August at Flux Factory

is gonna be a doozy!

The mailer doesn’t specify but the Color Wheelz collabo is curated by moi! I met Julia Vallera about 3-4 months back and thought her project would be a great way to “craft” Long Island City, and for its inhabitants – of which I am one – to better understand our dynamic city-town.

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This month:

Going Places (Doing Stuff) III
Flux Thursday
#24hCycle
Color Wheelz
Room I + Room II
2009 SP Weather Reports

Going Places (Doing Stuff) III

You get on a bus, you don’t know where you’re going, and then something happens!

You’ve probably heard about our amazing bus tours. If you haven’t, click here to learn more! We have four more tours coming up this summer:

August 7 Josh Bernstein, Moses Gates, Matt Levy & Moira Williams: Wild Tilly’s Circus Story
August 14 David Horvitz: 500 Golden Buddhas and the Speed of Water
August 21 Marie Lorenz: Ghost Ships of the Kills
August 28 Margaret Coleman: Demonstrations of Aptitude

Going Places (Doing Stuff) III is made possible in part through support from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Carnegie Corporation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Flux Thursday!

Join us on August 12 for this month’s Flux Thursday, our monthly potluck and salon. Dinner starts at 8 pm, with presentations to follow. Resident artist Sarah Tosques will present work from Iceland and New York, and Man Bartlett will be talking about his recent and upcoming performance art. We’ll be there – will you?

Man Bartlett: #24hCycle

Friday – Saturday, August 13-14, 8pm – 8pm
Flux Factory Gallery

What do the news and laundry have in common? Probably nothing! But we’ll be tasked to see how the two play together… over the course of 24 hours in August.

#24hCycle is envisioned as an absurdist summer party, a communal laundry washing experience, and a reading/discussion of the most up to the second news. It’s an excuse to do laundry. An opportunity to become sickly saturated in the news. Laundry will be aired and hung to dry, accumulating in the gallery space around us. Arguments will be lost and won. Our comforts may be met with discomforts, and vice versa. Our private articles of clothing will be made public, and public news articles will be made personal.

You may also bring clothing that you’d like to get rid of; the artist will be donating it to a local organization in need. Some refreshments/libations will be provided, but you’re encouraged to BYO: laundry, laptop, beverages.

For those who cannot be there in person, a live feed will be streamed, and developing interactions will be encouraged online at manbartlett.com/24hCycle.

Flux Factory artist-in-residence Man Bartlett creates performance-based works that take one task to the extreme for an extended period of time, while encouraging dynamic physical and virtual participation. These performances have taken place in diverse locations, such as a Best Buy, Winkleman Gallery, a former factory building in New Jersey, PPOW Gallery, and the Whitney Museum.

Color Wheelz

Saturday, August 14, 11am – 5pm

Flux Factory, in collaboration with artist Julia Vallera (MFA Parsons), would like to present Long Island City with Julia’s Color Wheelz project. Color Wheelz is designed to transform a 1997 Ford van into a traveling, participatory installation. This van travels through the five boroughs of NYC filled with playful activities, which facilitate exploration into how color relates to community. Visitors at each destination adapt the inside and outside of the van using an array of color-related items. These items include glowing neon wire, cling paper, velcro shapes, magnets and fabric.

The Color Wheelz van will be parked at the John F. Murray Playground on 21 Street between 45 Ave and 45 Road (map) on Saturday August 14th from 11am to 5pm – JOIN US as we visually craft Long Island City!

Room I + Room II

August 27 – September 6
Opening and performances Friday, August 27, 6-9 pm

Flux artists-in-residence Astrid Bussink, Kate Shaw, and Sarah Tosques are collaborating for an end-of-residency exhibition, showing new works including videos, performances, installation, photos and painting.

Room I

Still from The Art of Crocheting, by Astrid Bussink and Sarah Tosques

Astrid Bussink, a Dutch artist and documentary filmmaker, and Sarah Tosques, a visual artist and educator from Montreal, have collaborated to create a video installation and performance called “The Art of Crocheting.” A decade apart in age, they examine shared concerns as artists and individuals, personal pursuits, dreams and their effects. Astrid Bussink will also be presenting part of an on-going project called Constructions of Happiness.

Room II

Kate Shaw is an Australian painter that cheats on the medium with collage. A new series of her layered, brightly colored, marbled landscape paintings will be premiered at Flux Factory! The exhibition contains paintings, artist’s books, and video inspired by a recent road trip through the southwest and looking at how different cultures intervene with and interpret nature. Other work takes inspiration from an man-made mountain built from adobe (hay and mud) illustrating bible stories, rock shops in Utah, and mountains named after Biblical subjects.

Portfolio Launch: 2009 SP Weather Reports

Sunday, August 22, 4pm

The artist-run SP Weather Station, currently based on the roof of Flux Factory, invites you to a release party for its 2009 Weather Report portfolios. Each portfolio in the edition of 30 contains 12 works produced by 12 different artists who were invited to respond to any aspect of one month of SP Weather Station data in any format they desired. Works from the portfolio, including audio, books, drawings, and prints, will be on display in the gallery; the portfolio will also be for sale.

Participating artists include: (January) Mike Estabrook and Vandana Jain; (February) Susan Goethel Campbell; (March) Emily Larned; (April) Luke Strosnider; (May) Andrea Polli; (June) Mark Nystrom; (July) Patricia Zarate; (August) Jane D. Marsching; (September) Stephanie Rothenberg; (October) Graham Parker; (November) Isaac Gertman; (December) Birgit Rathsmann.

SP Weather Station is an interdisciplinary project that collects weather data, hosts a guest lecture series, and organizes weather-related publications, events, and exhibitions.

For more information, please click here.