Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Hotel Practice: Intervention at the Hilton



Hotel Practice
Intervention at the Hilton

A hotel room group installation by Queens College MFA artists during the College Art Association conference.

Room #_____  (to be announced in the Hilton second floor promenade on the days of the exhibition February 14 and 15)

Hilton New York
1335 Avenue of the Americas
6th Avenue at 54th Street
New York, NY 10010

Opening: Thursday, February 14, 5-10pm
Friday, February 15,  12-5pm
Closing: February 15,  Friday,  5-10pm


Entering a hotel room, you find yourself in a familiar arrangement: the bed, the television, the bathroom with travel-size toiletries. Its appearance is generic, but only because there is a systematized logic that determines what constitutes a neutral living space. At a hotel, you have no responsibility to the space; you are not expected to think about the labor and the mechanism behind the maintenance and the operations of the hotel. It is ideologically loaded in order to appear free of ideology.

For the MFA students at Queens College, Hotel Practice is an examination of the customary performance involved with inhabiting such a site of contradiction – a space for respite and escape, and potential depravity and unexpected convergences. Furthermore, organized in time for the CAA conference, where the field of art is actively charted through debates and discussions, the artists in Hotel Practice consider how to discursively situate their own work in relation to these continually constructed sites of art. Self-organized and -produced, Hotel Practice can be more accurately described as a demonstration of the artists’ practice, rather than as an exhibition. It invites you to a collective questioning of established methods of conducting oneself within a systematized field of social activities – whether that field be understood specifically as the hotel, or more broadly as the field of art.

To see more from these artists, please note their upcoming annual MFA show at One Art Space (23 Warren Street, NY, NY 10007).   Opening March 23, and on view from March 24 to April 3.

More info at: cunyqueenscollegemfa.blogspot.com