March Art Events Roundup

There are a number of art-related events happening this month, many in the next few days. Here’s our list of things to put on your must see list this month. Descriptions courtesy of the organizations.

Flux Factory

The Endless and Mobile Beautiful Collapsible Labyrinth, March 3-17
Opens March 3, 6-10pm; Closes March 17, 6-9pm
Free
39-31 29th Street, Long Island City

The Endless and Mobile Beautiful Collapsible Labyrinth (E.M.B.C.L.) is an interactive sculptural installation taking over Flux Factory’s gallery. Sculpture, video, sound and performance will inhabit a serpentine maze of track-mounted rolling walls, a kaleidoscopic reimagining of rolling library stacks. It will certainly rival MoMA and the Louvre, elevating Flux among the most well endowed hosts of exhibition-ready wall space per sq ft on Earth. Visitors are invited to roll through the “stacks” to discover the works, moving the walls in and out of place. This process will damage, activate, expand or alter the artworks, challenging the preciousness of the art object and creating a playful interactivity.

Flux Artists-in-Residence, Seth Timothy Larson and Abigail Beth Entsminger have curated forty participating artists in the first of Flux Factories 2017 major exhibitions.
Read the list of participating artists at www.fluxfactory.org

MoMA PS1

Night at the Museum: Mark Leckey Closing Party
Friday, March 3, 8pm-midnight
$15, MoMA Member tickets, $13, MoMA PS1+ Member tickets, Free (MoMA and MoMA PS1+ Members can secure tickets in advance by calling 718-784-2084 and choosing extension 0 during museum hours or during the event in person at the Box Office.)
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City

Celebrate the final weekend of Containers and Their Drivers with Mark Leckey himself during this special Night at the Museum closing party. Offering a last chance to see the acclaimed exhibition, which features iconic works that draw on British nightlife subcultures, the museum will come to life after sundown with a live activation by the artist, festive cocktails, bites by M. Wells, and surprise DJ sets.

Also on exhibit until March 12: Sascha Braunig: Shivers

With more than twenty works made over the last five years, Shivers showcases Braunig’s unique approach to the studio portrait. Beginning with meticulously rendered paintings of fantastical sculptural constructions, the artist has deployed a range of pictorial techniques to depict bodies under duress. The figures in her work are compressed by their environments, stretched and twisted across armatures, and often overwhelmed by their surroundings. Some are irradiated by industrial light, sutured into uncomfortable hybrids, and hollowed out. Drawing inspiration from the distorted bodies that litter the histories of modern painting, Braunig adapts these legacies to the discomforts and instabilities of contemporary life. In more recent works, her figures seem to turn on themselves, testing their own limits and those of the settings that confine them. While evocatively dystopic, her paintings also subtly empower their vulnerable subjects, advocating a humanist art for an age in which individual experience seems threatened by forces beyond our control.

Sascha Braunig: Shivers is organized by Peter Eleey, Chief Curator, MoMA PS1.

The Noguchi Museum

Dakin Hart: Curator-led Tour of Self-Interned, 1942
Sunday, March 19, 1pm
Free with Museum admission; advance registration is not required
9-01 33rd Road, Astoria

Dakin Hart, the Museum’s Senior Curator, will lead a tour of the exhibition, Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center. It marks the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the notorious wartime directive that authorized the incarceration of Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese heritage living on the west coast. The exhibition examines Isamu Noguchi’s extraordinary decision to voluntarily enter the Poston War Relocation Center in the Arizona desert, despite being exempt from internment as a resident of New York.

SculptureCenter

Lauren Bakst & Yuri Masnyj: Temporary Walls
March 4, 3pm and March 25, 3pm
Free but registration is required (RSVP). If the event is sold out, please email info@sculpture-center.org to be added to the wait list. Please include your name and preferred performance date.
44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City

Working at the intersections of sculpture, drawing, and dance, Lauren Bakst & Yuri Masnyj have been building a shared practice since 2014. In Temporary Walls, a new installation and performance work made specifically for SculptureCenter’s basement, Bakst and Masnyj continue their consideration of interior space as a stage. Temporary Walls draws on and reconfigures a lexicon of abstracted actions, objects, and language in order to dislocate assumptions of function and form.

Presented as part of In Practice: Material Deviance, on view at SculptureCenter January 29 to March 27, 2017.

On view concurrently: Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise
(Congolese Plantation Workers Art League), January 29 to March 27, 2017.

Socrates Sculpture Park

EAF16 Closing Celebration
Saturday, March 4, 2-4pm
Free
32-01 Vernon Blvd, Astoria

Join us for the final celebration before EAF16 closes on March 12th. We will honor our fantastic EAF16 artists Liene Bosquê, Travis Boyer, Andrew Brehm, Lea Cetera, Onyedika Chuke, Dylan Gauthier, Dmitri Hertz, Madeline Hollander, Olalekan Jeyifous, Lia Lowenthal, Dachal Choi & Mathew Suen, Galería Perdida, Sable Elyse Smith, Elizabeth Tubergen, Bryan Zanisnik.

The closing event will feature two EAF16 artist performances:

2-3pm—Madeline Hollander’s “st, nd, rd, th, th, th…”
Taking over Socrates Sculpture Park’s five acres, current fellow Madeline Hollander presents a site-specific performance that draws choreographic inspiration from government mandated public signage for safety protocols and “life-saving” techniques, such as the Heimlich maneuver posters, TSA pat-down, CPR, and airplane safety cards.

3pm—Dylan Gauthier’s Kite Flying Performance 7
Gauthier’s two-part EAF16 project explores the aesthetic, conceptual, and transcendent aspects of flight, invention, and collaboration. The artist pairs his sculpture, Accidental Flight, based on the triangular-trussed kites built by Alexander Graham Bell, with a monthly publication of kite patterns (“scores”) for visitors to take away, assemble, and fly.