Associated
Opening Reception: Wed, April 27th, 7-9pm

“Associated” is a site specific show in a severely damaged brownstone on 17th Street in South Slope, Brooklyn. Just after noon on 12 November 2010, a boiler exploded at the Associated Supermarket on 5th Avenue and 17th Street, igniting a fire that tore through the block, destroying Open Source Gallery. Next door to Open Source a three family house–the gallery owners’ home–was also rendered uninhabitable by firefighters’ efforts to stop the blaze. The exhibition, “Associated”, curated by Monika Wuhrer, Raphaela Riepl and Frank De Leon-Jones resurrects the derelict house with projects by 30 artists.

Due to the vagaries of city bureaucracy there is no exact date for the show. The show will take place during a two week period starting the day the city’s vacate order is dropped and ending when contractors begin work restoring the house.

opening up with the

OPEN SOURCE CARNIVAL

The Carnival involves a public celebration combining some elements of circus, performance, public fair and party. We encourage people to dress-up in costumes during the celebration and to bring a little bit of money for the future of OPEN SOURCE.
Performance Curators: Monika Wuhrer and Sara Bouchard

Participants

Sara Bouchard, Christian Brown, Reamonn Byrne, Wendy Chu, Ethan Crenson, Alex Darsey, Matt Dickey, Hubert Dobler, Glen Einbinder, Maya and Brad Engstrom, Peter Feigenbaum, Hari Ganglberger, Jason Gaspar, Pirmin Hagen, Fumie Ishii, Yuka Kawazu, Der Kommissar, Stefanie Koseff, Keiji Kubo, James Leonard, Loadingdock5, Katerina Marcelja, Amanda C. Mathis, Patrick May, Nolan McKew, Felipe Mujica, Matthew Orr, Annelise E. Ream, Jason Reppert, Raphaela Riepl, Evan Robarts, Manuel Sander, Frank Scheiderbauer, Jeremy Slater, Allison Read Smith, Miho Suzuki, Union Street Preservation Society, Johanna Unzueta, Kathleen Vance, Letizia Werth, Lily White, Jasper Wingo, Monika Wuhrer, Ami Yamasaki

Pirmin Hagen

The sculpture chosen for the show is one of the few things that remained of Pirmin Hagen’s show “First”. In a way it seems fitting, that this piece, which resembles both a mountain and a tent, is shown again in this space.
A thing that survived the fire and one that, as a very direct and primitve shelter, marks a new beginning within a continuouse development.

Reamonn Byrne

Réamonn Byrne’s assemblage and painting work is concerned with shifting paradigms of communication, such as the translation of idiom phrases or figures of speech, not deducible in meaning from their individual words, into purely visual terms. Literature’s structures prove an inspiration in the study of both written and visual language and narrative form. The work in the Associated show will be in a sense autobiographical for the artist as he is one of the displaced former tenants of the building.

Katerina Marcelja

Katerina Marcelja’s work is a conflation of simple organic forms with the sensual drama of Baroque representation. In her work, she takes the emotions and impulses that seem to drive classical narratives and applies them to simple organic forms.
“Narrative is deeply ingrained in my work, not in a literal but in a dramatic sense.”

Fumie Ishii

Photographs by Fumie Ishii.
In my 2nd year as a Brooklyn resident, I took a great job offer; babysitting Gary and Monika’s first son Oskar. He was only 6 month old. I commuted from Williamsburg to Park Slope 3 days a week after my school. Whenever I arrived at their house, Oskar seemed electrified and we played and laughed together until he passed out. It was a dream job. A part time mother. One day Oskar became a big brother and Hugo joined our afternoon party. Hugo sometimes surprised me with his poetic accurate observation of our nature and life. I loved their environment. It was there I listened to Neil Young’s Decade record for the first time. They cooked dinner for me and I liked the night Gary offered me a beer before my shift was over. Every afternoon was special and full of sweet warm memories. I am proud of documenting the Baldwin brothers. -Fumie Ishii

Peter Feigenbaum

Peter Feigenbaum’s ‘Hole in the Sky‘ series inverts the imagery of decay, abandonment and classic architectural ornamentation by bringing his Trainset Ghettoinstallation into the fire-damaged gallery where he showed prints in 2010.

Letizia Werth

Letizia Werth will show a series of 24 Drawings pasted on the construction boards in front of the gallery. All drawings resemble black trash bags, typical for New York City, waiting to be picked up.
Whatever types of societal leftovers await pick-up, we can only guess, as they remain hidden from view.

Annelise E. Ream

Ream’s work derives from investigations into the stories and art of mythology, folktales, and religion and how the stories we tell explain the world around us and feed our identities. For Associated, she will show a series of sketches, collages, and completed drawings, as well as site-specific wall drawings, from an ongoing project she has been working on over the past year entitled “The Ways of Fur”.

Anja Conrad

Anja Conrad lives and works as a photographer in Germany. When visiting last year, just before the fire, she shot this bathtub photo around the corner from OPEN SOURCE.
Now printed on fabric, like a flag, it hangs on the wall in the show suggesting an option for a new bathroom.

Kathleen Vance

With the series entitled “Traveling Landscapes”, vignettes of nature are encapsulated within steamer trunks and train cases aged through travel. Displaced elements indicative of natural landscapes are presented in partially opened cases, as to not fully expose the delicateness of what is contained within. The illusion of life and growth, illuminated within, reflects the desire to capture a part of nature untouched by humans.

Hubert Dobler

Hubert Dobler shows his site specific installation “double heart”.

James Leonard

Shot at over 2000 frames per second, this video stretches the brief moment it takes for three strings of firecrackers to explode to a slow ten minute ballet. Wicks disintegrate and spiral out of frame delicately. Sparks climb into each cylinder, pausing with a puff of smoke before exploding into discernable fireballs that hang longer than feels right. The work is an act of contemplation: a transformation of violence and destruction into beauty.

Stefanie Koseff

Stefanie Koseff is a video artist, who chose the badly damaged bathrooms to install her site-specific project,shower [fall] and bucket brigade. Both films bring water to the site of the fire.

Miho Suzuki

The house is to recall daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected. I have photographed the house of Baldwin family for almost a decade. Each print of recorded images is installed at the site at which each subject stood. In this sense, memory and imagination remain associated, or present and photograph parallel to an imagination.

Evan Robarts

His work deals with the interplay between science and art, looking for new relationships with material, form and identity. He incorporates memories and objects as a
platform for this investigation. Artists understand things by making while scientists understand things by seeing patterns that go together. These forms embody a geometric elegance that stimulate both the right and left sides of the brain through a logical but intuitive design.

Jason Reppert

My work is the result of a longstanding preoccupation with a visual expression of the pathologies inherent to our culture at large and their affect on our own subjective realities. Although I may begin with a specific narrative in mind my working process is fluid allowing my own phantasmagoric imagery to take over. At this point discontinuity, digression and paradox often begin to challenge the initial concept or impulse. I welcome this situation because it complicates a one dimensional reading of the work.
-Jason Reppert

Raphaela Riepl

Raphaela Riepl creates wacky forms from a logic which can only be seen as the artist’s very individual and intuitive system. The work seemingly adjusts itself to one’s angle or mood, allowing an emersion into one narrative stream or another as dark irony and humor abound. Riepl’s work does not try to tell a story but instead is a puzzle to be completed by the viewer.

Alex Darsey

Alex Darsey, a park slope based photographer, has been documenting his neighborhood and the world at large for years. Here, he trains his lens on a poetic moment amidst tragedy and ruin.

Christian Brown

Christian Brown’s obsession with, in his words,
“the edges of things,” is a collection of detritus that has beenreformed into an alternate and personal historical record.

Amanda C. Mathis

Chance tragedy has resulted in the loss of a home and, consequently, in the need for individuals to relocate. In the absence of past inhabitants, the vulnerability of the dwelling place is apparent. I respond to this through the dismantling of an interior, expanding on the necessary damage done by the firemen and emphasizing the false stability of the home. Through these unfortunate circumstances, I can explore the meaning of dwelling.
-Amanda C. Mathis

Sara Bouchard

Sara Bouchard’s work combines songwriting, found materials, recorded media and performance in an exploration of place and modern mythologies. Her multimedia work in the show reflects upon her experience of the November 12 fire, drawing together personal associations connected with the memory of the event.

Manuel Sander, Matthew Orr, Jasper Wingo

Phoenix, (you need ashes to start) is an audio mediation on water and fire, and the sounds of the second line, somewhere in the distance.
Where The Sky Meets The Sea, a video by Matthew Orr, Jasper Wingo. Four men navigate the circle of life as they put a peer to rest.

Patrick May

Patrick May’s work will be projected in the kids bedroom.
Once upon a time there were three little pigs and the time came for them to leave home and seek their fortunes. Before they left, their mother told them “Whatever you do , do it the best that you can because that’s the way to get along in the world. The first little pig built his house out of straw because it was the easiest thing to do…”

Felipe Mujica

The curtain piece presented is part of a series of fabric-panel installations that focus on the notion of temporary architecture as a critical and fragile fabrication of space.Wall-Curtains is a title that defines their double functionality, as a temporary wall which intends to create a more autonomous critique of the institutions; and as a curtain which utilizes the same materials and production methods of a household curtain and by doing so is able to present new formal and “decorative” situations in space.

Ethan Crenson

Ethan Crenson will carefully embellish the house’s fire escape within the limits allowed by the New York City fire code.

Johanna Unzueta

Johanna Unzuet’s pipe installations are based on interior landscapes, both visible and hidden, on pipes that conduct water, air or energy. The pipes she installs aim to become somehow invisible, to blend into space and to “visually” extend themselves outside the exhibition. The pipes work from the notions of industry and life and at the same time present simple lines in space.

Allison Read Smith

I had been working for a while on an exhibition of massive steel sculptures. They took many teams of people to manufacture transport and install. I needed to make the opposite: light and invisible. I needed to make something I could roll up, put in a bag and carry to a space where it could expand into a large work. The emotional connotations are that none of these objects can achieve their intended function. – Allison Read Smith

Performers

Lily White

Lily White is one of the greatest OPEN SOURCE supporters. An amazing musician and performer, and writer. She has performed at various OPEN SOURCE events and will blow you away with her saxophone!

Monika Wuhrer and Frank Scheiderbauer

will challange you for a game of Foosball on a table that has been played by the Austrian president Heinz Fischer, some professional Red Bull soccer stars and other crazy people!

VOTE for LOADING DOCK5

Loadingdock5

Ever heard about a PASSIVE HOUSE. Basically no heat or air conditioning needed! Sam Bargatz from Loading Dock 5 will talk and illustrate live what it means to make a passive house out of the damaged house.

Help LOADINGDOCK5 win the Best of Green Readers’ Choice for Design and Architecture and vote for them.http://www.treehugger.com/

Union Street Preservation Society

The Union Street Preservation Society is a Brooklyn-based string band mixing bluegrass with folk, blues and early jazz. Their spirited vocal harmonies and runaway-train instrumentals radiate an authentic energy ensuring good times for all. We welcome you to jam along with us!

Sara Bouchard

Sara Bouchard’s work combines songwriting, found materials, recorded media and performance in an exploration of place and modern mythologies.

Sara will perform “Songline I,” a musical score derived from found sources and accidental circumstances, played on melodica.

Hari Ganglberger

Hari Ganglberger has already gone a long way in his musical journey. Starting out as a kid drumming on pots and pans in the kitchen. Then taking drum lessons. later moved on to study classical percussion at Bruckner Conservatory followed by jazz drums at Vienna Conservatory / Austria. Laying and working with contemporary classical music-, jazz-, fusion-, experimental-, reggae-, afro beat-, persian dance-, musical theatre-, folk-, pop- and rock-ensembles. After relocating to NYC in 2000 the then still thriving punk scene became a special interest…the search for the right sound at the right time goes on.

Food and Drinks

Der Kommissar

A Brooklyn Sausage Joint
Der Kommissar opened recently on 5th Avenue near 15th street. Owners Gary Baldwin and wife Monika Wuhrer along with their partner Alex Darsey, have set out to build a spot for good beer, tasty sausages, and great hospitality. There will be some for you to taste at the carnival.

F**k Snow Globe, 2009 snowglobe

FUSEWORKS

Fuse Works exhibits and promotes multiples and editions by artists who approach edition artwork as a field of artistic discourse and inquiry itself, rather than simply a means of mass-producing their efforts.

Our partnership with Fuseworks means they will have a presence at all events and openings with a range of their wares available for purchase.