“I was incubated in a plane. When I landed, I was the same but somehow different. I was born for the second time. I became American. I became a citizen of the new country but an un-citizen of the old. But I’m still an immigrant.”
In her exhibition of new work, Naturalized, Carol Joo Lee explores the spaces, labels and identities that immigrants embody as they transform from the state of natural to naturalized via the crossing of borders. The act of migration may be as old as humanity itself, but the language and emotions surrounding it feel raw like a new cut on the skin. In a world that doles out different rights, labels, and identities to those who move and to those who stay, Lee attempts to understand the spaces and characters—performative and conditional—that define and confine us as citizens and immigrants, and the liminality of belonging to neither of these categories.
Lees’ work creates a personal iconography through unexpected, brightly-hued sculptural compositions incorporating symbols from her journey and immigrant communities.
Carol Joo Lee is a New York-based artist. Her work is an on-going endeavor in combining her love of the tension in ceramic between its endless possibilities for manipulation and transformation, and the stubborn limitation with her interest in how citizens and immigrants are defined and confined by the social and legal structures.
She received BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Geneva University of Art and Design. She’s currently working on her second masters in migration studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Carol Joo Lee, Coming and Going 2017
Glazed stoneware
8.5” x 6.5” x 6.5”
Carol Joo Lee, Take Off 2016
Glazed stoneware and porcelain
6” x 5.5” x 6”
Carol Joo Lee, Nudibranch 6, 2017
Glazed earthenware
7.5” x 3”x 6”
Carol Joo Lee, Breakfast, 2017
Glazed porcelain and stoneware
4.5” x 5.5”x 3.5”
For her solo exhibition, Sensitivity Test, Stef Halmos. Halmos took over Greenpoint Hill’s entire storefront and gallery for this special site-specific installation.
Halmos works to alter perceptions of the way women inhabit space, display grandiosity, and generate power by using and (misusing) traditional sculpture techniques and materials to create work that appears frivolous and pleasurable, while simultaneously triggering a sense of discomfort and confusion in the viewer. In the absence of academic reference and the self-seriousness associated with pedigree, she instead fills the room quite literally with silliness, ferocity, and precariousness in equal measure.
“If intellect codes as male, and body codes as female, the work I make is decidedly and proudly the latter. I repeatedly aim for revelry in a chaotic womanly nature as I sort through the everyday social nuances I absorb inwards and expand outwards repeatedly.”
Stef Halmos (b. Fort Lauderdale, FL) holds a BFA from Miami University (2006) and an MFA from the California College of the Arts (2012). Her work has been shown internationally, including exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Chelsea Art Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others. Halmos has received fellowships from the William and Dorothy Yeck foundation, as well as the Murphy and Cadogan foundation, with work published in T Magazine, Blackbook, and The New York Times.
Greenpoint Hill presents a two-person show featuring collaborative and solo work by Mikel Durlam and Monty J.
Both artists create dreamlike sculptural interpretations of the natural world. Their work defies categorization, synthesizing elements of design, visual poetry and surrealism. Durlam’s work presents a modern approach to representational sculpture. Monty J’s otherworldly living sculptures offer a more abstract take. Working together in a communal studio space in Brooklyn, Durlam and Monty J have created an ethereal collection of objects that connect the viewer to the terrestrial world while also fostering dreams of another one, far from home.
Mikel Durlam (b. Fort Dodge, IA) is a visual artist, musician and performer in Brooklyn, NY. Durlam has been an artist in residence at Pro Artibus (Finland), Wassaic Project (NY) and Vector (Romania). In addition to his solo work, since 2000 he has collaborated as the creative entity and performance/installation art duo The Fluff Construct. He has been a member of the art glam performance group Glitter Chariot and the doom psych band The Phantom Family Halo.
Monty J. Mattison (b. Detroit, MI) - known simply as Monty J - toils through the night perfecting his exquisite living sculptures. This past year Monty has exhibited work at The Future Perfect and Barneys New York. His work has been featured in T Magazine.
Greenpoint Hill is thrilled to announce this incredible group show curated by Trudy Benson. The exhibition title comes from a painting by Elizabeth Murray, which was notable in that it pushed the boundaries of traditional rectangular paintings and foreshadowed the 3 dimensional shaped canvases she would go on to make. The exhibition includes works by:
Andrea Belag
Maria Calandra
Isabel Halley
Leah James
Caroline Larsen
Rachel Malin
Beth Noe
Tessa Perutz
Talia Shulze
Adrienne Tarver
Rachel Williams
Ranging from hand-painted digital prints by Talia Shulze, to ceramic vessels by Isabel Halley, to shaped canvas paintings by Rachel Williams, the tie that binds the work in this exhibition together is an obvious presence of the artist's hand. The works share an emphasis on materiality. Just as Elizabeth Murray's painting, an oil painting on a rectangle, was pushed to 3-d objecthood by rotating the canvas about 45 degrees, the work in this exhibition does not simply exist as 2-dimensional image. In Maria Caladra's work, this shift occurs more subtly, through the mark-making. The work in Parting and Together asks for a more intimate viewing experience.
Bringing together prehistoric technology and contemporary ceramics, for the past year and a half, Leah James has been choreographing controlled outdoor pit fires to create her new work.
The firing and the preparation of the kiln are a performance, documented by the resulting 5.75 x 8.75 inch finished clay slab “paintings.” Each piece is made unique during the firing. As chemicals oxidize and are absorbed on the surface, a range of colors and shapes are deposited upon the hand burnished stoneware from different combustibles; banana peels cause grey and blue marks, fine black lines are created by burnt hair, and sawdust causes planar and irregular black shapes. This process has affinities to exposure in photography but instead of light, exposure to heat and chemical oxides create a range of marks, colors, shapes, and cracks on the bare clay surface. The slabs become objects for looking and seeing, recollecting the process of the performance and our relationship to the Earth’s materiality.
The work in Mineral Vocabulary was fired in April 2017 near Fishkill, New York. The document of the performance, nine rectangular ceramic paintings, hang side by side. This series plays on the nature of time and links the material of fired clay conceptually, as it is one of the formative human technologies. Clay is used abundantly in contemporary society but again relates to prehistory as the materials that make up the clay body have theoretically existed from the beginning of the universe and time itself, condensed within the solar nebulae.
Leah James is a Canadian artist living and working in New York. She received her BA from University of Waterloo (2006) and has exhibited her work internationally. She co-organizes Side Effects Gallery, an artist run project space in Brooklyn. The work in this exhibition is the fifth piece in an ongoing series of pit firing performances. Leah will be conducting firings throughout the summer in Ontario, upstate and on beaches near New York City.
Greenpoint Hill is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Alison Owen on view from March 30 through May 14, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 30th 7-9pm.
Owen’s new work is assembled from scraps and residue found at the studio; often donated by artists who work alongside her. The work reflects the poetry found in fragments and cast-offs, existing as a quiet, formal response to the found materials.
The exhibition will also feature an installation made from the to-do lists and notes of her friends. Created from pages sent from the notes app, she has created physical versions of this digital ephemera. With some distance, divorced from context, these notes become little poems; dream-fragments.
Arvold's exhibition of works on paper was inspired by escape. In 2016 he embarked on several adventures; including a journey to Central America where the jungle and ocean were in constant motion. This new body of work serves as a meditation on these infinite waves rolling in – lines mimicking their repetition.
Isaac Arvold was born in 1979 in rural Minnesota, found his way to New York City in 2010, and currently resides in Brooklyn.
Libby VanderPloeg - Ladies Who Lead
Our inaugural exhibition, "Ladies Who Lead" featured new work on paper by local Greenpoint artist, Libby VanderPloeg.
VanderPloeg's work spans painting, paper craft, mapmaking, and animation.
October 20, 2016 through January 20, 2017