REMARKABLE NEW LOCATIONS
Nye Ffarrabas & Nina Isabelle
CX Silver Gallery, May- June 2019
Remarkable New Locations is a series of interactive art objects inspired by Nye Ffarrabas's poetry and produced by Nina Isabelle using a car as a printing press. The objects are interactive as they invite the viewer to engage in marking and remaking the dry erase surface as a way to facilitate perceptions of process, language, and action.
The printing process involved inking each plate individually and pressing it into each sheet by driving a car over it to emboss the plate image into the saturated paper. Each piece was rolled over ten times with a car revealing various degrees of chance in the imagery. The original monoprint plate was produced using hand-etched plexiglass. Using black printmaking ink on 100% cotton 22x30 Arches 88 printmaking paper, the prints were individually processed, then hand painted using ink, gouache, and acrylic paint to highlight and color code the vowels using purple As, yellow Es, orange Is, blue Os, and green Us. The final layer is a hand cut transparent material affixed to the image surface machine stitched with orange thread.
Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Hendricks) has been an artist for 60 years and a poet for 80. She participated in Happenings beginning in 1961, as part of the Fluxus scene. In 1962 she interviewed several artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Bob Watts and Ivan Karp. In 1965, she established her own publishing company, the Black Thumb Press. Nye/Bici had her first solo show at Judson Gallery in 1966 and the next year performed Ordeals with Carolee Schneemann. In the 60s and 70s, Nye/Bici participated in many of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York events coordinated by Charlotte Moorman. Starting in 1964, Nye/Bici compiled journals as conceptual art with Geoff Hendricks, a series known as The Friday Book of White Noise which contains many seeds for her event scores. In 2019 Nye completed a mobius-strip-shaped infinite event score as a performance, installation and wall-piece.