Mar
24
7:30 PM19:30

Ultimate Concern #001

June Cheung (@lolosketches)

June Cheung (@lolosketches)

In asking a simple question, “what do you do,” we find surprisingly complicated answers.

Talk Show Screenings is proud to present Ultimate Concern, a panel conversation on day jobs, studio life, and the radical balancing act that every artist performs to stay afloat. Playing on the structure of late night talk shows, the evening will blend the boundaries between audience and presenter, as we welcome everyone to commiserate and share their experiences as working artists and as workers.

Joining us on the panel are three artists, June Cheung (They/Them), Yidan Zeng (She/Her), and Courtney Beaumont Jr (He/Him), who have unique experiences as working artists. They will discuss navigating freelancing and full-time lifestyles, how they knew when it was time to make a change, and how they keep finding joy in creativity and artistic work.

About Ultimate Concern:

The ideal image of the artist is an individual toiling away in their studio, but the reality is, most emerging and mid-career artists use a day job to enable their creative endeavors. We want to highlight the day job as a critical form of survival, particularly in major cities such as New York City and San Francisco.

In an informal interview format, we’ll ask artists/workers: is your day job an impediment to a studio practice or a source of inspiration? Do you pursue day jobs with consistency and set hours, or do you prefer the flexibility/unpredictability of the gig economy? Talk to us about your best and worst jobs in the open market. Are you trapped in the liminal space between emerging and mid-career? What do those words even mean? We want to know: how do you make a living, manage time, stay hopeful, and carve out a space for yourself.

About the Panelists:

June Cheung

Pronouns - they/them

June Cheung is a queer nonbinary Asian artist in NY creating soft, reflective spaces with their art. They mix art, tarot, and activism with their intersectional identity in the hope that sharing their own introspective journey will encourage others to live honestly and fearlessly. They explored the film industry (both union and non-union) for five years and stepped away to recover from the bigotry and harm the industry causes. They returned to their original two forms of art, drawing and photography, to find a gentle healing space for recovery, autonomy, and self-discovery. Their current focus is on intertwining community building with art creation, and their dayjob is at the Museum of Food and Drink as an Office Administrator where they advocate for queer, POC, and nonbinary visibility in exhibits.

Websites: laurencheung.com (previous legal name), instagram @lolosketches to view their tarot series.

Yidan Zeng

Pronouns: she/her

Yidan Zeng / 曽一丹 / is an intimacy investigator currently wandering/wondering through New York. She uses fabric, movement, and touch to explore multi-sensual forms for deep connection. Currently a resident artist at Textile Arts Center, she is experimenting with how natural dyes and weaving can be a conversation between the self and the natural environment. Her dayjob is Programs Coordinator at Eyebeam, where she interweaves questions of agency, wellbeing, and refusal into programming for youth and public events around technology. 

Website: yidanzeng.com, Instagram: @yidanzeng

Courtney Beaumont Jr

Pronouns – he/him

Courtney Beaumont Jr. (Ceebo) is a Jamaican-American Visual Designer / Art Director, a native Queens kid, and is always a student of all things creative. Never afraid to venture outside his lane to try something new and gain inspiration in unexpected places. A branding / design specialist with over 10+ years experience in the advertising world. 

When he’s not at his day job, he’s busy juggling freelance projects, or spreading some cool propaganda as Creator of The Calm Cool Collective brand. 

Web: cargocollective.com/ceebo , IG: @thecccnyc

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Mar
17
to Mar 31

THIRD SPACE

IMG_20191113_170712.jpg

For our first exhibition, Talk Show Screenings has put together works that are either in-progress, recently completed, or unpolished. We define unpolished as something that is sitting in the liminal space of studio and gallery, the piece that hasn’t been touched in months yet doesn’t feel quite finished, the work the artist has not come to terms with as it hovers in this undefined space. We’ve identified a need for a third space, where unfinished works are welcomed as early milestones of larger bodies of work, as a respite from the demands of rigorous practice, where odds and ends find a place at the table and take on a life of their own.

This exhibition will be mounted in Talk Show Screenings - an anti-white cube -  a living and working space, unpolished and fluid. We have invited ten artists working in various media to utilize the existing infrastructure to exhibit their works/works-in-progress. In addition to our large projection wall, exhibition areas may include the entrance way, kitchen, bathroom, stairs, and/or existing shelves.

There will be events ongoing throughout the course of the exhibition, punctuated by the launch of our program series, Ultimate Concern on March 24th. The show will be open by appointment, and artists are welcome to hold conversations or critiques outside of the studio environment.

Show Dates: Opening: March 17th, 6-9pm. By appointment, March 18-31st.

For more information on this or any of our programming, or to make an appointment, please email hello@talkshowtalkshow.com.

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The Labor Party Party #001
Nov
10
3:00 PM15:00

The Labor Party Party #001

An afternoon of conversation about co-working. When it’s good, when it’s bad, and how to make it better?

Architecture has always been social. As the legend goes, according to Vitruvius, “The beginning of association among human beings, their meeting and living together, thus came into being because of the discovery of fire.” One can speculate from this that the first act of building was not the construction of a personal dwelling, but a fire around which a community could grow, and from which the history of creative labor emerged. A constructed fire and a huddle of beings around it might demonstrate the first collaborative environment.

But what is often forgotten across the many millennia between that first act of community building and the Downtown towers and suburban office parks that make up the “creative workspace” landscape is that a good fire takes stoking. Architecture at its origins was not just an event of assembly but a continuous process of maintenance. Today, most architects do little to engage the afterlife of their projects, and this practice of maintenance is generally left either to cultish companies or indifferent landlords who ply us with free tap beer and rooftop yoga to keep us ignorant of the space and its discontents.

We at Labor Party would like to re-examine how designers build and stoke the fire. Instead of working top-down, We propose Labor Party as a bottom-up, ongoing series of workshops and community office hours -- an ad hoc co-working project that is organized provisionally to best cater to its participants as their needs arise and change.

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