What are you up tonight? Earlier this week, I helped my friend and artist Beth Dary complete her installation for the Skin of Liberty, Fractured and re-Structured art exhibit in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the show opens tonight at 7pm at the Brooklyn Fire Proof. If you’re in the NYC area, I’d highly recommend going!
Here’s a bit more about the show and artists and some pictures I took while helping Beth install her sculptures…
Here’s Beth installing “tea and rust stained porcelain “barnacles.” The sculptures climb the wood beams, wall and ceiling of the gallery in a topographical array that combines the riverscapes of the Brooklyn Waterfront and the Tagil River in Russia.”
Participating artists: Ekaterina Aksenova, Ron Barron, Oleg Blyablyas, John Boone, Todd Bryant, Alberto Bursztyn, Vitaly Cherepanov, Project 59, Beth Dary, Irina Fillipova, Tatiana Istomina, JKP(group), Angelina Kotova, Ksenya Koshurnikova, Rita Leduc, Anna Mineeva &Maria Belova, Kenneth Pietrobono, Lisa Hein & Robert Seng, Carol Salmanson, Kate Stone, Fyodor Telkov, Ian Trask, Qi You, and Zer Gut (group)
New York and Nizhny Tagil, a huge megalopolis, the center of the world and a small industrial city in the middle of nowhere, very different and far apart, have a peculiar connection. Every Ural tourist guide mentions that the famous Statue of Liberty in New York is covered with copper from NizhnyTagil’s famous Demidov’s mines. Awarded at the World Exhibitions in Paris and Birmingham, sheet copper from Nizhny Tagil caught the attention of the sculptor F. Bartholdi, who was looking for material for the outer shell of the Statue of Liberty in New York.
The name Skin of Liberty reflects the Statue of Liberty’s copper history, while Fractured & re-Structured refers to the current psycho-geographical state of Nizhny Tagil, the old industrial city in the Middle of Urals that started with the iron ore deposits in the mountain Tall that no longer exists. In its place there is now a huge deep crater filled with industrial waste. The oldest metallurgical plant built in the Urals during the time of the Demidovs is transformed into a museum. Two Soviet industrial giants, Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant and Machinery UralVagonZavod, have been in permanent crisis and decline and became the exclusive backdrop for local artists.
BRURAL: Skin of Liberty, Fractured and re-Structured brings together artists of different creative strategies, styles and media, who make aesthetic experiments with the environment and postindustrial contemporary reality. They use ready-made industrial and postindustrial culture; new media space and modern social contexts; recycling of urban space and architecture, garbage, newspapers and magazines; ruins and remnants of things and ideas. Often with guerrilla methods, artists change the very essence of phenomena and objects, modifying their structure and developing new meanings.
The show runs through March 8th, and the hours are Wednesday – Sunday from 3pm – 8pm (March 7th 3pm-11pm, March 8th 2pm-6pm). After the show at the Brooklyn Fire Proof Gallery, works will travel to Chelyabinsk for a show at the OkNo Gallery in September and Nijnij Tagil during the Art Biennial in Yekaterinburg.
(Exhibit description via. All photos by Kelley.)