Opening Day – Saturday, March 20th, 4-8PM: RSVP for a 1-hour time slot HERE. Due to our limited capacity, timed entry reservations are required to attend the opening reception. Please sign up for only one time slot, and your arrival to the gallery must be within the hour you have selected. Please read our COVID Courtesy Code prior to your visit.
After the opening day, the gallery will be open regular hours, Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6PM, and reservations will not be required.
Katya Grokhovsky works in installation, performance, sculpture, video, painting and drawing, exploring ideas of gender, identity construction, alienation, labor, history, and the self. Through research and autobiographical experience, Grokhovsky builds worlds and characters that examine and underscore stereotypes, assumptions, prejudices, and injustices. She is interested in the histories of migration and displacement, while enacting the bodies of the historically oppressed, in relation to the preconceived social order. Many of her projects deal with protest and freedom through failure, via radical and humorous actions: reclaiming the body through pleasure, chaos, and refusal, residing in the space of absurd grotesque and nostalgic kitsch.
At Smack Mellon, Grokhovsky presents FANTASYLAND, a site-specific mixed media installation that explores the rise and fall of a fantastical empire and its uncertain future. Using a variety of mediums and objects, such as giant plush toys, inflatable beach balls, deconstructed and re-assembled mannequins, an unfinished carousel structure, recycled parachute canopies, wallpaper, a glowing neon sign, and performance videos, the artist underscores American society’s surplus of objects, brutally intoxicating consumerism, and unbridled desire for material possessions that form an ironic, ultimate beacon and capitalist symbol of freedom. In this work, Grokhovsky investigates the American Dream through an immigrant lens, exposing a desirable yet unattainable mirage. FANTASYLAND reveals the eternal human longing for a better life and for connection that remains hidden and festering beneath the polite façade of shopping malls, big box stores, and marketplace websites. In this post-industrial landscape, the enchanted forests and docile characters of Disney fairy tales become sinister metaphors for the “land of opportunity,” an alluring veneer for a wasteland of human-made, consumerist debris.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS
Artist Talks – Sunday, April 18, 3–4:30 PM.
Performance – Katya Grokhovsky: Becoming American. Saturday, May 1, 4 PM. More program details are coming soon.
Image: Katya Grokhovsky, Postcards from America, 2020, digital painting and collage. Courtesy of the artist.
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This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
FANTASYLAND is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
