ROOMSERVICE, a new not-for-profit art space in Brooklyn

We walk deserts full of matter, monomaniacs pushing boundaries, escaping realities and diving into new habitats, melting together what we were with what we will be.


A new not-for-profit art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn has recently opened its doors at 485 Lorimer Street.
The space, named Room Service and run by Mattia Casalegno, Sarah Corona, Lilian Kreutzberger and Francesco Lecci, will focus mostly on site-specific installations developed by one or few artists at a time.

I Walk Deserts Full Of Matter is the first of a series of shows investigating art and space, how they interact and what they draw one from another.
The group show is composed by works by Jarrod Beck, Lilly Handley, Christian Hincapié, Alexa Hoyer, Alexandra Phillips, Paz Ortuzar, Alona Weiss, Alex Yudzon.

I walk deserts full of matter at Room Service, Williamsburg
From left to right, artwork by Alexandra Philips, Alexa Hoyer, Alexandra Philips, Paz Ortuaz, Alona Weiss, Christian Hincapié, Jarrod Beck

Alex Yuzdon and Alexa Hoyer rethink the great American landscapes’ iconography. Yuzdon with an hybrid formula, melting together stories from the Great American Book and icons of the former Russian Empire, revisited with mysticism and an iconic manga/Marvel attitude. Hoyer, in other ways, describes another American iconic imaginary: guns and deserts, emptiness, inner desolations, a desire for escape.
Disappearance, lack, and absence are present also in Jarrod Beck’s work, but in a performative way. A dialogue between nine actors lingering on space and memory gap — a performance about falling, love, death and 9/11, declined in the shape of newspaper column, as if the whole pamphlet was found on the news.
Alexandra Philips shows three works: a found banner, who was left outside, letting the City ‘painting’ its subject; an arch, built with fake marble stones; and a participatory walk-through sculpture, at the very entrance of the gallery. All works are related to the structural and architectural elements our cities are made of and contribute to a further understanding of our surroundings.

From left to right: Alexandra Philips, Alexa Hoyer, Alexandra Philips

Alona Weiss’s Negative Spaces question the evolution of a monument, when newer generations eat up the old meaning and recycle it, giving it the new vest of a playground, and melting together meanings and shapes, aggregation and power. Weiss also explores the space between the body and the screen, where the artist’s shadow melts and transforms the already blurred lines of former public monuments.

Alona Weiss

Paz Ortuaz, instead, creates a real monumental pyramid with found wood painted in black, by reflecting on the utopia/catastrophe of any new imposed reality, the rise and fall of any so-called “revolutionary govern.”

From front to back: Paz Ortuaz, Christian Hincapié

Lily Handley is represented with a solarcell-run water fountain. The fountain, an urban element that stands for a monument and a sculpture at the same time, here is also a reminder of environmental pollution and public responsibility for water consumption.

From front to back: Alexandra Philips, Lily Handley, Alex Yuzdon

From left to right: Christian Hincapié, Alexandra Philips, Christian Hincapié

Christian Hincapié’s painting is one of the works that interpret and testimony the urban landscape of NYC. His anthropological and architectural research and analysis on a large number of New York’s subway stations brought him to recreate some of their elements through painting. The exhibited painting is one of the two panels of a diptych, while the other one is showcased at a parallel exhibition space in Harlem.

Jarrod Beck, Lilly Handley, Christian Hincapié, Alexa Hoyer, Alexandra Phillips, Paz Ortuzar, Alona Weiss, Alex Yudzon: I Walk Deserts Full Of Matter at Room Service, New York, May 8-20, 2015