Tamar Ettun and Jessica Robbins
Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens, with Natasha Hoskins
Exhibition Dates: May 2 – May 31, 2015
Viewing Hours: M-Sa 8a-7p, Su 10a-6p
Location: 120 Essex Street NY, NY 10002
Two commissioned installations mounted within Essex Street Market in disparate vendor stalls
Artists Alliance Inc. is very pleased to present vois-tu-pas … que je brûle? (do you not see…, a pair of commissioned installations in two disparate vendors’ stalls in the Essex Street Market on view throughout the month of May, 2015. Both Ettun and Robbins work between sculpture, video and performance. They make objects that testify to the desire for the thing, for the body, and for the fetish. Their material perspectives are both playful and jarring, filled with curiosity and yet also clearly interested in how to picture the potential for violence. The title and the referent for this project are lifted from the final passage in Cathy Caruth’s book, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. The pair of commissions was also conceived in response to a space (the Essex Street Market) that feels saturated with objects and the desire they are marketed to evoke, but also absence, loss, and history simultaneously.
This project is a commission of Artists Alliance Inc, with support from the New York City Economic Development Corp, Essex Street Market and the Lower East Side BID. Presented in celebration of the Essex Street Market’s 75th Anniversary and in collaboration with Lower East Side History Month.
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Tamar Ettun is a Brooklyn based sculptor and a performance artist from Jerusalem, Israel, and is the founder and director of The Moving Company, a performance art company based in Brooklyn, New York. Ettun received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. Ettun studied at Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy, where she graduated with honors.
Jessica Robbins was born in 1988 and raised in Southern Virginia. After attending the Virginia Military Institute for two years she moved to New York City in 2007. She graduated from The Cooper Union in May of 2014 with a bachelors in fine arts. She is currently working and living in Brooklyn.
Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Her most recent projects include “Frames of War,” at Momenta Art in Bushwick and “Sex objects, dead zones, and trace fossils” with Mary Walling Blackburn for BOMB Magazine Online. She teaches art history and theory at The Cooper Union and curating at Eugene Lang. She is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia University. Her academic research is focused on violence and representation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Natasha Hoskins is completing her BA in Arts in Context with a concentration in Visual Studies and Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. On a good day she is a painter and will be included in the Ruach exhibit in Chelsea this May. Hoskins is the assistant to independent curator and writer Natasha Marie Llorens. Most recently assisting Lloren’s on “Frames of War,” at Momenta Art in Bushwick. She lives and works in New York City. Additionally, she enjoys short walks on the beach and back to back episodes of Broad City.
Image: Tamar Ettun, in, side – throughout, 2015.