SPRING/BREAK will return for its 5th edition in Los Angeles February 2024 and its lucky 13th New York City edition later in the year.
The 2024 New York City and Los Angeles theme is INT./EXT. (interior/exterior) -- see below for theme description and later inspirational "required" reading/viewings/listenings.
*Please note, all details regarding the application are provided here on the website, we do not accept proposals via email. All applications are reviewed and notification is emailed to the applicant. Once submitted, all application fees are non-refundable and non-transferable.
We are now accepting applications for our New York City Curatorial section. Independent Curators, Galleries, Non-Profit Organizations, and Project Spaces are welcome to apply via the Applications below.
SPRING/BREAK NYC 2024 Curatorial Applications - Deadlines Extended for the Fall Show
Early Application: Sunday, February 18, 2024 at 11:59pm (your time zone)
Regular Application: Sunday, May 12, 2024 at 11:59pm (your time zone)
Late Application: Sunday, June 30, 2024 at 11:59pm (your time zone)
All Applications (Early, Regular, Late) are reviewed with the same consideration.
No applications will be accepted after the last deadline.
No proposals nor applications will be accepted via email.
‘To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience... However, you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.’
-- Mark Rothko
‘Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.’
-- Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
‘My paintings are not about what’s seen. They are about what’s known forever in the mind.’
-- Agnes Martin
In art, scale and style can reel us in or keep us at arm’s length. Art’s dual nature, as-is, makes Object-hood trace a boundary, a barrier to instill admiration as an observer and covetousness as a consumer. What is Signified in the physical creation, meanwhile, seeks to bridge this divide, fording inner sanctums from outer spaces, transmute what’s tactile, lather it to a cream, a Big Idea, an organism little-concerned with paint tubes or installment payments or exposure times or syntax. This Jeff Goldblumification, you might say, from hunky nerd in the science of Craft to transcendental mutant sludge of Intangible Notion that becomes an artwork’s ultimate consecration – stale bread and cheap wine to ‘True Embodiment of Salvation’ – underscores the ideal religious moment of making anything to start with: artistic Transubstantiation; success, in other words, of connection with the Audience Head; the loosy-goosey membrane of the mind of the viewer breached somehow by a World hand-rolled, undisputedably base, like a home-made pretzel, on display, in the grease-stinking merry-go-round of the gallery, like through heat lamps on the too-bright-wall. Yet holy. Shit to gold. Yeast and fermentation to god-hood. Divine osmosis achieved.
Artworks, themselves, can accentuate this paradox of art experience from outer to inner, particularly if their subject hovers somewhere between the chasm, echoing some measure of the road map from out to in. In other words, doling out enough abstraction in its portrayal of Reality to remind you of the fiction it purports. And be more than what it merely represents. Landscape painting and Photography, often more literal forms of artwork, when leaning towards their more elemental foundations – light, color – for example, draw our attention to a natural Outside appealing more to how it or one feels than is. In Narrative Cinema also, theme and subtext bend realism to the expressionistic, working against the medium’s outer fixation on literal Story, giving us Poetry in motion as Bresson’s citation above suggests; the photographic outer reality becomes an Idea, not just a Muybridge pony show of beats and arcs and act structure. Words seek liberation from the page, novelistically, through allusions; lines indicate what is beyond their makers when they can map out negative space. Literal and invisible dance, keeping whatever we’re looking at both there in front of us and existing only in our minds -- this duality not without a degree of tension of outside and in, like that creepy modern Christmas carol of very not-cool-seeming coersion, 'Baby It's Cold Outside'... This, above all else -- 'to project a world' as Miss Oedipa Maas suggests in Pynchon's paranoiac act of creation -- is the aim of the artist: the 'something-more-ness' beyond and beneath the subject of their toil.
'Beginnings,' Gretchen Scherer
Inspiring our SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2024 theme this year, ‘INT./EXT’ (interior/exterior), is just this PB & J of tactility and intangibleness, a plea for Landscapes, Streetscapes, or works of Anatomy all that work against their cartographic instinct, mapping more than meets the eye, elevating what could be a chart or graph into the realm of Art; for the blending of Reality and Fiction, True and False, or for works stuck in-between mind and body, Dream and Waking: Surrealism, Expressionism. Impressionism, quite directly, with its fixation of painting en plein air, has a more direct place in an exhibition theme determined to mix outer and inner, at least in process. Andy Goldworthy subverts this al fresco with a non-collectible environmentalist bent. Transcendentalism, thus, in a scientific age, also presses against the pragmatism of nature, forcing a textbook undestanding of forces to wrangle the spirit, into places unknown. A focus, also, on the architectural or interior/domestic as subject exists within this theme, as epitomized with varying degrees of humor by Ed Ruscha or Anne Toebe or Giorgio De Chirico or Kenny Colors or Lizzy Gill—whose interior still lives roost amphora with glazes both photorealistically transfered and containing exterior multitudes. Consider Danica Lundy's works of anatomical transcendence, capturing quotidian daily scenes in X-Ray auras. Anatomy books figured in quite prominently to the naïf-ly painted dissections of words and identity also by Jean-Michel Basquiat; spacial cosmogony out of straw and hay another way to get out from in for Anslem Kiefer.
'Philistines', Jean-Michel Basquiat
Think, also, Jacques Tati’s marvel of architectural silent-sound comedy, Playtime… David Cronenberg’s appeal to the spirit through the gunk of practical effect flesh and—to the extreme—blood… Antonioni’s dramaturgy of isolation, from remote volcanic atoll to Rome to abandoned fascist hamlets in L’Avventura… Chantal Akerman’s epic of quiet domestic heroism and unraveling in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels… There are times, as with Rothko, where attempts are made at the purely spiritual through the tangible; surrealists like Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger and Luis Bunuel and Leonora Carrington and Conroy Maddox and Marc Chagall probe the meanings in the object-hood of the everyday, grappling at spirit's more quantifiably naughty cousin, Dream. Where does the territory for one remit to the realm of the other? At one point does the late Bobby Anspach’s effervescent sci-fi rainbow of chintzy cotton balls become pure Op-Art defying revelation? Channeling the Big Bad Woolf, is a rose is a rose is a rose, really, and when does it transform into ‘Rosebud’? The elusive symbolic payoff that means everything more-than-it-is and nothing-at-all that dream-storyteller Borges apparently hated when it came to the flame-engorged rider sleigh there at the end of the film? (Orson Welles was perhaps right to notice, on the realm of imagistic interpretation when Borges watched Citizen Kane, the brilliant man was already quite blind…)
'The Late Sleeper', Conroy Maddox
For our 2024 Los Angeles and New York City shows, then, SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2024 seeks any and all related to this transformation from inner to outer, architectural to transcendent, interior and domestic to beyond. When is en plein air hiding something hidden in plain sight? When is the dream waking, the inside outside, the fiction telling the honest to god truth? Landscapes, spiritual Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, Surrealist projections of meaning and dream all seem key. And the repurposing of anatomy's visual languages, inner made outer, Von Gersdorff's 'Wound Man' to Da Vinci's 'Vitruvian' to Milton Bradley's 'Operation' to Lundy's 'Three Hole Punch.' Buce Baillie's 'Castro Street' and Marie Menken's 'Arabesque for Kenneth Anger' expresses the interior of an exterior, Stan Brahkage's 'Window Water Baby Moving' the exterior of an interior. And anything we haven’t thought of that suggest this exchange between outer and in, outside and inside, spirit and flesh, or just straight up latter day Yangshao feng shui of genius loci, as the Romans fixated on: ‘the spirit of the place(s)' that compel us to document their angles; the corners of places to peer around that indicate Dream.
We are, more than ever, in perpetual and unconscionable wartime in our country. ‘Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appelant’ never held more meaning than our many state-sponsored attempts at 'civilization' through a Carthaginian Peace, waged now amidst uncountable multitudes of KAYFABE video hate-instigation; clickbait that compels the citizenry to absolve our Empire of perpetual bloodshed. There are inner and outer levels here too of propaganda, us vs. them, in-groups and out-groups on the global stage for 'INT./EXT.', the un-fucking-relenting manufacturing -- America's only true export now, popular as ever locally -- of consent. Peter Saul's cartoonish 'murder boards', then, of 'it's all connected, man' political realities in the language of high-voltage propaganda caricature are relevent with our theme, especially as he generally situates these issues in the spacial backdrop where they governmentally occured (see his Reagan-era gubernatorial Golden Gates, below). Also Aaron Johnson's palimsest transparencies, whose form echo the anatomical X-Ray vision of his political ritual killings featuring Uncle Sam, sitting presidents, and more, hold interiors and exteriors, both of state and of form, situated in a dream-symbology of political violence. So does 'INT./EXT.' have room for all the political and social ramifications of inner and outer also, particularly as a whole spate of political art rages, now more than half a decade long, with no inner element whatsoever, seemingly unconcerned with being anything more than a Loyalty Oath of minute-rice politics in-the-moment, with just that day's 'cause' captured in oil, warn like a badge, no other dimensionality to its outer than to prove moral high ground in social (media) status. Certainly, there is more 'inner' here than 'Fuck Trump' and 'I Stand With Ukraine' to be mined... and the inner dimensions of outer political realities, more rich than a political philosophy as one-dimentional as a Boomer Facebook dictum...
'The Government of California', Peter Saul, Venus Over Manhattan, New York
For ‘INT./EXT.’ we look forward to all of these permutations of out and in. Light a match. Shoot the breeze, let the gist catch the flue. Let sizzle your flamin hot Cheetohs of Architectural-Surrealist-En Plein Air-whateverness that, for the 5th year in LA, and 13th in New York City, lends that distinctiveness of vision that means SPRING/BREAK Art Show to the world. Little pig, little pig, let it in. ‘Cause baby it’s cooooold outside.
'Standard Station', Ed Ruscha
'Voyage au Bout de la Nuit', Anslem Kiefer
'Eveningness', GaHee Park, Gallery Perrotin Tokyo
'619 West Pearl Street', Azikiwe Mohammed, SPRING/BREAK 2020
"REQUIRED" READING
Poems for Architects, by Jill Stoner, William Stout Publishers, 2001
Fool's Paradise, A Carey McWilliams Reader, Edited by Dean Stewart & Jeanine Gendar, 2001
The Battle for Home: The Vision of A Young Architect in Syria, by Marwa al-Sabouni, Thames & Hudson, 2016
The Maya Deren Reader, Vol. 2 (An Anagram of Ideas, pg. 550 - 604), By Catrina Neiman, Edited by Millicent Hodson, Anthology Film Archives, 1988
Dept. Of Corrections (essays 'Kara Walker', pg. 199 - 201, 'Trompe L'Oeil' pg. 233 - 239, and 'Passages: On Kawara 1933 - 2014' pg. 249 - 253), by Bob Nikas, Karma, NY, 2015
The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch, George Routledge & Sons, 1946
The Age of Missing Information, by Bill McKibben, Penguin, 1993
The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles, by Gary Krist, Crown, 2018
All Fours, Miranda July, Penguin Random House, 2024
The Castle, by Franz Kafka, Schoken Books, 1974
The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan, Random House, 1943
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, Mariner Books, 1978
Feel Free (essays 'The House That Hova Built', 'In The Gallery', 'The Bathroom', 'Love In The Gardens'), by Zadie Smith, Penguin Books, 2018
Labyrinths (stories 'The Circular Ruins', 'The Library of Babel', and 'Funes the Memorious'), by Jorge Luis Borges, New Directions, 1962
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Edited by Philip Rosen (essay, 'The Specator-In-The-Text: The Rhetoric of 'Stagecoach' by Nick Browne, Columbia University Press, 1986
Film Form/Film Sense (essays, 'The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram' and 'A Dialectic Approach to Film Form'), Sergei Eisenstein, Meridian Books, 1957
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker, Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1988
"REQUIRED" VIEWING
Russian Ark (dir. Alexander Sokurov, 96 min, 2003)
89 Seconds to Alcazar (dir. Eve Sussman, 12 min loop, 2004)
Playtime (dir. Jacques Tatí, 135 min, 1967)
Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 132 min, 2019)
Lady In The Lake (dir. Robert Montgomery, 105 min, 1947)
Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (dir. Marie Menken, 4 min, 1961)
L'Avventura (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 143 min, 1960)
Late Spring (dir. Yasujirō Ozu, 109 min, 1949)
Calamity (dir. Vêra Chytilová, 96 min, 1982)
5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi, 94 min, 2012)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman, 201 min, 1976)
Black Girl (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 55 min, 1966)
Sorcerer (dir. William Friedkin, 122 min, 1967)
Power of the Dog (dir. Jane Campion, 126 min, 2021)
The General (dir. Buster Keaton, 75 min, 1926)
Last Year At Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 94 min, 1961)
Duo Concertantes (dir. Larry Jordan, 9 min, 1964)
Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Maya Deren, 14 min, 1943)
Barton Fink (dir. Joel Coen, 116 min, 1991)
The Curse (created by Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie, Showtime, 2023)
Strange Days (dir. Kathryn Bigalow, 145 min, 1995)
Stagecoach (dir. John Ford, 96 min, 1939)
Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 111 min, 1954)
Epic Transcendentalist Kung Fu Double Feature:
A Touch of Zen (dir. King Hu, 180 min, 1971)
&
The 47 Ronin [Parts 1 & 2] (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 223 min, 1942)
Tarkovsky 'INT./EXT.' Triple Feature:
Solaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 166 min, 1972)
&
Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 161 min, 1979)
&
Nostalghia (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 125 min, 1983)
"REQUIRED" LISTENING
When We Were That What Wept For The Sea, Colin Stetson, 2023, 52Hz
Sit Down For Dinner, Blonde Redhead, 2023, Section1
Wagner e Venezia, Uri Caine Ensemble, 1997, Winter & Winter
Miracle-Level, Deerhoof, 2023, Joyful Noise Recordings
Citizen of Glass, Agnes Obel, 2016, PIAS Recordings
Music for Airports, Brian Eno, 1978, Polydor Records
People On Sunday, Dominique Dumont, 2020, The Leaf Label
Spiral, DARKSIDE, 2021, Matador Records
Space & Time, Deux Filles, 2016, Les Disques du Crepu
Dina Ögon, Dina Ögon, 2021, Playground Music
Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities, James Holden, 2023, Border Community Recordings
In Search of a Better Tomorrow, EABS & Jaubi, 2023, EABS Jaubi & Astigmatic Records
Eden's Island, Eden Ahbez, 1960, Del-Fi Records
ZAIREEKA, The Flaming Lips, 1997, Warner Bros. Music [listening in original 4 CD/4 Disc Player surround gathering]
The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell, 1975, Warner Music Company
Promises (feat. London Symphony Orchestra), Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, 2021, Luaka Bop Inc.
Pacific, Haruomi Hosono, Shigeru Suzuki & Tatsuro Yamashita, 1978, Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc.
Could We Be More, Kokoroko, 2022, Brownswood Recordings
Sound Characters, Maryanne Amacher, 1999, Tzadik
Tour de France [remastered] , Kraftwerk, 2003, Warner Music Group
The Forgotten Edge, Molly Lewis, 2021, Jagjaguar
Elpmas, Moondog, 1991, The Estate of Moondog
Symbol, Susumu Yokota, 2005, Lo Recordings
Shebang, Oren Ambarchi, 2022, Drag City
