The show will run from February 20 through March 8. Gallery hours are:
Wednesday – Sunday, 3 – 8pm (March 7th 3-11pm, March 8th 2-6pm)
The guest curator is Vladimir Seleznev from the Ural branch of National Center for Contemporary Art.
Participating artists: Ekaterina Aksenova, Ron Barron, Oleg Blyablyas, John Boone, Todd Bryant, Alberto Bursztyn, Vitaly Cherepanov, Project 59, Beth Dary, Irina Fillipova, Tatiana Istomina, JKP(group), Angelina Kotova, Ksenya Koshurnikova, Rita Leduc, Anna Mineeva &Maria Belova, Kenneth Pietrobono, Lisa Hein & Robert Seng, Carol Salmanson, Kate Stone, Fyodor Telkov, Ian Trask, Qi You, and Zer Gut (group)
This project is possible with support of Brooklyn Arts Council, Ural Branch of National Center for Contemporary Art in Russia, Materials For The Arts, Sixpoint Brewery and private donations.
New York and Nizhny Tagil, a huge megalopolis, the center of the world anda small industrial city in the middle of nowhere, very different and farapart, have a peculiar connection. Every Ural tourist guide mentions that the famous Statue of Liberty in New York is covered with copper from NizhnyTagil’s famous Demidov’s mines. Awarded at the World Exhibitions in Paris and Birmingham, sheet copper from Nizhny Tagil caught the attention of the sculptor F. Bartholdi, who was looking for material for the outer shell of the Statue of Liberty in New York.
The name Skin of Liberty reflects the Statue of Liberty’s copper history, while Fractured & re-Structured refers to the current psycho-geographical state of Nizhny Tagil, the old industrial city in the Middle of Urals that started with the iron ore deposits in the mountain Tall that no longer exists. In its place there is now a huge deep crater filled with industrial waste. The oldest metallurgical plant built in the Urals during the time of the Demidovs is transformed into a museum. Two Soviet industrial giants, Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant and Machinery UralVagonZavod, have been in permanent crisis and decline and became the exclusive backdrop for local artists.
BRURAL: Skin of Liberty, Fractured and re-Structured brings together artists of different creative strategies, styles and media, who make aesthetic experiments with the environment and postindustrial contemporary reality. They use ready-made industrial and postindustrial culture; new media space and modern social contexts; recycling of urban space and architecture, garbage, newspapers and magazines; ruins and remnants of things and ideas. Often with guerrilla methods, artists change the very essence of phenomena and objects, modifying their structure and developing new meanings.