Nick Klein

For our inaugural program, I am delighted to present five weeks of art, music and lectures culled together by Nick Klein. Bring The Flowers To The Theatre honors the collaborative spirit of Sara's, a new exhibition and project space.

Throughout these five weeks, more than twenty artists will be showcased, with works spanning noise, performance art, lectures and artist’s talks—exemplifying an overall commitment to independent artistic communities and creating exciting new directions within the walls of the space.

Participants include Sara Abruña, Chanelle Allesandre, Bela, Base Camp Beta, Jack Callahan, Domingo Castillo, Audrey Chen, 离离草Chinese Artists And Organizers (CAO) Collective, Reece Cox, Double Black Diamond, Drumloop, Dust, Max Eilbacher, Hugo Esquinca, Roxy Farman, Angelo Harmsworth, Amanda Harvey, Patricia Hernandez, James K, Devin Kenny, Misha Khokhlov, Ben Kudler, Glyn Maier, Mankind, V. Manuscrip, Alene Marie, Katy Mongeau, Shredded Nerve, Montez Press Radio, Itsï Ramirez, Andrew Ross, Julia Santoli, Theodore Cale Schafer, Jen Shear, Rudy Shepherd, Dylan Shir, Beam Splitter, and Alex Suarez.

Bring The Flowers to the Theatre is an exhibition that roots itself as a site of production and exchange, with Nick Klein negotiating roles as maker, organizer, and collaborator. Centered around a stage-as-sculpture, the gallery operates as an invitational space for performance, lectures, radio, and collaborations. Conceptually orbiting around aurality as an access point and a grounding thematic of ecstatic potential, Klein’s stage is a catalyst for a generative flow of indeterminate variables of communal making. While the stage operates as an impetus, billboards act as an index of remnants, providing a non-linear chronology of the five-week collaborative excursion.

Early in Klein’s practice, sculpture and performance were key tenets of his obsessive interest in creative cultures and the acts of making and facilitating. In Miami, and later New York City, Klein observed the barriers that formalized art modalities burdened both the maker and the viewer with. This observation led Klein to delve further into the more accessible and democratic subcultures of noise and club-oriented sound cultures in the United States and abroad. With a long history of organizing and hosting artists, domestic and international touring, and curating a music label for expansive art practices, Klein’s kinship is with makers who are constantly modulating roles and formal stances. This modulation is both a survival tactic (in current-stage capitalism a maker is not so easily granted compartmentalization of practice), as well as a soft indictment on the need to brand and define.

With Bring The Flowers to the Theatre, Klein mobilizes a host of makers with interstitial identities as makers to draw not only new dots and connections between practices and methodologies, but to draw around and past them.