THE CASTLE OF THE SPIDER'S WEB is on view now! Come visit SPRING/BREAK ART SHOW!
We have exciting news!
It is our great pleasure to share that we are participating in this week's SPRING/BREAK Art Show. We have built an awesome installation and curated top notch works by three fantastic Deep Space artists.
SPRING/BREAK is an internationally renowned art fair, known especially for its unconventional focus on experimental and site-specific installations as well as its focus on emerging artists and curators. Under usual circumstances, the fair is in the Spring, but this year it is happening in conjunction with NYC's almost-autumn (!) Armory Arts Week.
This year is the fair's 10th anniversary edition and the roster of exhibitors and artwork on view is sensational. With over 100 rooms, the fair spans two floors of the former office headquarters of Ralph Lauren at 625 Madison Avenue, between 58th & 59th, in New York City.
Every edition of SPRING/BREAK Art Fair centers around a carefully manicured theme, curated by its seasoned founders, and would-be exhibitors are asked to propose a curatorial project that speaks to it. This year's show, entitled, "HERESY:HEARSAY," draws upon all things Medieval, and we brought together multimedia works by Macauley Norman, Deming King Harriman and TF Dutchman to immerse our guests in a space devoted to polarities.
In THE CASTLE OF THE SPIDER'S WEB, life/death, devotion/false idols, beauty/danger, medicine/poison, light/dark are expressed in the pandemic-inspired masked medieval portraits by Deming King Harriman, the reverential stained glass odes to hip hop iconography by TF Dutchman and the beautiful but deadly spiderweb renderings and installation by Macauley Norman. Come see for yourself how we've achieved the transposition of a "heretical" dungeon and cathedral to Manhattan's Midtown East.
The show is on view now through September 13th and entry tickets are available here. See more about our project and exhibiting artists below.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS TF Dutchman is a formally trained painter and stained glass artist based in Jersey City, NJ. He grew up in New Jersey and graduated from duCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ. His experiences with urban art, music and culture heavily influence the content of his work. Since the late 1990s, TF Dutchman has developed his skill and perspective and continues to push the bounds of what stained glass and painting can be. With nods to the aesthetics of Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Old Masters, his pieces incorporate elements of modern and classic fashion, hip hop icons, graffiti and skateboarding culture. His work is executed in vibrant palettes with abstract geometric patterning and figurative depictions. His glass panels, paintings and murals are evocative of a universal aesthetic and graphic appeal that is visually and spiritually enticing. TFD has exhibited in both solo and group shows at Works on Paper Gallery in Philadelphia, Apheele Studio in North Carolina, Novado Gallery, Prime Gallery, ShuaSpace, Outlander Gallery, 58 Gallery and Deep Space Gallery in Jersey City, NJ, Jajo Gallery and Index Art in Newark, NJ, and Malik Williams in New York. His work has been featured in Time Out New York magazine. Macauley Norman is a painter and mixed media artist based in Jersey City, NJ. He grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania with a BFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Painting. He has exhibited in solo and group shows at Deep Space Gallery and Lost JC. Macauley’s work is strongly influenced by formalism and abstraction, especially as in the work of de Kooning, Mitchell, Jasper Johns and Frankenthaller. His style is part of a growing movement in contemporary painting where formalist and abstract concepts are combined with pop illustration techniques and outsider art approaches to fine art in order to explore the visual and conceptual possibilities of painting. He experiments beyond the ordinary bounds of classic painting with the intention of creating beauty from the delicate balance demanded by unconventional aesthetics. Deming King Harriman is a mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She was raised in Miami Beach and graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in Illustration and a concentration in Book Arts. Deming has exhibited internationally, including solo shows at BBAM! Gallery (MTL), Deep Space Gallery (NJ), and group shows at Young At Art Museum (FL), The Baker Museum (FL), and Sagamore Hotel (FL). She has artwork installed in the permanent collections of four of Royal Caribbean’s largest cruise ships as well as Miami Dade Public Library and The Leder Art Collection. Deming’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Artnet and multiple pieces from her Zodiac Series are published in TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica: Astrology edition and are also part of an ongoing exhibition at the NY Port Authority Bus Station in collaboration with Chashama Art Studios. |
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ABOUT THE SHOW As Kurosawa did in Kumonosu-jō (translation: “spider web castle”), adapting the setting and story of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan, the idea of transposing stories, cultural events, aesthetic values and techniques from other times to the current moment and vice versa is relevant to our curatorial project for HEARSAY:HERESY. Our narrative takes place in the castle of the spider’s web. As one enters the main hall of the castle, medieval portraits hang on the stone walls, with masks evoking the aesthetic from the age of the Black Death, although they were created in response to our modern day pandemic. Through an altar is a cathedral of stained glass idols that call upon contemporary fashion, hip hop and graffiti to steady our hearts and souls as we travel through most unpredictable and unprecedented circumstances. We reverentially look to the familiar, to what we know, for guidance. In another time, when glasswork was born, it was reserved only for ideological devotion to the proscribed religious symbols of the day. It is still found predominantly in sacred spaces and here, in an act of originality and independence, the work is a tool for elevating the creator’s own idealizations and precious objects. The entryway to our castle is through the dungeon of the castle, a space conventionally hidden in the deep recesses of an otherwise opulently showy estate. The artwork in the dungeon of this metaphorical castle is ironically, heretically, bright. The palette is oppositional to what we know of the middle ages. Among pastels and bold color, the spider weaves its web of death and life. The web is beautiful yet it is cast to capture those who pass through it ultimately to die and serve as sustenance for its creator. Without the web, the creator would die. The web is a symbol of death and life and the necessity of one for the other, an eternal cycle -- death, birth, devotion, disease, death, birth, devotion, disease. Faith and hope help us endure in the face of imminent death. The darkness is threatening and yet it inspires the human search for the most profound light. Heresy speaks to oppositions, radical departures, antagonisms. Without one pole there is not the other. The polarity inherent in death/life, false idols/devotion, danger/beauty, poison/medicine, dark/light, vulnerability/protection, fear/faith are the alchemical loci of our curatorial exploration. |
For a pdf catalog of available works from this show DM us @deepspacejc or email us at deepspacejc@gmail.com.
Hope to see you at SPRING/BREAK—there's so much fantastic art to behold! For more info, check out press about the show in Hyperallergic here, The New York Times here, Hypebeast here and Vogue here.
Deep Space crew
