Fine Arts Faculty Mira Schor Featured in Two Group Shows

CURRENTS: ABORTION

A.I.R. Gallery

Gallery I & II

January 5, 2018 – February 4, 2018

155 Plymouth Street

Brooklyn NY 11201

Participating Artists:
Adrienne Jenkins, Alexander Bernon, Amy Cannestra, Amy Finkbeiner, Anne Ferrer, Audrey Anastasi, Bernadette Despujols, Cali Kurlan, Catherine Hall & Meg Lipke, Charlotte Woolf, Christophe Lima, Coco Hall, Cristin Millet, Cynthia Winika, d’Anne de Simone, Dani Sigler, Danielle Siegelbaum, Deborah Wasserman, Devra Fox, Divine Williams, Dottie Attie, Elaine Angelopoulos, Elke Solomon, Ellen Jong, Eugenia Pigassiou, Gina Randazzo, Grace Burney, Greta Young, Heather Saunders & Cassandra, Heather Weathers, Ilona Granet, Indira Cesarine, Irene Gennaro, Jane Zweibel, Jessica Nissen, Julia Kim Smith, Julia Buck, Justine Walker, Karen Meersohn, Kathy Grove, Katrina Majkut, Lannie Hart, Leslie Fry, Leslie Tucker, Megan Pickering, Marie Tomanova, Martha Edelheit, Martha Fleming-Ives, Maureen Connor, Mira Schor, Nadine Faraj, Nancy Hellebrand, Nancy Lasar, Nina Meledandri, Parastoo Ahoon, Pat Lasch, Perri Nerri, Rachel Lindsay, Rachel Portesi, Robin Adsit, Robin Jordan, Robin Tewes, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, Ruth Owens, Sabra Moore, Sooyeon Yun, Susan Carr, Valerie Hallier, Virginia Carey, Yael Ben-Zion

Public Programs

January 12, 1 PM

The Beginning Choice, performance by Parastoo Ahoo

January 12, 19, and 25, 2-6 PM

Your Story, readers will read from personal abortion stories submitted to the gallery

The 5th edition of CURRENTS presents an exhibition in which artists respond to the theme of ABORTION. In this turbulent moment in history, abortion remains a signifier of people’s ownership over their bodies, being as urgent a subject as any of the issues that now consume us.

The exhibition includes depictions of choice, loss, and anger; works of fecundity, disease, shame, and pain; images of helplessness and of power. There are pieces that reach into the past to demonstrate ways in which women used abortifacients, as well as work that is pro life and religious. All these propositions are united in the gallery to create a space in which we listen to each other.

More information available via A.I.R. Gallery.


are you dead, yet?

Thomas Erben Gallery

January 11, 2018 – February 10, 2018

526 W 26th Street

New York NY 10001

Thomas Erben Gallery is pleased to present are you dead, yet?, a group exhibition of artists whose work fervently apprehends the world as a domain of powerful, intransigent, often fickle forces that threaten to destabilize our collective and individual economic, environmental, political and spiritual equilibriums. Encompassing painting, sculpture and photography, are you dead, yet? reveals Horst Ademeit, Jason Eberspeaker, Kahlil Robert Irving and Mira Schor to be nevertheless united by a resonant approach to art, all of them stirred into action by an irrepressible awareness that life is complex and needs to be confronted. Incorporating, embracing or absorbing the realities of our fraught contemporary moment, the works by these artists reflect the urgencies of living in a fateful, precarious time.

Working in a variety of materials (e.g. porcelain, glass and stoneware), the sculptural works of Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, CA) invoke a host of references, resulting in visually as well as metaphorically richly layered pieces. Visceral and rhythmic, Irving’s assemblages and other sculptures consist of a variety of textures, colors and dimensions. In several works he compiles imagery and references ranging from 20th century decorative arts traditions (touches of Meissen pottery) to contemporary urban culture (newspaper clippings of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown). Fusing these popular and autobiographical, rarefied and quotidian elements, Irving’s work produces a reflection on the experience of living in America’s cities today.

Horst Ademeit (b. 1937, Cologne, Germany; d. 2010, Düsseldorf, Germany) meticulously documented the noxious influence of cold rays, an invisible form of radiation that he believed was constantly assaulting him and the environment. Using photography (Polaroids and, later on, digital photos) and measuring instruments of his own creation, Ademeit developed a complex documentation system of cold rays’ influences—in effect, an archive of their existential corruption. The Polaroids are like diary entries of the day-to-day impact of the rays, the white edges crowded with his voluminous notes recording their magnitude and effect as well as the date and his description of the day. On display will be examples from two series the artist had pursued for more than forty years: his daily “Tagesfotos” and “Observationsfotos.”

Summoning worlds of inscrutable forms situated in visionary realms, Jason Eberspeaker’s (b. 1980, Grand Rapids, MI) paintings convey a state of eldritch in-betweenness. These small-scale oil paintings have absorbed a range of historical antecedents, culminating in works that fluctuate between observation and imagination, land- and mind-scapes, abstraction and a state of becoming. Drawing upon societal trends towards obfuscation, collective paranoia, extremism and fast-casual fringe conspiracy, the works are visually tumultuous while exuding an air of stillness, as in the case of Untitled (2017), which veers between an abstract scene of smooth strokes of browns and grays and an inchoate landscape of stone and soil that echoes throughout the sky.

Repudiating the either/or approach, Mira Schor’s (b. 1950, New York City, NY) art embraces political activism, critical research and painterly richness. Richly spare, her recent work in painting balances hard-edged realities with a satirical grace, recognizing the humor in the political, the philosophical in the everyday. In For Once (2014), an offhandedly sketched box inquires–perhaps of the viewer–“are you dead?” This question and the seeming response of a prone stick figure–“for once I find myself in total control of my destiny” are drawn from email scams Schor has received. Always trawling for language that has multiple meanings and applicability, “are you dead?’ perhaps begs a question about power relations (as the figure appears half-buried), whereas the response can be as potentially ironic, Quixotic, or even heroic. Lean and Sartrean, appearances are not what they may seem.

More information available via Thomas Erben Gallery.