Piso Mojado is a series of six photographs that document an ongoing performance in which Tom Bogaert mounts a yellow multi-lingual safety cone onto a mooring buoy. The buoys have been installed around the world, including in the Dead Sea, off the coast of Miami, and in New York’s East River; each location and audience generates a new reading of the performance. Kate Donnelly’s video Also There is based on a three-week long performance in which a bizarrely costumed figure interrupts the attention of a commuting audience. During this daily state of transition the figure provided a fleeting distraction from the viewers’ routines, and also experienced a gradual metamorphosis itself as the costume slowly disintegrated. Cary Horton’s heavily manipulated photograph illustrates the collision of the organic and the urban environment. As humans continue to leave their indelible mark on the natural world, what is “natural” seems to be almost absurd and out of context, like the ghostly bull confined to an industrial area in Horton’s Longhorn. Bridget Parris uses historical references as a starting point, and injects humor and drama into her narrative scenes. The Marie Antoinette figure in This is Not a Seam Ripper is having her garment altered by someone who is clearly not a seasoned tailor, while the figures in Glass Houses illustrate the increasing reliance on one another for our well-being as private space becomes more public every day. Alluding to Surrealist tendencies, Elisa Pritzker’s photograph White Panty presents a playful scene in which the natural and the artificial interact to produce bizarre results. Steve Rossi’s sculptures of traditional Islamic mosaic patterns rendered in Fruit Loops recontextualize highly recognizable symbols of two vast-
ly different cultures. This visual mashup questions our assumptions about identity, cultural influence, and handmade and mass-produced forms of expression. In Cindy Stelmackowich’s Eye Wreath, hand-painted glass eyes sprout like seedlings from a human hair wreath. The artist re-contextualizes these charged elements of the body by combining them in a grotesque nature morte that alludes to the popular Victorian practices of taxidermy and using human hair for sentimental and romantic purposes. Anna T.’s ephemeral installation Balloons exposes the vocabulary used to celebrate the gender of newborns. This work examines the importance and inherent flaws of assigning a sexual identity to someone who is not yet capable of making conscious decisions. Over time, the balloons deflate to symbolize the replacement of these conventional values by other, perhaps more contemporary values.
As part of NURTUREart’s Education Program, Project: Curate! provides advanced high school students from Juan Morel Campos Secondary School an opportunity to experience contemporary curatorial practices by working closely with a professional curator throughout the year, culminating in an exhibition at NURTUREart Gallery. 29