Armory Week 2017: SPRING/BREAK
SPRING/BREAK is occupying a new space this year at 4 Times Square, one of the largest commercial spaces in the city. Says co-director/co-founder Ambre Kelly,“We’re interested in engaging iconic, atypical environments where contemporary art is often absent. In past years this included the former Catholic school of one of the oldest cathedrals in Manhattan, then the de-commissioned postal inspection offices of one of the city’s largest post offices. Our new space is an expansion of this –occupying the 12th largest commercial building in Manhattan, and with it, a new space and seat of American culture to occupy.”
“The narrative of SPRING/BREAK Art Show follows along trails of cultural molting,” says co-director/co-founder Andrew Gori. “The migrations and travails of institutions—be they religious, governmental, or commercial—like most artists, are where our exhibitions roost.”
Oscar Wilde famously suggested great art ‘reveal beauty and hide the artist’. For the 2017 BLACK MIRROR exhibition, more than 100 curators will feature artworks that explore the dance of identity the artist undertakes –between hiding and showing the self–especially in the face of modern technology, political unrest, and glimmers from ghosts of Art History’s past.
SPRING/BREAK Art Show continues its mission to offer free exhibition space to independent curators in order to foster exploratory exhibitions in atypical art environments. By keeping overhead costs for independent curators low, their focus can be on emerging and mid-career artists, as well as installation, performance, interactive and video work
Chashama curator Janusz Jaworski will present his own unique interpretation of the year’s BLACK MIRROR exhibition. Says Jaworski, “In the process of living through time, we bring memory and objects with us from moments past into the Now, creating our sense of self, and providing the means to obscure and highlight the person we are today via the choices we’ve made, and continue to make, in what we carry forward. Or might memories self-propagate into the future, giving us no choice in the matter, unless we somehow find ways to destroy them? The five chashama studio artists featured in this year’s SPRING/BREAK Art Show document and memorialize their pasts; twist and bend memories into alternate universes; and deconstruct objects from their pasts and even the possibility of self-reflection.”
