The Active Space will be leaving its doors open late for Bushwick Open Studio Weekend.

Friday June 1st 1pm – 10pm

Saturday June 2nd 1pm – 10pm Opening Reception 7pm – 10pm

Sunday June 3rd 1pm – 10pm

In “Freewheeling,” Deborah Brown exhibits paintings of car salvage lots, cement factories, and detritus at the end of the industrial age. The subject matter is familiar territory for Brown, who has depicted the landscape of Brooklyn’s Bushwick for several years. The new work enters the domain of fantasy, leaving literal interpretation in favor of a Bushwick of the imagination. Carcases of flattened and stacked cars resemble ziggurats from the ancient world. Cement trucks buried in heaps of sand masquarade as amphora; cement tanks become abandoned rocket ships. The palette is high key and odd; the light source, eerie. Through their lush paint handling and loopy lexicon of images, the paintings celebrate the power of a place to inspire the imagination.

Deborah Brown is represented by Lesley Heller Workspace in New York, where she showed “The Bushwick Paintings” in January/February 2011. She has also had solo shows at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California; Mira Mar Gallery, Sarasota, Florida; and Addison Ripley, Washington, D.C. Since 2006 she has had a studio in Bushwick, where she owns and directs the gallery, Storefront Bushwick. She serves on the board of Momenta and NURTUREart, not-for-profit art spaces in Brooklyn, and is a member of Brooklyn’s Community Board #4. In addition to her work as a painter, she has executed public art projects around the country including mosaics commissioned by the MTA for the Houston Street subway station in Manhattan and a series of roundels for the Royal Caribbean Cruise Terminal at the Port of Miami for Miami-Dade Art in Public Places. Her interview with Lucie Alig, “Not an Aesthetic, But an Attitude: Artist Deborah Brown on the Future of Bushwick’s Art Scene,” appeared in ARTINFO in September 2011.

After the reception, the show will remain open to the public Friday Saturday and Sunday 1-6 PM through July 1st 2012. Email ashley@566johnsonave.com.

Freewheeling
June 2nd, 2012
7-10 PM

“Easy breezy, just like ordering pizza online… ”
Vegan Pizza Party brings together some of the most influential new media artists.
Following the

Without any attempt to make a serious face, 9 artists are commenting on ‘New
Aesthetic,’ a brand new term, which refers to the increasing appearance of the
visual language of digital technology and the Internet in the physical world.
Following the New Aesthetic panel discussion on SXSW 2012 and An Essay
on the New Aesthetic published by Wired, the art world and media began a
seemingly endless debate on what exactly New Aesthetic is.
Vegan Pizza Party is not answering that question. It won’t even answer if New
Aesthetic is actually a thing, and how seriously should we take it. Vegan Pizza
Party simply is. And furthermore it’s fun! It’s entertaining, quirky, smart and dumb
at the same time…

Curated by Katarina Hybenova

Participating artists:

Man Barlett
Jerstin Crosby
Ryan Ford
James George
Brad Henderson
Carmen von Kende
Alexander Porter
Reed + Rader

Bushwick Open Studios weekend: June 1, 2, 3
Opening reception: June 2, 7-10pm

Making art accessible. That’s the aspiration of BushwickGallery.com, the 1st
Internet-based gallery in Bushwick; a sister project of BushwickDaily.com; and
one of the TOP 5 New Brooklyn Galleries of 2011 according to The L Magazine.
We are using the power of the Internet to endorse emerging artists from the
Bushwick area, and to bring art closer to young people. Moreover, our offline
openings held every time at a different Bushwick location, are legendary…

Offline opening reception will be held in collaboration with The Active Space at
their building on 566 Johnson Ave, Bushwick. The Active Space is a progressive
arts center in the fast growing community of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Once a feather
factory, this three story 100 year old building was completely gutted, redesigned
and renovated by David C. Welner of Welner Associates, to become the new
home to artists’ studios as well as a new 1600 sf art gallery.

Please join us for the closing of “Dreaming Without Sleeping,” where QRST will be “uninstalling” his 96-square-foot mural, “Eidola,”…with a saw and a hammer. All street art eventually dies, and this mural will not escape for being indoors. All pieces of the mural will be available for sale, signed. Prices start at $1.*

*$1 pieces will be blank squares. Pricing for other pieces ranges from $15 to $100.

More free stuff:
For the opening party, Criminy Johnson created signed and numbered drawings. And they’re gone. But for the closing, QRST has created stickers. Fancy, brand-new, hand-drawn, mass-produced stickers, and the first 75 are free.

Also free: beer and absinthe cocktails, till they’re gone.

Also for sale:
Paintings ($ varies) and signed artist books ($25). Email Robin for more information: mail@robingrearson.com.

The full show catalog

“Dreaming Without Sleeping” would not be a success without community support, and we’d like to thank everyone who has helped and supported the show. Thanks especially to The Active Space, The L Magazine, Brooklyn Street Art, ArtInfo’s Benjamin Sutton, 3rd Ward and John Ruscher, Lenny Correa, The Brooklyn Paper, Kianga Ellis, Miss Heather, Curbs & Stoops, Saki and I Heart Cool Stuff, and Thomas Seely at Break Thru Radio.

For a full list of press coverage: click here

The Active Space presents its first documentary screening by Ine Poppe and Sam Nemeth entitled “THEM F*CKIN’ ROBOTS” in
cooperation with Eyebeam Art and Technology Center on March 23, 2012 7-10PM.

“THEM F*CKIN’ ROBOTS” is a documentary about Norman White, one of the most influential media artists in his field. He produced humorous and beautiful work, but also trained hundreds of artists at the Ontario College of Art and Design to make their own, hands-on media art from 1976 onwards. This is on of the reasons a vast number of acclaimed media artists come from Canada. However, media-art does not cover the realm of White’s work: he produced a large oeuvre, from paintings to light murals to interactive robotics. Ine Poppe and Sam Nemeth filmed White and his students: they visited him in his huge watermill in Ontario and followed him and his students at work.
It took Poppe and Nemeth 5 years to finish Them F*ckin’ Robots. This had several reasons: it was hard to obtain material of the early works of White (video was still a ‘new’ medium) but moreover was it hard to fund a film about media art. In the contemporary cultural climate in the Netherlands no art- or film fund dared to take the risk of financing a documentary about media art, also because the film is about a ‘foreign’ artist. This reflects thematically in the film. The question wheather or not media art has a place in the mainstream art world is adressed as well as why it took Norman White such a long time -he started in the 1960-ies with electronic art- to get recognition. The film contains material from the 70-ies, 80-ies, 90-ies, 00-ies and original footage of the of the White family shot in the 40-ies,50-ies and 60-ies.

The screening of “THEM F*CKIN’ ROBOTS” takes place March 23, 2012, from 7-10 PM. Email ashley@566johnsonave.com.

THEM F*CKIN’ ROBOTS
March 23, 2012
The Active Space
566 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11237
www.566johnsonave.com

RSVP on Facebook

Directors Biography

Ine Poppe

Ine Poppe (1960, Amsterdam) is a documentary maker and writer. She publishes about digital culture, technology, art and science, mainly for the national newspaper NRC-Handelsblad. She lectures at the Audio Visual department of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.

Poppe made several documentaries for Dutch National television. ‘Hippies from Hell’, about Dutch Hackers, was shown in Europe and America at festivals, musea and universities. It was the first online Dutch documentary, licensed together with Lawrence Lessig under Creative Commons.

Poppe wrote scripts for several computer games.
In 2002 she was winner of the Geneva-Europe Grand Prize for TV-scripts, with Necrocam, a film about a webcam inside a coffin.

Sam Nemeth

Sam Nemeth (1962, Rotterdam) lives in Amsterdam. He studied Film and Television at University of Amsterdam. He worked as a video maker for video collective Staats-TV Rabotnik, for the educational department of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Dutch national tv. He was editor of the Dutch AV magazine Skrien. Sam held several functions at medialab Waag Society in Amsterdam and specializes in arts and technology and game development.
Aside from this he works as a free-lance documentary maker and writing journalist.
Sam Nemeth is currently lecturer/coach at The University of Eindhoven.

Document Credits

Screenplay : Ine Poppe
Director: Ine Poppe
Cinematography : Sam Nemeth
Sound : Floor van Spaendonck
Editing : Sam Nemeth
Narration : Elizabeth Turner
Music : Jan Kees van Kampen
Participants / Performers : Norman White, Laura Kikauka, Jeff Man, Graham Smith, Michelle Kasparzak, Sandor Ajzenstad, Edward Shanken
Funding (research): Fonds BKVB, Amsterdam
Producer: IP-Productions
licensed under creative commons

Thank you to everyone that made it out to the gallery grand opening last night. It has been an awesome year for The Active Space and we look forward to many more wonderful years with the Bushwick community.

CLICK HERE to see pictures from the event

“Dreaming Without Sleeping” allows viewers to glimpse the artist’s view of our waking world: a bent, slightly pessimistic and occasionally hostile place populated by animals and people who are often reluctant to be interrupted by the viewer.

“Criminy makes oil paintings in his studio but often makes wheatpastes that relate to these in some way. Many people are familiar with Criminy’s work but may have seen it outside of a gallery setting, and QRST fans might be discovering Criminy Johnson’s paintings for the first time,”says curator Robin Grearson, who worked with Johnson last year on a group show at the Active Space. “Criminy has been in Bushwick for a few years, and QRST’s street work often shows up here, so the Active Space is an ideal location to present the two styles together.”

“We opened in February of last year, so I’m happy that the first show in our building’s brand-new gallery space falls on our first anniversary,” says Ashley Zelinskie, director of The Active Space. “Robin is an accomplished writer, yet this is the third show she has curated here. Last year we discovered that we really work well together, and one thing I appreciate about my role as director of a Bushwick art space is the opportunity I have to support emerging artists andcurators I believe in.” Zelinskie says.

The opening reception for “Dreaming Without Sleeping” takes place
February 24, 2012, from 7-10 PM.
The show will be open to the public by appointment through April 20, 2012.
Email ashley@566johnsonave.com.

The Active Space is excited to announce our new exhibition space will open in mid February! Our first exhibition in our newly renovated 1500 square foot gallery will be solo show with a local artist soon to be announced. In addition to the new gallery space we are also offering ten brand new studios available for rental HERE. Check back soon for more updates!