23 October 2012 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MOVE IN FREEDOM — Synthetic Modernity and the Theory of Brooklyn Mari Oshima Alkemikal Soshu Eva Schicker THROUGH MARCH 30, 2014 Saturdays and Sundays, 1-6PM The rise of Brooklyn as a force in the art world coincides with a time when there was a loosening of the hold of theory over practice, and then a rejoining of theory through loose practice. This caused new dialects to arise in Brooklyn, and these were often, and by turns, eccentric and overarching. It was as if the modern enterprise were being approached all over again, from scratch, and by other means, rather than as the denouement or the “solving of the puzzle” of the recent past. The isolation and enchantment of post-industrial Brooklyn caused artists to picture themselves in the whole of the modern experience, not just on the ends of its recent phases. Sometimes I call this experience “immersive modernity,” sometimes I call it “synthetic modernity.” Or, on a lighter note, “steam-punk modernity.” It is the embrace of modernity in renewed and unearthly fashion that is the signature of the Brooklyn movement. And it is not in fact a thing in the style of the contemporary; with this show we drop that word from the name of our gallery. It was our first realization, upon launching Move In Freedom, that contemporaneity is a sterile thing, and also a relatively late import to Brooklyn art. The purpose of this show is to visit what we consider to be the Brooklyn manner of approach. And we go a step further by proposing that there is a theory of Brooklyn art, not necessarily a popular idea in so large and various a community of artists, but one that we will elaborate on in the forthcoming catalogue to the present show. It is to the synthesis of the modern that we go, not to its analysis, not to its commentary. The impulse is found in the vast warehouse installations of Williamsburg and Dumbo in the 90s, and across two generations of painting from Greenpoint to Bushwick. Mari Oshima is a pioneer of installation art in Brooklyn, whose ephemeral paper structures belie the monumental place they occupy in the post-industrial imagination of the borough. Alkemikal Soshu has never been to Brooklyn, but the Web has obliterated residential status as a requirement for entry to this discourse, and Soshu is a trenchant synthesist who, like an early Greenpoint painter, is more concerned with mapping his experience of the world than he is with answering questions about abstraction. Eva Schicker is a philosopher in ink and wash, long active in the Brooklyn scene, who conceived of this show, and whose contribution is to provide an ongoing stream of diagrams to the end of unraveling the vernacular that we explore in Move In Freedom. — Ethan Pettit