Upcoming Projects
March 1st-July 21, 2011
The island is open to the public Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays until September 25, 2011. Free ferries from lower Manhattan and Brooklyn (near the Brooklyn Bridge). More info at:
Curated by John Chaich
LaMama Galleria, 6 E. 1st St, between Bowery and 2nd Ave, NYC.
June 2-July 3, 2011.
Another recent show featuring a new installation, Clear Language, in a text based group show sponsored by Visual AIDS. This one got excellent press:
NYT review link
Other link 1
Other link 2
Site and date: TBD
I will premier a new performance/installation, Mapping Project #7
The Indianapolis Museum of Art
Anticipated date: 2013
This show keeps getting pushed back, mostly because Lisa Freiman is so awesome. And really, really busy. But she assures me it will happen and my Mapping Projects will be included. Stay tuned...
December 3, 2010 - January 29, 2011
Curated by Christine Licata
A group show on language and art, I installed a new piece, Glazing Over, on the walls of Taller Boricua.
October 30th 2010
Mapping Project #6 was screened in the one minute video section of the festival.
November 6-23, 2010
Curated by Jean Barberis and Georgia Muenster
The text used passages from Jim Crace’s 1999 novel Being Dead. Described as a secular meditation on death, Being Dead focuses on a married pair of scientists who are murdered while making love among a remote range of soon-to-be developed sand dunes. What follows is a post-mortem of their lives and the physical processes that occur between the moment of death and the discovery of the bodies.
On a ground of black chalk, the selected passages will be placed in two successive layers of color: first a layer of red and then a covering of white. At completion, stark white against a black ground, with hints of red peeking through. The text crisp and easily legible. Viewer’s footsteps quickly smear the crisp lines and start the process of destruction/collaboration. Colors bleed and blend, black and red increasing show through and the clarity of the text is gradually lost. By the end of the opening reception, the text may be largely unreadable. By show’s end, the drawing will have morphed into an indecipherable series of smudges and marks, discernible in spots as ‘text’ but no longer accessible to the viewer.
October 8th and 9th of 2010
Put together by the e-fagia collective, the video is also included on a Vimeo channel to broadcast the program globally, viewable at http://vimeo.com/channels/134689#2804316
The first layer used selections from interviews with Paterson workers recorded by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 1994. The second layer used selections from William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson.
The worker selections combine straight forward recollections of factory processes, conflicts between labor and management and the day to day routines of factory life. Filled with subtle and witty psychological portraits of individuals and heartfelt laments over the changes in the industry as factories steadily close, these interviews describe a vivid portrait of a city and industry now largely lost.
Paterson is a sprawling text described as both a “poetic monument to and personification of the city” and “an in-depth look at the process of modernization and its effects”. Williams described his goal as “speak(ing) for us in a language we can understand…We must know it as our own, we must be satisfied that it speaks for us. And yet it must remain a language like all languages, a symbol of communication.” The selected passages were a mix of self-reflective inner conversations from his struggle to make art ‘speak’ in a meaningful manner, meditations on memory, loss and the mutability of the written word at its point of inception.
Both sources were laid out in unfixed, powdered chalk and could only be closely examined/read by walking directly upon them. As a result, the texts slowly blurred into one another and became illegible. The viewer was given final discretion to exercise editorial powers.
Saturday April 3rd, 2010
Curated by Melissa A. Calderón
A new series of ephemeral text works installed in the block around the BronxArtSpace in the Mott Haven as part of a series of one night shows called CONVERSIONs. Thanks to Alex Guzman for his help during installation.
January 22, 2010
Curated by Amber Boardman
Mapping Project #6, a new video from the Mapping Projects series was screened.
See all the videos here: http://www.amberboardman.com//TheShirey/minutevideos.html
October 2009
Curated by Erin Donnelly and Radhika Subramaniam
The texts were derived from observations of common and fleeting public moments on the street. The drawings were made in ash and placed directly in the path of pedestrian traffic. Each work disintegrated and disappeared quickly under the rush of ongoing urban life, echoing the temporal and transitory nature of the moments documented
For more information go to: http://www.artinoddplaces.org/2009/
A collaboration with Heidi Neilson.
October 25th, 2009
Download the map at: http://www.heidineilson.com/
Liz Otten
Sarah Chacich
Also thanks to Andrew Bordwin and Luna Rossa Pizza for all the ash.