"Spettacolo" Fay Ku

April 01, 2023 by Available Space Art Projects

“Spettacolo” is New York City-based artist Fay Ku’s first solo exhibition in Las Vegas, NV, but Ku is no stranger to the city and its community. Ku was a 2009 visiting artist-in-residence at UNLV, and she has since maintained a professional and personal connection to the city through several group shows, through her artwork in the permanent collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum, and in her friendships with former students and colleagues. “Spettacolo” celebrates her long-standing affection for the city and its people, with much of the work made recently and in anticipation of her return.

Ku has long made works on paper where a cast of characters—most often women and children—engage (often disturbingly so) in the full spectrum of human behavior. Through her background as a double immigrant (born in Taiwan to a family originally from China), she draws inspiration from cultural and art histories, mythologies, and language.

The newest work is playful and lighthearted; spettacolo means performance or spectacle, and Ku’s cast of characters involve themselves with display, performance and/or movement—literal movements at times. Here, acrobats and performers have limbs or other components that can be moved by the viewer: a dancer dangling a threaded triangle can have her bent leg swivel out, for example, or an acrobat flies with flapping wings.

Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose work is figurative, narrative and connects with past and present cultural histories. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant and has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, HI), Marlboro College (Marlboro, VT), New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT) and Snite Museum of Art (South Bend, IN). Her work is in the collection of Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, HI), Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art (Las Vegas, NV), New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT), and the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT). She has been an artist-in-residence in over a dozen residencies, including Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY), Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NV), and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE).

Ku is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. in Literature and Visual Arts from Bennington College (Bennington, VT), and a M.F.A. in Studio Art and M.S. in Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Ku is represented by H Gallery, Paris, France.

"Up Next" Nima Abehenar

May 14, 2021 by Available Space Art Projects

For April 2021 we welcomed Nima Abekenar to do a project in our space. He would often visit us in our studio to brainstorm how he would change the space. Much of Abekenar’s work is about effecting the physical space in which a work of art exists in.

This in turn becomes his work. With past installations he has done this by flooding a space or bringing new architectural elements into existing ones. With ASAP he decided to not only do this physically but conceptually, taking into consideration what ASAP operates as; a project space.

With that in mind he transformed our space by building a wall close to the window to display paintings that seemingly advertise the next artist. He locked the door, not allowing guests within the tight space. This created a barrier as if it is an in between show “advertisement” not an actual work of art.

NIMA ABKENAR is a conceptual artist from Iran. In his work, he explores the subtleties of social phenomenon and political events. His dislocation from his native home at 17 has shaped his contextual and conceptual views in art and sociology. In his latest work "The Case of Burning a Flag", Abkenar displays a burning Israeli flag, and seeks the unbiased ground of the observer to ontologically execute the complexity of this social-political phenomenon in the context of the artist’s inevitable consequential connection to the event.

Nima’s interest in context has bounded his art practice with alternative non-art spaces such as commercial buildings and abandoned warehouses. For his latest collaboration with Black Mountain Institute, Believer Festival, he created a site specific light installation 1200; using 1200 gallons of water to contextualize the monumental quality of water.

For the past five years Nima Abkenar has collaborated with art entities such as Black Mountain Institute, D-well, AG gallery, and City of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs to create installations and develop public art projects both nationally and in his home country, Iran.

"They're All Gonna Laugh at You" Heidi Rider

October 25, 2020 by Available Space Art Projects

I have moved more than 40 times in my life. I’ve lived in seven different states, attended eleven different schools, and was home-schooled for three years. For an entire year in high school, I ate my lunch alone in a bathroom stall. Having frizzy hair, wearing hand-me-down clothing and speaking with an out of state accent didn’t make me any friends, but it sure as hell taught me how to use comedy to deflect shame and rejection.

When starting over as the perpetual new girl becomes a regular part of your life, you learn how to make it work for you. I grew up afraid that people would stare at me, or single me out as a weirdo and laugh at me. Now, in my performances, I deliberately place myself in those vulnerable and terrifying spaces and we share it together. I work almost exclusively in direct address with constant and unmistakable eye contact. No one hides. We all see each other.

I love me some losers—black teeth lady, saggy titties, ugly toupee no-chin-man, white trash granny, big butt lady, balding fat belly man. These people make me want to cry. Losers still need love; I perform them with some deep affection. And assholes still need to be called assholes. When I skewer and lambaste jerks, I make them as ugly as possible. I love making them stand accountable for themselves through my body. I let myself get wild and nasty to make people uncomfortable, laugh, or get angry. To feel something. I incorporate humor into my art, even when it isn’t funny.

In performances and in my visual work, I use the extreme comic character of the clown to channel personal and cultural anxieties. Clowns can joyfully process embarrassing feelings because they don’t experience shame. They’ll do anything for love and if they fall on their face, they just bounce back up and keep frolicking forward. Straight into the Pits of Hell, LALALA!! Through clown, I celebrate becoming the loser of my choosing.