Smack Mellon Open Call for Emerging Artists: Summer Group Exhibition (Due Dec. 1)
Smack Mellon Open Call for Emerging Artists: Summer Group Exhibition
Deadline: December 1st, 2024
Smack Mellon seeks artwork submissions for a summer group exhibition to be guest-curated by New York City-based writer and curator Pallavi Surana. This exhibition conceptually departs from the salt marsh—a transitional zone between terrestrial and aquatic environments that provides critical habitat for a variety of species. As ecosystems, salt marshes carry an inherent tension and exist as intermediaries: between land and sea, and between a perceived desolation and vitality. Historically, Brooklyn’s waterfront was lined with salt marshes, which were later filled in to accommodate infrastructure, buildings, and urban development. Using Smack Mellon’s location on the waterfront as an anchor, Smack Mellon seeks submissions from artists exploring themes of in-betweenness, belonging, and global movement.
The exhibition aims to address the current moment of persistent global migratory motion and displacement, and expands on Surana’s pre-existing research on how such movements can be seen through artistic modes of creation. Surana invites artists whose work engages with notions of excess, navigates interstitial spaces, reconsiders center and periphery, embraces contradictions that defy mutual exclusivity, and imagines borders as fluid and permeable. Through a focus on these perspectives and modes of making, this exhibition seeks to explore new possibilities, uncovering alternative systems of being that challenge conventional boundaries.
By approaching the salt marsh not just as a geographical feature, but as a metaphorical space, the exhibition will interrogate how these liminal landscapes resonate with broader global narratives—spaces of refuge, tension, and transformation. In doing so, the exhibition hopes to allow space for a layered examination of how artists grapple with identity, place, and belonging, while being rooted in a complex historical and environmental framework.
If needed, artists can relate to keywords like:
Tension
Density
Porous borders
In-between
Slippages
Permeability
Motion
Plurality