Second Sundays

SECOND SUNDAYS is a monthly series of open studios, live music, and site-specific interventions presented by Pioneer Works the second Sunday of every month. The series showcases artists in residence along with musical performances and DJs, curated by Olivier Conan.

Stream the event live on Clocktower Radio at clocktower.org/listen! Click here for a full list of Clocktower Radio events.

ON VIEW:
Z by Robyn Renee Hasty
Z Robyn Renee Hasty presents a new series of glass plate portraits created during her year long residency at Pioneer Works. Working with transgender, cisgender and a spectrum of genderqueer and gender non-confirming individuals, Z is collection of images that challenges our expectations of how gender is expressed, embodied and perceived.

NOMAD NO-MAD by Hyon Gyon
Hyon Gyon’s No-Mad Nomad brings together a grouping of the Korean artist’s large-scale canvases. Appropriating finely-shredded cloth, fabric scraps, wax, and other objects – such as shards of glass and fur forming snarled teeth– many of Gyon’s paintings depict a fearsome Korean shaman, while others more abstractly evoke a kind of existential, debris-ridden dread. One work features a vortex of childhood playthings; flattened stuffed animals revolve around a pseudo-face of sticky gold leaf, while a cheap, plastic doll is attached to the painting – rather brusquely – by its head, limbs hanging limply in the air. Both frightening and funny, Gyon’s work looms existentially in No-Mad Nomad, vacillating between representation and abstraction, the mystical and the everyday.

FROM WALDEN TO SPACE CHAPTER II/ THE HUT, 2015 by Stéphane Thidet
This project stages the collision between the book Walden or life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau (1854) and the mission Mercury Seven (1958) sending men to space. It is a polymorphic work, with several chapters, evoking the questions of autonomy, isolation, solitude, but also contemplation and enlarged perspectives through music and live performance with modular synthesizers ( Ciat-Lombarde, Grendel Drone Commander…).

THE FOREST by Andy Cahill, 2nd Floor Gallery
2011-2012 each panel 30×40 inches, acrylic on canvas

TRAINING SESSION by Mathilde Roussel, 3rd Floor Gallery
Training Session presents works on paper created by Mathilde Roussel during her residency at Pioneer Works. Set as a foundation for her upcoming September sculpture exhibition at The Invisible Dog Art Center, the project as a whole explores the cult of the perfect body in American culture, and puts into perspective aspects of mass production.

All work produced during Pioneer Works Residency.

OPEN STUDIOS:
Carmen Bouyer, Clocktower Radio, Robyn Hasty, Nanotronics Imaging, Paul Korzan, Janna Levin, Long Distance Poison, Ido Michaeli, Ruben Millares, Azikiwe Mohammed, Jesse Moretti, Mathilde Roussel, Chris Woebken, and Antonia Wright

INTERVENTIONS:
THE HOUSE IN THE SKY by Sascha Pohflepp & Chris Woebken, Garden Airstream
A series of conversations with contemporary thinkers on how we conceive of the future, cultures of chance versus cultures of control, ends of the universe, the role of statistical models in our understanding of the world, notions of agency throughout human history, utopia as Los Angeles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and much more.

The House in the Sky is set in a virtual re-creation of Josef van der Kar’s Wohlstetter House in the Hollywood hills, once home to two of the foremost future scenario thinkers of the 20th century and documented in a LIFE Magazine piece from 1954, a place that Geoff Manaugh in his accompanying essay calls “a nuclear Villa Diodati”.

Conversation participants (in no particular order): Jacob Gaboury, Kevin Slavin, Janna Levin, Nicola Masciandaro, Claire Evans, Gavin Schmidt, Sam Hart, Kate Marvel, Lars Büsing, Laura Ballantyne-Brodie, Oliver Medvedik and Joan Wohlstetter-Hall.

95mins, stereoscopic 4K projection

PORTSIDE OPEN WEEKEND, Mary A. Whalen 12-5pm
Sign-up for tours of the historic Mary A Whalen tanker in the Atlantic Basin as part of Portside New York’s weekend of free programs.

#trashDAY: WHO YOU CALLIN’ A BITCH?!? 4-5PM, Clocktower Radio
What happened to Sandra Bland? Why did the court of public opinion investigate Bill Cosby only after Hannibal Buress mentioned those decades old assault allegations in his standup? What is Missy Elliot doing? Why is there a regressive wage gap between men and women? How come, in 2013, two thirds of LGBT homicide victims were transgender women of color? Why did Diane Sawyer clutch her pearls when Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested that all 9 Supreme Court Justices could be women? Why is Michelle Obama, like, the flyest First Lady, ever? Why are only 14.2% of the top five leadership positions at the companies in the S&P 500, held by women? Was Bobbi Kristina murdered? Why is the woman on that subway ad frowning with two lemons and smiling with two grapefruits? Why they gotta bring citrus into all this? Why is Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important writers in the history of The United States, buried in an unmarked grave? How come a 6-pack of Hanes women’s white cotton briefs costs $7.24 and dudes can get a 7-pack of white cotton briefs for only 50 cents more? Why does Nicki Manaj think she’s original? Why is 17-year-old Kylie Jenner dating a 25-year-old person? And, most importantly, WHO YOU CALLIN’ A BITCH?!?

DJ BLACK HELMET: VINYL SET 5-6PM, Clocktower Radio
A deep funk and eclectic soul set from the creator of the Clocktower Radio series Your Boy Black Helmet, DJ Black Helmet cuts some classics and lesser knowns for an hour of sonic righteousness…

CLOCKTOWER RADIO ARTIST INTERVIEWS, Clocktower Radio
Cammisa Buerhaus 6-6:15PM
Cammisa Buerhaus is currently in residence at the Pioneer Works shipping container recording studio, where she is recording The Chroma Color Organ, her self built pipe organ, with collaborators including saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi and cellist Judith Hamman. Buerhaus is a performance and sound artist, most recently on stage at the Kitchen with the NYC Players this past March. She also released her debut record, YUU, on Wild Flesh Productions in June.

Mathilde Roussel 6:15-6:30PM
Pioneer Works’ resident Mathilde Roussel is a french artist based in Paris. Her drawings and sculptures are conceived like living organisms. During her creation process, Roussel progressively gives up control over the materials she uses by letting them find their own form of existence. She selects mediums that are both fragile and resistant: paper pulp, graphite powder, incised rubber or plants. This choice allows her to explore unstable forms and observe their continuous mutation. Through incision, opening, recovering and suspension, the artist forces the forms she produces to find their place in space, thus expressing and revealing the movement they contain in themselves. To a larger extent, Roussel’s practice seeks to record temporalities that inhabit our corporeality: aging, hardening, scarring and mutation. This research consists in producing tangible forms that indicate our vulnerability. At Pioneer Works Mathilde Roussel create works for her exhibition at The Invisible Dog Art Center curated by Gaelle Porte. She explores the way we transform our body to fight its deterioration, and ultimately, death.

LONG DISTANCE POISON
It Sounds Like Time Inside, 3rd Floor Studio
It Sounds Like Time Inside is a short film presented by Clocktower artists-in-residence Long Distance Poison, depicting experiments in candle making, modular video synthesis, and meditations on narrative and time. The evening begins with a short experimental candle and incense workshop. This workshop demonstrates the process behind the materials used in the film.

Something seems to be revealed but then suddenly is concealed. A relation to Being flickers.

During the opening of the video installation, Long Distance Poison hosts an experimental candle and incense workshop, forging material for their culminating A/V performance, Sound and Time. Come observe their process and ask questions, dip your own candle, and experiment with your time.

Rumkala Malantara 9pm, Garden Recording Studio
A repeat performance of Long Distance Poison’s modular video/analog sound event Rumkala Malantara will take place in the Pioneer Works recording studio at 9pm.

BORDER CROSSERS by Chico MacMurtrie/Amorphic Robot Works
Chico MacMurtrie/ARW premier the first version of Border Crosser, a lightweight inflatable robotic sculpture, which poetically explores and questions the notion of borders and boundary conditions. Inflating from a dormant organic heap of fabric into a form resembling a communication tower. It begins to arch toward the other side of the border as a peaceful metaphor.

Its actions allude to the equality of humanity against a backdrop of tensions and conflicts over national and cultural identity. Technology comes to the fore in this questioning of the boundaries placed upon trans-border cultures and ecologies.

Border Crosser provokes investigation of borders as constructed entities, expressing a utopian desire to live in a world without borders.

LA NEWYORKINA, Garden
La Newyorkina will be selling paletas, Mexican ice pops, in the garden throughout the evening. All products are handmade from scratch in small batches, using the locally sourced ingredients. La Newyorkina donates a portion of their sales to Crea, an organization that helps generate employment opportunities in Mexico for low-income women.

BENNY & BUBBLES, Garden
Benny and Bubbles sell nice records in the garden from 360 Van Brunt Street.

LIVE MUSIC:
THE WESTERLIES 6:30pm
The Westerlies re-imagine the chamber music experience through boldly personal performance, recording, collaboration, education, and outreach. Since their inception in 2011, they have cultivated a new brass quartet repertoire featuring over 50 original compositions as well as adaptations of Ives, Ellington, Bartok, Ligeti, Stephen Foster and numerous traditionals. Their music exudes the warmth of their longstanding friendships, and reflects the broad interests of its members.

JANKA NABAY 8pm
Janka Nabay is the king of Bubu – Sierra Leone’s brand of electro-pop. Back in his hometown of Sierra Leone, Janka electrified traditional Bubu music by adding drum machines and synthesizers and giving it a frantic edge that made him a national hero. Now based in the US, Janka has hooked up with musicians from Brooklyn and DC (where he lives) who call themselves the Bubu Gang. Janka and his musicians share a similar fascination with the old and the new, mixing modern beats and analog keyboards with call and response vocals, improvisation and touches of 70’s psychedelia. The collaboration seems to capitalize on the best of all worlds and the result is musically stimulating and just as danceable as Janka Nabay’s early hits. David Byrne’s label Luaka bop released their first full-length album a little while back.