“Specter in the Threshold” at The Border Gallery

Participating artists: Paul Maheke, Bianca Boragi,  Elliott De Cesare, KS Brewer, and Robert Balun

Curated by Jamie Martinez

April 19 – May 5, 2019

The Border Project Space is pleased to present Specter in the Threshold, an exhibition curated by Jamie Martinez displaying works across media that illuminate haunting remnants. The Participating artists are Bianca Boragi, Elliott De Cesare, KS Brewer , Paul Maheke and Robert Balun.

Using the materiality of their medium, the works in Specter in the Threshold access alternate spaces, unresolved histories, diasporas, and the apparition of bodies that inhabit them.  Across sound, painting, drawing, and installation, these artists manifest haunting as a means of reconciling the individual, the collective, and their shared spaces and histories.

While these works have been derived from an array of inspirations–mystic encounters with psychics, dreams, domestic interiors, the ruins of capital, or processed possessed psyches–they all orbit and seek to access that which is missing and gone, yet persists nonetheless, haunting the individual and the collective.

Bianca Boragi (b.1985 in Paris, France) received her MFA from Yale School of Art, Sculpture department and her BFA from the National Superior School of Arts from Paris- Cergy.  Her work has been screened recently at the New-York Amazigh Film Festival, Festival Mutocospio, Mexico and at independent cinemas such as Video Revival and Anthology Film Archive, NY.  She has exhibited her work for group exhibitions at NURTUREart Gallery, Chashama Gallery, Field Projects Gallery, NY, internationally in France, India, Italy, Scotland and throughout the United States.  She was recently awarded the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Right and was an artist resident at MASS MoCA’s Asset for artists residency program and priorly at the Centquatre, Paris, France, Pact Zullverein, Essen, Germany and Cal’Arts, Los Angeles, USA.

Elliott De Cesare (b. New York 1989) received his undergraduate education from both The New School and School of Visual Arts where he received his BFA. In addition To Elliott’s schooling he continues to the present date, psychoanalytic studies as members of both Aprés Coup and Das Unbehagen. From 2014-2016 Elliott worked as the assistant to leading American art critic, art historian, and writer, John Jonas Gruen. His work has been shown in The Katonah Museum of Art, The National Arts Club, Kurt Seligman Center, the prestigious windows of Bergdorf Goodman and various other galleries in New York and overseas. Elliott is presently the founder and Director of 5-50 Gallery in Long Island City, NY.

KS Brewer (b. 1992) combines time-based and multi-sensory forms with extensive research on psychological trauma and its personal and collective impacts. Her work attempts to bypass the barriers to communication that trauma creates by appealing directly to viewers’ senses and emotions.

Brewer holds a B.A. in Film & Television from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She will be a resident artist at ChaNorth this May, is currently a participant in Trestle’s Critical Feedback Program (2019), and formerly a recipient of Honor USA’s Audience Choice grant (2016), and a finalist for Peripheral Vision’s publication fellowship (2018). She has exhibited and performed at numerous venues including Chashama Gala (upcoming), Aggregate Space Gallery, Lucas Lucas Gallery, Plaxall Gallery, Superchief, and Flux Factory. Her work has been featured in publications including Forbes, Ravelin Magazine, Museé, Emergency Index Vol. 7, and Vice show Desus & Mero. She is the curator of the current exhibition STAG: The Illicit Origins of Pornographic Film at the Museum of Sex.

 Paul Maheke is an artist, born in France, and living and working in London. He completed his MFA at l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2011 and a programme of study at Open School East, London in 2015 where he pursued a period of research and a series of public conversations entitled ‘Beyond Beyoncé: Use It Like a Bumper!’ Maheke was awarded the South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2015-16 and his exhibition ‘I Lost Track of the Swarm’ was exhibited in the first floor galleries in late spring 2016.

Paul’s art conceptualises the body as a container of history and meaning. “For queer people of colour there is this huge imbalance between those moments of erasure and absolute invisibility, and simultaneously there is an hyper-visibility and a demand for that, and how do you navigate that.” He’s seeking to rearticulate, destabilising dominant narratives. “There is something that has to, for me, go beyond the representational because the representational is also violent.” He is creating space for understanding identity beyond colonialist, hierarchical frameworks. To make room for discussion. “There is this idea of placing myself somewhere outside — believing in the position at the periphery of things, and the periphery can address the centre by staying at the periphery.”

Represented by Sultana Gallery, Maheke is doing his New York debut at the Abrons Art Center in Spring 2019.  Recent projects include: ‘Ten Days Six Nights’, cur. Catherine Wood and Andrea Lissoni, Tate Modern, London, UK (2017); ‘Acqua Alta’, Sultana Gallery, Paris, FR (2017, solo show); ‘What Flows Through and Across’, Assembly Point, London (2017, solo show); ‘In Me Everything is Already Flowing’, Center, Berlin (2016, solo show); ‘No Ordinary Love’, Galerie Sultana, Paris (2016); ‘The Rebel Man Standard Festival’, Guest Projects, London (2016); ‘I Would’ve Done Everything for You / Gimme More’, cur. Cédric Fauq, London (2016); Festival de l’Inattention, Paris (2016); ‘I Lost Track of the Swarm’, South London Gallery (2016); artist-in-residence at Darling Foundry, Montreal, Canada (2015); ‘ODRADEK’, Les Instants Chavirés, cur. Mikaela Assolent and Flora Katz, Montreuil, France (2015); ‘59th Salon de Montrouge’, Montrouge, France (2014)

Robert Balun is an adjunct at The City College of New York, where he teaches creative writing and composition. His poems are forthcoming from Reality Beach and Powder Keg Magazine.  Recent work appears in TAGVVERK, Tammy, Prelude, Barrow Street, Poor Claudia, Apogee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. He is the Coordinator of the Digital Chapbook Series for The Operating System.  His debut collection of poetry, Acid Western, will be published in 2020.

 This piece in this show is the second in an ongoing series of works that seek to reconfigure how poetry is normally encountered; off the page, beyond the stage, and into a physical space.  I think that poetry tends to be generally siloed and specialized, rarely encountered unless you are already the kind of person who seeks out poetry.  Similarly, the performance of poetry tends to be a one-sided interaction between reader and audience.  By placing poems in a physical space, new audiences, who might not have otherwise, are able to encounter poetry.  And just as the poetry of performance or page ask for specific considerations of medium, the public poem offers its own implications of form.