BLACK BOX: EXCHANGES

Monday, August 13, 2012, 6 – 9pm
Ray Kelly: Roping Dummy

“Black Box: Exchanges,” is a new initiative dedicated to showcasing solo projects for one evening only. This summer join us every Monday for an intimate evening with an exciting group of emerging and mid career artists.

Black Box will provide access to artists whose work emphasizes new media and the latest technologies. Conceived by artistic director Juan Puntes with the exhibition space studiously designed by architect Ana Catalina Rojas, Black Box is an enclosed cubical black hole, all six surfaces hued in a dense black ultra-flat finish paint that throws the normal perception of visual elements off kilter, defying gravity as if floating in space, where the artwork can define a new independent spatial identity and is free of the traditional exhibition format.

Black Box aspires to tap into White Box’s new Media Lab, which as it further develops will expand into an invitational for artists from around the world to present in real time, using the internet highway and new telecommunications means, their latest gamut of various media, performative, interactive and sonoric artworks. While the build-out of the new Media Lab is in the process of receiving capital funding, Black Box provides artists with a creative, truly in-kind collaborative opportunity and forum, one that builds on intern and professional in-house talents.

Week twelve opens with Ray Kelly’s Roping Dummy, a relational aesthetics installation and interactive performance. Roping Dummy displays a readymade steel bullhead, or roping dummy commonly used in the training of lassoing, alongside a hay bail, recalling Western traditions found in American art from Albert Bierstadt to Prince. Viewers are then offered the chance to participate in a lassoing lesson lead by the artist, becoming a relational aesthetics project that brings traditional Western activities into an artistic context.

Ray Kelly was born in Texas. Kelly studied at the Art Students League. He assisted artist Mark Rothko for three years during the development of the Rothko Chapel. He has lectured at Skowhegan and founded the Rivington School in 1984. Kelly has exhibited internationally and locally at The Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York; PS1, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; and White Box, New York.