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You may have been wondering, "What does a Family Style dinner look like?" Well feast your eyes on a magically condensed version of our first pilot dinner designed and prepared by our prized Board member, Phyllis Kim. 17 guests in total ate together that Sunday night, including both residents Cecilia Ebitz & Ben Quint-Glick (whose show opens May 1) many of whom had never met until that night. That's the thing about sitting down to a table family style-it's so welcoming and it gives you the time that you sometimes don't get buzzing around everyday life. You never know, you may sit down next to a new collaborator, patron or friend.  Family Style dinners take place inside the galleries, and for this one we were dining inside the March Exhibition, Hocus Pocus by Devan Shimoyama. His paintings are vested in exploring the location of the queer black male in contemporary society and in queer politics. He does so usually depicting his own portrait in various different manifestations that for me point toward a sort of divine lore. In every painting, he plays with a seductive color spectrum, fields of paved glitter and well-cats! The show pushed the boundaries of painting through surface material but spoke to our earliest uses of paintings as grand artifacts that are able to carry a potentially shifting story through time with just one still image.  Phyllis outdid herself with a huge selection of traditional Korean dishes that everyone seemed to really enjoy--even a dish with tiny little salted baby fish + raisins called Myulchi bokkum (that tasted a little bit like one of those salads with ramen noodles in it). A major crowd pleaser was her Ddak Bokkeum which is slow cooked, chicken and potatoes in an amazing brothy chilli sauce. So now you see what it's all about. We hope you will join us for our next Family Style #2 with Andrea Berzinsky when she makes a Slavic meal based off of her Grandmother's cooking. \\\Sunday May 24th///
Cecilia Ebitz’s residency and show,HANDHOLDING, come to an end this weekend. On Sunday, April 26th, the artist invites you to Bunker Projects for a rooftopBBQ and BYOB refreshments, from 5:30-9:30pm. This closing reception is not only a time to celebrate Ceci’s site-specific installations, but also an opportunity to discuss the work with the artist. Arrive promptly at 5:30 to participate in an informal critique and open group dialogue.
When first approaching this work, one might be struck by the use of every objects and the attention to color. “Ready made objects”, as the artist refers to them are a reoccurring medium in Ceci’s work. Objects can be evocative and become archetypal in our lives when imbued with memory and significance from our past experience. Objects can act as surrogates for the self, abstracting the extremely personal into a more universal symbolism, in a similar way to painters choosing a particular color to communicate meaning on their canvas. The artist works in an intuitive way. When asked about her approach to material sourcing for site-specific works, she begins by thinking about texture and space. Residing at Bunker was beneficial for Ceci to afford her the time to be and think in the exhibition space and early on, the materials, most of which were already on-site, revealed themselves. Inspired by vintage interior design, each individual installation in this body of work is a composition, a still life: the artist takes a painterly approach to the 3-dimensional, utilizing wall color as a framing mechanism to designate space and delineate between moments. And while all of the works are in dialogue with each other the individual compositions contain their own microcosms of object interactions. The artist works with juxtaposing objects that seem accidental or coincidental to reveal something spectacular. This body of work is a tangent off of her original proposal for her time at Bunker. It is a riff off of an earlier body of work, largely about trauma, that she hopes to continue exploring further in the future. In her perspective, this series feels like it’s still more of a sketch than a polished, refined, or finished thing. It’ll take some revisiting and contemplation to continue honing down to the desired exploration of concept. And that’s why the artist invites you to share your own thoughts on the work, this Sunday! Ceci has recently moved from Bunker to sunny Braddock, PA where she is working on various new projects, including a collaborative movement and sound piece…stay tuned at http://www.ceciliaebitz.com. By Alyssa Kail (board member at Bunker Projects) |
