Water Street Projects (WSP) presents EXCHANGE, an exhibition with new commissions by Tosh Basco,
Brendan Fernandes, Isabel Lewis, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Raúl de Nieves,
and large-scale installations by Radcliffe Bailey, Emeka Ogboh, and Ebony Patterson
Performances of Brendan Fernandes’s work “Flashes of Utopia,” will take place every Thursday at 10:00pm.
EXCHANGE will remain on view at 161 Water Street through June 11th. Admission is free.
HOURS:
Thursday: 12pm – 10:00pm, with performances at 7:00pm
Friday through Sunday: 12pm – 8:00pm
Works in the exhibition include:
Radcliffe Bailey: “Windward Coast – West Coast Slave Trade:” an expansive sculptural installation, composed from piles of piano keys, being presented in New York City for the first time.
Tosh Basco: With this new commission, Basco for the first time invites viewers into her performance painting process in which her body’s movement transfers pigment onto canvas. Performing to a poem by Etel Adnan created in response to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, her figure slowly transforms the stage she stands upon into a monumental painting,
Brendan Fernandes: “Flashes of Utopia,” a commissioned sculptural installation that emulates a dinner table, catwalk, construction site, and playground, activated through performance and public engagement, examining power dynamics across labor, ballet and bondage.
Isabel Lewis: “Hosting Place for Water Street 2123,” a new site-specific, multi-sensory celebratory installation, performance, and live experience using choreography, music, spoken word, scent, that prototypes an underwater kelp farm as future architecture for interacting with and reimagining the ocean’s rising.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: A new video commission conjured from the An-Bang Cemetery – City of Ghosts in Hue, Viet Nam, that follows two dancing figures as they move through the architectural symphony of the palatial graves.
Raúl de Nieves: “Book of Hours,” this large-scale screen blows-up the intimate illustrations in Medieval religious texts to induce spiritual connection, a narrative of biblical proportions that visualizes the transition to the afterlife; it will be accompanied by two newly commissioned mixed-media mare sculptures that bend and twist caught between agony and ecstasy
Emeka Ogboh: “The Way Earthly Things are Going,” a reimagining of multimedia work presented at documenta 14 and the Tate that confronts economic crisis, forced migration, and servitude from ancient times to the present through the haunting sounds of Ancient Greek lamentation to the incessant movement of contemporary capital.
Ebony Patterson: “Root and Shrub, Root and Shrubz,” a mixed-media immersive work that excavates the concept of the garden as a site of splendor and danger, decomposition and growth, survival and renewal.
