Gallery Hours
wed-sat 12-7P

True Life: I’m a Staten Island Girl
Foucalt’s Heterotopias
Artists Denise Murphy, Ryan McGivern, Jenna Lucente, Amanda Curtis, Shawn Bishop-Leo and Mikhael Antone
Curator Mikhael Antone

This exhibition seeks to invert the stereotyped portrayals of Staten Island both as the “forgotten borough” of New York City and the borough that won’t seem to go away in the media. Shows like MTV’s Jersey Shore and the True Life series depict a Staten Island full of self-centered, vain, and over-privileged youth. – This show represents a different cross-section of Staten Island rarely seen on television – a group of artists addressing their unique feminine identity and how it’s perceived in this place they call home: Staten Island.
This show investigates the idea of “heterotopias” or “other spaces” through the individual unique feminine perspective. Foucault describes heterotopia as alternative, phantasmagorical, and ordinary space where transience and timelessness intersect with normal and ideal constructs of chronology, identity, sexuality, and reality. Heterotopia can be described as a material space as well as a conceptual, virtual, urban, and even geopolitical spatial construct, including hinterlands, wonderlands, borderlands and brothels. Heterotopia is an unwieldy collection of Other space…
Foucault suggests two primary roles of heterotopia: To create a space of illusion that is for and of the Other, and to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space. It is often compared to a mirror, reflecting society upon itself and making the real seem unreal, as it re-presents, contests, and inverts real social spaces.
Within the space the exhibition seeks to reframe preordained social constructs of what it means to be a “Staten Island Girl” but at the same time it invites a wider reading of identity in the social contexts of “other spaces”.

links:
www.mikhaelantone.com/show
www.showhownyc.com
www.secondsaturdaystatenisland.com
Artist sites
www.shawnbishopleo.com
www.jennalucente.com
www.assemblyroomgallery.com
www.ryanmcgivern.org

Special Thanks to Ginger Shulick of COAHSI, for bringing us all together and Theo Dorian of SHOW, for hosting this exhibition.