Anxious Spaces 2015 Closing Party

Anxious Spaces: Installation as Catalyst is Clocktower's annual performance and installation festival that introduces a new generation of artists who are based in New York, partner regularly with alternative event spaces and collectives throughout Brooklyn and beyond, and utilize installation work as a platform for performance. The exhibition brings a dynamic selection of these artists onto Knockdown Center's dramatic compound for a month of on-site development, and the exhibition culminates with a July 26, 2015 celebration of the work and its fluid transformation from environment to stage.

Performance line-up:
DJ set by Ital - 7:30PM
Projection mapping from EyeBodega and dark techno with Via App - 8:30PM
Interactive procession with artist Lucas Abela's IV:BPM - 9:30PM

Click HERE to join the event!

More on the installations and performances:

Will Ryman presents Cadillac, a life-sized sculpture of the iconic American vehicle, constructed from Bounty paper towel, resin, and glue. The installation changes the meaning of two commercial symbols: The Cadillac; an American symbol of class and power, and Bounty paper towels; disposable and mass produced. The sculpture suggests that power is fragile.

Molly Lowe installs Growth, a sound/video piece and garden environment that draws the viewer out of the sun and into the darkness. It is a hypnotizing, heightened space where external and internal worlds fester in limbo. Here, viewers are invited to sit on a mysterious patch of grass and watch the miraculous minutiae of plant life grow, magnified on screen in a most sinister alien way.

Formed by a set of portable stand-alone single beat organic-analogue drum machines, Lucas Abela's installation, IV:BPM, is made from medical intravenous drip equipment forested together and wired to audio gear to generate overlapping complex surround polyrhythms. The public engages with the composition in three ways: by adjusting the IV nozzles to change the BPM, manipulating audio effects to augment the audio, and shifting the IV stands within the space to alter the mix. These participatory elements turn the installation into an instrument/drum machine orchestra, performed en mass by attendees and an organized procession on the day of the event.

Tim Bruniges presents Normalize (the pull of the earth), a site-responsive sound and sculptural installation engaging material tension and acoustic resonance within the architecture of Knockdown Center. Through the use of non-traditional sound (re)production forms, this installation explores the agency of sound as an atemporal and regenerative, autonomous entity. The installation is developed through an artist-in-residence collaboration with SIGNAL, Brooklyn.

Aurora Halal's installation, Where Exactly I Am, takes over a subterranean annex at Knockdown Center, transforming the space into a veritable dream-world. Darkly lit, in a surreal, hallucinatory way, a floating video is projected onto transparent screens, cloaking the mysterious cave in holographic effects. The video projection is a suspended moment in time, a kind of cubist video painting, in which the subject is filmed and shown from every angle. As visitors to the space immerse themselves in the room, they discover the film to be a motion study of a human figure, exploring the limitless possibilities of its form.

In an off-site ruin at the Maspeth space, Prince Rama present Fountain of Youth 11:11, a mythical water installation and tarkovskian musing on time and beauty. The crumbling brick walls of this roofless structure, set against the Edenic material of the piece—the restorative elixir of a veritable fountain of youth, flowing from discarded cans of monster energy—create a visual and conceptual paradox in the space. Two venus de milo stone sculptures stand ground at the fountain, confronting passersby with an elusive message.

Audra Wolowiec installs Concrete Sound, a modular series of cast concrete forms based on the geometric shapes of sound foam used in recording studios and anechoic chambers. Normally used to control sound, the shift in materiality does the opposite, refusing the intended function to instead create unsettling, muted landscapes. The work commissioned for Knockdown Center is a wall relief of a single panel that accumulates to form a large grid. While the work is directly related to sound, the strong geometric lines also call upon grids found in textiles, architecture, and industrial landscapes.

The July 26th event requests a suggested donation of $8-15, on a sliding scale. 5-10 p.m.