Welcome Back - Maggi Peyton Gallery, Manhattan Borough President's Office, New York

 

How We Live Together, Anne Katrine Senstad

Photo courtesy of Yi Gallery 

Welcome Back

Maggi Peyton Gallery

Hosted by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office and President Gale Brewer

October 4th to December 6th, 2021

1 Centre St. South Entrance, 19th Floor

New York, NY 10007

(347) 239-9086

Opening Reception Monday, October 4th, 5-7pm

Maggi Peyton Gallery inside the Manhattan Borough President’s Office at 1 Centre St. South Entrance, 19th Floor, New York, NY.  

RSVP: events@manhattanbp.nyc.gov

The gallery is open to the public weekdays from 10am to  5pm. 

Welcome Back is a group exhibition featuring over thirty artists’ responses to the unprecedented COVID-19 Pandemic. Curated by Jean Sonderand for Maggi Peyton Gallery, and hosted by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, the exhibition is an opportunity for artists and the public to come together and consider the variety of public and private experiences we have faced over the last two years. Welcome Back is a celebration of our resiliency as a city and culture, and an invitation for New Yorkers to consider how we will grow and adapt as we recover over the years to come. 

Each artist in this exhibition had a unique response to the pandemic, but certain themes jump out as we look at the collection as a whole. Some ticked away the time reading the daily updates in the news, with headlines and crosswords marking the uncertain trajectory of an unfolding, global crisis. PPE, consisting of masks, gloves, and medical ephemera, littered our lives and our streets, accumulating physically as well as symbolically. With the world cut off, the familiar shape of our homes was radically transformed. Our bedrooms and offices became safe havens in which entire lives were carried out, while a view out of a window became a portal to an unfamiliar world of vacant streets. Meanwhile, our obsession with sanitation led others to re-investigate the meaning of touch and contact, especially when physical closeness could spell a death sentence for those we cherished. Scarcity, uncertainty, and boredom drove us nearly mad, but the same forces inspired many to re-envision our lives, our communities, and our aspirations. 

Welcome Back is a reflection of how our sensibilities have changed and adapted to this ‘new normal’, and an invitation to embrace these experiences as they guide the trajectory of our recovery, in New York and beyond.

How We Live Together is a text alteration of French philosopher Roland Barthes 1977 lecture series on idiorrhythmic living formats and novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces in relation to societal ideals, tolerance and notions of oppression. The change of Barthes How To Live Together to Senstad's WE activates ideas of how We want to shape our common future as community.

The opening reception for Welcome Back will be held on Monday, October 4th, 5-7pm, at Maggi Peyton Gallery inside the Manhattan Borough President’s Office at 1 Centre St. South Entrance, 19th Floor, New York, NY.  The gallery is open to the public weekdays from 10am to  5pm. 

Radicall Light - Moments within Monument

A short video traveling through details of Senstad's monumental neon light, glass tube and sound installation Radical Light with an enveloping soundscape by composer and musician JG Thirlwell. From Seinajoki Kunsthall and Kai Art Center. in Collaboration with Arts Promotion Center Finland. Video by AKS Studio

SC.01.01 - 20th anniversary edition

 

SC.01.01 20 by Anne Katrine Senstad with sound by JG Thirlwell. 

A 20 second clip from the restored 2001 video

Title: SC.01.01.

Artist: Anne Katrine Senstad

Music: JG Thirlwell, courtesy of Entopic Music Scale: 4:3 Stereo Year: 2001 (Unique 2001- 2021 edition) SC.0101. by Anne Katrine Senstad was created in 2001 as a visual glitch work accompanied by a glitch sound composition by composer and musician JG Thirlwell as a unique work on technology, glitch and the beauty of noise -as audio visual poetry. The video marks the first collaboration between Senstad and Thirlwell who have continued to collaborate on projects ever since. The video work was first screened with curator Koan Jeff Baysa in New York in 2003. A series of photographic works also derived from Senstad's sound files, and exhibited in the group show PLEXI at Galleri JMS in Oslo, Noway in 2002 and included in Senstad's solo show ONE, at the same gallery. These "Light and Sound Panels" works, were also exhibited at Transient NYC as a 2 person exhibition with Matthew Abbott (RIP) in 2003, curated by Laura Raisanen of Jeffrey Deitch Gallery as a solo curatorial project. On SC.01.01: Senstad created the early experimental and poetic glitch video through several stages of digital and manual actions, experimental analogue camera work and film/video editing. The material is self referential: sound as material to cut up and scratch, as documentation, visual manifestation and visual compositions, - and a record of its existence and language. The video material was first filmed onto DV tape on a Sony Camera from a no-longer existing sound program from Senstad's own sound productions that consisted of cut up narrative sound . The obsolete sound program ran on a 90's G3 Mac. Thirlwell's sound piece is a published composition on Entopic Music, from glitched noise as tones and notes, recomposed as a musical piece. it inhabits a melancholy, nostalgia and an almost human presence through its technology and the CD/DVD as material. The era of the late 1990's marks the very end of analogue sound, where music fully stepped into the digital age, which altered the music industry and musicians lives forever. Today, we are at a similar threshold of agency.