Star Circle Stage
Mike Crane
Jamie Isenstein
Matt Keegan
Jacob Robichaux
curated by Jenni Crain
4.1 – 4.30.17
Orgy Park
237 Jefferson Street 1B
Brooklyn, New York 11237
Orgy Park is pleased to present Star Circle Stage, an exhibition with works by Mike Crane, Jamie Isenstein, Matt Keegan and Jacob Robichaux curated by Jenni Crain. The exhibition is comprised of three video works and the progressive elements/sequential executions of an orchestrated event. While the videos play on endless loops, the performance could be considered in a three-act-like structure. This association to and simulation of a model used in screenwriting categorizes time into beginning, middle and end, or, as experientially perceived, past, present and future. These constructs of time, both the culturally conceived and the existentially cultivated, foster our fabrications of memory and meaning, identity and social involvement.
Mike Crane’s 2015 video, Choice Modeling, follows a test subject of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) research, a process that measures cerebral activity via changes in blood flow in the brain. The footage is scripted as it restages the test subject’s recollections of the studies, but also in its inclusion of her participation in the patterned structures of the study itself. The subject, Beth Griffith, is an actor and musician, a performer, “well versed in the intricacies of human memory and emotion.” Griffith’s accounts are spliced with scenes where neuroscientist, Dr. A. Bornstein, enacts a neuroscientist lecturing on neuro-economics, and others in which he engages in his actual research. Arguing against the rational and reasoned, logic-based archetype of thought on which mainstream economics is based, Bornstein makes his case that decision making processes are based on contextual, emotional response.
Jamie Isenstein’s performative works contort generic categorizations of art making practices and their circulation. In her work on view at Orgy Park, a projector sits atop a pedestal in the presumed place designated for the absent art object. The sculpture is stripped of its three-dimensionality as its image is cast in traditional installation-view format upon the wall before it. The still image is itself a farce as frame by frame it moves forward in time. The sculpture filmed via video camera, the typical tool for performance documentation. The subject of the video, the sculpture, points towards a past action, the artist’s intervention and a trace of her hand in making. Isenstein has played the harp by weaving through its strings in a loom-like manner, stifling the musical properties of the instrument and transforming its frame into a stretcher for the tapestry that’s taken their place.
While Matt Keegan’s practice presents itself in myriad mediums and forms, the use of language as material is a repeating fundamental foundation in his work. In “N” as in Nancy (2011), Keegan’s mother sits on the left side of a split screen as the right sequences through three minutes of hand-made flashcards. As each card is revealed, Nancy interprets the image aloud in English, while Spanish subtitles transcribe her dialogue at the bottom of the screen. The sixty-or-so flashcards included in the film come from Nancy’s own collection of hand-assembled collages, which she made to teach English-as-Second-Language courses to high school and adult students. Nancy’s visual to verbal assignments are automated from years of familiarity; however, her initial gravitation towards certain selections in stock-imagery and color to convey cross-cultural meaning speaks of a shared, societal subjectivity.
Jacob Robichaux’s contribution to Star Circle Stage will evolve throughout the span of the exhibition. Robichaux’s work can be considered as a circuitous mediation of prop and sculpture, sculpture and performance, performer and viewer. From April 1st through April 15th, Robichaux will present an installation of curated ready-made objects, which sit atop a translucent, Lucite cart; this means of presentation suggestive of what is still to come. Robichaux’s performances involve and incite everyday objects and behaviors in a rhythmic cacophony of simultaneously choreographed and improvised gestures. Just as nebulous as the transition from sculpture to performance, stagnation to activation, is the, perhaps unwitting, passage from viewer to participant to performer. Not unlike Isentsein’s installation, which flips the conventions of the artwork and the gallery upon each other, Robichaux’s performance becomes a matrix breaking down and blending the traditional allocations between artwork, author, and audience. Throughout the latter half of the exhibition remnants of this performance will remain on view, existing somewhere as something new.
1. Excerpted from an essay by Anselm Franke on the occasion of Nervous Systems, an exhibition he curated with Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2016. In the curatorial statement they write, “Nervous Systems is an exhibition about how our experience and understanding of the “self” and the “social” are changing. It looks at how we become part of vast networked infrastructures and the way that abstract laws of the market and finance capitalism translate into subjective experience.”
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Mike Crane (B. 1982, Miami, FL and raised in Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in New York. His work most recently exhibited at Arsenal, Berlin, DE; the Bronx Museum Biennial, New York; the Berlinale Forum Expanded, DE; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE. In 2014 Crane was the recipient of the apexart franchise award, and in 2015 he received a Creative Capital visual arts grant for an episodic teledrama series set and filmed in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. Crane has participated in residencies at the Triangle Arts Association, Brooklyn, NY; Rupert Centre, Vlinius, LT; and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, where he is a current resident.
Jamie Isenstein (B. 1975, Portland, Oregon) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Headspace, a solo exhibition of her work, is currently on view at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL through April 15th following a solo exhibition earlier this year at the Joseloff Gallery at Hartford Art School, Hartford, CT. Her work has exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; Tate Liverpool, UK; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, New York; Amand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; among others.
Matt Keegan (B. 1976, Manhasset, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Keegan’s most recent solo exhibition, Generation, at Participant Inc. (New York, NY, 2017), featured a two-channel video installation, which focused upon the artist’s immediate family members in an interview-like excavation of identity, intention, experience, and language. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, DE; FOAM, Amsterdam, NL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and The Artist’s Institute, New York, NY, among others. Keegan also practices as a curator, writer and editor. He is the co-founding editor and publisher of North Drive Press (2004-2010) and founding editor of == (2012-2014).
Jacob Robichaux (B. 1979, New Iberia, Louisiana) is an artist and curator living and working in New York, New York. His work has been a part of exhibitions at American Contemporary, New York, NY; Chez Valentin, Paris, FR; D’Amelio Terras, New York, NY; Museum 52, New York, NY/London, UK; and Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Robichaux most recently performed at Bennington College, Bennington, VT, and past performances include those at MoMA P.S.1, Queens, NY; Jack Hanley, New York, NY; The Mandrake, Los Angeles, CA; and Café Dancer, New York, NY. Robichaux is the co-founder and co-director of Gordon Robichaux with Sam Gordon, a curatorial agency and gallery that primarily works with under-recognized artists and provides new perspectives on more established artists. Gordon Robichaux organized “Contemporary Drag” as a part of NADA New York this past March, which was a four-day series of performances, panels and video screenings that highlighted the contributions of and brought together performers and promoters of drag culture.