June 8 - June 27 2018

BOBBY BUSNACH | KATRINA DEL MAR | MICHELLE HANDELMAN | JOHN KELLY | BOBBY MILLER

Opening Reception: Friday, June 8, 6-9 pm

Bobby Busnach

Stranger in an Alt-World

"Throughout the 70’s I photographed my friends as family. Those portraits and group shots reflected the times, as well as our lives. Most of that family of friends have not survived. I am a survivor, and feel an obligation to speak for my friends and for what was important to us, as well as for the many others of my generation who have passed before their time. I am concerned that the truth of what has come before us will be obliterated and forgotten, just as I myself may be forgotten when my time comes. As I move closer to that time I am overwhelmed by the imagery from my life, particularly from the 60’s and 70’s, and from the early days of our fighting in the streets for Gay Rights, Women’s Liberation, or Black Power, all of which directs who I am today and how I still see the world. In my work I utilize sexual politics, gender-fuck, transformation, iconic imagery, personal experience, as well as political statement in a way that I hope brings that work into a timelessness, today, yesterday, as well as tomorrow. Marilyn Monroe, to me, is a timeless icon, a perfect example of someone who fought and struggled to achieve the American Dream only to have it snatched from her grasp. I feel that inside all of us is a little bit of that innocence and sensuality, as well as a vulnerability and fear of being alone while surrounded by millions of people. My silk screens, photos, collages, writings, remixes… allow me to make peace with, rather than to run from, my ghosts, and to confront my own great fear of being alone though surrounded by a world of millions of people."

Bobby Busnach has shown his work in numerous galleries, including the Leslie-Lohman Museum in NYC this past January. A selection of Bobby’s 70’s photos (packed away in a suitcase for 30 years) are currently featured in a layout in the spring/summer edition of Hunter Fashion Magazine issue 32. And, in the works, is a book out of the U.K. also of Bobby’s 70’s photos of his family of friends.

Katrina del Mar

Super 6

Katrina del Mar is a New York-based photographer, video artist, writer, and award-winning film director. Best known for her decades-long work in video and photography, chronicling the reality and illusion of her Lower East Side friends and lovers as punk heroines; within her girl gang movie world. Del Mar’s critically acclaimed “Girl Gang Trilogy” of films has thrived internationally, playing venues such as the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France; the MoMA Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach and at many film festivals, art venues, universities and cinema houses. “Gang Girls 2000” was compared favorably to Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” and got a four-and-a-half-star review in Film Threat. “Surf Gang” won a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Video, among other awards. In 2013 Katrina successfully ran a Kickstarter crowdfund campaign for “delMarvelous” an ongoing short serial documentary web series. Katrina completed her MFA at Bard College in 2017 and received the 2018 Kathy Acker Award for Film.

Michelle Handelman

Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume

“My work can be best described by theorist Helene Cixous’ ideas of Visceral Feminism: aggressively traversing the corporeal landscape in its various forms of excess and undress, while simultaneously giving it up for the viewer in an overflow of visual and psychological sensations.”

Michelle Handelman uses video, live performance and photography to make confrontational works that explore the sublime in its various forms of excess and nothingness. Raised during the late 1960s, Handelman split her time between Chicago, where her mother was a fixture in the art world, and Los Angeles, where her father was a player in the sex industry. Her art developed through great struggle and loss throughout the era of the AIDS crisis and over the years Handelman has voraciously traversed all these worlds, developing a body of work that investigates ways of looking at the forbidden and revealing the dark, subconscious layers of outsider agency.

Her recent works Hustlers & Empires (2018), a commission with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Irma Vep, The Last Breath (2013/15); Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume (2009/12); and This Delicate Monster (2004/07) are all large scale, multi-channel video and performance works that were successfully produced in partnership with multiple venues including the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Henry Art Gallery, Participant, Inc., and the Contemporary Austin.

She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and has been awarded grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Cultural Agency, and Creative Capital MAP Fund among others. Her work has shown internationally including Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; Guangzhou 53 Art Museum; PERFORMA, Krannert Art Museum; Lincoln Center; REDCAT and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been widely reviewed in The New York Time, Art in America, Art Forum and featured in catalogs for many exhibitions including Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde and Moving Time: Video Art at 50/ both curated by Michael Rush. Other projects include Passerby > Ghost Sites for the show public.exe: Public Execution (Exit Art 2004) curated by Anne Ellegood and Michele Thursz; DJ Spooky vs. WebSpinstress M (2002) an animated collaboration with Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky, and in 2007 Bloomingdale’s chose Handelman’s work for their Fall Art Campaign.

Handelman was based in San Francisco during the 1990s and collaborated for many years with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene. Together they created several bodies of work including The Torture Series (Sony Visions Award 1995) and the film Catscan (1990). In 1995 she directed the feature documentary BloodSisters (Bravo Award), an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene. She also performed in several films by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, worked on Jon Moritsugu’s film production Terminal USA and collaborated with Eric Werner, co-founder of the industrial performance group Survival Research Laboratories.

Her fiction and critical writing appear in several anthologies including Inappropriate Behaviour (Serpents Tail, London 2001) and Apocalypse Culture 2 (Feral House Press 1994). Her work is in the collection of Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art; Kadist Art Foundation SF/Paris; di Rosa Foundation and Preserve, Napa, California; and Zabludowicz Art Trust, London. Handelman is an Associate Professor in the Film & Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

John Kelly

Excerpts from Sideways Into the Shadows

John Kelly is a performance and visual artist. He has created over 30 group and solo performance works, including ‘Pass The Blutwurst, Bitte’ (1986) and ‘Find My Way Home’ (1988), both of which received NEA American Masterpieces Dance Awards (for their 2010 & 2011 reconstructions). Recent works include ‘Escape Artist Redux’ at Bard Live Arts (2014), and ‘Love of a Poet’ with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River to River Festival (2015).

Other awards include 2 Bessie Awards; 2 Obie Awards; a CalArts Alpert Award; a Visual AIDS Vanguard Award; and the Ethyl Eichelberger Award. Fellowships include: The American Academy in Rome; The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; The Guggenheim Foundation; The Sundance Theatre Institute; Art Matters, Inc., and a USA Artists Fellowship.

Acting credits: the Broadway production of ‘James Joyce’s The Dead’ (Bartell D’Arcy); Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ (Cupid), at A.R.T. (Eliot Norton Best Actor Large Ensemble Award); Rinde Eckert’s ‘Orpheus X’ (Jon/Persephone) directed by Robert Woodruff, at TFANA; ‘Dog Days’ (Prince), an opera by David Little, directed by Robert Woodruff; ‘Threepenny Opera’ (Streetsinger/Filch) at Atlantic Theatre Company, directed by Martha Clarke; ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ (Spencer Reese), a film written and directed by James Franco.

His visual artwork has been exhibited at Alexander Gray Associates, NY; MOMA; the List Visual Art Center at MIT; ICA, Philadelphia; The New Museum; PS 1; Art In General; MACRO, Roma; Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Firenze; the Coreana Art Museum, Soeul, Korea; and the Howl Art Gallery, NY.

He is currently completing his first graphic novel ‘A Friend Gave Me A Book’, and recently released his first solo recording ‘Beauty Kills Me’ on the Strange Troubadours label. Future plans include a new work about Samuel Steward (poet, novelist, and university professor who left academia to become a tattoo artist and pornographer) at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in 2019.

Bobby Miller

Wigstock

These photographs of Wigstock, the outdoor drag festival in NYC, are from my book “ Wigstock in Black & white” and were taken between 1985 and 2002. The people in them are part of a diverse community of artists in New York City.

Bobby Miller, born in Washington DC in 1952, is a performance poet, writer, actor and photographer. He has been taking photographs since 1974. His first influence was his mother Dorothy C. Miller, a prolific amateur photographer. His first contemporary influences were Christopher Makos, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jimmy De Sana. Miller studied photography at The New School with Lisette Model.

As a hair and make-up artist he worked with photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Lynn Goldsmith, Diane Turbeville, and Christopher Makos among others. He is the author of 25 books of photography and poetry. His work has been shown at AMP Gallery in Provincetown, Woody Shimko Gallery in Palm Springs and most recently The Howl Gallery in NYC.

As a poet and spoken word artist he has collaborated with recording artist DJ Dmitry of the band Dee-Lite on a recording of “My Life as I Remember It to Be” released in 2015 and can also be heard on Epic Records CD Home Alive with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Joan Jett, and others performing his “Keep Your Mouth Off My Sisters”.

He has performed his original material at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, The Smithsonian Institute, New York University, Westminster College, The Rhode Island School of Design, Bennington College, The American Crafts Museum, The New York Historical Society, The Massachusetts State Poetry Festival, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The CMJ Music Festivals, Jackie 60/Mother/ NYC, ARO.SPACE/Seattle, The Kitchen, LaMama etc., Dixon Place, P.S.122, Fez, and The Downtown Arts Festivals in lower Manhattan. He was also a winner in The National Poetry Slam as a member of The Nuyorican Poets and has performed internationally with poet John Giorno and alone at venues including The Tabernacle, The Battersee Arts Center, The ICA in London and The Glasgow Center for The Arts in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mr. Miller is also the recipient of a Jackie 60 Lifetime Achievement Award, four Jackie 60 Awards and a NYC Glammy Award.

A LIVE GALLERY SPACE