Upcoming Exhibition Programming:

Wednesday, March 6, 1pm: livestream on @tsany instagram live of the first segment of Spinners with Jessica Mensch and Emily Pelstring

Saturday, March 9, 5-7pm: Janine YC Lai will host INGESTATION, where participants are invited to make, think on, and enjoy tung yuan

Sunday, March 10, 4pm: 1st reading event of poetry and other writings at the gallery. Please email the curator at sisichenstudio@gmail.com if you are interested in participating

Saturday, March 16: Performance by Jesi Cook

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Rhapsody Tentacular, an experimental curation composed of eight variants of participation, each driven by its own impetus and improvisational spirit. The exhibition engages both the form and essence of a rhapsody, a musical composition of irregular form, often improvisational and highly emotional, as well as the concept of “tentacularity” with each autonomous arm compelled by its own independent curiosities and processes, yet connected through shared metabolism of energy cycled through the gallery space from these activations both on and offsite. The eight “arms” of the exhibition, invoking the likeness of an octopus, consist of individuals and collaborations working across diverse modalities of performance, broadcasting, dance, research and archivism, culinary arts, interactive installation, musical composition, writing, and poetry. The gallery space serves as a nexus for these energies to briefly intersect as they pass though, with open potential to form kinship.  

Participants are listed alphabetically below under their respective “arm” of the exhibition. Note: numerical organization is for reference purposes only and does not imply any sequential order.

Arm 1: Jessica Mensch, Emily Pelstring 

Arm 2: John Felix Arnold, Jesi Cook, Amari Jones, Leo Ryan, University of North Carolina Wilson Special Collections Library (Organized by Sarah Carrier and Nadia Clifton)

Arm 3: Straw Pipes (Stonie Clark and lele dai)

Arm 4: Kathleen Granados

Arm 5: Janine Lai

Arm 6: Sarah Crofts, Weihui Lu

Arm 7: Alice Cohen, Anthony Sertel Dean, Andy Demczuk, Nat Evans, Zachary Keeting, Chanteclair/Katie Kotler, Joe Moffett, Kate Mohanty, Now That’s What I Call Girl Talk (Lyle Daniel and Arthur Sillers), NTHNL, Mike Santiago, Frank Schellace, Ronen Shai, Kate Sherman, Joel St. Julien, Bob Szantyr

Arm 8: Rachel Allen, Stephen Ira, Justin Kamp, Eva Swiecki

*Additional writers and poets TBA

The concept of this show grew from a desire to experience an exhibition outside of a conventional model where typically the roles of participation—artist, artwork, space, curator, audience—are fixed, and these fixed points of value are more easily aligned with late capitalism structures of power. The heart of the proposal to rethink what the gallery space can hold, and how it can contain, came from a deep appreciation for Ursula K. LeGuin’s notion of The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction-- which uses Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, a proposal that the first cultural device used by humans was a carrier bag instead of hunting tools, centering the telling of human history around an action of gathering and containing, rather than killing and conquering—to recenter the telling of human stories around interdependent growth and gathering, rather than the destructive, traditional hero’s tale. Likewise, the form of the exhibition is contingent upon collective momentum, rather than fully formed individual work. 

Rhapsody Tentacular begins with a “table read” on February 24th, where participants will meet, most for the first time, and set intentions for their projects to take place during the run of the exhibition. The term “table read” can refer to the gathering of an entire cast of a production for the first readthrough of a script, and also to table-turning, a practice of mediumship popular in the Victorian era where a group of people would perform a séance around a table and communications with spirits were deciphered through reading taps or tilts of the table. The act of setting intentions together initiates a potent energy, which each collaborator will continue to grow, separately. The participants will document the activations and updates from their projects and relay these back to the gallery at their own tempo throughout the duration of the show, and the curator will actively compose and recompose the gallery space with these contributions, so that the space is ever evolving. In this form, those involved have full autonomy over their own projects and direction, free from compromise, yet the experience of the show is time-based and shared, where the whole exceeds the sum of its parts and belongs not entirely to anyone, quite like the form of connection itself. 

Rhapsody Tentacular is curated by SiSi Chen. This is her second curatorial project with TSA NY.