Times Square Arts Announces Fall 2022 Midnight Moment Program

Carolina Caycedo, Patrón Mono: Ríos Libres, Pueblos Vivos (video still courtesy of the artist)

Featuring Works by Artists Carolina Caycedo (September), Kilo Kish (October), and Zoë Buckman (November)

Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to present their Fall Season Arts Program featuring Midnight Moments from artists Carolina Caycedo (September), Kilo Kish (October), and Zoë Buckman (November).

Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 90 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. This year, Times Square Arts is celebrating the ten year anniversary of the Midnight Moment series with a roster of all women and femme-expansive artists until April 2023.

FULL SCHEDULE

September 1-30, 2022 | Nightly 11:57-Midnight
Carolina Caycedo, Patrón Mono: Ríos Libres, Pueblos Vivos
Presented in partnership with The Armory Show and Instituto de Visión

Each night in September, flowing water and glittering gold will move in kaleidoscopic configurations across the iconic billboards of Times Square. Patrón Mono: Ríos Libres, Pueblos Vivos is the latest addition to Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo’s ‘Water Portraits” series, a collection of work designed with the intention to reform our relationship to water, and follows the fate of waterways across North and South America.

Patrón Mono: Ríos Libres, Pueblos Vivos portrays the lower Cauca River canyon located in Antioquia, Colombia – a region currently impacted by the Hidroituango hydroelectric dam contingency, and where armed and environmental conflict overlap. The muleteers, fishermen, and artisanal miners of the region refer to the Cauca River as ‘Patrón Mono’ (Blonde Boss), because of its yellow color and the gold found in its waters and sands. As Caycedo explains, for the local community of residents and workers, the Patrón Mono is the best employer in the world as “it doesn’t set schedules, it never refuses to pay, and it always provides them with fish and gold.”

In Caycedo’s ‘Water Portraits,’ bodies of water are reimagined into living beings through the mirroring, abstraction, and remixing of images of rivers and waterfalls. The portraits are designed to grant autonomy to these waterways that have been colonized by humanity. They work to create a distinct identity for water by repositioning waterways as social agents within contemporary environmental conflicts. Caycedo’s ‘Water Portraits’ invites us to decolonize the natural landscape and reevaluate our relationship towards it.

Patrón Mono: Ríos Libres, Pueblos Vivos is co-presented by The Armory Show with Instituto de Visión on the occasion of the 2022 edition of the fair, taking place September 9-11 at the Javits Center in New York City.

October 1-31, 2022 | Nightly 11:57-Midnight
Kilo Kish, American Gurl
Presented in partnership with Womxn in Windows

Each night in October, multi-hyphenate artist and performer Kilo Kish will bring a new kind of Americana to the billboards of Times Square. Kish’s American Gurl merges pop culture, camp, and fantasy into a video work that centers herself within conventional ideas of the American Dream. Created in conjunction with her 2022 concept album of the same name, American Gurl creates a visual bridge from the past to expansive musings on the future, utilizing the persuasive powers of art and consumerism in the center of Times Square.

“With these pieces, I am interested in exploring how we can reimagine the American dream to include women of color along with our hopes and desires. These moving images represent the intersection of our past and present, exploring new ways of dreaming through their fusion,” said Kilo Kish.

American Gurl was assembled using the artist’s personal collection of vintage travel postcards that are collaged into animated vignettes featuring backdrops of quintessential American tourist stops including farmhouses, iconic bridges, resorts, and airways. Central to each composition is Kish herself, resulting in a series of moving selfies that rework space and time into a dreamland complete with multiple costume changes and props such as ice cream cones and feathered fans. All of this comes together to create American Gurl – a projection of “wish-you-were-here” vibes from fictional, faraway places.

November 1-30, 2022 | Nightly 11:57-Midnight
Zoë Buckman, MENDED
Presented in partnership with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Each night in November, the 90+ billboards of Times Square will light up with pink handsewn petals and chain links, mixed with vintage linens stitched into boxing gloves to create Zoë Buckman’s MENDED that comments on the dualities of tenderness and strength in kaleidoscopic refrains.

Through a multidisciplinary practice that includes sculpture, public installations, ceramics, and photography, Buckman takes a clearly feminist approach in her exploration of identity, trauma, grief, and empowerment. Buckman, who often takes on gendered violence as subject matter, uses materials that live in the liminal spaces between soft and hard, feminine and masculine, and intimacy and aggression. The visuals in MENDED weave together imagery and motifs found throughout the artist’s work –– footage of boxing gloves, domestic textiles, metal chains, and florals. Abstracted and reshaped into mesmerizing mandalas, the video work takes us on a journey that mirrors the swing from chaos to focused introspection that often accompanies the various stages of grief.

MENDED is an adaptation of work created through Loss Tapes, a series of collaborative digital works in which Buckman has continued her exploration of the varied qualities of grief and power found in the female experience. Born out of Buckman’s NFT Residency with Voice, the original iteration of the work featured an accompanying score by Dave Guy and Homer Steinweiss, featuring rich tones of horns, percussion, and vintage synths that come together to create the feeling of a victory march.

ABOUT CAROLINA CAYCEDO
Carolina Caycedo is a multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, video, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues.  Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory, as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities.

 She has developed publicly engaged projects in major cities across the globe, and held residencies at the DAAD in Berlin, and The Huntington Libraries, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, among others. She has participated in numerous international biennales including the Sydney, Chicago Architecture, São Paulo, Istanbul, Berlin, Havana, and Whitney Biennials. She has received funding from Creative Capital, Prince Claus Fund, Latinx Fellowship, Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, and others. 

Caycedo’s current solo museum exhibitions include Projects: Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas at MoMA (2022-2023) and Land of Friends at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle (2022-2023). She is a nominee for the Artes Mundi 10 Prize.

ABOUT THE ARMORY SHOW
The Armory Show has been a cornerstone of New York’s cultural landscape since its founding in 1994, bringing the world’s leading international contemporary and modern art galleries to New York each year. The fair plays a leading role in the city’s position as an important cultural capital through elevated presentations, thoughtful programming, curatorial leadership, meaningful institutional partnerships, and engaging public art activations.

ABOUT INSTITUTO DE VISIÓN
Instituto de Visión is a Bogotá based gallery for conceptual based practices. Our mission is to investigate conceptual discourses that have been neglected by the official Latin American art canon. We have recovered important estates from throughout the Latin American art of the mid XX century and we continue to investigate the most enigmatic oeuvres of the region.

Through a parallel program, we represent some of the most relevant contemporary practices from Colombia, Chile, North America, and Venezuela among others. Directed by three women, Instituto de Vision gives special attention to female voices, queer theories, environmental activism, the conflicts of migration, and other critical positions that challenge the established order.

Using the international art scene as a platform, we are committed to giving visibility and expanding the work of artists that reveal critical realities and raise important questions for these contemporary subjects.

ABOUT KILO KISH
Kish Robinson (Kilo Kish) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer working in music, film, installation, performance, and the written word. Musically, she has collaborated with Gorillaz, The Internet, Vince Staples, and Donald Glover, garnering attention since her debut in 2011. Her most extensive project is ‘Kilo Kish’, a solo music project exploring personal identity and socio-cultural expectations.

Kish works in a project-based format, diving into various genres and mediums to dissect her unsettled view of millennial life. Her work is characterized by existentialism, absurdity, and humor, explored through popular media formats like songs and music videos.

Her music has been featured in Vogue, W Magazine, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Dazed, The Guardian, Billboard, and Fader. Kish’s videos have been screened at the Getty Center, The Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Image and Sound in Brazil. She’s worked with countless brands in the fashion sphere, including Chanel, Rodarte, Levi’s, Nike, and Adidas. She’s created capsule collections and fashion pieces with Maison Kitsuné and X-Girl Japan. Kish exhibited performance and film works with two solo installations at HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in Los Angeles.

ABOUT WOMXN IN WINDOWS
Womxn in Windows is a platform for the perspectives of womxn on culture, identity and society. What started as an annual public exhibition of womxn-made art films in storefront windows is now on a mission to support intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue. WxW has been regarded by the LA Times as ‘a video art show made for this moment’ and by LA Weekly as ‘an installation that challenges conventions of female representation’. Through the years WxW has shown the works of digital artists and filmmakers such as Ja’tovia Gary, Kilo Kish, Alima Lee, Christine Yuan, Yumna Al Arashi & Arshia Fatima Haq among many others. WxW was founded in 2019 by Zehra Ahmed.

ABOUT ZOË BUCKMAN
Zoë Buckman was born in 1985 in Hackney, East London. She studied at The International Center of Photography (GS ‘09) and was awarded an Art Matters Grant in 2017. She has shown in solo exhibitions at Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles; Papillion Art, Los Angeles; Project for Empty Space, Newark; Garis & Hahn Gallery, Los Angeles; and Milk Gallery, New York. Group exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; The Tarble Arts Center, Illinois; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York;  Unit London; NYU Florence, Grunwald Gallery of Art Gallery, Indiana University; The Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia; The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta; and The National Museum of African-American History & Culture, Washington, D.C.; The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey; The Centre Regional D’Art Contemporain, Sète, France and Smack Mellon, New York. Public art installations include For Freedoms’ “50 State Initiative”, “Inaction is Apathy” billboard at 21c Museum Hotel Bentonville, Arkansas and “Champ” at The Standard, Downtown LA with Art Production Fund. Buckman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

ABOUT PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY
Inaugurated in 1999, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is a leading contemporary art gallery that represents a diverse roster of emerging and established artists. Since moving to its current premises on Heddon Street in 2011, the gallery has focused on the representation of female artists, who now account for 90% of the programme. Renowned for its emphasis on institutional acquisitions, the gallery is proud to have placed significant artworks in museum collections worldwide.

ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Mel Chin, Tracey Emin, Jeffrey Gibson, Ryan McGinley, Yoko Ono, and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.