A Copious Flow

August 4 through 27, 2023
Opening August 4, 5 to 7pm
Free and open to the public Saturdays and Sundays, 11:30am to 5pm

Athens Cultural Center, 24 2nd Street, Athens, NY, and throughout Greene County

A Copious Flow  presents a selection of artworks concerned with the imagining, use, and control of public space, made by artists affiliated with Shandaken Projects. In this gallery presentation and in artworks appearing in the public sphere, the exhibition explores how a commons can be constructed from haptic, civic, poetic, and hegemonic perspectives. The phrase "a copious flow" is drawn from George Maciunas' Fluxus Manifesto, where it appears as a foundational metaphor in his call for wide distribution of art for the people.

Through his puckish reflections on, and prompts to reinvent, the substance of daily life, David Horvitz invests quotidian experience with exuberant possibility. The text-based and video works presented here each suggest new ways to approach public space and public responsibility. By reimagining time as qualitative, or suggesting that horticulture can be a threat to power, Horvitz reminds all individuals that their consent is required in order to form consensus—and that it can easily be withdrawn. A new artwork by Horvitz will be presented to each household in the Village of Athens while this exhibition is on view.

Julia Weist’s research-based, recursive practice investigates and intervenes in the systems it encounters. For her series “Motion Picture Division Association of America,” Weist identified filmic material that had been censored by New York State in the early 20th century, and reintroduced it to the Motion Picture Association, and locally to Mid-Hudson Cable, for consideration according to contemporary standards. Much of it still cannot officially be shown. Weist’s gesture reveals that the Hollywood media landscape—a shared cultural experience for most Americans and a strong force in the structuring of the public imagination—is contested territory that remains, to a surprising extent, subject to regulation and control.

Phoebe Berglund is a choreographer, dancer, and leader of the Phoebe Berglund Dance Troupe (PBDT) whose practice opens pathways for sensual experiences of public space. PBDT brings classical dance and experimental forms into urban parks and other natural settings. By allowing their surroundings to inform their movements, PBDT members come to know their local parks and other rehearsal and performance locations in atypical, physically intimate ways. All are invited to learn the PBDT method in a free workshop offered in Athens Riverfront Park on August 5.

Maggie Hazen’s extensive work with incarcerated individuals heavily informs her practice. In the gallery, her Threshold works, quixotic assemblages of aerial views of prisons, garden imagery, and lepidopterist equipment, reference systems of biopolitical control that create taxonomies of humankind so that freedom can be given to some and withheld from others. Hidden in Plein Sight, a new artwork by Hazen presented on a billboard on Route 23A from August 1 through 28, contrasts the interior of a jail cell with a view of the Hudson River Valley painted by Thomas Cole. This work poses difficult questions about who has access to which public spaces, including bucolic parkland, pastoral fictions, and prisons themselves.

In addition to creating works of visual art, Hazen also runs the nonprofit organization Juvenile Justice Arts and Media Network (JJAMN), which supports incarcerated and formerly incarcerated young adults with art education, scholarships, and professional development. On the occasion of A Copious Flow, JJAMN will present new artworks by the Columbia Collective, a multimedia group of young female and trans artists named after a facility in which they were incarcerated, on billboards throughout Greene and Columbia counties from August 1 to 28.

A Copious Flow is organized by Shandaken Projects, and co-sponsored by the Athens Cultural Center.

Outside: Movement Scores for Urban Ecologies
Workshop led by Phoebe Berglund
August 5, 10AM-12PM
Athens Riverfront Park, Athens, NY

This outdoor movement workshop, presented as a part of A Copious Flow, will focus on graphic and text-based scores that connect the body to natural surroundings. Participants will be guided through improvisational forms and drawing exercises to explore various dance notation systems: signs, symbols, scribbles, numbers, words, figures, and so on. The group will work from existing scores and create their own to perform. Anyone age 12 and up is welcome to attend: no dance or drawing experience is required. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Phoebe Berglund is an American choreographer based in NYC, who makes works for theaters, museums, galleries, and outdoor sites. Her choreography is characterized by the use of repetitive formal structures, athletic physicality accented by classical ballet and contemporary gestures. Berglund’s early formal training was in ballet and modern dance. In 2013 she earned her MFA at Hunter College in Combined Media and is the recipient of the Leutz/Reidel Fellowship at the Universitat der Kunst Berlin. Recently her work has been presented at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art 2022, The Getty Museum Los Angeles 2021, Sadler’s Wells Theater London 2021, Gallery of Academy of Music Czech Republic 2020, MoMA PS1 2018, Villa Empain Brussels 2018, The Center for Performance Research NYC 2017, New Art Dealers Alliance NY 2017, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church 2016. She has been an Artist in Residence at Swatch Group in Shanghai, Boghossian Foundation Brussels, MoMA PS1, Lighthouse Works Fishers Island, and Hunter College. She has been a Visiting Artist at the University of Arts Helsinki, Finland, Virginia Commonwealth University and MoMA. Berglund was an artist in residence at Shandaken: Storm King in 2018, and her work Signals in the Landscape was commissioned by Shandaken Projects to appear at Storm King Art Center in 2019.

Maggie Hazen is a New York-based visual artist from Los Angeles who has cultivated an artistic practice spanning sculpture, video, collage, performance, and installation to explore the complex ways in which subjects interact with and perform within the spaces they occupy. She is the founder and an active member of the Columbia Collective, which is dedicated to supporting the visibility of young incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists who have been rendered invisible by the system. Hazen’s work has been exhibited, screened and performed at institutions including The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Foreland Contemporary Art Campus, Catskill, NY; Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play, Miami, FL; The Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, CA; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Hazen has held residencies at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Shanghai, China; I:O residency at the Helikon Art Center, Izmit, Turkey; Vermont Studio Center in Vermont; and The Pasadena Side Street Projects, Pasadena; CA. She participated as a fellow in the Bronx AIM program and The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Currently, Hazen is working to build the Juvenile Justice Arts and Media Network, an emergent arts and media production platform supporting the creative freedom of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth in order to help heal cycles of harm, celebrate young creative talent and respond to the urgent challenge of foraging new terrains of justice. Shandaken Projects offered a printmaking workshop and production support to the Columbia Collective at Hazen’s invitation in 2022, on the occasion of their exhibition Talking Back at Foreland, Catskill, NY.

Witty and poetic, the work of David Horvitz meddles with systems of language, time and networks. Eschewing categorization, his expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, and natural environments. His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. Using image, text, and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works—in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost-and-found services—our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real. Horvitz was an artist in residence at The Shandaken Project in 2012, and was commissioned by Shandaken Projects to present his work Monsanto Seed Burning in 2013.

Julia Weist is a visual artist based in New York. Her practice focuses on the power that systems of control and circulation confer to individuals, communities, institutions, and governments. She produces artwork through participation, using strategies of collaboration and intervention to gain insight into bureaucracies, processes, tools, and relationships that are otherwise insular and opaque. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Jewish Museum among other collections. Her work has recently been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institution of Chicago and The Queens Museum. Her most recent public artwork, Campaign, debuted in Times Square in 2022. Weist was a board member of Shandaken Projects from 2012-2019.

Background image: David Horvitz, Give Us Back Our Stars, 2020-21, photograph by David Oliver, courtesy Athens Cultural Center.