The Soothing Center
Trestle Projects, 400 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11232
Sunday August 27th, 4-7 pm
Curated by Jesse Firestone
We invite you to join us in an afternoon of pocket option broker exercises and psycho-spiritual healing. Navigating the sticky interactions between self and community-care, we will explore both the celebratory culture and the hidden ideologies of different survival systems. Participants will have the opportunity to christen our bespoke questionnaires and worksheets, breaking into small groups to discuss their findings. We encourage you to re-parent your inner child in this conversational experience featuring soothing snacks, https://www.pocketoption.co.za and curative visuals.
Preparatory materials:
Tara Brach, The RAIN of Self-Compassion
Abeni Jones, Beyond Self-Care Bubble Baths: A Vision for Community Care
We are pleased to announce 2MF’s July 2017 meeting:
Thursday July 13, 7–9 PM
Artists Space
55 Walker St.
New York, NY 10013
“I mean basically the only way to guarantee that we will dramatically reduce acts of violence involving guns is to basically remove guns from society, and until somebody gets enough ‘oomph’ to repeal the Second Amendment, that’s not pocketoption.co.za happen.”- Karl Rove, 2015
Gun violence is one of the leading causes of death for children ages 1 - 17 in the United States. Such violence has been legally shown to be unpreventable unless a Constitutional Amendment were passed, which at least in part included repealing the 2nd Amendment. The amendment process requires support from either two thirds of the United States Congress or two thirds of States Legislatures. It would seem like a long shot given the current, frenzied state of US politics, but of course Donald Trump is also President now and nothing is impossible.
Artist Joshua Smith recently published The Gun Violence Amendment, 2017 as a postcard with New York publisher Primary Information. In it his text would first repeal the second amendment, and then go on to say that, “The manufacturing, transportation or importation in or into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of pump-action, semi-automatic or automatic firearms is hereby prohibited.” which would suggest the radical policy shift of forbidding all but fully manual firearms for US gun owners, including local and state police forces, and thus vastly disarming and limiting the country’s easy access to weapons designed to murder vast amounts of people. Smith will present his Amendment in public for the first time in a conversational in person talk, and attempt to rally some concrete support for it in the process. 100 stamped Gun Violence Amendment postcards will also be available on site for easy mailing to representatives, friends, and family.
All of these efforts, housed as they are here in a fine art context raise questions like who represents “the people”, and what is represented by that expression, how can activists and artists produce or affect societal and cultural shifts benefiting “the people?" Throughout our meeting we will work to address how Judith Butler’s consideration of public assembly relates to Smith's and perhaps our own interests in affecting change through the simple “performance” of our gathering together to discuss issues like gun violence, and public policy campaigns. We will also consider the Library of Congress’ United States: Gun Ownership and the Supreme Court at as well as an overview of the constitutional amendment process at the National Archive.
We will close by taking stack from attendees for an open mic conversation with topics related to gun violence, violence in general, the constitutional amendment process, art and art’s ability to affect public policy and / or the conversations about it.
We’ll encourage a comfortable, conversational environment throughout the evening, with refreshments and some snacks. Mingling and milling about are also encouraged.
Primary Information will be on site throughout the event, with additional postcards created by artists including Lutz Bacher, Kevin Beasley, and many others on sale for $1 ea.
Pre-Meeting Reading:
Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015
Library of Congress’ United States: Gun Ownership and the Supreme Court
Overview of the constitutional amendment process at the National Archive
About the Artist
Joshua Smith has exhibited work at Albert Baronian (Brussels), White Flag Projects (St. Louis), Shanaynay (Paris), and in New York at Shoot The Lobster, SOUTHFIRST, Art Production Fund, Essex Flowers, West Street Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, and John Connelly Presents. He cofounded the exhibition projects Essex Flowers, Apartment Show, and Commonwealth Contemporary. He is the founder of The Gun Violence Amendment. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, New York Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Interview, and Hyperallergic, among other publications.
About Primary Information:
Primary Information is a non-profit organization devoted to publishing artists’ books and artists’ writings. Primary Information was formed in 2006 to foster intergenerational dialogue through the publication of artists’ books and writings by artists—emerging, mid-career, and established. The organization’s period of focus is from the early sixties to the present, with an emphasis on the conceptual practice of using publications as an exhibition space.
Artists Space is accessible via elevator from street level, welcomes assistance dogs, and has wheelchair accessible non-gender-segregated toilet facilities.
We are pleased to announce 2MF’s first meeting of 2017:
Sunday January 29, 5–7 PM
Sunview Luncheonette
221 Nassau Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11222
Refreshments will be served
"All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy." -Gaston Bachelard
The home is the beginning of everything. It is the site of many of our 'firsts' in life, and is an early proving ground for those important events which occur later, elsewhere. Our first senses of love, war, betrayal, peace, joy and grief happen in the home, alongside our first understanding of our sense of seeing, tasting, touching, smelling and hearing.
Beginning as a second womb, the home shifts to accommodate our changing expectations of our lives and ourselves. Such a protean space also provides a remarkable framework for the creation of meaning and the spinning of narratives. We will look at how Gaston Bachelard's conception of the house as psychic space works remarkably well as a vehicle for both psychological introspection as well as storytelling. David Batchelor's Chromophobia will provide a jumping-off point for a discussion about how the decoration of the home, with a special focus on color, creates meaning and connects to issues of class and race.
Some particularly domestic (though not at all comfortable) film clips will lead the way into a game where groups create their own narratives for a given interior or interiors.
Pre-Meeting Reading:
David Batchelor (1997), Chromophobia. Chapter 1: Whitescapes
Gaston Bachelard (1958), The Poetics of Space.
About the Artist:
Nate Heiges has just begun a private exhibition series, Interiors, showcasing the work of a single artist at a time in their own home. He has exhibited at the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Suburban in Oak Park, IL, the Austin Museum of Art, the Houston Center for Photography, Franklin Streetworks in Stamford, CT, and Nina Johnson Galley in Miami as well as MoMA PS1, Marc Jancou Gallery, Still House Group Gallery, and Underdonk Gallery all in New York. His work is in the collection of the Drawing Center, New York. Mr. Heiges has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the T. A. J. Residency in Bangalore, India and the Shandaken Project. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and was awarded an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2010.
We are pleased to announce 2MF’s November 2016 meeting:
Sunday November 20, 4-6 PM
Knockdown Center
52-19 Flushing Ave
Maspeth, NY 11378
"The Office"
“[management is] the art of getting things done through people” - Mary Parker Follett
As artists our professional and personal spheres have collapsed, our day jobs/incomes giving way to our more serious occupation: making the art, getting it shown and supporting our fellow impresarios. We do this work as solitary entrepreneurs or sometimes in small groups but we participate in a system that appears from a distance to share similarities with larger consolidated structures and seems to constitute our positions into a form of organized labor.
With this in mind it could be said that what is missing from this art world of object/idea producers, disseminators and aggregators is a quality middle management position: someone whose job it is to direct the flow of labor towards useful ends and serving as a communicative device between the various tiers.
In lieu of this we propose an employee skill-building exercise designed to facilitate group interaction that sharpens personal motivations while simultaneously considering the whole. Modeled on the popular game “Mafia”, “The Office” will be sure to unmask team players, weed out social climbers, reward clever deception, and bring stability and hierarchy to the nebulous world of artist-cum-laborers.
Pre-Meeting Reading
Mark Panay, "5 Psychological Theories of Motivation to Increase Productivity"
About the Artists
Sister Gallery consists of partners, Zuriel Waters and Jenny Lee. From 2014 to 2016, the gallery space held bi-monthly exhibitions in a window at 69 Irving Ave, in the heart of Bushwick. Waters and Lee met at Rhode Island School of Design, and moved to New York City in 2010. In addition to curatorial projects, Lee and Waters also write and paint.
Video From the Meeting
We are pleased to announce 2MF’s September 2016 meeting:
Friday September 9, 7-9 PM
Knockdown Center
52-19 Flushing Ave
Maspeth, NY 11378
I’ve fallen in love for the last time/You’ve got to know you a chicken
My intimate relationship with with post-industrial bohemia
How did I end up here? Was this a mistake?
New York is a hard place for an artist. Many of us could live elsewhere and afford larger work studios, larger homes, better food and weather. The internet allows us to collaborate through the internet. We can share ideas, images and sound in mere moments. Why do we stay in a city that clearly goes out of its way to make things difficult?
Eric Ramos Guerrero discusses coping and navigating the trappings of freedom, examining how 19th and 20th century bohemia informs how we see ourselves in the studio. Questions about how one should navigate New York’s bohemian art world that are unanswerable by those in attendance will be directed to a spirit that we will communicate through a glass and lettered board.
Is it all worth it?
Pre-meeting listening and viewing:
Music playlist via YouTube
1. The Boho Dance Joni Mitchell
2. The India Song Big Star
3. I Want to Break Free Queen
4. Walk on the Wildside Lou Reed
5. Samson and Delilah (aria) Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix Klaus Nomi
6. Caravan Van Morrison
7. Frankly, Mr. Shankly The Smiths
8. All the Young Dudes David Bowie
9. Don’t Kiss Me Goodbye Ultra Orange & Emmanuelle
10. Into My Own Thing Sly & the Family Stone
11. The Way We Get By Spoon
12. Tu Davilla 666
13. Fame and Fortune Graham Coxon
14. Know Your Chicken Cibo Motto
15. Downtown The b-52’s
16. Wasn’t Born to Follow The Byrds
Divination playlist via You Tube
1. Fortune Teller The Hollies
2. Troubles of My Own Fats Domino
3. Deja Vu Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
4. Ouija Board Morrissey
5. Crystal Ball Styx
6. Close Encounters Bats for Lashes
7. Cool Song No.2 mgmt
8. Magic Olivia Newton John
9. Blue Eyed Here Pixies
Spirit of the glass. so scary don't do it. (Via You Tube)
Spirit of the glass challenge!!!:) (Via You Tube)
About the Artist:
Eric Ramos Guerrero is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. He was born in the Philippines and moved to California where he received a BA from San Diego State University. He then attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he received his BFA in 2006. The following year he moved to New York where Ramos Guerrero completed his MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Ramos Guerrero has shown his work in New York at The Drawing Center, El Museo Del Barrio, White Box, The Ise Cultural Foundation, The Fisher Landau Center for Art, The Knockdown Center and internationally at the Inside-Out Museum, Beijing, China, Pongnoi Art Space, Chiang Mai, Thailand, The Centro Cultural De La Raza in Mexico and Chelsea College in London.
Meeting Photos:
Sunday July 31st, 5 pm
(harbor)
221 Madison St.
New York, NY, 10002
Sonya Derman and Maria Stabio will host their first 2MF meeting as facilitating artists in the exhibition “Tandem” at (harbor) on Sunday, July 31st. Stabio and Derman co-run 2MF, a collaborative practice and meeting series that encourages pro-emotive and ante-academic conversation in the arts. The artists will explore their own topics of interest, while also illuminating their shared (and independent) motivations for creating and caring for this ongoing project.
Stabio will dissect Chen’s New Yorker piece “Unfollow” as an intersection of “the personal is political”, the nuance of emotional lives in the actors of hateful rhetoric, and finally the role of social media in activist culture while connecting this article to her interest in 2MF’s ante-academic and pro-emotive stance.
Derman will approach Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Thinking through disgrace, shame & tenderness, textures, warm language, & moving side by side – an introduction as a sort of wide doorway, where one can loosen with linked arms.
Pre-meeting reading:
Adrian Chen, “Unfollow”, The New Yorker, Nov 23, 2015
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Introduction, Touching Feeling, 2003
About the artists:
Sonya Derman is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and educator. She received a BA in Studio Art from Carleton College (Northfield, MN), and an MA from the Royal College of Art (London, UK).
Maria Stabio (b. 1985 San Francisco) is a first generation Filipino-American artist. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from Boston University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. For more information, visit mariastabio.com.
About the exhibition:
(harbor) presents an ongoing program of events and installations. Regina Rex and (harbor) pedal on the same proverbial bike at their Madison street space. In the spirit of these two galleries operating together, Tandem, curated by Steve Mykietyn, presents seven two person artistic collaborations that each operate as combined voices.
