ON AIR brings the magic of live television to NYU’s Barney Galleries.
The NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions is pleased to present ON AIR, an exhibition produced collaboratively by artists Chris Blue, Steph Bow, Jong Yoon Choi, Nora Chuff, Sammy Dalati, Zachary Schoenhut, Emma Strebel, Peter Valenti, Lizzie Wee, and Dorothy Lam; ZiHong. Advised by Jonathan Berger.
From April 8 – 18, 2015, the Commons Gallery will close to the public and become the site for a fully operating television production studio, visible only from above via the Barney Building’s mezzanine. Equipped with an editing lab, costume shop, production office, fabrication studio, prop house, green screen, and an array of film sets, the space will be utilized by the group of artists throughout each day of the exhibition to create an evolving roster of television programming. Concurrently, the Rosenberg gallery will be transformed in to a TV den, where visitors can lounge and watch a regularly updated schedule of live and prerecorded output from the Commons Gallery studio. ON AIR takes its inspiration from the unregulated possibility, unprecedented formats, and unique agency found in the rich history of self produced cable access television shows, as well as from the present day explosion of DIY web series disseminated via platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. The exhibition operates under the auspices of “BFA,” a fictional TV network occupying “Channel 34,” which is comprised of over twenty regularly scheduled television programs. The artists in the exhibition function as executive producers, creating the station’s shows both autonomously and collaboratively.
BFA/Channel 34’s programs are as eclectic, idiosyncratic, and personal as the range of creative practices, interests, modes of production, and conceptual concerns of each contributing artist. Nora Chuff’s travel program, Traveling Chuff, brings us along for the ride as she moves with her selfie stick from the ancient ruins of Peru to the farms of rural Pennsylvania. Steph Bow and Emma Strebel’s ElectriKitchen challenges chefs to cook five star meals without open flame. Yoon Choi's Poetry Reading with Deepfried_Kitty touches the soul with poetry in motion, and Lizzie Wee’s children’s show is set in the imaginary land of Suria Park, a home away from home invented by a young Chinese immigrant girl named Xian Ying. Exploring the unique nature of so called “after hours” programming, Chris Blue’s Blues riffs on the format of 90s music video countdowns and their discussant VJ hosts, while Zachary Schoenhut’s erotica talk show Postcoitus is set in Schoenhut’s own bed, where a variety of his intimates and scholarly mates discuss questions pertaining to sex, gender, and feeling. Sammy Dalati’s surrealist noir series Visions and Pete Valenti’s art school “critroom drama” Dish offer radical interpretations of the serial soap form. Meanwhile Dorothy Lam; Zi Hong’s three part opera, \O\, builds its narrative using the visual language of geometry and a dissonant score, and Emma Strebel’s The Weather Channel experiments with the passage of time via live television.
ON AIR’s approach to the “group show” format departs altogether from a conventional model where autonomous artworks share a common theme, instead opting to present an exhibition that exists as a composite, thereby embodying the shared values of a community of individual artists.
In a communiqué released by the BFA Network, it’s executive producers state:
“We’re trying hard to hint at the total freedom to be had if normal, honest people just take a piece of the pie for themselves. As we emerge like bugs from higher education, we hate Bad Faith. In good faith, we present to you the sweat of our efforts. What you will see is part sendup, part sincerity; part hackney, and part originality; part orgo, and part orgasm: A symphonic symposium symbiosis of visions, tele, of our time.”
