SPRING/BREAK Art Show NY

September 8 - 13, 2021

Room 1062

ARSENAL

Uta Bekaia

Vincent Cy-Chen

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

Levan Mindiashvili

PREVIEW (PDF)

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625 Madison Ave

More info and Tickets* HERE

*Due to COVID-19 protocols, advanced timed tickets are required

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ARSENAL is the title of our presentation for the SPRING/BREAK NY, comprising works by four artists Uta Bekaia, Vincent Cy Chen, Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, and Levan Mindiashvili. For all of them, the act of art-making is deeply informed by their queer identities. It has become a form of resistance towards their oppressive cultural upbringing. Yet, at the same time, their work offers an array of resources to navigate and celebrate the "otherness" and open up new possibilities to be in the world. The overall installation is a rebus-like reminiscence of a medieval chapel and/or dungeon, with intricate and enigmatic accents of pleasure, trickery, and desire.

The center of the room is occupied by a life-size standing figure in a richly embroidered and rhinestoned attire inspired by the European medieval clergy of the higher status. Their face is covered with the mask shaped like a sun and holding a polished brass bell in their hand. Next to them, there's a sculpture of the magical creature, half-human/half-animal, obediently sitting at the "master's" feet. Created with the gradient sequence fabric and meticulously embroidered face, the beast emanates a disturbing allure. These are the sculptures of Tbilisi-born Uta Bekaia who's multimedia work is a speculative recreation of rituals of his native Georgia and medieval Europe at large. With the fascination with traditional crafts, Bekaia creates richly adorned wearable sculpture-costumes, ceramics, tapestries, and objects and brings them together as immersive installations, films, and live performances.

On the left side and the wall behind the sculpture is covered in a jacquard-woven, hand-altered tapestry of Georgian-born Brooklyn-based Levan Mindiashvili. Depicting traces of the empty bed and the remnants of the architectural ruins, the tapestries are "translations" of their paintings and the photographs of their sculptures captured by the artist. Subdued in blueish greyscale tones, these works stand as ghosts for vanishing dominant structures yet carry the longing for the spaces for love and desire. The tapestry behind Bekaia's sculpture is flanked by two hand-painted round mirrors of the floral patterns by Mindiashvili - "scratches" from the memories of his childhood floral wallpapers of his Mother's bedroom.

Mindiashvili's tapestry of the empty bed is flacked by the row of ceramic sculptures of belts and chains - wall pieces of Vincent CY Chen. Chen creates multimedia displays that negotiate shame and desire with work that allures saturated colors, curvaceous forms, and illumination. Being a queer immigrant from Taiwan, Chen's work explores competing layers of otherness centering on the body. By examining exotic flora and fauna studies and relics that fetishize the "unknown," he creates a taboo world built of biological oddities, sexual fetishes, and artifacts of power. This world is influenced by surrealist literature, body horror films, and the portrayal of the queer Asian body as emasculated, exoticized and fetishized.

Leaned against the right wall is a row of the unglazed white porcelain sculptures of Brooklyn-based Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, whose work centers on violence in queer communities. Based on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender hate crime cases, these sculptures are distorted base-ball batts, tin cans, and hammers used as weapons in these cases. As she twists and contorts wet clay, the weapons become a stand-in for the bodies entwined in the act of violent urgency and physical intimacy. The disturbance of everyday objects calls into question the very system in which they exist. In her recreation of familiar forms, clay becomes skin as she presses into the wet skin-like surface. The twisting, mutilation, and ultimate undoing of the body are transferred to the objects. The disturbance of everyday objects calls into question the very system in which they exist. Yet leaned against the wall, melting and powerless, these objects can be read as defeated power structures and systems.

As the visitors turn their back to leave the installation, they face hand-scribbled neon by Levan Mindiashvili in light aqua reading "In Search of the Miraculous.”

Uta Bekaia is a Georgian-born multimedia artist currently residing and working in Brooklyn and Tbilisi. He had studied Industrial Design at Tbilisi Mtsire Academy. He has been awarded with the residences at ART OMI, Museum of Art and Design MAD, NY; Garikula, Georgia; His work has been shown at SchauFenster, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Tbillisi; Kiev Biennial in Istanbul and Kiev; ERTI Gallery, Tbilisi; Triumph, Moscow; Silk Museum, Tbilisi; The Lodge Gallery, NY; Center for Contemporary Art, Batumi; among others. He has staged parades for the Tbilisi City Hall Tbilisoba Festival; Book Capital of the World Opening Ceremony, TurnPark, ArtPark among others.

Vincent CY Chen is a New York based artist who works in sculpture and installation. He received his BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2015, and his MFA in Studio Art at New York University in 2019. His work has been shown in Super Dutchess Gallery (New York), 80WSE Gallery (New York, USA), Field Projects Gallery (New York, USA), MANA Contemporary (New Jersey, USA), and more. Chen is also a co-founder of De:Formal, an online platform dedicated to promoting artists who work with mediums under-recognized in the conventional gallery system.

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is a Brooklyn-based mixed media artist. Lindsey-Hall holds a MFA in Photography from Parsons The New School of Design in 2012 and a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art in 2004. She has held solo shows at Victori + Mo Gallery, Christopher Stout Gallery, Brown Gallery at Duke University (Durham, NC), Gallery Aferro (Newark, NJ) and shown in group shows in various galleries in New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Louisville, KY, Savannah GA and in Pingyao, China. She is NARS Residency Recipient, and a participant in the Emerge Program with the Aljira Center for Contemporary Arts in conjunction with Creative Capital.

Levan Mindiashvili is a Georgian-born Brooklyn-based visual artist. They received his MFA from Buenos Aires National University of Arts (2010) and BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2003). They have exhibited at East Slovak Gallery, Kosovo; EFA Project Space, NY; ShauFenster, Berlin; BRIC, Brooklyn; National Museum of China, Beijing; Georgian National Museum; Marisa Newman Projects, NY; Silk Museum, Tbilisi and more. They are The Socrates Sculpture Park 2021 Fellow and a recipient of the Peter S Reed Foundation Grant, NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program fellowship, Creative Time X Summit Grant, AIM Fellowship of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and NARS Foundation Residency. Their work has been reviewed in publications such as Frieze, Art in America, HYPERALLERGIC, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsia Pacific, PIN-UP Magazine, Huffington Post, and more.