ARC
activate, research, createARC 2024
ARC (activate, research, create), A.P.E.'s curated summer program, is in its seventh season, continuing the investigation of a contemporary art gallery as an active space within the community.
During each residency, the gallery will be open to the public through a variety of workshops, performances, showings, and interactive installations. Each project maintains a central inquiry into the relationship between the public, the work, and the space in which it is made.
The ARC 2024 projects are:
During each residency, the gallery will be open to the public through a variety of workshops, performances, showings, and interactive installations. Each project maintains a central inquiry into the relationship between the public, the work, and the space in which it is made.
The ARC 2024 projects are:
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ETERNAL by LESN101 + NAGO
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R.U.R or Rossum's Universal Robots by NADA Art Collective
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Everything Old is Garbage by Bobby Brownlow
- Inside the Breath (In Network Time) by Sara Smith
ARC 2024 EXHIBITIONS
ETERNAL
LESN101 + NAGOJune 5-9
As everything changes in our world, the only thing that remains fixed is the change itself. Through the lens of graffiti artist LESN101, and hip-hop producer NAGO, we see the radical acceptance of this change in ETERNAL. With the focus on the creative process rather than the final works themselves, LESN101 and NAGO demonstrate the core of their respective crafts through live collaboration and composition. Arriving with paint and 70’s cinema scores, and leaving with alien artwork and broken speakers, ETERNAL invites the audience to both experience and participate in the spinning of straw into gold. Join us in celebrating the electric impermanence of our lives.
LESN101 makes art to free the soul. As a Lao American visual artist, LESN101 is on an introspective journey to discover his authentic voice, skillfully blending graffiti, abstract expressionism, and portraiture in his work. His artwork draws profound inspiration from a personal and familial narrative marked by survival and trauma. Beginning in 1976 with his mother’s journey to America as a refugee of the Laotian Civil War. Born in Nashville, TN, LESN101 spent his formative years in the midwest until domestic violence forced his family to relocate to Springfield, MA. He channels his mother's resilience and his own experiences with fear and trauma into transformative art, exploring themes of self-liberation, healing, and empowerment.
NAGO makes music for ghosts. A sample-based hip-hop musician, NAGO collages audio into introspective sonic cinemas. Rooted in his upbringing in Springfield, Massachusetts, NAGO explores themes of family, solitude, classism, racism, and generational cycles. With an emphasis on the technology he uses, NAGO blurs time by shifting between rigid, computer-led patterns and soaring, abstract passages. NAGO is heavily influenced by both the foundations and future of hip-hop, and describes his work as an “abandoned factory machine learning to play jazz.”
R.U.R or ROSSUMS UNIVERSAL ROBOTS
NADA Art CollectiveJune 10-16
There are robots all around us, hearing us, commanding us, serving us. And often, in our daily mechanized tasks, remembering passwords, optimizing our bodies, we begin to feel robotic ourselves. This installation will be based on the linguistic source of the word “robot,” the play R.U.R. or Rossum’s Universal Robots, and explore the themes of industry, labor, humanity, and the soul, through a collective artmaking process and performance of the adapted original play. The installation will use cheap or found materials to create beauty from the surplus of capitalism. Join us in Rossum’s Robot Factory...
NADA Art Collective is an intergenerational collaboration between poets, printmakers, performers, persuaders, potheads, and polymaths, currently physically grounded in Western Massachusetts.
NADA Artists Featured in RUR:
KIER is a writer and director based in Northampton.
Maggie Sullivan is a printmaker and tattoo artist based in Northampton.
Olive Rowell is a sculptural artist living in South Hadley.
Iya Currier is a sculptural artist based in New Hampshire.
Max Feldman, aka spa water is a musician and comedian based in Brooklyn.
Steffanie Paul is a experiential artist and bioinformatician based in Boston.
Autumn Shelby is a transient performer currently living in San Cristobal.
Marty Vanzant is an artist based in Northampton.
EVERYTHING OLD IS GARBAGE
Bobby LaBitchJune 18-22
What kinds of things in our heritage and history do we want to keep? What from the past do we romanticize? What do we want to leave in the past?--Childhood? Trauma? Ancestral values? Outdated fashion trends? Our old toys? What can and should we discard, no matter how painful? Where does all that stuff go?
Bobby LaBitch will spend the first day of the residency installing a Victorian-style drawing room in the gallery. The room will be furnished and decorated with LaBitch’s own sculptures, made of recycled, discarded and salvaged items–particularly childrens’ stuffed animals. Unlike in traditional house museums, everything will be touchable, sittable, browseable, and gallery goers will be invited to enter the room and spend as much time as they would like. LaBitch will be in residency in the drawing room daily during both closed and open gallery hours. His daughter, Louise Brownlow, will be in residency periodically as well. The large storefront gallery window will be the fourth wall of the room, and all going-ons throughout the week, including setting up and breaking down, will be visible to people on the street.
Bobby LaBitch makes things out of discarded items, fake fur, and hot glue–mostly home goods and other traditionally girlish and gayish arts. Most of his “art” deals with built space and living space, history, colonialism, the body, family, childhood and sexuality. He has been a ballerina since age 4 and is currently balding from injectable testosterone. This is his first artists’ residency.
Louise Brownlow is a visual artist and dancer. She is currently interested in sewing, fashion and costume design. One of her paintings was featured this year in the Looky Here2024 calendar. She will be assisting the artist to install and decorate the finished room in the gallery.
INSIDE THE BREATH (IN NETWORK TIME)
Sara SmithJune 24-30
Inside the Breath (In Network Time) is an ecotopian exploration of the biological properties of interconnection, and a long project set in I.N.T., the calendar era of our interspecies planetary future. The borderless future world of I.N.T. is based on the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa as modeled by octopuses, made possible by bacterial communication networks. We are the climate.
During the ARC residency, transdisciplinary choreographer Sara Smith will be experimenting with and developing immersive installation elements for a later multimedia exhibition, and building and recording I.N.T. folk dances and songs with members of the Network Time Human Chorus.
Sara Smith is a transdisciplinary choreographer and librarian. Their projects consider concepts of interconnection, practices of micro-attention, and the poetics and politics of embodied and archival research. Sara’s artworks have been seen and heard in theaters, museums, studios, public parks, recreation center basements, and cloud-based platforms, and have received support from the LEF Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in choreography, and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Hewnoaks, and the American Antiquarian Society. Since 2013, Sara has been the Arts & Humanities Librarian at Amherst College.
VINTAGE 'NATURE FLIMS' NIGHT
Thursday, June 27; 7:30pm
OPEN HOUSE + PROJECT DISCUSSION
Sunday, June 30; 3pm
INT FOLK SONG CIRCLE
Sunday, June 30; 4pm