Featuring Brian Barr and Lauren Rice
Curated by Jesse Harrod
Exhibition Dates: July 2 – August 3, 2014
Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 2 from 5-7pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12-6pm
Location: 120 Essex Street (inside Essex Street Market)
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space is proud to present Data/Transfer/Object, the first New York exhibition by Detroit-based husband and wife collaborative Brian Barr and Lauren Rice. Like many of their previous collaborations, the exhibition will experiment with the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture focusing on the shifting cultural significance of ideas, objects and images. Through living and working in Detroit, Barr and Rice have identified Detroit’s collapsed economy as the first post-industrial American city, yet simultaneously a breeding ground for new strategies of cultural production. They are interested in Detroit as a precursor for potential/impending economic, social, and ecological collapse. The artists see themselves as collectors engaged with the postproduction notion of recycling and reshaping images in order to reexamine history and by default, the future.
The title of the exhibition, Data/Transfer/Object, is a play-on-words referencing the technological transfer of data between systems. It also references the artists’ process of collecting and storing images and objects, their use of the image as object, as well as their process of taking and recombining contextual information and translating it into an aesthetic language. Through a multi-disciplinary approach to painting, photography and sculpture, Barr and Rice explore the relationship between analogue and digital processes. As a result they create of a non-hierarchical discourse surrounding the shifting nature of deteriorating and evolving visual information.
In their aesthetic and conceptual choices for the work exhibited in Data/Transfer/Object the artists will respond to and interact with one another, each picking up a concept where the other leaves off. Given the difference of their individual practice, together they provide a more complete and complex visual thesis.
Brian Barr and Lauren Rice have had collaborative exhibitions at Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) and Flashpoint Gallery (Washington, D.C.). Together, Barr and Rice are starting PASSENGER, a residency program and center for contemporary art in Detroit. In 2011, Rice was awarded a fellowship at The Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA). Barr has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH) and The Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA). Barr has curated exhibitions at Org Contemporary (Detroit, MI), Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), and the Museum of New Art (Detroit, MI). In March 2013, Barr and Rice co-curated, No Longer Presidents but Prophets at Delicious Spectacle (Washington, DC) and will be co-curating Ad Infinitum at the Katzen Museum (Washington, DC) in November 2014. Lauren Rice has had solo exhibitions at venues including, COOP Gallery (Nashville, TN), Transformer (Washington, DC), and The South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, IN). Barr and Rice currently live and work in Detroit, MI.
Jesse Harrod has an MFA from the department of Material Studies at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Harrod writes and makes work that employs traditional and contemporary craft and sculptural practices. She has exhibited throughout the US and Canada in cities including, Toronto, Halifax, Chicago, and Detroit. Harrod attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Harold Arts and Ox-Bow. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Tyler University.
Cuchifritos is FREE to the public and handicap accessible. Located inside Essex Street Market at the south end nearest Delancey.
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space is a program of Artists Alliance Inc., a 501c3 not for profit organization located on the Lower East Side of New York City within the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. Cuchifritos is supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. This program is made possible by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. We thank the following for their generous support: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York City Economic Development Corporation and individual supporters of Artists Alliance Inc. Special thanks go to our team of dedicated volunteers, without whom this program would not be possible.