Date:
March 30–June 17, 2017
Recess Assembly, 370 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Public Hours:
Thursday - Saturday, 12-6pm
In January 2017, Recess launched Assembly, a nine-month pilot program in a space that is acting as a satellite to our original Soho location. To expand upon our mission to connect artists and publics, Assembly is at once an arts-based diversion program for court-involved youth and a public storefront gallery.
For the second cycle of the Assembly program, from March–June 2017, the street-level, public storefront gallery will house Iyapo Repository, a speculative lab and resource library operated by Salome Asega and Ayodamola Okunseinde that maintains a collection of digital and physical artifacts created to affirm and project the future of people of African descent. Similar to Recess’s seasoned Session program in Soho, which allows artists to pursue works in progress in a public setting, Assembly grants participating artists the opportunity to activate and add to the space cumulatively, working toward an evolving installation rather than a static exhibition.
Throughout their three-month project, Asega and Okunseinde will create an installation to present and expand upon the collection of artifacts that currently comprises Iyapo Repository and will host a series of interactive workshops during which participants will become archivists of an imagined future history. To inhabit the role of archivists, participants will sketch and rapid prototype artifacts from the future that represent cultural remnants such as food, music, politics, or fashion. After the workshops, the artists will bring a select few of these artifacts to life as technologically functional objects that retain the integrity of the participants’ original blueprints. The resulting forms will be put on view as new additions to the Repository. Alongside the art and artifacts collection, the space will also host other divisions of the Repository, including collections of manuscripts (drawings and 3D sketches of objects developed in previous workshops), films (short video loops contextualizing how the artifacts could be used in real life), and rare books (printed texts and audio resources that inspire the artists’ efforts with the Repository).
In addition to their work on Iyapo Repository in the gallery space, Asega and Okunseinde will participate as teaching artists during the educational diversion programs, and they will collaborate with lead teaching artist Shaun Leonardo to incorporate material from their project into the program’s visual storytelling curriculum.
About the artist
Salome Asega
Artist
Salome Asega is an artist and researcher whose practice celebrates dissensus and multivocality. She is currently a Technology Fellow in the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression program area. Salome is also the co-host of speculative talk show Hyperorpia: 20/30 Vision on bel-air radio, and a director of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory in Bushwick. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and Recess Art. She has exhibited and given presentations at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Performa, EYEO, and the Brooklyn Museum. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology where she also teaches.
Projects
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde
Artist
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (ayo) is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and time-traveler living and working in New York. He studied Visual Arts and Philosophy at Rutgers the State University of New Jersey where he earned his B.A. His works range from painting and speculative design to physically interactive works, wearable technology and explorations of “Reclamation”. Okunseinde was the co-founder and creative director of Dissident Display Studios, an award winning studio and art gallery based in Washington DC. As a collaborator with, amongst others, choreographer Maida Withers, Carmen Wong, and Yoko K., Okunseinde has created several interactive performance based works and has performed in several countries including Mexico, Finland, and Croatia. His art residency participation includes ITP’s S.I.R., IDEO’s Fortnight, The Laundromat Project, Eyebeam, New INC, and Recess Assembly. He has exhibited and presented at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Tribeca Storyscapes, EYEO Festival, Brooklyn Museum, M.I.T. Beyond the Cradle, and Afrotectopia amongst others. His works themselves exist between physical and digital spaces; across the past, present and future. They ask us, through technology, to reimagine notions of race, identity, politics and culture as they travel through time and space. Okunseinde has taught at New York University, Bennington College, Hostos CUNY and 92Y. He holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design in New York where he is currently an adjunct faculty member.
Projects
In January 2017, Recess launched Assembly to serve as an artist-led alternative to incarceration while empowering young people to take charge of their own life story and imagine a positive future through art. Through the 40-week Peer Leader program, our young people are exposed to various mediums of art making, careers in the arts, and internships at arts and culture spaces around the city as a pathway to a career in the arts. A guest artist joins each new cohort of the program and collaborates with youth on a project in our public storefront gallery.
Explore/Archive
See all
July 16–August 18, 2024
The Forever Museum Archive: Circa 2020_An Object
Onyedika Chuke and Assembly
a series of events, political polls, and artistic gestures chronicling events of 2020 in hindsight
November 11, 2023–January 25, 2024
Session & Assembly Collaboration: BARRO
Marcela Torres and Assembly
Torres in collaboration with Assembly will explore the history of New York through its soil and natural clay deposits.
