ART > EMERGENCY ROOM @ PS1 Art Center

EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE

EMERGENCY ROOM
February 8 - March 19, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - December 15, 2006) P.S.1 proudly presents Emergency Room, a constantly evolving collaborative exhibition conceived and led by artist Thierry Geoffroy, a.k.a. Colonel. To realize this project, Geoffroy has invited over thirty local and international artists to create and install new works in a range of media, all generated daily in response to current events. Emergency Room is on view in the third floor Archive Galleries from February 8 through March 19, 2007.

Emergency Room is motivated by a desire to learn what other artists think about current affairs from varied international perspectives under strict time constraints. By providing a physical space in which artists can display works made in reaction to current events, Emergency Room takes the pulse of the artistic community today. On each day of the exhibition, artists will install new work in response to the events of the last 24 hours, an arrangement that recalls daily news cycles. The artworks stay on view until the next morning whenthey are moved to an adjacent archive space and replaced by new work.

Emergency Room seeks to foster a sense of community among the participating artists and an atmosphere in which the gallery serves as a laboratory both for personal expression and formal experimentation. Artists will come with very different methodologies, from the politically charged to the personally intimate, to interact with a specific space and develop an on-going project together.

French-born Thierry Geoffroy (b. 1961) has presented his art internationally since 1995. Recently, he had solo exhibitions at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; IKM Museum, Oslo, Norway; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; and Devron Arts, Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. In 2006, Geoffroy presented Emergency Room at Galerie Olaf Stuber, Berlin; and Kunsthallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen. He received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France in 2003. Geoffroy will present a project at the 2007
Venice Biennale.

Emergency Room is organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Reflections of New York’s Luckiest

NYTIMES.COM: In his 1949 essay “Here Is New York,” an ode firmly grounded in the city’s varied lore, E. B. White concluded the first paragraph, “No one should come to New York unless they are willing to be lucky.” Taking inspiration from that canny insight, two curators at the Museum of the City of New York have served up a copious slice of New York’s cultural life in the mid-20th century. (Photo: Stanley Kubrick was a Look magazine photographer when he caught himself in the mirror of Rosemary Williams, a showgirl, in 1949.)

Read the full article in The New York Times here.

Willing to Be Lucky: Ambitious New Yorkers in the Pages of LOOK Magazine

Oct 21 through Jan 3

Willing to Be Lucky is drawn from the Museum’s collection of photographs from LOOK, one of the 20th century’s most influential pictorial magazines. Featuring more than 100 images from the 1940s and ‘50s, the exhibition focuses on individuals—both celebrities and ordinary people—who, in pursuing their dreams, were just offbeat enough, with a little luck, to land them in the pages of LOOK. Themes include dancers, boxers, showgirls, artists, and overnight sensations, and the early photography work of Stanley Kubrick is prominently featured. The title is drawn from E. B. White’s celebrated 1949 essay "Here Is New York," in which he asserted, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

Willing to Be Lucky is made possible by the Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation and the Ferris Foundation. Additional support is provided by Crane & Co. Museo Fine Art Papers.

Press release available here.

AOL City Guide: Times Sq. NYE

New Year's Eve is celebrated all over the world, but the holiday's undisputed epicenter is in the Bow Tie of Times Square (42nd to 47th streets between Broadway and 7th Avenue). Serious musical heavyweights serenade the event's hosts, but many would argue the celebrities are just along for the ride; as Countdown Entertainment's Jeffrey Straus puts it, "the people in the Square are the real stars." More than a half-million of them will turn up to see the lighting and raising of the ball in the early evening, a continuous musical soundtrack, the distribution of pom-poms, confetti bags, balloons and other party favors, and the internationally televised, 60-second countdown to midnight -- when the ball drops, followed by a two-minute fireworks display and a blizzard of confetti.