Due to concerns about COVID-19 spread we have elected, out of an abundance of caution, to postpone this performance to a later date.
A reception and zine launch for Display will be held, in the presence of the artist, on TBD in Project Space. Please join us for Nicholas' guided tour of the lighting installation and a performative reading of the accompanying zine "Display no1."
ABOUT THE PROJECT
An open work, Display consists in the setting of an assortment of incandescent light bulbs of various shapes, sizes, and colors in the ceiling of the gallery along with a set of guidelines—both a protocol and a mode d'emploi. The work is accompanied by a series of artist-made zines. Functioning as an addition to the gallery’s lighting system, and in dialogue with systems art, media theory, installation art, Fluxus, and institutional critique, Display poetically and literally spotlights the invisible labors inherent to the visual arts system, staging the work of a speculative exhibition lighting designer–a role in reality often played by untrained interns, gallery staff, or the artists and curators themselves–as central to the way the art on display is experienced. By subtly employing incandescent and color light bulbs, Display undermines the assumption that art spaces may only use neutral lighting to display art, a counter to the once-subversive white cube. Vargelis's system will be utilized during all exhibitions in EFA Project Space's 2020 season, as a passive collaboration with curator-led and artist-led interventions in the space.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nicholas Vargelis (b.1979) lives and works in New York and Paris. His work combines various contemporary practices including social organization, technological development, narratives, the iconography of forms (such as the history of the light bulb), with the artist as a "situation inventor" who alters contexts to provoke different orders of thought. His practice is often collaborative and linked to a social network of artists, writers, architects, and thinkers. http://vargelis.com/