Open Source Gallery (306 17th St., Brooklyn)
Sunday July 22 from 11:00am to 1:00pm
Join us at the cHURCH where artist Katarina Poliacikova will be discussing her current project, Fires Venice Tequila Sunsets. This is a free event. Bagels and coffee will be served.
Katarina Poliacikova is an artist-in-residence at OS Gowanus in June and July of 2018. Her project, Fires Venice Tequila Sunsets, is a personal adventure that links narratives across time and space, it is a way of creating connections to a place and opening ways for curiosity and serendipity. She will be giving a talk about this project at the cHURCH OF MONIKA on July 22 at Open Source Gallery (306 17th St., Brooklyn).
In her book As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980, Susan Sontag writes self-reflective notes about the allure of lists as a way to “perceive value, confer value, create value, even create — or guarantee — existence..” In an entrance from February 21 1977, Sontag created a list of things she likes and dislikes that goes on as a stream of consciousness: simple, beautiful and decadent at the same time. Reading about things that someone else is/not fond of creates a special moment of intimacy. It can make one feel connected to a person they had never met and will never get to know personally.
During her artist residency in Lithuania last year, Poliacikova started creating, discovering and filming scenes, atmospheres and associations. She approached them as visual narratives based on Sontag’s list likes, rendered through her personal vision and preferences. Written in 1977 on Manhattan Island exactly four decades later, the list transcended time and space, as she set it into the semi-island of Neringa. Neringa has a size and shape very similar to the Manhattan Island, but yet is a totally different place. (Tramadol)
This summer, Katarina will explore the list through a different angle and environment, returning to NYC: the city where Sontag’s diaries were once written.
The list of Susan Sontag’s and Poliacikova’s “shared likes” include:
fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, coarse salt, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, microscopes, large rooms, drinking water, ivory, sweaters, urinating, staying in hotels, the color blue, making lists, caves, watching ice-skating, taking taxis, eucalyptus trees, hands, socks, raw peas, bridges, Dürer, escalators, deserts, white walls, horses, sitting cross-legged, stripes, large windows, fresh dill, reading aloud, going to bookstores, under-furnished rooms, dancing
Katarina Poliacikova’s residency has been supported using public funds provided by Slovak Arts Council.
