MONDAY JUNE 9 – 7PM – On the occasion of MoMA’s Carte Blanche to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of MK2′s founding, The Invisible Dog is pleased to host a conversation between prominent film producer and art collector Marin Karmitz and ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis.  They will discuss his approach to photography as a filmmaker, the construction of his rich and eclectic photographic collection, and his dialogue with the artists he collects.

“A man of pictures if ever there was one, Marin Karmitz—filmmaker, producer and creator/director of the MK2 cinema network—is primarily known for his passionate bond with the moving image. It is less well known that Karmitz, who during his period of political activism was also a photographer, has compiled an outstanding collection of artworks that remains his ‘secret garden’: an utterly original collection of photography. [...] Christer Strömholm rubs shoulders with Christian Boltanski, Antoine d’Agata converses with Chris Marker, Annette Messager meets Johan van der Keuken, and Anders Petersen and Abbas Kiarostami are neighbours of Gotthard Schuh and many others. [...]They combine wonderfully in a vision concerned as much with people, feelings and time as with the sincerity informing the creative process. And, though uncalculated, there are numerous—and certainly essential—echoes of the cinema.”

Christian Caujolle, excerpt of Traverses, Actes Sud, 2010

Marin Karmitz was born in 1938. A graduate in film photography from the IDHEC film school (now Fémis), he first worked as an assistant director for Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda and Jacques Rozier. In 1974, Marin Karmitz set up his own production firm, MK2, and soon added a distribution arm. Over thirty years it has produced more than a hundred films and distributed nearly 350. Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Louis Malle, Kieslowski, Kiarostami, Angelopoulos, Gus Van Sant, Jonathan Lossiter, Ken Loach, Jacques Doillon, Pavel Lunguin, Hong Sang Soo, Michael Haneke and many others have been produced by MK2. Karmitz’s work has received many official tributes since the 1980s, by institutions such as the Cinémathèque Française, the Pompidou Centre, MoMA, and the film heritage centres in Tel Aviv, Madrid, Munich and Boulogne. Strongly involved in contemporary art, Karmitz curated in 2009 the exhibition Silences at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, which was restaged later that year at the Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Lisbon. At the Rencontres d’Arles in 2010, he presented his collection of more than two hundred photographic works for the first time.

In partnership with International Center of Photography – ICP
www.icp.org

more information www.theinvisibledog.org

Tanned and well-rested from our August holiday, we are back on Bergen Street and busy installing everything from new art work to our brand new seasonal exhibition space, The Glass House, for our Saturday September 7th opening.

This fall we will debut an unprecedented three exhibitions - each one by a different solo artist featuring new installation-based works but all very different in theme and style. We will have Massimo Guerrera (Montreal) in the main gallery, Louie Hinnen (Brooklyn) in the garden gallery, and Anne Mourier (Brooklyn) will be the inaugural artist in the Glass House.

September 7th is sure to be a long, exciting opening night on Bergen Street.

In addition to the Glass House, we will be opening a second new space - a pop up shop featuring the fashion of French designer Anne Willi. Later in September, we will host an exhibition 4th Cycle of the Textile Art Center's Residency program, and we will continue our partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française's Crossing the Line Festival with a weekend of performances by the choreographer Fanny de Chaillé and visual artist Philippe Ramette.

Opening reception on Saturday September 7, from 6 to 10pm

Free Admission

www.theinvisibledog.org

Camden, by Jean-Christian Bourcart

PHOTO EXHIBITION AT THE INVISIBLE DOG / BROOKLYN

“Absurd, all I did was search the web for the most dangerous city in the USA. I wanted to find that strange energy given off by places where rules and social constraints have been abolished or weakened. A sense of freedom mixed with the excitement of danger. Also I wanted to understand and witness what is real life behind the statistics, and check that it’s still possible to reach out to others, as distant and alien as they might seem.

At the top of the list I found Camden, New Jersey, less than two hours from New York. There, I discovered the face of everyday poverty hidden behind stigma and stereotype. Through everyday observations, incidental, significant details of destruction and helplessness, but also emotional gesture, I confront the realities of those who have been out of the system for too long, victims of what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls a “territorial stigmatization” of whole neighborhoods as “no-go areas” as an important structural element of the new “urban exclusion in the twenty-first century.” Yet there is not more violence in Camden than anywhere else. It is just more raw and visible, and less masked by hypocrisy and cynicism. Maybe this work will help to provide some evidence of the economic and social machine that swallows us up and spits us out. How to determine what is really going on – and then what to do about it – is at the base of every political and social concern.

Jean-Christian Bourcart is one of the best contemporary photographers working today. His work is extremely imaginative; totally unique; deeply humanistic and often imbued with wit. He is unlike any other Artist I know.
Nan Goldin

Exhibition on viewing until Saturday february 2nd - free admission

more information visit our website www.theinvisibledog.org

Mere hours before her partner, President Francois Hollande, was to speak at the UN, Madame Valerie Trierweiler took a tour of the Invisible Dog Art Center [Brooklyn NY] lead by our director, Lucien Zayan. She throroughly enjoyed speaking with Steven & William Ladd whose "Shaboygen" she saw on the ground floor before visiting the second and third floors to meet with various artists-in-residence, Joanna Neborsky, Prune Nourry, Malcolm Brown, Mac Premo et Anne Mourier and 2FIK.

We are honored to have Madame Trierweiler visit us and thrilled that she loved our building, our art and our artists. This visit also celebrates the end of the first week of our very first Kickstarter fundraising campaign to fund the entire program of the fourth season.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us thus far - we have raised nearly 40% of our goal in just one week!! Keep spreading the word so others can contribute, and if you have not yet donated, please visit our Kickstarter page.

Today, french magazine Paris Match, relates her visit: During the French President's visit to New York for the UN general assembly, his partner VT appeared happy and relaxed. She told us she "loved visiting The Invisible Dog" an art center created by the French man Lucien Zayan, in an old Brooklyn factory that she visited that same morning.

more photos are visible on our website

The Invisible Dog Art Center's Fundraising Campaign is being launched to commission a season of exhibitions, performances and residencies at The Invisible Dog.

At the pace The Invisible Dog is growing, we need help to continue our ambitious programming. We are dedicated to expanding our role as an accessible space for communities to form around a central love for the arts and other cultural programming. We recognize that artists create more and better work when freed from the stress of fundraising.

Help us raise $25,000 to disperse to artists throughout the season, and in turn we will bring you bigger, better, and continuously free exhibitions and performances from an international roster of artists.

Heralded by the New York Times as "one of Brooklyn's cultural anchors," the Invisible Dog wants to blow you away with its 4th Season.

Please show us your support and donate now!

Holy River is a multimedia exhibition by the New York based artist Prune Nourry and curated by Tatyana Franck. Sculptures, installations, photographs and videos will take over the entire ground floor of the Invisible Dog. The Holy River exhibition is the culmination of a three-year project on gender selection focused on India. Mirroring the Holy Daughters exhibition that took place in 2011 in Paris around the theme of Milk, the flowing theme of this show is water. It features a selection of works inspired by a performance Prune realized last year in Kolkata.

In August 2011, Nourry commissioned a team of artisans from Kolkata’s potter’s district to create a monumental (17 feet) hybrid sculpture inspired by the design of her earlier Holy Daughters, and made from Ganges clay in a traditional style. Then in October 2011, during the Hindu festival «Durga Puja», this imaginary deity infiltrated the procession of thousands of Hindu deity figures. She was carried through the streets until the Ganges bank, where she was finally returned to the river from which she was born. The Holy River sculpture juxtaposes the symbol of the woman and cow’s sacred fertility, with the holiness of the Ganges river – purifier and source of all life. Yet, similarly to the mistreated cows and girls, the river is highly polluted and taken for granted. The deity, fruit of Nourry’s imagination, not only encourages to reflect on sex selection in Asia, but also brings awareness to the growing lack of free, clean water, and the religious, social, political and ecological issues that arise through both these important subjects.

Conjoining with the diverse layers of Nourry’s art, performances throughout the exhibition will feature a special sensory experience in the artistic merging of dance curated by Simon Dove and performed by Preeti Vasudevan, sound by Mitchell Yoshida, smell by Olivier Delcour, taste by Michael Hamilton.

Curated by Tatyana Franck with the support of Sophie Ubald Bocquet.

Opening reception: Saturday May 12 from 6 to 10pm

www.theinvisibledog.org

Daniel Horowitz is an award-winning illustrator and art director. Working primarily as a digital artist over the last decade, one day Daniel Horowitz considered what might happen if he were to pull out a blank page and begin to draw. Not on commission and with no particular purpose in mind. The self imposed minimum, one drawing a day, was to serve as an exercise to pull himself away from the computer and to begin to explore analog creativity. Daniel was concerned that the quality of these artworks would be too different from, or inferior to, his better known commercial illustrations, so he had little intention of sharing this experiment. However, as days turned into weeks he began to realize that within the spontaneity of this process, something curious and new began to emerge. Horowitz formed a blog and began to post his daily explorations. The overwhelming response helped to see the project through to its end at 365 drawings.  Although the requirement was to post a sketch or line drawing and nothing more, he began to create more elaborate collages and paintings as the rhythm took hold of his imagination.

Daniel Horowitz's exhibition on viewing from March 10 to April 22

at The Invisible Dog Art Center

for more information please visit www.theinvisibledog.org

Whether I am constructing three-dimensional works out of doll-house-sized objects, taking a “straight” photograph, or patiently gluing beads and glitter onto watercolor paper, I am always thinking about the intimate, the personal and how these notions fit into a larger world we all share. I began my artistic journey in search of a way to heal myself and my relationships.

One of my earliest works, The Little Boxes, tells the visual story in minute, separate scenes of a “perfect childhood” where I never really felt my mother was “present.”  This led me to discover the power of opening a dialogue between others and myself thru Art.

 In Family Secrets, little doll-house-sized figurines trapped in antique cloche-covered scenes are sitting quite literally on their past. I am consciously never turning back to the source of inspiration, but the stranger’s stories strangely begin to intertwine with my own…

 I believe that personal stories, in their universal quality, have the power to break frontiers of space, time, language and that once the link is created it leads to healing for all concerned.

 I interview women and men about their deepest emotional pain in order to create People. In an effort to stay true to their abstract descriptions, I transpose their responses into spatters of bright, atomized inks and paints and accumulations of glitter, beads, gauze, nails …  I think that there is something about the process of verbalizing pain in an abstract way that is therapeutic on a very deep level.

 It is time - a light-hearted series of photographs reminding us of our proportional place in the universe and The intimate life of nature - a set of 10 little 3D display boxes where I foreground photographs of a woman’s body with little garden tools, taking a close look at how woman and plants communicate in theirs cycles, are both a gentle attempt to heal our relationship with our environment.

 More recently I have been analyzing thru large, still life photographs my life long passion for White Goods and the meaning of the color white … it’s ultimate balance and harmony, it’s complete energy, it’s universal message linked to peace, purity, virginity, healing … but also absence and deficiency. 

So often people tell me  “You should work on a larger scale, expand, look further…”

but ultimately, that old adage about the Truth you seek lurking “in your own backyard” makes sense to me.

Why should we go explore the Far Away, the Inaccessible, when the answers we are seeking might reside in our families, our neighbors, and in ourselves?

Prune Nourry is part of the exhibition "THE ARTISTS OF THE INVISIBLE DOG" on viewing on Saturday March 10 and Sunday March 11

Portrait by Malcolm Brown

for more information please visit www.theinvisibledog.org

Prune Nourry is a sculptor and visual artist who is passionate about social and ethical issues and whose artistic process deals with contemporary issues. Her research is centred in particular on debates surrounding human reproduction.  Prune uses scientific tools of analysis and collective forms of art appreciation. Scientific, because she questions Bioethics and Genetics. Collective, because through happenings in the gallery and on the street, her work always involves a strong participatory dimension. Reflections on bioethics are changing and evolving along with the practice of the artist herself.  From the chimera, a hybrid between Human and Animal, developed by Domestic Babies, the artist began a broader debate on prenatal manipulations and possible outcomes. With her happening Procreative Dinner and an upcoming exhibition in India, Holy Daughters, she has begun to investigate the myth of the «perfect child».The 21st century marks a milestone in genetics. Scientific advances through genetic manipulation could put human beings in the place of the Creator.

Prune Nourry is part of the exhibition "THE ARTISTS OF THE INVISIBLE DOG" on viewing on Saturday March 10 and Sunday March 11

for more information please visit www.theinvisibledog.org

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Holy Daughters

HOLY DAUGHTERS - Men without women from Prune Nourry on Vimeo.

In September 2010, the artist Prune Nourry installed her sculptures in the streets of New Delhi, and documented with photos and videos the multiple reactions of the inhabitants. After barely settling into the street decorum, the sculptures aroused curiosity and provoked a sudden mob. The link between Gau Mata (Mother Cow) and the condition of women was naturally shown before a largely male audience and mix of the most diverse classes: street vendors, plumbers, policemen, students, ...

Hybrids between India’s sacred cow and women, Prune’s sculptures «Holy Daughters», raised the issue of the selection of sex through ultrasounds, an important Asian contemporary issue. In India, the cow, a symbol of fertility thanks to the milk it offers, is venerated. The girl on the other hand, though the vector of fertility, is seen as a burden and is therefore undesired. Hybridizing girls with Indian cows points to a paradox: while placing women at the same rank as sacred cows, it also stick the girl to this image of purity, as she's perceived by Indian society for generations.

http://www.fiaf.org/crossingtheline/2011/ctl11-artist-profile.asp?artist=Nourry

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The Sperm Bar

The Spermbar project from Prune Nourry on Vimeo.