Starting this past fall with the opening of our Migration year, Proteus Gowanus launched an onsite Artist-In-Residence program. We invited three individuals (two artists, one anthropologist) to produce work corresponding to our three Migration exhibitions. As the summary event of our yearlong Migration exploration, we invite you to join us for the opening reception of the Migration Residents Exhibition.

Lado Pochkhua opened the Migration year with a project using documentary photographs he took with an old camera and expired film he bought for pennies in a flea market in Tbilisi, Georgia. He moved to Tbilisi as a “displaced person” in 1993, escaping the civil war in his native Abkhazia. For the next ten years, he resided in a refugee settlement with other Abkhazians. “The old FED camera and film were sufficiently reliable equipment for what I wanted to do – become an observer, not just a participant, in refugee life.” Lado will exhibit the photos as a light box installation — small beacons of memory.

Our second resident was Sal Randolph, who makes art involving gift economies, social interaction and public spaces. She established the Bureau of Unknown Destinations at Proteus, inviting visitors to take home BUD packets containing instructions and a ticket to an unknown destination. The packets included a notebook to jot down thoughts and observations during their journeys. Sal will exhibit the delightful and various notebooks made by the BUD travelers.

Our final resident is anthropologist Eben Kirksey, who has hosted members of the Multispecies Salon during his stay at Proteus Gowanus while also developing the Utopia for the Golden Frog, an environment created from a discarded refrigerator for the Golden Frog, found today only is zoos. The Golden Frog’s extinction in the wild is believed to result from the widespread laboratory use of another frog, Xenopus laevia, which spread a fungus deadly to amphibians worldwide and which will be on exhibit at the gallery. Eben’s work as a biocultural anthropologist asks who benefits when species meet?

In partnership with the literary journal A Public Space, we are pleased to present Author Maud Casey and former Proteus artist-in-residence Sal Randolph in readings and discussion of the wonder of wandering and the process of unknowing. A Q&A will follow. Professor Jeff Dolven will moderate. Maud Casey’s “Stubborn Desire,” inspired by the case of fugue victim Albert Dadas, was published in Issue 15 of A Public Space. Sal Randolph’s Bureau of Unknown Destinations project, sponsored by Proteus Gowanus, sent 100 participants on day-long blind adventures.

Homemade cookies provided by A Public Space; beer provided by Brooklyn Brewery.

Maud Casey is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and a collection of stories, Drastic. For selections from her current novel, she received the Calvino Prize.  Maud teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.

Sal Randolph is an artist and theorist who works with issues of gift-giving, money, alternate economies, and social architecture. She founded the non-curated sound-exchange web project Opsound, which functions through the use of music released exclusively under a copyleft license. Other large-scale, collaborative projects created and implemented by Randolph include Free Manifesta and The Free Biennial, in which several hundred artists presented their work in free and open shows in New York and Frankfurt public spaces. Sal was artist-in-residence at Proteus Gowanus during the second show of our Migration year.

Jeff Dolven teaches Renaissance literature, poetry, and poetics at
Princeton University. He is the author of Scenes of Instruction (U of
Chicago Press) and a book of poems, Speculative Music (Sarabande,
forthcoming), and he is an editor at large at Cabinet magazine.

The Bureau of Unknown Destinations will be having a small celebration for all the adventurous souls who have traveled to unknown destinations over the past months.

Travelers' Notebooks

Please join Sal Randolph, Migration Artist-In-Residence, at Proteus to raise a glass of wine, meet other voyagers and see some of the marvelous notebooks and artifacts which have been returned to the Bureau.

No RSVP needed, friends welcome.