The Parrish Art Museum opens "Radical Seafaring", a survey of artist site specific projects taking place on the water from an international rooster of artists. Works represented include performance art, journeys, actions and experiments by 25 artists based in the United States, Brazil, France, Japan, the Netherlands and Mexico. The multidisciplinary exhibition features 25 artists or collectives with works ranging from artist-made vessels, to documentation of creative expeditions, to speculative designs for alternative communities at sea.
The show is organized and curated by Andrea Grover, Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish. A color catalogue of 152 pages with essays has been published in conjunction with the show. "Radical Seafaring" opens with a Members Preview on Sunday, May 8, 2016, and continues on view through July 24, 2016.
The off-site project, Mary Mattingly’s houseboat, WetLand, 2014, will be docked on Sag Harbor’s Long Wharf shortly and open for visitors in May. WetLand is a modified houseboat made by the ecological artist Mary Mattingly to demonstrate easy-to-do sustainability projects (solar power, rain water collection and purification, vegetable gardening, upcycling, etc.). The project also describes the impact each individual can have on the environment.
“The increasing number of works created on the water by contemporary artists is approaching the critical mass of a movement like Land Art,” stated Grover in the exhibition announcement. “The ‘offshore art’ projects in "Radical Seafaring" represent a new form of expression that is especially powerful and timely as climatologists anticipate the effects of rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, and the impact on coastal zones—especially when one considers that half the world’s population live within 200 miles of a sea coast.”
.
Swoon (American, born 1977) "Swimming Cities of Serenissima", 2009. Floating performance and installation Photo: Tod Seelie. Courtesy Parrish Art Museum.
.
The variety, scope, and scale of the projects in the exhibition are presented in a range of media including models, videos, audio recordings, photographs that document performative and monumentally scaled projects as well as sculptures, drawings, prints, artifacts and installations.
Among the works on view will be Swoon’s handmade raft, Old Hickory, 2009, Mark Dion’s Cabinet of Marine Debris, 2013, Bas Jan Ader’s installation, In Search of the Miraculous, 1975, Simon Starling’s large format projection, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006, and detailed models by R. Buckminster Fuller (Triton City Model, 1980), Pedro Reyes (Floating Pyramid, 2004), and Cesar Harada (Protei 010.9 Mini Cargo, 2014).
The exhibition, featuring projects dating from 1968 to 2016, is organized by four themes—Exploration: the quest for new experiences; Liberation: self-reliance, the desire to shape one’s world, and Utopian impulses; Fieldwork: hands-on, methodological information-gathering about the environment; and Speculation: using waterways as the stage upon which to build other realities.
______________________________
"Radical Seafaring" is exhibited from May 8 to July 24, 2016 at The Parrish Art Museum. A Members Reception takes place on Sunday, May 8, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Click here to reserve or call 631-283-2118, extension 181. The Parrish Art Museum is located at 279 Montauk Highway Water Mill, NY 11976. www.parrishart.org.
RELATED PROGRAMMING: Mary Mattingly's WetLand will be docked at the Long Wharf in Sag Harbor in May and will be available for viewing Saturdays through Mondays. Click here for reservations and details. Free.
Tideland Sessions, an extended all-day series of talks and performances presents artists, writers, scientists and historians in conversations on environmental stewardship with a focus on the regional landscape. The event takes place on Saturday, May 21, 2016, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Click here for details and to register. Free for museum members, students and children or $10.
Play Reading of Men's Lives by Joe Pintauro takes place on Friday, June 17, 2016 at 6 p.m. The reading, produced and directed by Emma Walton Hamilton and Stephen Hamilton, celebrates the 25th anniversary of "Men’s Lives" by Joe Pintauro, based on Peter Matthiessen’s nonfiction book about the East End’s fishing community. Click here to register. Free for museum members, students and children or $10.
Copyright 2016 Hamptons Art Hub LLC. All rights reserved.