The Kitchen at Queenslab
By Alison Burstein, Curator, Media & Engagement
SINCE THE FALL/WINTER 2019 SEASON, The Kitchen has presented several events and projects at Queenslab in Ridgewood, Queens, including a concert by Mario Diaz de Leon, performances by Lauren Bakst, and an exhibition of new work by Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin. Currently, artist Baseera Khan is using the Queenslab space as the set for their experimental television pilot called By Faith. This diverse array of programs demonstrates the possibilities that have emerged from a partnership between The Kitchen and Queenslab, through which The Kitchen uses Queenslab’s building as a space for collaboration with artists and for public presentations. The video below features The Kitchen’s Executive Director and Chief Curator Tim Griffin with artists Jim Hodges and Carlos Marques da Cruz of Queenslab in conversation about the initiative The Kitchen at Queenslab.
As Griffin, Hodges, and Marques da Cruz discuss, the partnership has created valuable opportunities for The Kitchen to connect with a neighborhood outside of Chelsea, where we have been located since 1986. Additionally, Queenslab’s expansive scale allows us to work differently with artists: the space is approximately 8,000 square feet with forty-foot ceilings. The open layout means that we can invite artists to respond to a site that, unlike our own building—which is structured as a black box theater on the first floor and gallery space on the second—does not have a pre-established identity as either a gallery or a theater.
Before COVID-19, The Kitchen envisioned Queenlab as a speculative site for residencies, where artists could rehearse, practice, install, and then, if they wish, present work to an audience (though there is no obligation for the artist to produce a completed work). The chance for artists to occupy this liminal space between envisioning and presenting is all the more resonant in current times, especially when combined with The Kitchen's new mode of operating during the pandemic as a kind of television studio, with artists creating projects and performances during their residencies in physical space that are streamed online to wider audiences.
For their The Kitchen at Queenslab projects, the artists have developed unique ways to respond to and make use of the space during residency periods within the building in Ridgewood. Through this residency format—which invites artists to spend anywhere from several days to several weeks working within Queenslab's space with technical support from The Kitchen—we strive to enable artists to test out forms of production and presentation that might not be possible within other contexts of more traditional scale and structure. For instance, in creating the performance work after summer… during her residency, Bakst devised a staging that positioned audience members in the center of the space, with projected elements surrounding them on three walls. Throughout the piece, Bakst traversed and interacted with the physical space—at one point writing on a wall, at another sliding objects across the floor from where she was seated out into the space of the audience. Representing a different approach, Bernstein and Rubin used their residency to develop Vomitorium, their largest-scale project to date: a four-channel video installation projected within a spacious amphitheater designed to sit in the center of Queenslab.
Under current conditions, when space and proximity take on heightened significance in relation to COVID-19, Queenslab has served as an ideal site for the making of Khan’s By Faith with collaborators and a production crew working together in accordance with social distance protocols. To create a show that revolves around the artist’s experiences in their Crown Heights apartment, Khan has erected a set that includes nearly life-sized photo screens depicting views of her personal space. The project collapses real and virtual space through livestreams of scenes shot against these two-dimensional representations: at times, the footage reveals the seams between the staged set pieces and the industrial space in which they are positioned, adding another layer to the disorientation of space, scale, and dimensionality.
In the coming months, we look forward to hosting additional artists through The Kitchen at Queenslab, and exploring with them further configurations of Queenslab’s remarkably generative space.
Images and video: 1) Conversation between Tim Griffin, Jim Hodges, and Carlos Marques da Cruz, 2020. 2) Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin, Vomitorium, 2020. Installation view, The Kitchen at Queenslab. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle. 3) Baseera Khan, By Faith, 2020. Television set installation view, Queenslab. Photo by Ariana Sarwari.