ILLUSION / DELUSION - Alexis Pace

Please join Alexis Pace for the opening of her second solo show at Le Petit Versailles. 

The Opening is August 1st 

5:30pm - 8pm E. Houston Btw Ave B & C.

August 1 -30th.

This is the second in a series exploring body image and perception. Illusion\Delusion is made up of a series of shards of mirror hung throughout the garden allowing the viewer to explore and experience the refraction of self.

--Visiting Hours Wednesday-Sunday  2-7pm--

Le Petit Versailles events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc., Gardeners & Friends of LPV, GreenThumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts, and the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs. LPV Exhibitions are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

ROSHANAK ELMENDORF

ROSHANAK ELMENDORF
EXHIBITION AND SCREENING

Saturday, July 19 at 7 PM
Le Petit Versailles
346 East Houston St. (at Ave. C)

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Le Petit Versailles is pleased to have artist Roshanak Elmendorf share with us her animation and drawings for a day-long exhibition.

Roshanak Elmendorf was born in Tehran, Iran. In 1977 she came to the United States to pursue a career in science. Influenced by the social changes in Iran, she returned to the country in 1979. More than a decade after obtaining a medical degree from New York University in 1993, she developed an interest in painting and drawing. In 2005 she started her studies at art studio classes in New York and New Jersey. Searching for a juncture between poetry and art led her to the discovery of experimental film and moving image that would incorporate drawings, paintings, photography and film. She uses a combination of analog and digital animation, video processing and sound design to intervene with the source images.



Le Petit Versailles events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc., Gardeners & Friends of LPV, GreenThumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts, and the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs. LPV Exhibitions are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

SUMMER NIGHTS ON JUPITER

Join us on July 18th for Summer Nights on Jupiter curated by Stephen Boyer and hosted by Le Petit Versailles. This July will feature readings and performances by Wo Chan, Tommy Pico, Ariana Reines and Pamela Sneed. Rain or shine we'll be amongst the flowers.

About us:

Stephen Boyer is a novelist, poet, performer but would rather be on Jupiter, obviously.

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Wo Chan is a queer Chinese immigrant devoted to poetry and drag. He recently received a BA from the University of Virginia where he learned how to write poems and wear lipstick. Wo pays his bills as a makeup artist by day, and at night, performs as Pearl Harbor with the Brooklyn drag collective Switch n' Play. Wo holds poetry fellowships with Poets House, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary, and as a drag queen has performed at Brooklyn Pride, Princeton Ivy-Q conferences, and the Architectural Digest Expo. On his days off, Wo likes to eat bahn mi sandwiches and windowshop.

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Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a writer and editor. He’s the author of absentMINDR (VERBALVISUAL, 2014)—the first chapbook APP published for iOS mobile/tablet devices—was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has been published in BOMB, Guernica, and the Best American Poetry blog. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn.

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Based in New York, Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow Alberta Prize, 2006, Coeur de Lion 2007, Mercury 2011, all from FenceBooks, and Thursday, 2012, from Spork, and the Obie-winning play TELEPHONE 2009, commissioned & produced by The Foundry Theatre. She is the translator of The Little Black Book of Grislidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig 2009 and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by TIQQUN 2011, from Semiotexte, and of My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, 2009 from Mal-O-Mar. Performances and theatrical works include THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD at Stuart Shave Modern Art 2013, LORNA, with Jim Fletcher, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre 2013, MISS ST'S HIEROGLYPHIC SUFFERING at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 2009, and SWISSNESS at The Swiss Institute 2012. Most recently she published The Origin of the World, a book for Semiotexte's contribution to the 2014 Whitney Biennial. This summer she will present MORTAL KOMBAT, a new performance work with Jim Fletcher, at Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne in Switzerland.

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Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, writer and actress, featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, published by Henry Holt in April 1998 and KONG and other works published by Vintage Entity Press 2009. She has performed original works for sold out houses at Lincoln Center, P.S. 122, Ex-Teresa in Mexico City, The ICA London, The CCA in Glasgow Scotland, The Green Room in Manchester England, and BAM cafe. She has headlined the New Work Now festival at Joe’s Pub/Public Theater. In 2013, she performed at Central Park Summer Stage, The Whitney Museum of Art, Columbia University’s, “Geographies of Mass Incarceration.” In 2011, she performed in South Africa, in collaboration with the women’s organization FEW. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence Writing for Solo Performance and Solo Performance in Production. In
2014 She appeared at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, and Long Island University. Her work is included in The 100 Best African American Poems edited by Nikki Giovanni. Her recent publications include work in Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays, Future Perfect, and LIU Teaching Narratives with upcoming work in Ping Pong Magazine and Cutbank Magazine.

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Le Petit Versailles events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc., Gardeners & Friends of LPV, GreenThumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts, and the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs. LPV Exhibitions are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

SPACES OPEN & CLOSED

SPACES OPEN & CLOSED
Saturday, July 12th at 8:30 PM
Le Petit Versailles – 346 E. Houston St. (at Avenue C)
Admission by Donation ($5) or Whatever You Can (Food, Drink)
All Events Rain or Shine
Curated by Josh Guilford

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“It’s really nice this meeting of two worlds.” –Rosalind Nashashibi

Allied Productions, Inc., the Millennium Film Workshop, and Magic Lantern Cinema present an outdoor screening of films by the British artist Rosalind Nashashibi. Featuring 16mm films drawn from the collection of the London-based distributor LUX, the program is conceived as a site-specific screening for the Lower East Side community garden, Le Petite Versailles.

Nashashibi’s work pairs nicely with Le Petit Versailles. Her films often unfold within semi-public realms defined equally by their apertures and enclosures, echoing the mixed composition of this open-air green space encased by apartments and concrete. A cruising ground in a wooded section of a North London park, a working-class neighborhood in a Midwestern city, an Italian cargo ship at sea: Nashashibi gravitates toward places where the inner and the outer coexist with a sort of mesmerizing duality, observing closed communities as they congregate in open view, and analyzing the codes of appearance that organize and shelter such communities. Her films revolve around intimate spaces and relationships that are observable but not fully accessible, presenting images of interiors that feel disarmingly proximate yet perpetually out of reach.

Presenting five of Nashashibi’s films from 2002-2010, this program combines a pair of the artist’s early works, which observe daily rituals being conducted in unfamiliar locales, with three recent films in which Nashashibi more actively reorganizes the scenes and activities she depicts through various production techniques and editing strategies. The program thus spans two distinct periods of Nashashibi’s film practice – the observational and the constructive – while also revealing these periods to be bound together by her sustained investment in cinema as a technology for examining our relationship to outer and inner spaces.

“That’s what’s really attractive about making films. You go into a situation knowing that you’re interested and even knowing why you’re interested, but it’s the filmmaking that gets you closer to the parts of your knowledge that are inaccessible or not yet accessible… [I]t’s really only about trying to find out why I’m going back to this place or situation in the first place.” –R.N.

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Featuring:

“Midwest,” 2002, 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes
Day and night in a working-class section of Omaha, Nebraska. “The films [Midwest and Midwest Field] transparently reflect their subject. The environment dictates the ways the characters will move. The way the characters move informs how the film will be edited. Also choreographed by a system, the camera behaves on the street according to the rules of public space. The point of view is detached for the same reasons we avoid peoples’ eyes on the street, and don’t walk close to strangers.” –Lucy Skaer, “Rosalind’s Patterns,” The Fruitmarket Gallery

“Midwest Field,” 2002, 16mm, color, sound, 3.5 minutes
A counterpoint to Midwest. “A group of middle-aged men fly remote-control glider planes and spend a lazy afternoon in the wide, flat fields outside Omaha.” –LUX

“Bachelor Machines Part 1,” 2007, 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes
“Bachelor Machines Part 1… chronicles the voyage of the cargo vessel Gran Bretagna as it ventures from Italy to Sweden. Following the captain and crew as they go about their business, Nashashibi uses images, not words, to tell the story. The men talk sometimes, but not always in English, so we settle in to the task of intuiting emotion, motivation, and social relation through facial expressions and bodily cues. And, although the film treats a closed company of subjects—the men who form a forced community for the three months of confinement on an isolated shipping vessel—the artist's interest is not merely anthropological. We witness their interactions in recreational and work contexts with the fixed detachment of an embedded participant observer, but Nashashibi spies the ocean and the vessel itself with equal intensity. The framing of the oceanscape, bobbing with the rhythm of the waves through a porthole, transports us to the ship’s deck, and we are distinctly apart from the world. Surrounded by a vast horizon of nothingness, but containing us in a confined space, the ship has its own reality, its own time. And the ocean itself is timeless, an eternity of shifting waves that have appeared the same since the beginning of the world.” –Elizabeth Thomas, UC Berkeley Art Museum

“[W]e didn’t share a language with the people on the ship, and so they felt protected by their language… [I]t really helps for people to have an illusion of privacy. This wasn’t a deliberate choice with the sailors, but it allowed us to get really close.” –R.N.

“Jack Straw’s Castle,” 2009, 16mm, color, sound, 17.5 minutes
Shot in and around the western section of north London’s Hampstead Heath, a popular cruising ground, Jack Straw’s Castle is divided into two connected, but seemingly incompatible sections: the first, featuring observational footage of anonymous men cruising; the second, featuring scenes of a hired film crew staging shots of the same location. Along the way, we encounter images of chimeric figures that seem to embody the heterogeneous form adopted by the film.

“I find it easier to be hidden or almost hidden… [L]ike in Jack Straw’s Castle, where it was really the cinematographer, more than I, who communicated with the crew. It allowed their language to develop without my interfering in it. I found that to be a liberating experience.” –R.N.

“This Quality,” 2010, 16mm, color, sound, 4.5 minutes
“This Quality is a film shot in downtown Cairo. It comprises two halves: the first shows a 30-something woman looking directly at the camera, and sometimes acknowledging the existence of others around her who we cannot see. She has beautiful face with eyes which seem to see internally rather than outwardly, they almost have the appearance of being painted on, suggesting the blindness of a mythological seer. The second half shows a series of parked cars covered with fabric. Each car suggests a sightless face, as the fabric stretched around the machine turns it into a face but also seems to hood the car so that it is conspicuously hidden, like a child covering his eyes.” –LUX
TRT ca. 68 mins

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Le Petit Versailles events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc., Gardeners & Friends of LPV, GreenThumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts, and the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs. LPV Exhibitions are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Magic Lantern Cinema is supported in part by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are taken from Drawing Room Confessions: Rosalind Nashashibi issue no. 6, London, 2012.