S.O.S. Outreach, Programming and Exhibitions

Introduction to basic composting and Adopt-A-Worm campaign with the children of Parkchester After School Program, Bronx.

Come and join me at Eyebeam (Saturday, March 20, 1-6pm) as I'm collecting pledges for environmental stewardship, and teaching people the basics of urban friendly, worm-based composting

You are invited to join the Urban Wilderness Action Center for a day of action where people from NYC, Berlin, Amsterdam and London will design and disseminate projects around the theme of "urban wilderness."

UWAC DAY is Saturday, March 20. Each of four lead cities will host a day of free artist-led interventions that respond to urban wilderness. We will document the day through a live Twitter, Flickr, and video feed streamed through the UWAC website.

Live video chat with all four sites: 3PM EST
Ongoing live Twitter feed from each project site at #UWAClive

1-6PM EST, NYC:
Join us at Eyebeam for a series of FREE and open to the public events:
540 West 21st. Street, New York, NY 10010

• Eyebeam Student Residents Caroline Spivack, Jade Highleyman, Luther Cherry, Spencer Brown, and Zoe Penina Baker are working with artists Doris Cacoilo and Sonali Sridhar and gardener / window farmer Maya Nayak to workshop a guerrilla gardening andventure. Participants on UWAC Day will craft and distribute their own plant-based urban intervention.

• Tattfoo Tan (artist) will be onsite at Eyebeam collecting pledges for environmental stewardship, and teaching people the basics of urban friendly, worm-based composting. Free worms!

• Matthew Slaats (artist) will be at Eyebeam signing up participants to join Freespace, an initiative which will be made up of are forgotten spaces, private spaces, lost spaces. People are invited to go out and find and reclaim a space, or donate a space they control in some way for a period of time.

• Boswyck Farms will be demonstrating hydroponic systems, and introducing their new Mobile Guerrilla Kitchen.

• Liz Neves (healthy home consultant) will invite participants to re-establish wilderness in NYC by recreating a lost world where beavers dammed and turtles swam in flowing streams, and foxes frollicked under towering trees.

• Safari 7 will invite participants to embark on a self-guided tour of urban wildlife along the No. 7 Subway line. Listen in, grab a map, and go!

• Jay Weichun (filmmaker/artist) will be onsite from 2-6PM making flower bombs. Using a simple mixture of regional wildflower seeds, soil and clay, flower bombs are a fun way to spread color and life to places of neglect. Participants are invited to make their own flower bombs and form their own flower bombing collectives!

The Urban Wilderness Action Center (UWAC) is a project initiated by artist Jon Cohrs, in collaboration with the Eyebeam Student Residents, Eyebeam education coordinator Stephanie Pereira, and UK-based artist Kai-Oi Jay Yung. Please visit Eyebeam's website for a complete schedule of events in London, Berlin, and Amsterdam:http://eyebeam.org/events/electrosmog-festival-urban-wilderness-action-center

UWAC has been conceived of as part of ElectroSmog, a new, three-day, international festival that will introduce and explore of concept of "Sustainable Immobility": a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.

Tabeling Banner used at Eyebeam's ElectroSmog Festival:Urban Wilderness Action Center

Leaflet is also translated into Spanish to engage the public better.

There is a lack of access to fresh produce in the neighborhood of Tomkinsville and St. George in Staten Island. Yes, there is a summer farmer's market at the municipal parking lot but not every resident can afford to buy from the farmers market. Why the most simply and straight forward argiculture practice can't sustain the need of everyone? Shouldn't produce be more affordable when the farmer did not buy synthetic fertilizer and did not use harmful poison to control the weeds and pest? Let's not wait for the law to pass, the politician to appear to television, let plants some of the crops ourselves. Let's get inspired and work together and formed a community garden and be self sustainable.

Let’s Green Up Our Neighborhood! Learn how to compost, raise egg laying chickens and participate in a seed exchange. See what other gardeners are growing in Staten Island. Saturday June 12, 26 and July 10, 2-4pm here at Victory Laundromat. This S.O.S. (Sustainable. Organic. Stewardship.) programming is an art project by an artist and your neighbor, Tattfoo Tan and commissioned in part by The Laundromat Project. The Laundromat Project is a community-based non-profit arts organization committed to the well-being of people of color living on low incomes. Understanding that creativity is a central component of healthy human beings, vibrant neighborhoods, and thriving economies, we bring art programs to where our neighbors already are: the local laundromat. In this way, we aim to raise the quality of life in New York City for people whose incomes do not guarantee broad access to mainstream arts and cultural facilities. We understand that art exhibits may seem off-limits to the uninitiated. And in turn, the average person may feel locked out of their own creativity. To root art making in reality, every year we invite local artists of color to create public art projects in and/or around their neighborhood coin-ops through our Create Change program.

Let this bi-weekly programming be a catalyst to a greener future and create change in our own neighborhood.

This project was developed and commissioned in part by The Laundromat Project's Create Change Public Artist Residency Program.

Press:

New York Foundation for the Arts, Immigrant Artist Project Newsletter: Issue Fifteen, August 24, 2010

These recycle detergent bottles planters are fills with corn seedlings that will be given away at the Laundromat Project's event.

 We are pround to showcase the debut of Cat Wizard from Furgus Farm at The Laundormat Project.

July 15, 7pm Composting Know-how with Master Composter Tattfoo
July 22, 7pm Conversation about Urban Gardening

Arario Gallery is very proud to present Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian, an ambitious survey exhibition featuring the work of nearly fifty artists curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng.

Irrelevant wishes to highlight artists who are more American than Asian, based in New York, and embedded in an expansive community of emerging artists struggling to show and succeed in this cutthroat city. You will not find paintings about the Cultural Revolution or Mao Zedong that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will not find manga-infused characters performing acts of hypersexuality nor will you find decorative miniature drawings with motifs embedded within a specific cultural history.

What you’ll find is a surging flow of creativity where artists actively engage in their practice, exploring the absurd within everyday experience, the use and misuse of materials both new and found, and the curiosity of defining artistic practice. Food and consumption is considered within an urban agricultural environment, and social interaction is taken out of norm and reenacted in refreshing alternative ways. Pictured narratives gear toward a dark and isolated realm and obsession is the source behind abstracted images.

A major focus of this exhibition is to formulate a community, building a foundation for artists to gather and exchange ideas and experiences. There is an endless array of amazing underrepresented artists in NY, thriving yet unheard. Through this exhibition we get to see artists engaging with their given role and their interests within a particular medium, exploring on both conceptual and idealistic levels with painting, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. We get to see abstraction within the everyday and the everyday within abstraction. We get to see materials unfolded, manipulated, reworked and dysfunctioned. We get to feel self-conscious and hyper aware of our stance as viewers, where time and space is altered and questioned.

Irrelevant is a friendly and humorous, and somewhat ridiculous, rejection of a neurotic art market and its obsession with specifying artists to a particular culture and ethnicity. This exhibition purifies and de-labels the artist as Asian, by labeling the artist as Asian, to be shown inside a contemporary Asian art gallery.

Artists:

Seong Min Ahn, Shin Young An, Sophia Chai, Louis Chan, Karen Chan, Rona Chang, Gigi Chen, Yoon Cho, Micah Ganske, Hyoungsun Ha, Geujin Han, Takashi Horisaki, Jane V. Hsu, Hidenori Ishii, Hong Seon Jang, Kyoung Eun Kang, Heige Kim, Seung Ae Kim, Nancy Kim, Hein Koh, Shizuka Kusayanagi, Amy Fung-yi Lee & Caroline Jung-ah Park, JaeEun Lee, Sinae Lee, Soo Im Lee, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Pixy Liao, Juri Morioka, Tadashi Moriyama, Joel Morrison, Dominic Neitz, Christian Nguyen, Asuka Osawa, Eung Ho Park, Youngna Park, Jung Eun Park, R&D, Ruijun Shen, Satomi Shirai, Hidemi Takagi, Tattfoo Tan, Kikuko Tanaka, Jason Tomme, Mai Ueda, Kako Ueda, InJoo Whang, Mika Yokobori, Yejin Yoo, Jayoung Yoon, Seldon Yuan

Gallery hours are Monday thru Friday 10-6pm and by appointment.
Contact info@ararionewyork.com for more information.

Press:

Composting workshop with Master Composter Tattfoo at Arario Gallery, July 15, 7pm





Youngjune Hahm for Arario Gallery

Conversation about Urban Gardening at Arario Gallery, July 22, 7pm

with:

Derek Deckla, curator and activist
Andrew Casner, an urban farmer and artist
Daniel Bowman Simon, advocate
Aki Baker, designer and activist

Youngjune Hahm for Arario Gallery