- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
Live among the exhibition for some weeks as I have, art objects take on an aspect of permanence, inevitability. These things live out their active hours in dust clouds in the studio, during transport and installation. Here in the gallery they are in time-out, benched, beached.
The movement of light is the main event of the day, making sundials of anything halfway inclined to stay upright. The light appraises with equanimity those objects under the museum’s skylights and their giant cousins outdoors. Impossible to resist seeing correspondences. The place has such an overbearing history, with streets drawn by compass and named for continents. Every existing thing has a ghostly antecedent. For every Unisphere there is a Perisphere. A pile of charcoal leavings from a Sunday grill-out; when discovered Monday morning becomes an evocation of Mount Corona, the ash heap that this place used to be.
The objects in the exhibition are ambassadors for a telescoping awareness of the cyclical nature of time, which this place cultivates with its dizzying multivalence. Shane Mecklenburger‘s Roadkill Diamond (2012), synthesized from an armadillo carcass, circumvents time and so retains the joke of its metonym, toughest material vs. impregnable shell, whereas time levels all jokes, flattens the drama of this correlative gesture. The diamond forgets its origin after awhile.
Dave Hardy’s sculpture, such a lovely sag of that foam over glass stilts, like a knife pressed into cake before it gives. The concrete-immersed foam hardens to freeze this suppleness in time. A hulking feel that looms in the mind, although you know probably not so heavy, always weightier than when last imagined.
Its opposite is the tennis stadium construction next door. The white fish bones I encountered my first night walk to the subway slowly resolved in two years into a structure; a corpse in reverse. Hundreds of tons of steel, giant pylons the size of automobile tunnels upended to erect a cyclopean scaffold, there to enclose a scene in which the two ends of a tennis net will be tied, mere inches over which a 2-ounce rubber ball will pass.
Lawrence Mesich’s Highest and Best Use (388 Bridge St.) (2016) envisions a skyscraper, infinitely extensible, perfect for the site dominated by the Unisphere, a greeting card from another age lovingly signed by US Steel. This build-up continues in NYC, a coyote climbing a ladder that disappears out from under, leaving him to comb the air.
A modest countermeasure against the long sunset of the Rustbelt, Corona Park still supports an extraction-based (sort-of) industry, fresh New Jersey sod. Fortunes were built on less.
The work most aware of the inescapable gravity of the site is Kristin Lucas’, Dance with flARmingos (2016), a group exhibition of Augmented Reality works at various locations around the park. The encounter with AR artifacts effectively cuts one off from one’s senses in favor of an uplink to the influences that saturate this air, cellular webs and ghostly ethers enmeshed. Miyö Van Stenis' The Artist Online Since 1989 (2016) overlays a view of the Unisphere with a rotating laptop featuring a skull’s face, an apt vanitas in an age scorched by the hubris of technology worship, writ large against the icon of another age’s failed utopian cosmography.
Brian Zegeer was born in Lexington, KY. His works encounter the Appalachian and Lebanese landscapes of his parentage as highly-charged networks of affiliation and group narrative. Zegeer believes that the process of stop-motion animation can catalyze objects in the landscape to reveal their metaphoric, political, and forensic content—the ghosts of their obscure histories. Zegeer is currently an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum. He received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, attended Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in 2010.