Projects


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Common Room, Curated by Björn Meyer-Ebrecht


Eric Brown​, Sharon Butler​, Paul Gagner​, Jule Korneffel​, Esperanza Mayobre​, David McBride​, Adam Parker Smith​, and Jenny Vogel​


Opening reception, Thursday, June 4th, 7 – 10 pm.
Open during Bushwick Open Studio: Saturday June 6, and Sunday June 7, 2015, 12 – 6 pm
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht's studio, 1182 Flushing Ave., 2nd floor, Brooklyn, NY 11385 (map)

I am pleased to invite you to a group show that I am curating in my studio during Bushwick Open Studio weekend. Common Room is an installation of a room within a room, which I built in my studio. The room has a raised platform as the floor and painted plywood walls. Within the room I will present a group show of works by eight artists. The initial idea of the show was to bring in works that function as windows offering different types of views. Thus the shared space in the common room can be located either in front of or behind the work. Common Room describes the actual confines of the location as a stage-like shared space. At the same time it references the shared intellectual, illusionistic or optical spaces these specific works create, linking them to a larger social room and context.
Common Room is the second installment of a series of curatorial projects in my studio. It follows last year's Communal Table, in which I built an over-sized table that served as the shared base for sculptures by 12 artists. The current installation continues my interest in functional architectural objects, and represents the first time I have created a sculpture that functions as usable space.

 (image: http://meyer-ebrecht.com/Content/../Archive/CommonRoom/CR-install_13.jpg)
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Artists:


Eric Brown
Eric Brown was born in Buenos Aires in 1969, Argentina. He lives and works in New York. Brown’s minimalist painting, sculpture and works on paper typically draw from architectural plans of public works such as airports, runways, bridges and highways, communicating a personal exploration of what it means to be in constant motion and transition. His paintings, for example, depict both geographical places and states of mind through the uniform layering of pictorial devices that hint at the urban landscape depicted underneath. Rendering the painterly image nearly obsolete, Brown diminishes representational value and preciousness, imbuing the picture plane with states of mind instead.
Brown has had solo exhibitions at Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY; the Calvin Klein Flagship Store and Goff + Rosenthal in New York, NY; and Project Room, Philadelphia, PA. His work has been included in exhibitions at Ventana 244, The Bogart Salon, Davidson Contemporary and Josee Bienvenu Gallery in New York; Helen Day Art Center, Stowe, VT; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Queens Museum, NY and at Artforum Berlin.

Sharon Butler
A painter and arts writer, Sharon Butler is widely known as the publisher of the influential art blog Two Coats of Paint, which received a grant from the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program last year. She is affiliated with the MFA programs at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Connecticut, where she was also the 2014 Artist in Residence at Counterproof Press. Her work has been shown at various galleries, universities, and art fairs throughout the country, including NADA New York, Theodore:Art, Storefront Ten Eyck, Pocket Utopia, The Painting Center, Brooklyn Museum, Islip Museum, Union College (Schenectady, NY), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), SEASON (Seattle, WA), John Davis (Hudson, NY), George Lawson (San Francisco, CA), and Matteawan (Beacon, NY). As one of the inaugural participants in the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program, Butler maintains a studio in DUMBO overlooking the Manhattan Bridge.

Paul Gagner
Paul Gagner was born in 1976 in rural Wisconsin. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005, and his MFA from Brooklyn College in 2009. He has exhibited throughout the US including the Sheila & Richard Riggs Leidy Galleries at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art and the Richmond Center for Visual Arts. In 2009, Gagner has four collages included in the Museum of Modern Art's print collection. Paul Gagner lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Jule Korneffel​
But how to manifest something that is fluent and elusive?
In her work Jule Korneffel aims to visualize the mere process of painting. In believing that art and life belong together, she uses common art supplies as well as things originated in every day life. Her interest lies in casualness and curious incidences. A lot in her work operates with chance and, or is the lucky coincidence of right timing. Her across research is alike the process of distilling. The aim is to filter pictorial events.
Jule Korneffel was born 1975 in (West) Germany and currently lives in New York.
She received a diploma in Fine Arts from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where she studied with Tal R. She is currently enrolled at Hunter College´s MFA program. Her work has been shown constantly in several art spaces and galleries, as Kunsthistorisches Institut/ Bonn, Sox/ Berlin, Helpers/Brooklyn. Together with Alfons Knogl she invented (in 2009) and maintains the artist-curator project SUSI/Zusi Graham. Since 2011 she runs the project "Sweater—Jule Korneffel“ which recently got reviewed at the blog of Städelmuseum/Frankfurt.

Esperanza Mayobre
Esperanza Mayobre is an artist whose work ranges from elegant graffiti that portrays urban chaos, fictive laboratory spaces, candles to create lines of light, giving money away to talk about the third world countries debt, dust that converts illegal to legal aliens. Born during the Venezuelan oil boom, Mayobre was raised between Caracas and Golindano. She holds a degree in cabinetmaking from the IACT in Caricuao and a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Museum School in Boston. Her recent projects include a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Air and Space Museum, a Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop, a Jerome Foundation travel grant for a Brancusi pilgrimage and Postcards to Venezuela for Creative Time Reports. She is the recipient of the Process Space Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Smack Mellon Studio Program, the Workspace Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Artist in the Marketplace Program and a fellowship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, La Caja Centro Cultural Chacao Caracas, the Bronx Museum, the Jersey City Museum, MIT Cavs, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C., the Contemporary Museum of El Salvador, the Incheon Biennial Korea, Smack Mellon, Postmasters, Jack Shainman, among others. Her work has been reviewed in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, El Nacional, Arte al Día and Art in America.

David McBride
David McBride (b. 1974) was born in Columbus, Ohio. He received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Ohio State University in 1999, and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College/CUNY in 2005. He also received a Master’s degree in Library and Information Sciences from the University of North Texas, in 2013. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Adam Parker Smith
Adam Parker Smith is a New York based sculpture and installation artist. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, Tyler School of Art and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been shown widely in the USA as well as internationally at Urbis, Manchester, England, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg, the Brooklyn Museum, Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco, La Montagne Gallery, Boston, Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Galerie Sho Contemporary, Tokyo, the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China, Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, Austria, and the Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE. Smith’s work has been written about in New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Art in America, The Village Voice, ArtForum.com, Modern Painters, The Boston Globe and The New York Post.

Jenny Vogel​
Jenny Vogel works in video, photography and computer arts. Vogel’s art explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web-cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material. She received her MFA from Hunter College (NYC) in 2003. She is a 2005 NYFA fellow in Computer Arts and is currently Assistant Professor of New Media Art at the University of Massachusetts. Her work has been screened and exhibited in group and solo- shows in numerous locations and galleries: Storefront Gallery, NYC; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; McKinney Contemporary, TX; San Francisco Camerawork, CA; Arnolfini, UK; The Siberia Biennial, Russia; The Swiss Institute, NYC; EFA Gallery, NYC; Kunstwerke, Berlin; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC.