Jonas Olson and Carol Pereira, Queens Biennial

My friend Jonas and his wife Carol are going to be in the Queens Biennial.

Here is the Press Release:

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY 11368-3398
718.592.9700
www.queensmuseum.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Coren Denise Cooper
718.592.9700 x 221

ccooper@queensmuseum.org

QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART CAPTURES THE POWERFUL
ARTISTIC ENERGY OF THE BOROUGH IN
QUEENS INTERNATIONAL 4

A Biennial Survey of Artists Living or Working in Queens:
42 Artists, Collaboratives and Collectives from 18 Countries who
Redefine the Artistic Landscape of Queens
January 24 – April 26, 2009

Queens, NY, December 15, 2008 – The Queens Museum of Art is proud to open 2009 with Queens International 4 (QI4), the fourth installment of its biennial, on view January 24 – April 26, 2009. A survey of new and on-going projects by 42 emerging and established artists, artist collaborations and artist collectives from 18 countries that now live and/or work within Queens, QI4 reflects the multiple influences, thematic breadth and broad range of traditional and experimental approaches employed by the vibrant and growing artist communities in Queens.
By developing their own artistic perspective from a position on the art world periphery rather than at its center of influence, the QI4 artists explore the contradictions of the mainstream art world and the real world.

In 2000, the US census revealed the borough of Queens to be the most ethnically diverse county in the nation and QI4 represents that diversity with artists from Australia, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Peru, Scotland, South Korea, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. As a result, just as Queens has been celebrated, marketed and branded as a local/international destination, this exhibition is both local and international in scope.

"The artists in Queens International 4 are engaged in breaking past aesthetic barriers, as well as, those of culture, tradition, heritage and nationality," says Erin Sickler, the exhibition co-curator and QMA Curatorial Assistant. "They reject conventional art theories in order to develop critical conversations with their immediate non-art surroundings."

Guest co-curator José Ruiz adds, "Through migration the internationalism of the world becomes the multiculturalism of Queens. Multiculturalism does not imply a static representation of multiplicity but rather an ever-changing shift amongst multiple cultures. Multiculturalism in Queens is in a moment of regeneration. QI4 aims to embody the complexity and multiplicity of artists within Queens and the scope of art in general."

QI4 aims to present the neo-culturation of Queens as a growing model for society at large. The artists’ non-conventional collaborative, interactive and public art practices are an example of this cultural theory at work within the realms of culture, identity politics, geo-political spaces, aesthetics, and environmental issues.

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Alejandro Diaz
Critics Welcomed!, 2003 – present
Courtesy Mary Goldman Gallery, NY and the artist
QI4 offers visitors and critics alike a wide selection of work ranging from the spectacular to the subtle. Whether overt or contemplative each of the works challenge normalized paradigms such as "multiculturalism", "globalism", "resistance" and "aesthetics."

Chin Chih Yang, Tim Thyzel, and artist collectives Douglas Paulson and the Anti-Fascist Culture Club and SP Weather Station examine current global and environmental issues from various perspectives through site-specific projects for QI4. Chin Chih Yang and Tim Thyzel investigate the use of everyday items from different standpoints. Yang uses discarded found items to create his work. For Human Sculpture, Yang encourages passersby to attach trash to his body in order to create a new suit of armor. Tim Thyzel, a sculptor, creates boats from common consumer materials such as bubble-wrap and packing tape, as a means of injecting socially conscious functionality into everyday life. Thyzel’s Packing Tape Boat Launch will set sail in Flushing Meadows Corona Park’s Meadow Lake on Saturday, April 4 and Douglas Paulson and the Anti-Fascist Culture Club will launch The Undiscovered Atoll of Flushtopia, a chain of islands in Meadow Lake at the beginning of the run of the show. SP Weather Station installs artist-run weather stations in various locales, and for QI4, they will install a station on the roof of the Museum, allowing visitors to monitor and interact with their immediate and global environment.
For QI4, Future Shock and Ryan Humphrey utilize bike culture as a forum to activate and complicate the question "what is art?" as viewed from the lens of adolescent nostalgia and popular culture. Future Shock is an artist collective who merges BMX bikes with large sound systems, creating an undeniable dialogue and social interaction with their environment. Their "stereo bikes" reflect a syncretic relationship between their Caribbean culture and current relationship with Queens. In Fast Forward, a site-specific installation, Humphrey builds a BMX "rhythm section," comprised of undulating ramps enclosed by quarter-pipes surrounded by a backdrop of customized bikes, wallpaper and other objects that will be activated during the opening by BMX trick-riding legend Dizz Hicks.

Kirsten Nash and Omar Chacón’s paintings may appear subtle to some, but their work is bold in its rearticulation of a traditional medium. In Nash’s landscapes, shopping mall parking lots and streetlights become deep fields of subtle color, incised lines, and reworked grids where impermanence and silence reign. Chacón’s abstract paintings forge together expression with craft, color with symbolism, fluidity with density to explore the limitations and possibilities of the canvas.

Heidi Boisvert and Oded Hirsch uncover the politics that lay hidden in art. Boisvert will premier a 3D video game, Stich, Cut & Die, which invites Museum visitors to assume the role of a NY Times journalist who is about to uncover an international human trafficking network. Hirsch uses staged narrative photography to explore the psychological aftermath of war.
FEATURED ARTISTS

Cara Judea Alhadeff
Heidi Boisvert
Omar Chacón
Corey D'Augustine
Gregory de la Haba
Domenick Di Pietrantonio
Alejandro Diaz
Eteam
Lars Fisk
Future Shock
Nicholas Ragbir, Veronica Ragbir, Travis Bhimraj,
Anil Bhimraj, Jessica Ragbir
and Rattan Bhimraj
Tommy Hartung
Karolyn Hatton
Daina Higgins
Oded Hirsch
Sin-ying Ho
Ryan Humphrey
Janelle Iglesias
Lisa Iglesias
Darren Jones
Cecilia Jurado
Jayson Keeling
Las Hermanas Iglesias
Ha Na Lee
Jia-Jen Lin
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
Yasue Maetake
Derick Melander
Brendan Mulcahy
Kirsten Nash
Kymia Nawabi
SP Weather Station
Natalie Campbell and
Heidi Neilson
OKAMOTO STUDIO
Shintaro Okamoto, Takeo
Okamoto, Jeremy Mangan,
Ben Grasso, Timothy Colla,
Kaz Adachi, Thomas Brown,
Gerard Greco, Meghan McKee and Daniel Guzman
Jonas Olson and Carol Pereira
Douglas Paulson and the
Anti- Fascist Culture Club
Chris Domenick, Christopher Robbins, Chuck Yatsuk, Elizabeth Tubergen, Emcee C. M., Master of None, Eva la Cour, Jacob Goble, John Baca and Rachelle Beaudoin
Justine Reyes
Jaye Rhee
Dario Solman
Tim Thyzel
Nicole Tschampel
Jovan Villalba
Chin Chih Yang
Amy Yoes
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EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
An extensive 120 page full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes a foreword by Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director of Queens Museum of Art and critical essays from Co-curators José Ruiz and Erin Sickler. Additional contributors include writer Jeanne Su, Prerana Reddy, QMA Director of Public Events, and former Queens International participants Michael Rakowitz (’02), Isidro Blasco (’04) and Mary Valverde (’06). Artists’ entries, biographies and a full exhibition checklist will be included.

EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Queens International 4 and related programming are made possible with the generous support of the Blumenfeld Development Group, Ltd., Build it Green NYC, JetBlue Airlines, and the QMA's Board of Trustees and Advisory Committee, our corporate and foundation supporters, members and friends.

ABOUT THE QUEENS INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
Queens International 4 is the fourth in an ongoing series of biennial exhibitions presented by the Queens Museum of Art. QI4 illustrates the individuality and complexity of twenty-first-century art from creators who utilize alternative methods to work inside and outside of their studios, identities, cultures, and nationalities. Thus, the exhibition is an extension of the Museum’s mission to serve as a nexus for diverse communities and contemporary artists locally, nationally and internationally.

In 2002, the Queens Museum of Art inaugurated Queens International, a biennial exhibition of artists from around the world who live and/or work in Queens. While the number of international art fairs and festivals has risen sharply over the last decade—sprouting up from Sydney to Istanbul and Dakar to Taipei—Queens International remains unique. Rather than importing international artists to a specific locale, Queens International addresses the growing influx of international contemporary artists in Queens from a local standpoint.

CURATOR BIOGRAPHIES
José Ruiz is the co-curator of Queens International 4. He received a B.A. in Studio Art and Latin American Studies from the University of Maryland and a M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres Department in 2004. In 2000, he founded Decatur Blue, a gallery in Washington, DC that produced over 30 exhibitions and performances. His interests in alternative spaces and grassroots organizations led him to the Bronx River Art Center in 2006, where he serves as Gallery Director and Curator. Some of his curatorial projects include DB Sides, Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran, Washington, DC (2001), San Francisco Video Artists’ Festival (2004), Appropriately Yours, Transformer Gallery, Washington, DC (2006), Laura Napier: Spontaneous Formations, PS122 Gallery, New York, NY (2008) and Metro Poles: Art in Action, Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY (2008).

Erin Sickler is the QMA’s Curatorial Assistant/Exhibitions Manager and co-curator of Queens International 4. She received her undergraduate degree in Visual Art from Oberlin College and an interdisciplinary graduate degree in Art History and Museum Studies from New York University. After working for various artists and art organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, she joined the Curatorial Department of The Queens Museum of Art where she has curated exhibitions including Jane South: Deceptive Volume (2008) and Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Sowing Seeds (2007). She is the New York correspondent for the German art magazine Kunst Bulletin.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Queens Museum of Art offers a range of programs, activities and events for visitors of all ages that will incorporate artists, scholars, and critics in thought-provoking discussions on a wide variety of issues central to the works on view. Public Programs for QI4 include a variety of happenings for various age levels. The first Saturdays of each month during the run of the show include gallery talks, artist-led workshops, artists’ studio tours, and a film program, "A Frame Apart", a series of short films that use Queens as their centerpiece. Family-friendly programs occur every first Sunday through MetLife Foundation presents First Sundays for Families programming. QI4 will close with a bike rally in Flushing Meadows Corona Park with Transportation Alternatives, artists FutureShock, Chin Chih Yang and local bike clubs. A full schedule follows and additional information can be found online at www. queensmuseum.org or via telephone at 718.592.9700.

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January 24, 2009
6pm – 12am
Opening Reception of Queens International 4
The opening will feature a gallery walk-through, screenings of the film series, "A Frame Apart: Short Films on Queens," live performance by Flushing indie-rock band The Unstoppable Death Machines, DJ Witnes playing a special Queens hip hop set, DJ Juan Mapu representing Queens’ Latin flavor, and performances by QI4 artists Chin Chih Yang, Ryan Humphrey and Carol Periera with Jonas Olson.

February 1, 2009
1 - 4:30pm
MetLife First Sundays for Families: Queens International 4 - A Closer Look
Join Queens-based artists from the exhibit Queens International 4 for a special tour. Bring unwanted and lightly worn clothes to participate in artist Derick Melander’s project to make sculptural stacks out of donated clothes. Susan Thomason of City Center will lead an interactive dance workshop using themes in the exhibit to create a kinetic human sculpture.

February 7, 2009
12 - 7pm
Queens International 4 Screenings & Performances
12 - 2pm: Join artist Derick Melander in his participatory project Into the Fold (2009). During the opening and throughout the exhibition, he will be creating a site-specific work made from folded and stacked second-hand clothing with the help of museum guests.
2 - 3pm: Artists from SP Weather Station have installed a weather station on the roof of the Queens Museum of Art, and sculptor Nathalie Miebach will deliver the first in a series of three presentations around the data they have collected. Miebach translates scientific data related to ecology, climate change and meteorology into three-dimensional structures principally through weaving.
3 - 6pm: Join us for a screening of "A Frame Apart: Short Films on Queens" followed by Q&A with directors. Film titles include:

MADE IN QUEENS (Nicolas Randall and Joe Stevens, 2008,10 min)
Profiles "America’s first stereobike crew," a group of IndoCaribbean kids from Richmond Hill who modified their BMX bikes with banging sound systems.

TWO DOLLAR DANCE (Yolanda Pividal, 2008, 17 min)
Every weekend, hundreds of Latino immigrants pack the dance clubs of Jackson Heights, where they meet the "two-dollars ballerinas," women who will be their dance floor partners for two dollars a song. Through their eyes, this film dives into the stories of men and women who leave their families and countries behind to work in the United States.

AROUND THE WAY (Ruby Flores, 2008, 11 min) Filmed in Jamaica, Queens, and is an exploration of diversity, identity, and being a Filipina-American woman. The film celebrates friendship and a summer afternoon in Queens.

THE IRISH ROPES (Robert Sarnoff, 2006, 30 min)
The Irish Ropes charts the rise and fall of a champion-producing gym on a dead end street in Far Rockaway, while simultaneously following ten Golden Glove aspirants on their quest for glory at Madison Square Garden.

MODERN DAY ARRANGED MARRIAGE (Rehana Mirza, 2006, 6 min)
When two young Indian-Americans, Rajesh and Suna, meet in a local restaurant to "interview one another," is marriage on the menu or just coffee?

ARIS AND THE ART OF PARKOUR BHANGRA-FU (Chrysovalantis Stamelos & Paras H. Chaudharti, 2007,12 min)
A stolen bag leads our hero on a chase through the streets of Astoria. This throwback to the old school Hong Kong martial arts films remixed with French Parkour and some Greek, Arabic and Indian music is a newly re-energized action genre.

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6 – 7pm: Face the Music Concert
Face the Music is made up of twenty students, ages 11 to 16, who love new classical music with a "rock edge." Director and Queens Resident Jenny Undercofler, and composer Huang Ruo will lead them in a program of intense, conceptual, yet rocking works by David Lang, Phil Kline, and Michael Gordon.

March 1, 2009
1 - 4:30pm
MetLife First Sundays for Families: Queens International 4 – Artists Explore Nature
For his performance Human Sculpture, QI4 artist Chin Chih Yang incites passersby to decorate his body with trash creating a new suit of armor for the artist/environmental warrior. Picking up on the theme of sustainability, join Bash the Trash in building and then performing on instruments made from trash. SP Weather Station has built an artist-run weather station at the Queens Museum of Art and organized three entertaining weather-related presentations throughout the day in the Panorama of the City of New York.

March 7, 2009
Queens International 4 Field Trip
3 - 6pm: Long Island City Studio Tour of Queens International 4 Artists
Co-curators Jose Ruiz and Erin Sickler will lead intimate tours of the studios of QI4 artists Domenick Di Pietrantonio, Karolyn Hatton, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Tim Thyzel, Nicole Tschampel, and Amy Yoes. A light snack will be provided. Space is limited, for information and to RSVP
email: QueensInternationalFieldTrip@gmail.com.
6pm – late: For the adventurous, finish the evening with an Opening/Performance at QI4 artist Gregory de la Haba’s studio.

April 4, 2009
Queens International 4 Sets Sail!
2 - 3pm: Artists from SP Weather Station have installed a weather station on the roof of the Queens Museum of Art and digital media artist Jane Marsching will deliver the last in a series of three presentations around the data they have collected. Marsching's current project, "Arctic Listening Post," explores our past, present and future human impact on the Arctic environment through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices, including video installations, virtual landscapes, dynamic websites, and data visualizations.
3 – 6pm: Hop on the trolley at the Queens Museum of Art and head to the boathouse at Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Part for the literal launch of two artists projects while enjoying a festive BBQ. Douglas Paulson and The Anti-Fascist Culture Club will install his sculptural islands The Undiscovered Atoll of Flushtopia and Tim Thyzel will launch his Packing Tape Boat. Please call 718-592-9700 at noon that day for rain announcement, Rain Date: April 11th.

April 5, 2009
5 – 6pm
Crossing the BLVD: Crossing the Cultural Divide
Join Judith Sloan of Earsay for a unique afternoon mixing cultures, stories, and performers, reflecting the international mashup of Queens, the most diverse locality in the United States. Featuring monologues from Crossing the BLVD, an award-winning multimedia project about new immigrants and refugees created by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan of EarSay. Monologues will be performed by Queens Museum staff, along with a multi-ethnic cast including Michael Premo, Editha Rosario, and Geeta Citygirl. Dancers Elise Knudson and Teresa Kochis choreograph pieces to spoken-word stories about the changing face of America. Music by Basya Schecter (of Pharoah’s Daughter) and Taylor Rivelli.

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April 26, 2009
3 – 5pm
Closing Celebration Queens International 4
Join us for a Bike Rally headlined by Future Shock, an IndoCaribbean bike gang from Richmond Hill whose rides are tricked out with thumping sound systems. QMA and Transportation Alternatives will invite bike gangs, artists with bike projects, bike advocacy groups, modders, and bike clubs and crews for an outdoor celebration to close out the 4th edition of Queens International with a bang. For his performance Human Sculpture, QI4 artist Chin Chih Yang incites passersby to decorate his body with trash, creating a new suit of armor for the artist/environmental warrior. Please call 718-592-9700 at noon that day for rain announcement, Rain Date: May 3rd.

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ABOUT THE QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART
The Queens Museum of Art was established in 1972 to provide a vital cultural center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park for the borough’s unique, international population. Today it is home to the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335 square foot scale model of the five boroughs, and features temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art that reflect the cultural diversity of Queens, as well as a collection of Tiffany glass from the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass. The Museum provides valuable educational outreach through a number of programs geared toward schoolchildren, teens, families, seniors and individuals with physical and mental disabilities.

DIRECTIONS
The Queens Museum of Art is located in The New York City Building in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Subway: 7 to Willets Point/Shea Stadium and walk approximately 10 minutes through the Park to the Museum, which is located next to the Unisphere. Alternatively, exit at 111th Street Station. Walk south on 111th Street past the New York Hall of Science. Left on 49th Avenue into the Park. Continue past fountain over the Grand Central Parkway Bridge. Museum is on right, next to Unisphere. Bus: Q48 to Roosevelt Avenue & 111 Street. South to Park. Q23, Q58 to Corona Avenue & 51 Avenue. East to Park. Car: Via the Grand Central Parkway, exit at Shea Stadium and follow signs to the Museum. Free parking.

ADMISSION
Suggested donation: $5 for adults, $2.50 for students (with valid identification) and seniors. Free for children 5 and under. The first Sunday of every month is free for families attending Metlife Foundation presents First Sundays for Families programming.

HOURS
The Museum is open Wednesday through Friday from 10:00am to 5:00pm, and from 12:00pm to 5:00pm Saturday and Sunday. The Museum is closed Monday, Tuesday and major holidays. Phone: 718.592.9700. Fax: 718.592.5778. Website: www.queensmuseum.org.