary closes August 5th. Gallery hours are by appointment, 12-6 pm Tuesday - Saturday. To schedule a viewing or for any additional information please contact Hazel Lee Santino at creative@brooklynfireproof.com or 646-491-1730.

Quiet Riot at Duck Farm--a previous installation by Christine Sciulli. 

ARTISTS (adapted from the artists' statements and biographies)

[dNASAb]

[dNASAb] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited widely in the past ten years, including exhibitions in New York, Moscow, Basel, Barcelona, Berlin, Seoul, Netherlands, Austria and Paris. He curated the show “Colliding Complexities_ Extreme feats of the New York New Aesthetic” in 2012, with a corresponding panel discussion at Pratt University. He presented his work in the “Art Salon” Art Basel Miami Beach 2009. In 2006, he participated in the International Summer Residency at the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY, where he worked with the “Wobulator,” Nam Jun Paik’s pioneering video synthesizer. In 2010, [dNASAb] was awarded a scholarship at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, New York, and an Artist’s Residency at the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University, New York. He was recently an Artist Honoree at the BRIC Contemporary Art Gala, 2010, “Brooklyn Art:Work.”

[dNASAb] maintains “Video Art Explorer,” an academic resource project that is an online compendium of artworks created utilizing video as a raw material. He has a BFA in Sculpture and Mixed Media from Florida State University. For further information, visit dnasab.net

CHiKA

Working across a variety of media, including LED-light, live video projection and interactive technologies, CHiKA transforms the energy of a live performance environment, provoking the public consciousness and awakening the public awareness through interactive installations. She creates what she describes as the symphony of light: minimalist geometric visuals that explore and invite the public to reinvent themselves through the relationship between images, light, and sound.

CHiKA’s work has been shown in numerous international venues and festivals. She has been a resident fellow at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, an IAC/InterActiveCorp Teaching and Research Fellow for Vimeo, an Eyebeam Resident Artist, a BRIC Media Arts Fellow, and a Made in New York Media Center by IFP Resident Artist. For further information, visit imagima.com.

MELISSA F. CLARKE (with thanks to Sue Ngo)

Melissa Clarke is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work employs data and generative self-programmed compositional environments. Clarke often works across mediums as a way to look at hybridizations of wilderness and technological spaces—towards considerations of nature at the center of human experience, myth, science, and information collection. She works at the intersections of research, data, science, design and art, creating custom hardware and software systems for her projects. She’s interested in open source tools, online spaces, and citizen science with a background in interaction and electronic visual and audio art.

Clarke has performed and exhibited her multimedia work internationally. She has lectured and taught on matters of new media, the information age, on open source data, and algorithmic art at University at Buffalo (2013), SUNY Empire State College in Syracuse, New York (2012) and at SUNY Stony Brook. (2012). She is a graduate of NYU’s ITP program with a 2-year Tisch Fellowship. She is currently a professor at Stony Brook University, teaching algorithmic, web and animation art. The fabrication and paper design for her work in this show was produced in collaboration with Susan Ngo. For further information visit melissafclarke.com and vimeo.com/user15983354.

LINDSAY PACKER

Lindsay Packer describes herself as a visual ventriloquist. She coaxes light, movement and film-like projections from ordinary materials and uses simple optics to displace and relocate images. Her working process is site-responsive and improvisatory, and her work springs from a sense of discovery, play and wonder about the magic to be found in the everyday. Her work challenges our current cultural assumption that glowing, moving images are likely to be digitally produced: the moving pictures she builds are created without cameras, film or video and result from the precise but precarious alignment of physical objects, architecture and sources of light. She creates analog flashes of narrative to reveal the ‘home movies’ and bright stories tucked into the ordinary things we tend to overlook or pass by.

Packer was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India in Installation Art and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. For further information visit lindsaypacker.com and vimeo.com/lindsaypacker.

CHRISTINE SCIULLI

Christine Sciulli’s encompassing, site-specific installations are based around catching light, focusing on the projection potential of straight lines and circles of light. Her work examines the perceived transformation and fragmentation of those straight and curved lines are they are intercepted by physical networks made of various materials, including string, grass, tree canopies, privet hedge, vines and fabrics. The viewer's line-of-sight reveals the conceit inherent in a single point of view. From most viewing angles the "caught" light is perceived to be random and capricious but when eyes are aligned with the projector, the simplicity of the projection is clear. 

Sciulli’s work has been widely shown nationally and internationally, and she has been commissioned for numerous public works domestically. She received an Architectural Engineering degree from Penn State University, graduating as a Besal Scholar, as well an MFA degree in Combined Media from Hunter College. For further information visit christinesciulli.net and vimeo.com/xine.

OLIVER WARDEN

Oliver Warden is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist making interactive, conceptually driven art. Warden's varied practices wrestle with the proliferation of the spectacle and its ongoing relationship with global capitalism. His work explores this as a transaction of violence, desire, and power, suggesting it as the first global visual language. His practice weaves through many mediums including installation, painting, video game photography, performance and social networking. Warden’s latest body of work presents a high-res image woven into an infinity mirror. The work layers light and contends with the intimate, one-on-one relationship that is formed when desire meets objecthood represented in the mirror, the image, the sculpture and ultimately, the 'selfie'.

Warden holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, which he attended in its first year. His work has been shown nationally, and he recently appeared on TakePart Live, a live television show in L.A., where he talked about his project GLOBALL, a social network as work of art.  For further information, visit wheresgloball.tumblr.com/

ANDREA WOLF

Andrea Wolf is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist from Chile. Her work consists of ongoing research on time, memory, and image. Wolf’s practice focuses in memory objects we produce (photos, home movies, postcards) and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. Wolf creates video installations and video sculptures to tackle these matters, representing the tension between remembering and forgetting. Working with found footage - with anonymous stories - she leaves an open space to be filled by the meaning that each of us brings through our personal experiences.

Wolf holds MFAs in Documentary Filmmaking (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and Digital Arts (Universidad Pompeu Fabra), and a MPA in Interactive Telecommunications (NYU). Her work has been shown internationally and she has had numerous artist residencies. Wolf is founder and director of REVERSE, a non-profit workspace and art gallery in Brooklyn. For further information, visit andreawolf.org and vimeo.com/andreawolf

NATALIA ZUBKO

Natalia Zubko’s work ranges from small, intimate light sculptures built out of everyday materials to large, public installations. Her work explores the Japanese concept of Yugen: building in mystery and subtlety. Embedded in this concept is the value in the transformative quality of materials and spaces pared down to their essence. This is achieved through careful and deliberate attention both given by the creator and received by the viewer. Zubko often uses everyday materials, such as dryer sheets, straws, q-tips, in repetitious growing forms that reference the natural, micro, and cosmic world, as a vehicle to investigate and reveal the beauty in the seemingly simple and mundane.

Zubko has BAs in Anthropology and Art History from Brandeis University as well as a post-baccalaureate certificate (Brandeis) and MFA (Parsons) in Fine Arts, Sculpture. She lives and works in NY, and has worked on numerous interdisciplinary, multi-media, collaborative commissions and projects around the city. For further information, visit nataliazubko.com.