Multi-Media, Mixed Messages at New Art Exhibit in Tribeca
Satellite Collective, an arts incubator that brings together visual artists, writers, and composers to collaborate across disciplines, is hosting an evocative new exhibition, “Satellite Tribeca,” at the Mriya Gallery (101 Reade Street), starting today and continuing through May 18. The show features prints, photography, and sculpture by Kevin Draper (an architect, writer, sculptor, and technologist) and Lora Robertson (a photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist).
The multi-disciplinary work stretches across two weekends of premieres and events. “Satellite is working in a new kind of venue for the collective,” said Mr. Draper, the group’s artistic director, who co-founded the collective in 2010 with members of the New York City Ballet and other artists from diverse creative realms. “We are bringing the athletic performance and production values of our performing arts work into a gallery space.”
Mr. Draper’s series of works is called “With Respect To The Killer In My Heart,” and includes “Delta,” a handcrafted super-bike, which he describes as “a mechanical expression of the American id in aluminum.” His “Dominant Landscape A and B” are large images of terrain, hand-printed on fabric twenty-two feet long, which run the length of the gallery and portray the passing of time through textures of urban decay, motion, and sudden stops. “I am focused on the breakdown of Modernism as a language,” Mr. Draper said. “Brutalism has emerged as the style of the past that fits best now.”
Lora Robertson, executive director of the group, calls her series, “The American Yes.” Built around large-format photographs printed on aluminum sheets with a dye-sublimation process, the photographs reveal austere and carefully composed still lives. “I channel Hunter S. Thompson, shooting at bottles while pressing the shutter,” is how Ms. Robertson describes her photographic process. Her pieces also include “Maiden | Mother | Crone,” an ennead of sand-cast, bronze pelvises, female and life sized. The work is meant to answer the proliferation of laws and policies “that curtail women’s ability to make decisions about their bodies,” she said, adding, “it asks viewers to ponder where a woman’s autonomy ends and laws, institutions, and authority figures step in.” The cumulative effect of Ms. Robertson’s photographs and sculptures, she said, is meant to conjure “the slow demolition of a Molotov cocktail, the weapon of necessity for grassroots resistance.”