Opening Reception: Friday April 5th, 6-9pm

Bronx River Art Center is pleased to present Tableau, a four-person exhibition of works that reveal identity through a range of perspectives spanning social economics and culture, community and family, and individual memento. 

Brooklyn-based curator and artist Chad Stayrook, a former gallery director of BRAC, is the guest curator.

culture

Alexa Hoyer’s photo series Montaje Al Aire (Air Montage), documents a technique of window dressing unique to Cuba in which limited goods and materials are displayed to the public suspended from ceilings with fishing line, wire or string and available props. Created out of necessity due to the scarcity of resources imposed by the U.S. blockade, Montaje Al Aire serves as an example of innovation in the face of adversity.

community

Amanda Browder’s impressive catalog of work has most notably taken the form of large-scale fabric draped building pieces. The works require collective community efforts including partnerships with institutions and building owners, calls to local residents for fabric donations, and public sewing days with volunteers. Future Phenomenon, created in collaboration with the Greenpoint Brooklyn community in 2010, is Browder’s first such work. In Tableau it is repurposed as an intentionally arranged floor piece that acts as documentation of artist-led community organizing and the fruits such efforts bear.

family

Chloë Bass’s Obligation To Others Holds Me In My Place borrows from the visual language of family home movies and photo albums to capture both the profound and everyday nature of interracial families. Though ultimately manifesting as a four-channel film documenting American mixed-race families through  typical familial celebrations, Tableau presents the project's current form with video essay and found-image and text works depicting fictitious family moments. These works are part of an unfolding, multiform family album which serve as notes for Bass’s future film, questioning of the linear narrative of racial progress and identifying gaps in the American archive.

individual

Elisabeth Smolarz’s Encyclopedia of Things began with an impossible, yet worthy goal: a collective portrait of the human condition depicted through objects-held-dear, one person at a time. For this series of photographs, Smolarz collaborates with individuals in their home environments. Each participant selects personal objects which are  portals to memories both precious and meaningful, and then arranged for the camera in a temporary installation. The installations of participants' most treasured objects embody their sense of self and identity and tell the story of each individual. The final result is series of intricate non-concrete portraits consisting of a prevalent vocabulary made out of ubiquitous objects that echo the universality of the human condition.