Carnegie International

Lenka Clayton and I are collaborating on a new commission for the 57th Carnegie International which opens on Oct 12, 2018 and runs through March 25th, 2019. Read a pre-show interview with us here. Note in the below image how lenka seems to be passing me an invisible object through time and space.

. . . circle through New York Launches

(From Guggenheim Museum press release)

In their new project A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York, artists Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin gather a diverse group of local communities in a complex system of social and material exchange. Following a period of extensive research, the artists identified six very different public sites that lie along an imaginary circle drawn through Harlem, the South Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan’s Upper East Side. These spaces serve as the project’s co-creators and venues. Each venue worked with the artists to select an important aspect of their identity—referenced in the project’s full title— which will rotate among the six locations over a period of six months from March 1st through August 30th.

Project Website

Curated Exhibition at DAAP Reed Gallery in Cincinnati

I've curated an exhibition Straight to Video that includes a group of amazing artists at DAAP Reed Gallery in Cincinnati. It runs from October 2nd- November 23rd.

The exhibition focuses on several socially engaged art initiatives that are performed with members of the public with the explicit intention of existing as video in their final iteration. Thus, the artists use video as a strategy to create social-engaged artworks that place equal value on the public-process and the filmed result.

ARTISTS INCLUDE: Johanna Billing (Pulheim Jam Session and Magical World), Agnes Agnes and Nina Sarnelle (Sisters of the Lattice), Lenka Clayton (People in Order), Harrell Fletcher (Blot Out the Sun), Adelita Husni-Bey (After the Finish Line), Luciana Kaplun (Gilda), Cynthia Marcelle (Automovel), Zach Ostrowski (The MainDew and I Pancakes! Live with Stark Show Choir), Lee Walton (Sitters)

Picture: Johanna Billing (Pulheim Jam Session)

Picture: Johanna Billing (Pulheim Jam Session)

Existential Scarf Design for Partick Thistle Football Club

This scarf was commissioned by Kingsford Capital and the THING for the Scottish football club Partick Thistle’s 2015–16 season. Partick Thistle fans are known for being a fiercely independent, non-sectarian (even atheist), underdog counterpoint to the other two Glasgow mega-teams, the Celtic (mostly Catholic fan-base) and Rangers (mostly Protestant fan-base).

While researching this project, I found a remarkable existential chant from an online audio archive.  It was attributed to Partick Thistle fans and featured a group yelling loudly and repeatedly, "You Don't Know Who You Are!"  The chant is not on the official club roster, and the creators of the archive aren’t really sure where it came from, but I felt that the chant, forceful but anonymous, wonderfully blurred the line between sport and philosophy with an assertion that cuts to a core question we all wrestle with at some time in our lives. 

(5,000 scarfs were given away. Other artist commissioned to create editioned works for Partick Thistle that season include: Martin Parr, Barry McGee, David Shrigley, Kota Ezawa, and Jonathan Monk).

Instructions:

1. Hold scarf in the air with text facing the opposing team, or an opponent of your choice.

2. Chant: YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

3. Consider: Do any of us know who we are? 

4. In moments of personal crisis, the scarf can also be turned inward and the same chant applies.

The Art Assignment with PBS Digital

This week we meet with Jon Rubin, a Pittsburgh based artist whose practice often focuses on cultural exchange, pushing us to imagine other people and their lives more complexly. For his assignment, he asks you to do the same by bridging the gap between you and your neighbor.