Exhibit Index — Ditch Projects

Jan 13 - Feb 11

Opening reception
Saturday, January 13th, 5-7pm

&&&2
Ethan Greenbaum, David Kennedy Cutler and Sara Greenberger Rafferty

&&&2

Ditch Projects is pleased to present &&&2, a bi-coastal exhibition that serves as both a survey and sequel to the collaborations of Ethan Greenbaum, David Kennedy Cutler and Sara Greenberger Rafferty.

Ten years ago, the artists initiated a series of meetings to talk about materials and techniques, based on their mutual interest in using photographic imagery to destabilize traditional art categories like painting, printmaking and sculpture.

The meetings resulted in an artist’s book titled &&&, in which the three artists imagined themselves as a fictional industrial supply firm. For Greenberger & Greenbaum & Cutler &, the fictional company had a veneer of prestige. For these capitalist outsiders, a corporate symbol of joint commercial enterprise was almost tantamount to success.

The book was released at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair in 2013 in both a mass market paperback and a boxed, limited special edition print series based on swatch sample catalogs. The intention of the project was lost on nearly everyone, but a few key people became aware of the artists’ positioning themselves as a small movement. This included the photography curator Dan Leers, who organized a show and catalog of their work, Beyond The Surface: Image as Object, at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center in 2014.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of &&&, Sun You has invited Greenberger & Greenbaum & Cutler to mount simultaneous exhibitions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, NY and Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR. The exhibitions at both artist-run spaces feature a backdrop that wraps the gallery with deconstructed pages from the original &&& book, over which the artists have installed works from 2013 and 2023. The original book is also exhibited, as well as a new portfolio of prints (&&&2) to celebrate ten fruitful years of collaboration, hand wringing and friendship.

Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist. Selected exhibition venues include KANSAS, New York; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Hauser and Wirth, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York, Higher Pictures, New York; New York; Marianne Boesky, New York, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; Socrates Sculpture Park; Long Island City and Stems Gallery, Brussels. Recent projects include a solo presentation with Lyles & King and solo exhibitions at Galerie Pact, Paris and Super Dakota, Brussels.

His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, ArtReview and Interview Magazine, among others. Ethan is a co-founder and editor of thehighlights.org and his writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Wax Magazine, BOMB, Paper Monument and others. He has also curated and co-curated multiple exhibitions at venues including The Suburban, Chicago; Lyles & King, New York and Super Dakota, Brussels. Greenbaum is the recipient of the Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, the Silver Art Residency, The Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donne’s Workspace Residency, LMCC’s Workspace Program, The Robert Blackburn SIP Fellowship, The Socrates EAF Fellowship, The Edward Albee Foundation Residency and The Barry Schactman Painting Prize. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art.

David Kennedy Cutler is an artist, writer and performer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Cutler received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. He has had solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton; Essex Flowers, New York; The Centre for Contemporary Art, Tallinn, Estonia and Nice & Fit, Berlin, Germany. Cutler has performed in various spaces in New York including Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Essex Flowers, Printed Matter, Halsey McKay, Derek Eller Gallery, and Flag Art Foundation, and internationally at the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia, among others. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College and The RISD Museum, and his artist’s books are included in the libraries of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker and Modern Painter, among others. Cutler is represented by Derek Eller Gallery, NY and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty produces image-based works in paper, plastic, glass, metal, fabric, and video. Her work is driven by an ongoing examination of contemporary and mid-20th century visual culture and considers the ever-changing implications for photographic images in the digital era. She’s also into comedy.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a 501c3 non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Our goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. We seek to build an ethos of cooperative achievement in the visual arts, creating the physical and emotional space for artists to show their work and exchange ideas on their own terms. Our artist-run model expands the artist’s role beyond that of studio practitioner to include the roles of curator, critic, and community developer and provides an alternate model to the conventions of the current commercial art market.

The core of our mission is our exhibition program at our five locations. Each site curates independently; at the same time, the network functions collectively through programming exchanges and the sharing of resources, connections and governing structure. While our unique, grassroots organization of spaces in multiple locations allows us to curate exhibitions that are sensitive to the needs and interests of their respective cities, our geographic reach also offers opportunities to connect local artists to a national conversation. Through a model of horizontal, rather than vertical growth, we are trying to rethink the way an arts institution can work, providing more space and opportunities rather than consolidating time and resources into a single space or vision. We want to create a true network of artists, a dynamic exchange of ideas between cities and an enriched dialogue at each space.

We strive to foster relationships between artists from all career stages, lifting up underrepresented work and voices, and offering new contexts for the work of mid-career and established artists. Since the founding of our Philadelphia space in 2009, we have shown over 2000 artists in our over 400 exhibitions and projects. Our exhibitions and projects have been featured in numerous print and online publications including The New York Times, ArtForum, Art F City, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the artblog, WHYY, Sculpture Magazine, Sixty Inches From Center, Chicago Gallery News, LA Weekly, Two Coats of Paint, Artinfo, and Artnet News.

An excerpt from ‘A Window is a Verb’ by Tom Melick, for the occasion of Set, Ditch Projects 2020, booklet published by Cooperative Editions and Anna Kristsensen

Anna Kristensen (b. 1983, Sydney, Australia) lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC. Set is her first solo exhibition in the US, and was developed on residency at the Vermont Studio Center and Mass Moca in 2019, and at Urbanglass, Brooklyn. The exhibition is funded in part by an Australia Council Career Development Grant. Anna received an MFA from the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney, in 2009, where she taught from 2009-16. She has undertaken residencies at Art OMI, NY (2017), The Australia Council for the Arts’ Greene Street Studio, NYC and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, NE (2013). Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, University of Western Australia, Shepparton Art Museum and Wollongong City Gallery. Anna is represented by The Commercial, Sydney and teaches painting at Rutgers University, Newark NJ.

www.annakristensen.com.au

When the water comes to light out of the well of my self

Amina Ross

Oct 5 - Nov 2, 2019

An undisciplined creator. Amina Ross creates boundary-crossing works that embrace embodiment, imaging technologies, intimacy and collectivity in physical and digital spaces. Amina has exhibited work, spoken on panels and taught workshops at venues throughout the United States. Amina's intention within a media-centering practice is to engage sensuality and sense-perception as modes of reclaiming the body. Amina is currently a 2018-2019 Artist-in-Residence at Arts & Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago.

As an educator Amina is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Contemporary Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Co-lead artist of Teen Creative Agency at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

As a curator and cultural organizer Amina is curator of ECLIPSING, a multi-media festival celebrating darkness.

aminaross.com

Amina Ross’ solo show, When the water comes to light out of the well of my self, is part of their ongoing inquiry into the mechanical and conceptual intersections of objects and the containers that give them meaning. Ross is specifically experimenting with how objects ranging from fluid to wavelengths to textiles to bodyforms come into contact with their containers—namely, time, space, and scale—in order to understand where these points of contact might be (re)shaped. Using a variety of digital and material handcrafting techniques, Ross hones in on these points of contact as deeply expansive sites where we might refigure basic networks of interaction in ways that might prompt other, perhaps more radical, ways of seeing, engaging, and feeling.

In this, Ross’ technical processes of rendering objects and containers are inextricable from the understanding that black bodies and black people have been constructed as objects (particularly, instruments of labor) and containers that host a myriad of racist, classist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic projections. The 3D animations, hard and soft sculptures, and photographic processes that drive the exhibition reflect Ross’ multidimensional and multisurface attempts to build real and imagined environments that break down the object-container relation in ways that demand richer vocabularies for describing how inhabiting the very category of “black” looks and feels like. As each element of When the water comes to light out of the well of my self crafts a lush environment that defamiliarizes the presumed relations of objects and containers, they may also generate more liberatory modes of individual and collective well-being that are rooted in self-awareness, vulnerability, empathy, and pleasure.

Ross’ queries into microgestures of connection are perhaps most potent in their treatment of the figure of the body. 3D animation software provides users with model avatars whose body shape, size, position, and skin can be molded at will. The skin and clothing of these avatars is contained in one flat jpg file: the body’s contours are stretched out in a kind of gruesome sewing pattern or paper-doll cutout that will then be applied to the avatar’s mold. The avatar’s skin is quite literally a finish, a surface applied onto another surface to complete its decoration. In their works, Ross works with this idea of skin as finish, or as a surface in its own right, and is so able to pose points of contact that are not otherwise materially possible. In some of Ross’ recent animations exhibited elsewhere we find bodies that leak into and out of one another, and we find fluids that may be solids and back again; we can sometimes see through forms that should be opaque, and forms that should be distinct and autonomous melt into one another. Here in When the water comes to light out of the well of my self we find skins mapped onto digital and material surfaces that may not fully support or contain them; maps of avatar skins and images of bodyforms are placed new scenes and on unexpected textures to render evermore complex fields of contact.

As they work within and beyond the digital, Ross is enabled to imagine and do bodies (read: objects) and their environments (read: containers) differently. They explain that “I have to work harder or be more creative in my imaginings of the potential of what a body can do in space.” In the digital environment, Ross is “not constrained by gravity. If I'm not constrained by any principles in this world, what do I want to do? What principles do I want to keep?” As Ross reconfigures the boundaries around how bodies look and move—where light and liquid move across them, and in what ways they do and do not simulate “reality”—they also reconfigure the very commonsense logics of the spaces they construct to contain them. Ross’ digital environments subsequently defy laws of contact that invite us to reframe our own understandings of bodily autonomy, of density and porosity, ask us in turn to reframe in our own understandings of the (sonic-spatial) conditions under which intimacy and vulnerability might surface. When you are not constrained by any principles in this world, what do you want to do? Where do you do? How do you want to feel? Where would you mesh with another _________?

Ross’ productively uncouth movements through digital terrain are matched by their experiments with containers and objects in material space. They build armatures that may be able to hold, but not necessarily contain, the on-screen avatars, should they ever leave the space of the screen. And just as the digital armatures giving structure to skins can be out of scale, off-kilter, or seemingly unfinished, the armatures constructed in the gallery space pressure unhinge our own centers of gravity and senses of scale. Throughout their practice, Ross has undone the familiarity of objects like bed frames, pillows, extension cords, towels, jewelry, and construction materials by undermining their scale, texture, color, solidity, etc. In the process, they both invite yet forestall our own memory-based attachments to our surroundings. Ross’ movements between animations and hard and soft sculptures thereby offer a deeply technical explorations of wildly ephemeral attachments to feeling and feeling good. At times, what we feel is the discomfort of getting up on structures that we can’t quite mount, or the mental exhaustion of trying to make out singular forms that may actually be many, or the taxing work of tracking the refraction of light in an image or within an animation that casts further light across the gallery.

These estrangements within a single piece, across the gallery space, and ultimately surrounding our own senses of self are underscored by the very title of Ross’ exhibition, which is pulled from Friedrich Nietzsche, the late 19th century German philosopher who has been thoroughly (mis)read for his examinations of religion, morality, and the nature of the self. He was thinking and writing at a time of great upheaval in Europe and his writings continue to take hold in times of uncertainty, when seemingly commonsense definitions of morality, ethics, and politics can feel the most unhinged, making us, in turn, feel uncertain of ourselves. When the water comes to light out of the well of my self is not, however, a Nietzschean exhibition: it does not engage with the (sometimes-contradictory and always Euro-masculinist) proclamations about radical individualism and critiques of systematized governance that Nietschze was famous for. What Ross does do is take up Nietschze’s subtle invitation to think critically about the productivity of entanglement: that water and light may be distinct entities but they are in a blurry loop with one another, and with a measure of work—of stillness and reflection—a possible self emerges, only to make way for the water to come to light yet again.

Ross’ exhibition crafts multiple, overlapping environments that situate us deeply within this process of producing the self amidst the objects and containers that we surround and are surrounded by. They draw us in with the seductive allure of screenglow and the repetitive loops in their animations, pairing them with the comforting familiarity of well-hewn sculptures that read wood, metal, and textile together. Yet they continually press against our reliance on satisfaction therein. Their photographs, in particular, demand a kind of focused attention from our brains working to resolve blur, static, lack of focus, and/or blur. Ross’ management of our expectations for satisfaction—that a loop will productively conclude, that there will be seamless rendering of a digital form, that we will be able to comfortably inhabit a sculpture, that we will come away fully knowing an artwork—enhances their longstanding interest in crafting environments that picture black liberation as not only possible but fully inhabitable. It is here, however, where When the water comes to light out of the well of my self is not merely an architectural prescription for what this black liberation might look like or where it might manifest. It is just as much a complete staging of what it feels like to not yet have access to that object, but to occupy the full affective, sensory-motor disorientation that is the very condition of the container that structures it.

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kemi adeyemi
thinking/writing/teaching @ the university of washington, seattle