Please join us for opening reception of Battle Ground, the third and last exhibit of our yearlong Battle theme. Battle Ground will explore the pathos of the Battle of Brooklyn, stimulating our collective memory, evoking parallels between past and present, while focusing on the complexity, moral ambiguity, and devastation of this important Revolutionary confrontation. Historical imagery, rendered meaningless by over-use and political manipulation, will be revived in new forms.

The word “revolution” circles around us, forming the early consciousness of our country. History, also cyclical, repeats itself, and when it is forgotten, it haunts us, lying dormant in our collective memories. In 1776 one such haunting unfolded across a wide swath of what is now Brooklyn. Perhaps the battle is often forgotten (relative to others) because it was, in the words of Walt Whitman, a “resolute defeat.”

The battle-haunting still rages around us at Proteus Gowanus. Its culminating events took place just feet from our gallery location, along what was then the Gowanus Creek. The fields and marshes of 1776 are now a post-industrial urban landscape, and the Gowanus Canal is a hotly contested Federal Superfund and development site.

Maryland Willow, Robert Gould

Battle Ground is curated by Sasha Chavchavadze with help from Robert Gould, Angela Kramer and Eva Melas.

Battle Ground participants include artists, educators, urban planners and writers:

Paul Benney, Peter Bonner, Sasha Chavchavadze, Eymund Diegel, Robert Gould, Katarina Jerinic, Andrew Keating, Christina Kelly, V. Komar & A. Melamid, Angela Kramer, Robyn Love, Eva Melas, Duke Riley, Robert Sullivan.

*Special thanks to the restaurant and bakery, Runner & Stone, which takes its name from tide mills that operated along the Gowanus Creek in the 18th century.

For our last exhibition of the Paradise year, we focus on Bedevilment, in collaboration with our friends at Curious Matter, who will install an exhibit within the exhibit entitled The Naming of the Animals.

Myth says that naming the animals is an obligation assigned to humankind at the creation and it is one that has never ceased to demand attention: the task of naming, ordering, cataloging, dividing, pairing, discerning, describing, speaking…. Indeed, Paradise itself, where naming first began, was a place divided and separated, which is why its beatific presence bedevils us. As the exhibitions at Proteus Gowanus and Curious Matter attest, these paradisiacal topics are vexing.

We are bedeviled by threatened harmony, endless desiring,  dangerous magic and unhinged innocence, all on view in the works of 19  artists, writers , designers and collectives. Also in store is the Spring line-up of evening events with musicians, scholars, priests, dancers, filmmakers, historians and writers.

The exhibit at Proteus opens this Saturday and will run through July 16. The show at Curious Matter opened on April 3 and closes May 15. For details on Naming the Animals and directions to Curious Matter, click here.

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In addition, we are pleased to host this spring two Paradise projects-in-residence. In the work of Madhu Kaza’s Here Is Where We Meet and Clarinda Mac Lowe’s Cyborg Nation, we examine the relationship between intimacy and service, domestic ritual and public space, and between our human selves and the smart machines which serve and guide us.

Cyborg Nation extends our recent inquiries into future utopias,  offering Teknotherapy for all who need help coping with their increasing dependence upon electronic gadgets. Have you fully accepted your cyborg nature? With Teknotherapy, a Cyborg interlocutor (or “teknotherapist”) leads group and individual sessions during April and May for those of us grappling with our machinic selves, helping us to come to terms with our relationships with our electronic extensions. For more details or to make an appointment, click here.

For our second project, Here is Where We Meet, Madhu Kaza will travel to individual participant’s homes by appointment to read them to sleep at bedtime. Here is Where We Meet is part of the artist’s ongoing Hospitality series, projects that examine social conventions, rituals of domestic and daily life, relations between strangers, hosts and guests, and boundaries of public and intimate space. Here is Where We Meet is particularly concerned with the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, the drift from the world of stories to the world of dreams, and a re-engagement of the pleasure of voice in our experience of texts. More details will be available soon.

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