BECHDEL PROJECT to host: Random Fiesta: 80s Made 90s Raised
On June 10th and 11th from 12 to 6 pm, Bechdel Project (252 Green St), as part of their Community Space Program, will host the work of five artists who have been shaped by being a part of the last generation to experience life pre-internet. Each brings a unique, playful style and flavor to the show.
An additional resonance for the show comes from the history of the Bechdel Project’s home, which was once the studio space of pioneering installation artist Judy Pfaff. Pfaff was a part of The Whitney Biennial in 1981 and 1987, was awarded a Guggenheim in 83, and has since received numerous awards and recognitions, including the MacArthur Genius Award.
BECHDEL PROJECT (Maria Aparo, Lucy Flournoy, & Jens Rasmussen, Co-Creative Directors) is a non-profit feminist arts incubator in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. You can learn more about their Development, Education, and Advocacy programs at www.bechdelproject.org
About the artists:
Laura June Kirsch is a Canon award-winning photographer based out of Brooklyn, New York, and originates from Baldwin, Long Island, NY. Her work has appeared in publications such as Vogue, Juxtapoz, NY Mag, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Wine Enthusiast. She has been profiled by Juxtapoz Magazine, Paper, Vice, Whalebone Magazine, Flaunt, and Greenpointers. Her first monograph Romantic Lowlife Fantasies, was published in 2022. She was a fixed contributor at The Village Voice from 2010 - 2017 and a resident photographer for House Of Vans from 2012 - 2022. Tumblr selected Laura from thousands of creatives to document Coachella for their Creatrs program in 2015 & 2016. Originating from Baldwin, Long Island, her passion for photography formed at age 5 when she received her first camera. She studied at the School Of Visual Arts and graduated with a BFA in photography in 2007.
RUSS RUBIN (b. 1983) is a painter of abstract landscapes from the exotic woods of New Jersey. Working summers in the family factory in Newark, he’d stare out the bullet-holed windows, sketching with his finger in metal dust on an old punch press, dreaming up his future as the Jewish Jean Michel Basquiat slash center fielder for the New York Mets. With the latter failing to materialize and art school shot down by his factory rat father, he fled for New Orleans and eventually Los Angeles. There he waded his way through the cesspool of the music industry, emerging at the center of the east side indie scene of the later aughts. Designing logos, posters, and album covers for the bands he managed led to a Creative Director gig with a fledgling promoter, and from there, he began to reconnect with his lost dreams of schmearing the paint. Russ’s work has been collected across the US, Europe, and Asia, acknowledged by the MOMA, acquired by the Jeff Koons Collection, shown with Young Soy Gallery in Hong Kong, Brushes with Greatness in London, and at Mark Borghi, Ground Floor, Field Projects, OnePiece, and the YouTube Space in New York.
LPX, aka Lizzy Plapinger, is a multi-media artist originally from London, England, currently living and working out of Brooklyn, New York. Whether in music, performance, visual art, or design, her signature “pantone punk” style, an aesthetic ideology rooted in joy rebellion, is consistent across all. Her visual work explores the spiritual through high-octane abstract maximalism, using the sublime frequencies of color and shape to explore their power as a language beyond language and the fizzy line between where material and immaterial meet. With each piece, she curiously combines sonic, textile, mechanical, and biomorphic signatures in an attempt to capture the often felt but not seen ticks, booms, and pulse of an intangible armature that’s always buzzing beneath the surface of the tangible world and self.
Joy rebellion is a core tenant of my work and existence as an artist, human, and woman specifically. It's an ideology rooted in an active rejection of a world where we are consistently minimized, silenced, and attempted to be kept in a fearful state. My work, in its celebration of loud, bold, brave maximalism, is a hopeful catalyst and form of protest.
Mary Shah's paintings focus on light, space, and time, with a specific interest in how one's consciousness attaches and identifies itself within those combined contexts. She was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1984. She earned her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2007. She was Director of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. for eight years, until the gallery closed in 2019, and is now Director at Alexandre Gallery and an independent curator. Her work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions since 2004 and is in public and private collections across the United States. She was selected by Michael Rose as one of the artists to follow in 2021 and included in the eponymous online exhibition. Her work was recently selected by the NYC reading series and literary journal, Pigeon Pages, to illustrate two newly published poems by poet Alexandria Hall. Her most recent show, “Dream Opera,” was reviewed by Jonathan Stevenson for Two Coats of Paint, and four major paintings were acquired by NYU Langone. She is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art in New York and has been showing with him since 2015.
Miles Shelton, Born in Brooklyn, NY 1988. I work in New York City and reside in Brooklyn. My work aims to explore glimpses into childhood nostalgia, using acrylic paint as my main medium. This current body of work focuses more on the idea of the micro-advertising I saw as a child in Brooklyn, going to different supermarkets and bodegas with my mom. If you’ve ever been to the snack ale, then you’ve seen tons of orange price tag stickers. The paintings are based on several books of stickers that I have collected over the years. In an attempt to bring to light the strangeness of all the decisions that went into them, I recreated them larger on canvas using flat blacks and grays on top of fluorescent oranges in an array of different shapes, fonts, and number sizes.
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