Jon Burgerman

CV: What are the first things that struck you about living in NYC?
JB: It’s not really like visiting NYC; before it was a lark riding around on a packed subway and having to buy over priced groceries. Now when I do it I affect a pissed off demeanour, it’s trudgery and inconvenient. I think I started doing this just to blend in. Visiting anywhere is generally better than living in a place. Living involves responsibilities. I might make my next goal never to live anywhere, I’ll just visit for extended periods of time.

CV: What about the art world here? Have you been pleasantly surprised, or maybe less pleasantly surprised, by its inner machinations?
JB: There’s lots to see and lots to do which is fantastic. There’s lots of opportunities but less time to do anything, so that feeling of being disappointed in oneself looms larger. Like any place, most people seem to know each other, even in a big city it’s a small world. And people here are just as flakey as anywhere else. Promises promises, shhh shhhhh… only say you’re going to do something if you truly intend to do it!

CV: Often times a change in studio or environment causes a change in artistic output. Are there any major differences now that your home and studio are the same place and in a new city?
JB: When your beady eyes are glued to a glowing screen and little else, you could be sat anywhere, unfortunately. So on one hand little has changed. But going out, seeing new things, meeting new people, breathing new toxins and licking up different scents has had a big affect. My drawings and paintings are continuing to evolve and develop and I’m sure that is in part to my new environment. I plan to get a studio for painting in though. Part one of my plan to move to NYC involved finding a place to live. Now I’ve achieved that and know where the post office is, I can move on to part two; find a nice, bright studio space within walking distance from my flat. It’s a little isolating working from home and I think I’m missing out on meeting people by ‘going to work’ each day.

The Slice is Right

CV: Your practice is super compartmentalized, with your commercial products residing at Burgerplex, a very active advertising practice, your band, and your body of fine artwork. Even so, everything you do is instantly recognizable within the Burgerman style, yet perfectly befitting its platform. How do you navigate these separate disciplines and maintain a cohesiveness in your work? Does this ever make you feel schizophrenic?
JB: Hey, who isn’t schizophrenic?! It’s a balancing act, I have to juggle many things all at once. If I stop and think about it all too much I’d probably screw up and drop the balls. Does this analogy make sense? I believe in sticking to a truth, a sensibility that makes sense to you, of you, as a person and an artist. Some days I’m a painter, the next I’m in a band and the day after that I’m designing a collection of clothing, the constant is always me and how my brain ekes out thoughts. If I stick to that then the disparate elements of my fragile world will add up to a competent satisfying whole.

CV: You refer to yourself as “lazy” in interviews. What the…?
JB: I am terrible. I’m lazy and distracted. I’m woefully undisciplined. New York is great and awful. I’m surrounded by dead beats and failures, which is kind of great, at least for my wheezing ego, but then this city also attracts super talented artisans which only further confounds my self pitying failed expectations. I could do better. All my school reports said that, that I was lazy and too busy distracting myself and others. I think they were on to something.

CV: How does participating in such an international scene (as opposed to a hyper local scene) affect your work?
JB: I don’t know. People are sort of similar all over the world. I don’t know what, if any, scene I actually belong to. Like good old Groucho once said anyway, I don’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.

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Flux Factory’s Board of Directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Christina Vassallo as Executive Director. She succeeds Chen Tamir, who, after five years of involvement with Flux as a Curator and Executive Director, had a major impact on its artistic programming and greatly expanded its organizational capacity.

According to Board member Nick Griffin, “Chen Tamir has done so much in her role as Executive Director to guide Flux through what has been a very challenging, but also very fruitful period. So it is of course with much sadness, and a great deal of whining, that I have accepted her decision to step down. That said, I could not be more excited or confident about the prospect of working with Christina Vassallo. She brings the aesthetic sensibility of a curator, the organizational skills of an administrator, and the passion of a true believer in the transformative power of an organization like Flux.”

Christina Vassallo joined Flux Factory in January 2010. As Adjunct Curator she co-curated the most recent Flux exhibition, The Typhoon Continues and So Do You. She is spearhearding additional upcoming projects, including hosting a quarterly meet-up and curator’s support network, as well as an interlocking series of events that address key concepts of collaborative art-making practices (Congress of the Collectives). As Executive Director of Flux Factory, she plans to preserve the best of Flux Factory’s unique culture and mission while further define the organization’s relationship to the larger cultural landscape of New York City. By procuring resources for projects, arranging collaborations with other collectives and partnering organizations, and providing a welcoming context for seemingly impossible ideas, Vassallo hopes to expand Flux Factory’s profile as an incubator for the creation of new artworks.

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Twelve artworks will be selected for display in shop windows along the avenue via an open call. See the call for proposals below, or click here.

The deadline is MAY 20.

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mix it up!

coy Man

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silk screening adventures

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In the current show, Ryan Roa contributes the kind of poetic and conceptually-driven installation that has come to define his body of work. Inside the small museum of Trinity Church, Roa has placed Re-form, a sculpture made of flashing emergency lights supported by a cleaved telephone pole, which recalls a downward pointing version of the cross of St. Peter.

Jones with Re-form

On the walls surrounding the sculpture are various hand-written and typed notes left by visitors as they consider the issues set forward through the exhibition and the church’s annual theme. These public communiques will be collected and presented in book format at the close of the exhibition. There is an effortless connection between the communicative power of Roa’s materials and the various levels of expression in the visitors’ notes.

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Hope/Crisis

And also today, the packaging and shipping elements for Random Number Multiples arrived! Each print comes with a letter of authenticity and a description of the artwork with artist bio & instructions on how to care for the print. But the element I’m most excited about in the shipping package are these awesome “handle with care” stickers.

Handle this

Prints go on sale Feb 1!!!!!
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Watz, Arcs04-01

Watz, Arcs04-00

The exciting part about these prints is that Thorp and Watz, who mainly use software as their medium, are embracing a technique that allows their hand to be so evident. All of the images in this post come from a weekend of silk screening at the Bushwick Print Lab, under the guidance of founder Ray Cross.

The four different prints are editions of 50, and are available exclusively through Random Number for $100 each. The online store launches the first week of February and we will celebrate with an exhibition showcasing both artists’ work on February 11 in Brooklyn. It will be a great opportunity to see the screen prints framed and in person if you’re in the NY area.

Details to follow shortly, but pre-orders can be placed by contacting info@randomnumber.nu. Click here to see more artwork details and photos from the printing process.

Thorp, RGB

Thorp, RGB

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CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Flux Factory, an open art collective that provides contexts for artists to create new work and actively promotes a community of diverse cultural producers, is currently accepting proposals for an exhibition that focuses on objects of war and occupation.

Armed conflict leads to unique forms of expression that pervade contemporary culture in myriad ways both visible and invisible, tangible and abstract. For this exhibition we are inviting artists to respond to one of five cultural by-products or expressions of war that have been chosen for their symbolic value and relevance to daily life. They include: (1) Transcript of the Milosevic war crimes trial at The Hague, (2) the balaclava face mask, adopted as a symbol of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, (3) US Army recruitment video game, (4) Save Darfur Coalition full-page ad in New York Times, and (5) North Korean Hell March video and the ensuing discussion posted on YouTube.

We invite you to respond to one of these objects or images in any way you wish. There is no limitation to medium, and a small honorarium will be available for selected proposals.

We will also feature a panel discussion and produce an accompanying catalogue of the exhibition. This show, organized by Douglas Paulson, Chen Tamir, Ginger Shulick, and Christina Vassallo, is an extension of a previous exhibition by Tamir, “One After Another,” in which 8 artists were asked to respond to a photojournalist’s image of Palestinian prisoners being led blindfolded and handcuffed to an Israeli military base near the Gaza Strip. You can read more about “One After Another,” which was presented in 2009 at the National Gallery of Saskatchewan, here.

Interested parties should submit:

• One paragraph explaining your project. 300 words maximum. Please title your document in this format: LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_LETTER.DOC or .RTF
• List specific installation requirements (how large a space would you need, electrical or hardware requirements, etc) along with a projected production and installation budget
• Documentation of previous work: Maximum 2 page PDF document or 5 JPEG images (72 dpi only)
• Images should be titled: LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_IMAGE#
• Or 5 minutes of video. Please do not send movie files. Instead, include a link to your work online in the proposal paragraph.
• Resumé or bio, maximum 2 pages. Titled LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_BIO.DOC or .RTF

The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, January 19. Please use “War Show Proposal” as the subject of your email, and remember to add your name to all materials. Do not send original material.

Send submissions to christina[at]fluxfactory[dot]org. If you have any questions, please email with “War Show Question” in the subject line.

We’re looking forward to your proposals!

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Applications are due NOVEMBER 11, and you can find the official form here. Below is a photo of last year’s 2nd place winner, Katie Huffman, who cleverly worked around the framing grid for her Winter Solstice scene.

Katie Huffman, Pillow Cafe, 2009

Any discussion of artist-designed Brooklyn storefront windows wouldn’t be complete without a nod to the inspired displays at Desert Island, the fascinatingly geeky comics shop on Metropolitan Ave in Williamsburg. The owners have showcased mostly female artists in their window displays, and have even opened their storefront to a kids art program. The striking arrangements include scale models of redbird subway trains made of cardboard, the psychedelic displays of Ali Aschman, a natural history museum-type display by Sherri Hay & Raphael Leon, and James Moore’s glowing stalagmite that is currently on display.

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