SPRING/BREAK Art Show
watching the conkers arrive
March 6-12, 2018
Curated by:
Jason Andrew, Kanad Chakrabarti, and Sarah Pettitt
Featuring:
Kanad Chakrabarti
Oliver Evans
Sarah Pettitt
Robert Raphael
Robert Rivers
Shaan Syed
Audra Wolowiec
ROOM #2349
SPRING/BREAK Art Show
4 Times Square (Entrance at 140 West 43rd Street)
New York, NY
In its first appearance at an art fair, ever, Norte Maar presents "watching the conkers arrive." Curated by Jason Andrew, Kanad Chakrabarti, and Sarah Pettitt, the room will feature a collection of works by seven artists from the UK and Canada, Brooklyn and Queens, NY, which interrogate language, geography, culture—all involving cross-disciplinary works with abstract grounding, leaving room for reflection on heritage and the borders of experience.
Kanad Chakrabarti’s (Ranchi, India / New York), born in Ranchi, India, pursues a collision between technology, markets and the politics of history. In this installation, he looks at Sicily as a metaphorical omphalos that foregrounds the tension and cultural confrontation that globalisation has wrought. Kanad, an MIT undergrad, received his MA from the Slade School of Fine Art (London), and currently divides his time between London and New York. ukc10014.org
Oliver Evans (London, UK) takes and collects photographs to document time and place, occurrences and circumstances. His travels have been vast and his collaging of images tells only fragments of a story. oliverandrewevans.com
Sarah Pettitt (UK / Queens, NY) simultaneously interrogates beginnings and endings. Her process exists in the space between the visual and the haptic, and steps outside the constraining bounds of language. Her materials and visual antecedents harken to the totem, the votive, the funerary rites of the ancients, viscerally evoking the power of the anthropomorphised form. sarahpettitt.co.uk
The ceramic-base work of Robert Raphael (Brooklyn, NY) draws on the complex history of decorative art, a tradition that intersects and runs parallel to the history of art. Decoration is often perceived to be superficial, but he believes its strength lies in its seductive nature and the complex meanings that result when surface, mass, pattern, and cultural history come together. robraphael.com
Drawn simply with one continuous calligraphic line, Robert Rivers' (London, UK) nose paintings are almost architectural renderings of space--of outside and inside. Grass and straw gathered from walks in the countryside are caught amidst the threads of the embroidered noses, fragments of summer, they disrupt the singular curving line and cross languages of paint, drawing, and collage. robertrivers.co.uk
Shaan Syed (London, UK) is interested in asking a question of context and culture: how do established systems of looking relate to how we see anew and how do they influence the way we make, look at and read images now? Primarily through painting, yet also incorporating screen-printing, sound and performance, Syed addresses the conundrum that painting may be at once a process, a reveal and a sign. shaansyed.com
Originating from Detroit, Audra Wolowiec (Brooklyn / Newburgh, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, installation, text and performance with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. Her poetic sound installations and experimental language scores often use the gap, space, or breath in between speech—not as forms of negation, but as complex generators of meaning. Audra currently divides her time between New York City and Newburgh, NY. audrawolowiec.com
