HEART'S GYMNASTICS Curated by Yevgeniya Baras in NY

HEART'S GYMNASTICS 

EJ Hauser, Melissa Brown, Erin Lee Jones, Yevgeniya Baras, Jackie Tileston, Anna Schachte, Fabienne Lasserre 

Curated by Yevgeniya Baras

Opening: Sat May 31, 6-9 PM

Exhibition Duration: Saturday, May 31-Sunday, June 29th

Oupost

1665 Norman St,

Ridgewood, NY 11385

(Halsey Stop on the L Train)

(Please see the list of other exhibitions I am in below)

"HEART'S GYMNASTICS"

EJ and Yevgeniya had breakfast and talked about Gymnastics. 

Yevgeniya Baras: Heart’s Gymnastics is risking by taking the heart places where upon first consideration it should not go. When looking at work I am interested in someone who is consistently pushing themselves.

EJ Hauser: This makes me think about the fact that I admire artists who are able to be vulnerable, which is a huge requirement to make good work. If you don’t risk something, the return is not going to be the same as if you say: ” I am willing my heart to go places it shouldn’t or knowing it shouldn’t be going there and still willing to do it.”

EJH: A figure doing a back flip in my painting comes from a reoccurring dream I have when I am standing with you in my dream, we are talking, and I am like: “Hey Yevgeniya, look at this and I jump up in the air, flip, and land back on my feet. Then when we think about dreams being in touch with words: “Do back flips” is an expression. “I did back flips over that painting”, for example, or “head over heals”.

YB: I think this idea of gymnastics as an activity most of us don’t usually do but it’s a stand in for a kind of emotional and intellectual stretching; a flexibility.

EJH: It has been said, that a good artist has to be willing to be naked in public. And when we think about the idea of subject matter and content, you have to be willing to put something out there and know that the meaning that someone else gets out of the work belongs to them, and that could be frightening. You have to think about how your broadcast is being received. 

YB: How much great music, theater, amazing art has been misread? What kind of revolutions have certain cultural products caused that they were initially not encoded to cause. They were picked up by other people and their needs.

A Painting, a sculpture, a song, throws up a mirror for you to consider your own experience.

EJH: One may fear to do heart gymnastics.

YB: But the only studios I am actually interested in is where we will talk about color pink but then we will talk about your mother. 

EJH: One of the first things you said about the artists in the show have in common is that it’s about your appetite, for what you want to see, what you want to be contextualized with, your experience of the contemporary conversation and I think that this idea of the flexibility of the heart. There is a great song by McGarrigle sisters : “Heart like a Wheel”. The line is: “You can bend it but you can not mend it”. The wheel runs a little off kilter because it has been harmed a few times. I think there is something really beautiful in your belief in the heart, your belief in the flexibility of the heart and the necessity of the heart being able to take you places. 

YB: Thank you. It is learning to be awake.

Other exhibitions I am in:

"By Invitation Only" 

Kinz + Tillou Fine Art

Opening: Tuesday, May 20, 6 - 9 pm 

59 Cambridge Place
Clinton Hill, Brooklyn

Curated by:

Renee Riccardo, Mickalene Thomas, and Andrew Gori

"Meanwhile, Back at The Farm" : 

Suzanne Goldenberg, Maria Britton, Shanna Maurizi, Clare Grill, Yevgeniya Baras, Mike Olin
Opening: Friday, May 30, 2014

195 Morgan Ave

Bushwick, NY

Curated by Melanie Parke and Justine Frischmann

Group Exhibition
Honey Ramka
Opening: Fri, May 30, 2013
56 Bogart St.
Brooklyn NY 11206