Detail 2

UK-based Lotte Karlsen from Norway @ Mothership NYC, September 2018

Through September, when the bustling art season kicks in, Norwegian artist Lotte Karlsen is excited to be back in NYC and at the Mothership, this time around as an artist in residency at the rooftop live-work space in Greenpoint. Lotte plans to dedicate some of her residency time to revisit and rework the glass installation created for her first solo exhibition in NYC in 2016, the Sound of Silence. Shimmering new work will travel from NYC to UK for a group exhibition entitled I Am My Own Primal Parent (Sept 28th - 2nd Nov) at KARST, Plymouth’s largest independent contemporary art venue. A show curated by NYC-based radical siren Katie Cercone. Other female artists included are Melanie Bonajo, NARCISSISTER and Go Push Pops.

On September 11, 2018, the Manchester-based artist, curator, and founder of Alexandra Arts, Karlsen will be bringing the spirit of her most recent venture, the Pankhurst in the Park (PitP) festival 2014-18, from Manchester to New York with a “PitP-infused art salon”, hosted in and by Mothership NYC.

It will feature a performance by New York-based collective ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS, and work by UK artist Anna FC Smith. Travelling from the all-femme EMINENT DOMAIN flash exhibition staged at the former blue-chip Robert Miller gallery space in West Chelsea in July, it organically stemmed from Alexandra Arts recent collaboration with online based NYC’s ART 511 Magazine. This spring, they teamed up and produced a limited-edition print commission: a publication marking International Women’s Day (March 8th) and the centenary of women over thirty earning the right to vote in England. Read it online here. At this event, you can catch Lotte in conversation with ART 511 Magazine publisher Scotto Mycklebust.

This year’s will be the final Pankhurst in the Park Festival. There will be a closing ceremony at Last Frontier NYC in Greenpoint, on September 21, 2018. Everyone is invited to join us in celebrating four years in which Karlsen has spearheaded an initiative committed to providing a platform for women in the arts by commissioning a stunningly broad array of artists, performers, makers, and critics and reaching out to all members of the community regardless of gender, class, or cultural background through workshops, open exhibitions, performances, and other events. This is the last chance to catch UK-based Anna FC Smith’s work tour of NYC.

It is precisely these commitments which have brought Karlsen together with the Mothership’s all-female crew. Both enterprises are driven by a collectivism and community spirit and a recognition of the need to support artists at all levels of their development. They also converge in their dedication to the representation of women in the arts. There is a shared guiding principle in Lotte’s work which is insurrectional and combative in its insistence on justice, equality and progressive visions of the future. Pankhurst in the Park is quicker to use the word ‘takeover’ than ‘exhibition.’

This dimension of Karlsen and her work as an artist and a director is rooted in deeply personal and painful transformative life experience. To gain a sense of meaning and purpose and to truly look at oneself is also to cast one’s gaze outward to others. It was in opening herself up to working within the community in which she lives that she found the strength to heal, and it was on this principle that Alexandra Arts was founded. It is an ethos of ‘social sculpture’ - community engagement through creative practice as creative practice.

Pankhurst in the Park 2018 program of events is funded by Arts Council England, Manchester City Council Department of Culture, St Mary's Primary School, Friends of Alexandra Park and the Neighborhood Investment Fund from the Whalley Range ward.

Detail 3

Scottish Artist Kirsty Whiten @ Mothership NYC, October 2018:
We are very pleased to announce that our upcoming Artist-in-Residence, Kirsty Whiten from Scotland, has been awarded a grant from Creative Scotland to come spend the month of October 2018 onboard Mothership NYC.

Kirsty Whiten is an artist known for her intricate and disturbing drawings and paintings and instantly recognizable street art. Graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1999, she lived in Paris and Edinburgh before building a house and studios in the Scottish countryside with her family. Whiten’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows with Stolenspace in London, Edinburgh Printmakers workshop and Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh.

Kirsty Whiten makes intricate watercolors and large, colorful, detailed oil paintings. She works with human figures, stories and psychology. The images she makes are confronting and often humorous, concerned with picking over the social norms, exploring human behavior, especially gender and sexuality.Whiten has published two crowd-funded artist books; a beautiful hardcover book of misremembered rituals WRONGER RITES The Quing of the NowPeople 2016, and another of new work about ritual actions and healing, ICON ORACLE , to be published June 2018.

Kirsty's Residency Project onboard Mothership:
"I’m exploring the theme of human ritualistic practice, witchcraft and shamanism, finding non-religious meaning in this. When I’m onboard the Mothership I want to visit loads of galleries and museums for drawing and research, but most of all I am really looking forward to meeting artists – particularly if they’re working with gender, sexuality and performance. I’m really up for collaboration to produce new material, I love to have performative session with models, where we playfully explore costumes and poses as a process of uncovering narratives. I’ll take photographs and make drawings from life to work into big paintings when I’m home in my studio in Scotland. I cannot wait!"