Double Session
CCS Bard Galleries
Natasha Llorens
A “double session” is not a bracket or an opposition. The exhibition as a session is rather, and simply, a temporal space of production that is intensified, doubled. Beyond the pairing of projects and the production of discourse, the double session insists on the task of analyzing the gap between iteration and repetition, or the experience of social practice and the art discourse that frames it.
Mary Walling Blackburn’s project, Library for (the land of fuck), is a parasitic library. Its collection is immaterial, comprised of audio broadcasts on shortwave radio that investigate the twinning of utopia and dystopia. A series of performative events are planned with undergraduate classes that extend the library’s logic: the embodiment of sound as the process of considering impossibility, the impossibility of both utopia and dystopia as well as their relationship to one another.
In This Hello America … engages both the physical and social architecture of Bard College by re-envisioning the cultural space produced by Sasson Soffer’s public art sculpture Hello America (1980), located near the campus center. Douglas Paulson will be joined by Christopher Robbins, Ward Shelley, Kerry Downey, Rancourt/Yatsuk, and Christopher Domenick, among others in constructing a live/work project space inside and around the existing artwork - a collaborative platform for both production and reflection.
Mary Walling Blackburn (born in Orange, California) is an artist living in New York. She is the director of the Anhoek School, an educational experiment, and organizer of the Radical Citizenship Tutorials. www.welcomedoubleagent.com
Chris Domenick ’s work deals with compiling personalized fragments – stories and impressions – through drawing, printmaking, collage, video, and performance. He is currently enrolled in the MFA Program at Hunter College.www.purpleisgreen.blogspot.com
Kerry Downey makes multi-disciplinary work that addresses queer longing, loss, and forms of “waste.” The work is often site specific, drawing connections between architecture, social space, and the physical body. www.kerrydowney.com
Douglas Paulson chooses to work collaboratively. He’s part of the Copenhagen-based collective Parfyme, and an organizer of Flux Factory in NYC, and initiates expansive project-based collaboratives. www.douglaspaulson.com
Born in Florida and currently based in NYC Rancourt/Yatsuk orchestrate events and exhibitions centered on American leisure pastimes: mixing drinks, motivational speaking, real estate speculation, hypnotherapy, multi-level marketing, and vacationing.www.rancourt-yatsuk.com
Christopher Robbins works on the uneasy cusp of public art and community action, and has lived and worked long-term in West Africa, the Fiji Islands, and former Yugoslavia, as well as London and his native New York. www.christopher-robbins.com
Ward Shelley specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture, architecture and performance as well as his series of timeline paintings. Shelley has exhibited in more than 10 countries. www.wardshelley.com
Double Session is curated by Natasha Llorens as part of the requirements for the master of arts degree in curatorial studies.
Student-curated projects at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends._ _Additional support is provided by the Monique Beudert Award Fund.
