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By Dennis Lynch
Brooklyn Daily
School is in for winter!
A radically free art school will celebrate its move to Sunset Park’s Industry City with a new exhibit and a free dance party on Jan. 15. The queer arts collective House of Ladosha will christen the Bruce High Quality Foundation University’s new space with “This is UR mind,” an exhibition one member called an “experiential dive into the mind of Ladosha.”
“It’s a blow-up of the consciousness as a group” said collective member Neon Christina. “We’re going to be showing video art pieces we all worked together on, with some sculptures, and portraits, all amounting into one installation.”
The gender-bending group “puts self-expression via social media on the same level as more traditional mediums,” according to its mission statement, and some of the show’s videos were taken from their online presence. The Bruce High Quality Foundation approached the group because the collective, like the school, is “generative” and not “reactive,” according to outreach director Sean Carney.
“When they see a lack of representation for their voices, they just create a world where those voices exist,” he said. “And it made sense for us to work with a group whose practices are so rooted in social media, participation in nightlife. Their art represents areas where artists often feel at home, but that aren’t necessarily part of the mainstream yet.”
Members of the collective will play music alongside DJs at the opening’s after-party, starting at 10 pm.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation University, which starts its next semester of free, ten-week classes on Jan. 24, is open to anyone with an interest in art.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a background in visual arts, or writing, or anything really,” Carney said. “You can have people who have never had any formal arts education sitting in class next to someone with a terminal degree.”
The Foundation has rented studio space in Industry City since 2012, running classes in two spaces in Manhattan. But with rent across the river “becoming a little preposterous,” according to Carney, the group refitted its Brooklyn space to host the art school and gallery.
The new classroom can accommodate roughly 1,000 students per semester. The move to Brooklyn will further the group’s mission to build an “other arts community” apart from the traditional, Manhattan-based scene, Carney said.
“We’re trying to build this arts community that anyone can join,” he said, “It doesn’t feel like Chelsea — it’s a lot more open and inviting and more reflective of what New York actually looks like. We hope that a lot of the local artists get involved and that to the people in the community, that the ‘New York City art world’ is not parachuting down into their community.”
House of Ladosha at Bruce High Quality Foundation University (33 34th St., 6th floor, between Second and Third avenues in Sunset Park, www.bhqfu.org). Jan. 15 at 8 pm. Show available by appointment until Feb. 28. Free.