- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
Written like a Mad Lib featuring QI 2016 artwork titles roughly in order by artist's last name, this piece can be decoded by clicking through the adjacent artist pages to follow as you read through the text below
Lost wallet, cancelled credit cards. Nahawand. Beirut, Lebanon. June 18, 2016
Ate well. Vivid day. Beirut, Lebanon. June 20, 2016
Saw Kate Winslet (I think) coming out of a bar. Beirut, Lebanon. June 21, 2016
Hotel window is cracked but view is excellent. Beirut, Lebanon. June 24, 2016
Met a guy who called himself Big Ben; didn’t ask why. Dbayeh Suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. June 25, 2016
Visited Lost Shadows [AND Museum]. Odd collection of postcards. They seem to hold meaning to someone else who is from here. Maybe. Not your typical array. Unusual landscape views are populated by anachronistic details; a car sits in the foreground of one, against a grand but unremarkable landscape.
The next museum brings me to a painting titled, Las Reinas. It reminds me of being in art history class so I move on to find A Third Space, one that doesn’t require so much focus and concentration. What is the point of all this canned culture? I need some Studio Abandon.
Or maybe I should go Fishing with Angela. She did say that if I got bored or wistful that I should call. Why not?
Later, after Angela and I spent many Golden Hours together, contemplating the Untitled and unnamed feelings between us, I Beat It. I had to go. We were on the verge of experimenting with The Potential in Waves Colliding and there were surely Signs of Flood. The waters we overlooked all those evenings were advancing doggedly (despite some stubborn people’s will to believe humanity did not have impacts on the planet). So I moved on. Perhaps towards another Destiny.
Two days later, I met Tommy. It was on a hike through a dry, rocky landscape. We began to talk rather philosophically about how to determine The Lightest of Stones. From mere observation, Tommy claimed, he could discern their weight. I doubted him, but we kept talking as we made our way to a tavern for dinner. There, conversation turned to technology, of which Tommy was deeply skeptical. He claimed he had devised a Memory Module Mask with Interference to disrupt attempts at reading his thoughts. He was paranoid, particularly when in range of wifi. Fortunately the tavern was not equipped.
As the night wore on, he boasted of a forthcoming tech-pocalypse, a Phantasmic Data Dawn, where 0s and 1s would have the day. Besides his mask, he claimed to have the only antidote, Lime Data. Things got sketchy at this point. I was lost, and Tommy too far down his rabbit hole of tech disaster to be distracted.
Somehow, I managed to disrupt his monologue, but only insulted him. He said I had committed The Eternal Insult (is this a cultural thing?) and we could not go on talking. While disconcerted that I could evoke an Eternal Insult without intending to (in fact, I wasn’t even sure what that meant?), I was relieved at being excused.
Leaving the tavern, I walked by a club advertising a Dance with flARmingos in flashing neon. That sounded like fun but perhaps another night. I’d had enough abstract thinking with Tommy, and I was fairly sure that augmented reality, flamingos, and dancing would take more energy than I had left. It was 2am, after all.
Back at the hotel, I dreamt of Chasing Waterfalls. Following the flow from the top of a ravine, down through a tropical forest, dense with the scent of passion fruit. The fruits themselves had ripened and fallen on the trail. At first the rich aroma was divine, ambrosia. But as the trail wore on, parallel to the waterfall streaming downward, the fruits rotted and the heavy smell of their decay as sweet and sickening, mixing with the wet dirt of the path.
As the waterfall slowed to a trickle, several miles onward, I heard someone whisper, “evian is naïve spelled backwards…” Was this water even ok to drink? I had no choice. It was the only water for miles.
I woke up parched in the pre-dawn light. No rainforest, I was still in Beirut. Or Queens?
Once, in a conversation with an old, dear friend, she said that ours was a Prepersonal relationship. She meant that there was nothing we couldn’t discuss, although as we got older the humiliations of daily life seemed less like something either of us wanted to rehash. We sat in a café, Tendered Currency for our drinks, and talked about the new zoning guidelines for Highest and Best Use (388 Bridge St.). Was the neighborhood really changing? Were we somewhere between Omniscience and Oblivion? How did KZ manage to get such a great studio in Ridgewood?
Suddenly my friend asked if I knew what Western Standards were? I asked if they were bathroom fixtures. No, she laughed, that’s American Standard.
Wondering about Organizational Transparency we wandered back through the old Worlds Fair grounds to the Museum. This Space is special. It unfolds over time. It may contain a Memory of a tiptoe, an excavation, expansion cement, stolen doorstop, reproduction glass, graphite crucible, paraffin wax, accidental steps, shared machine part, tree pruning sealer, memory of an unfair necessary, corning wax bite, Maple, tack cloths, the positive of language, packing foam, binder clips, unfired porcelain, handmade lead tubing, a paperweight, granite dust from a monument making shop in Queens, fine bone china rims, when all the color goes away, rubber cast of how to move in 1939, lined paper tray, gift wrap tape, an earring back, dinner plate fragment, silver approximating thread, compressed pewter, the insides of jingle bells, unfired porcelain with dye transfer, Plexiglas, a small city on quick wood, fragment of a glass crucible from Kokomo, IN, fragment of a glass kiln from Kokomo, IN, sinking pewter, Friendly Plastic, Quick Copper, all about timing, bb’s, muslin, half a bouncy ball, a pin back standing in for “seeing the future,” Memory Foam, Aqua Resin, marble dust, red cleaning camouflage, chunk glass, potluck stone, Birch plywood, brads, Super Paint, middle gray…
Suddenly, an Untitled (Interference). Selections from Sports Closet were available at the front desk: bocce, even croquette. We could use them in the park if we left our IDs. Games of Chances aren’t really my thing so we continued on, watching the group of young students go into the park to draw Plein Air.
As we made our way inside, we bumped into Louis & Sam. They were talking about the collages and music they would make together, right here, in Corona, New York: City of Tomorrow. They went off to plan their next project, while we contemplated the Panorama and decided we were Becoming New Objects. Well, maybe not entirely new, but at least transformed.
Laura Raicovich is President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum. She wrote this while listening to the rain, sitting on the front porch during her vacation, while thinking about the necessity of rules and how to break them.