- 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
Excerpted from a conversation between Dave Hardy and Max Warsh, participating artists in Queens International 2016
Max Warsh:
A lot of your earlier work dealt with provisional architecture, which is something I was also fascinated with for many years. Do you think architecture today has been able to embrace or accept an idea of impermanence? Even if this idea is built into structures that intend to last forever? I ask because because I love how your work handles these contradictions and I was interested to hear if you felt like there were any architectural works that functioned in a similar way?
Dave Hardy:
It feels to me like people are fixated on the idea of their buildings sticking around forever, we haven't passed that, even as things become more disposable. It’s a weird thing to think about as an artist, the idea of work – of stuff – sticking around and outlasting you. My Dad, who has been an artist all his life, tells me about the feeling of watching his sculptures overrun, with vines growing over them in the woods. But I guess the contradiction is between the material and the immaterial, and how they express each other. Structures of praise use particular forms to evoke something greater, like googie architecture dots the landscape with IHOP A-Frames that express some sort of optimism or belief. Which makes me think about something great in your work and your use of facades – whether it's ornament, or pattern, or different types of cladding – to create a continuous field of surface and then to fracture it. Thinking about impermanence, is this collapse of flatness and depth, of interior and exterior, something that interests you as a psychological exploration?
MW:
I used to use the word psychogeography to describe my work, which is a phrase that comes from the Situationists, and they were definitely concerned with a form of disruption or fracture in the perception of urban space. But I'm really drawn to these details in architecture, where I feel like the building is trying to speak to me. I suppose I'm interested in what happens when you humanize a building. Once you do this, you can really see how a building breathes, speaks, and moves. There's definitely a strong psychological impact in how we collectively perceive architecture and notions of permanence, and by intentionally trying to humanize these structures, I suppose I'm trying to disrupt that. In this way, your sculptures have really strong human personalities, when and how did they start to evoke characters or people?
DH:
Hahahaha. I love that idea, of trying to humanize buildings. I don't know that my sculptures ever did start to evoke people, but other people see them that way. I think of them as relationships, as things coming into contact with each other in different ways. And in that, I guess they contain elements that are evocative of gestures: awkwardness, fleshy folds, softness, and brittleness. Things that are associated with bodies. The encounter can feel like running into a person, when they're roughly the same scale as your body, when they take up that kind of space, they start to behave like characters. It's kind of a game, leaving that to a viewer, but then pushing that sense of familiarity, through titles sometimes, sometimes through really obvious appendages. There's all this admission and denial, all these contradictions again. And then looking at your work, the way you're thinking about the personalities of buildings, cutting up and recombining the facades of buildings, it's funny, it almost feels like fashion. Is that something you think about, "where is the person?" in all these decisions?
MW:
Yes, it's definitely important for me to think about the tradesperson who placed this material down on a facade in the first place, and then how it is communicated to me or any other passer-by. So through this interface of architecture, a very human interaction can occur and this is fascinating to me. And, I think there is a relationship to fashion in how I am looking at the numerous ways that a building expresses its surface through both ornamental and utilitarian details. Also when different architectural styles clash within a collage, it’s hard not to think about fashion. I once worked with a fashion designer who printed one of my collages onto a number of garments—pants, jackets, shirts, hats—which was something I never would have thought of. It was exciting to see it though, and it made complete sense—a moving body wearing one of my collages as if the architecture was so fluid it just extended onto the bodies of people walking by. I'm always thinking about ways in which I can make something that embodies the characteristics of moving images within a still image, and this clothing functioned in that way. This tension between stasis and fluidity is such a large part of your work. There's always this looming feeling that something is potentially on the verge of collapse, when, in fact, it is very solid, and I can't help but read this as somewhat of a critique or failure of ideology, do you see it that way?
DH:
Yeah, I think it is, that's nicely said Max. I've gotten to this place in my work where a feeling is meaning enough. There is all of this building that goes into the pieces, and then it's all removed so that there are just a few elements, looking like they shouldn't possibly be able to stand. Tension holds them together, just at that point of collapse. As something we both use in our work, I think “collapse” is a good thing to end with here...