Bobby Abate's Outsider Tarot | Friday, May 3rd
Talk & Readings from 7-9pm
Extended Gallery hours from 6-10pm
This Friday at International Objects: A special Tarot reading event featuring Bobby Abate's Outsider Tarot.
Bobby spent a decade researching, creating, and self-publishing the deck and guidebook. Over that time, Bobby discussed the project with his close friends, some of whom will be on hand to offer short meditative readings.
This special evening focuses on one of the Major Arcana—Ghost Car (The Chariot)—inspired by Ghost Parking Lot, a 1978 shopping plaza art installation in Bobby’s hometown by the architecture and environmental arts organization SITE.
Ghost Car offers passage to another spiritual plane where the higher self can be cultivated, far away from the distractions of the shopping plaza and the world of materialism. Exploring a connection between David Bordett’s Starry Speculative Spectacle Skeptical: Ballad of a Minor Character and Epilogue, and Bobby’s Outsider Tarot, attendees are invited to participate in collaborative joyride readings centered around the question, “what connects us?"
Deck/Guidebook sets will be for sale.
Confirmed Readers:
Mitsuko Brooks
Andrés Senra
Kelley Simons
Amalle Dublon
Anna Young
Todd Stephens
Kelley Simons
Selin G
B. Wurtz Album Release Concert | Friday, March 1st, 7 PM
International Objects and Hen House Studios are delighted to invite you to a performance marking the release of B. Wurtz's latest album, Under the Sky.
Internationally recognized artist B. Wurtz continues to pursue making visual art, but in the last several years, he has returned to a passion he has had since being a small child: making music. This led to him recording an album in 2020, Some Songs, which was produced by Harlan Steinberger at Hen House Studios in Venice, California. Now that same collaboration has led to the release of a second album, Under The Sky. B. Wurtz will be performing songs from both albums with his friends Harlan and Tommy Jordan of Geggy Tah.
B. Wurtz is an American painter and sculptor. He lives and works in New York City. Wurtz received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1980. Wurtz is known for his transformations of commonplace materials into sculptures. In 2015, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work that traveled to La Casa Encendida in Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.
Harlan Steinberger is a record producer and engineer at Hen House Studios, a record label and recording studio in Venice Beach where he has worked with such artists as Willie Nelson, Cinder Well, Bumcello, Rocky Dawuni, Particle Kid, and Sunny War, among many others. Hen House has become a unique creative hub welcoming both emerging and established artists.
Tommy Jordan, known for his role in the band Geggy Tah, has left a lasting impact on the alternative music scene. As a founding member, multi-instrumentalist and singer, Jordan contributed to Geggy Tah's distinctive sound, blending elements of rock, pop, and electronica. He has also been an integral member of the French band Bumcello, singing on and producing their critically acclaimed album “Al”.
Extra Taste: Exhibition Opening & Afterparty | Saturday, 2.10.2024
David Bordett, Mysterious Stranger, 2019, Plexiglass, plywood, paint, electrical components and LEDS, stainless steel hardware and chain, 60 ½ × 4 1/8 × 2 ½ in
International Objects presents Extra Taste, an exhibition of objects that mine the iconographies and mythologies embedded in everyday consumer culture.
Exhibition Opening Reception
53 Scott Ave, 6–9PM
Second Floor
Afterparty
99 Scott Ave, 8:30PM–Late
Final door at the end of the block.
Valid Until Sunset | Thursday, November 16th, 7 PM
In 2015 writer and curator Jarrett Earnest began carrying a small instant camera everywhere he went, photographing friends, artworks, parties, and sex. When people would ask, he’d say they weren’t photographs but “writing.” Over the next seven years this practice evolved into an interrogation of images and time, looking at Renaissance painting, contemporary sculpture, and video art, for example, through the medium of photography—and how images become nested into, and inseparable from, the layered narratives of our lives.
Valid Until Sunset brings together sixty of these photographs, each with a text on the facing page, creating a unique hybrid of art criticism, queer theory, and travelogue. The book seeks a new mode of address—a way of speaking to and against images—following philosopher Simone Weil’s method for understanding images, which is "not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.”
On November 16th, 7 PM, Jarrett Earnest will perform excerpts of the book alongside projections, accompanied by cellist Anthime Miller, at International Objects gallery (53 Scott Ave, Brooklyn, NY).
Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and the editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings by Peter Schjeldahl (2019), The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955 (2020), Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980-1993 (2021) and Devotion: today's future becomes tomorrow archive (2022). His criticism has been published in magazines and exhibition catalogs around the world, and appears regularly in the New York Review of Books.
Anthime Miller is a cellist, singer, and composer based in Brooklyn, New York. They are the composer-in-residence for Circle Theater of New York (CTNY) and principal cellist of the Regina Opera Company, performing internationally with the Dell’Arte Opera Company, New Amsterdam Opera, and the National Theatre of Luxembourg and many others. In 2022 they co-founded Mini Masterworks— a chamber music series devoted to bringing large scale symphonic works into intimate and unconventional spaces.
MATTE Magazine is a print publication founded in 2010 by photographer Matthew Leifheit as a platform for new ideas in photography. MATTE Editions is a photobook publishing imprint.
Chris Burden | Thursday, October 26th, 7:30 PM Screening
© 2023 Chris Burden / licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Screening of Chris Burden's videos Big Wrench and The Big Wheel, presented with Electronic Arts Intermix.
Big Wrench
Chris Burden
1980, 15:12 min, color, sound
In this narrative performance for video, Burden tells the story of his relationship with a truck named "Big Job." To relate his autobiographical monologue, he sits deadpan before the camera with moving images of the truck behind him. Writes Burden, "During a six-month period, while the artist wrestles with the problem of owning an antique 16,000 lb. freight-truck, Big Job becomes a metaphor for personal insanity. [I] talk about the 'curse of Big Job,' my foiled plans to transform the truck into a rolling communications command post or a traveling museum, and my difficulty in getting rid of the rig. A true story."
The Big Wheel
Chris Burden. In collaboration with Willoughby Sharp and Robert Burden.
1980, 29:02 min, color, sound
During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."
Chris Burden gained international attention in the 1970s as an influential and often controversial figure in the West Coast body art, performance and conceptual art movements. Investigating the psychological experience of personal danger and physical risk, he used his own body as an art object in outrageous, sometimes shocking acts, aggressively confronting the artist/audience relationship and the artmaking process.
Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a leading international resource for video and media art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 4,000 new and historical video works by artists. For 50 years, EAI has fostered the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.
Gryphon Rue | Thursday, October 12th, 7:30 PM
In connection with the exhibition Perpetual Screw, International Objects presents an intimate concert with modern master of the musical saw, Gryphon Rue.
To Rue, the appeal of working with an instrument that is also a common tool is clear: “The saw is a very physical instrument, immediate and pure… Some people hear my saw playing as feedback, animal cries, voices. The other day at the airport someone asked me, ‘What’s in the case?’ So I told them, ‘It’s an acoustic theremin.’ Saws have a wonderful ambiguity. They are readymade instruments. How many instruments help you build a house?”
It’s important to Gryphon Rue to “keep the human hand in electronic music,” and the dynamic between the human hand and the technological means of making are essential to Perpetual Screw.
Please join us next Thursday, October 12 for the 7:30 performance. Our extended exhibition and bar hours are 6-10pm.
Gryphon Rue (b. New York, NY) is an artist, composer, and musician. A crazy quilt derived from field recordings, custom synthesizers, singing saw, and harmonium, Rue’s music sweeps across forms of minimalism and elastic dance. It suggests biological actions, molecular events, psychic possession, & nourishment. Rue’s latest album is A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers (Not Not Fun). He also performs in a duo with Merche Blasco (North of The Future, Astral Editions) and with Benton C Bainbridge, in the audiovisual duo Rue Bainbridge. His program Earmark on Montez Press Radio features emerging and established composers and sound artists. Since 2020 Rue’s performances have spanned international venues such as Fondazione ICA Milano, Hauser & Wirth, de Young Museum, Vector Hack Festival, Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival, Roulette Mixology festival, New Media Art & Sound Summit, Experimental Arts Intermedia, Microscope Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Qubit, No Moon, and Nowadays.
