The Skirt

The Weakness Against the Silence 

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 8, 2-5 PM

Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents The Weakness Against The Silence an installation by Zhenya Plenchkina Sklar in collaboration with Misha Sklar vydavy sinkdikat, curated by artist and OyG co-director Zahar Vaks.

Apart, they can’t unmake the limited, concealed, idiosyncratic meaninglessness of war!

The Weakness Against the Silence is an audio visual installation in which personal thoughts and feelings, muddled, mistaken for facts, looking at the intense despair from a safe distance, horrific shadows of fake news and propaganda, trajectory changing, mind raping, derailed, human nature, who do you stand with?…

The show creates a visual landscape where number of questions, such as "what is it to be a witness? Is there a safe distance that makes you a witness and not participant?" These questions are brought to light with the background of current world affairs.

Bold and frontal approach of presenting the work, makes "weakness " to be the most effective antidote to cruelty of silence.

Artists Bios

Zhenya Plenchkina Sklar was born in Odessa Ukraine. Zhenya is a performance and installation artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Zhenya received her BFA from Pratt Institute, and her MPS from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU New York. Zhenya's work has been exhibited at the A.I.R. Gallery and Bushwick Open Studios. As vydavy (in collaboration with Misha Sklar) Zhenya's work has been exhibited at the Moscow Biennial and Architectural Venice Biennial as well as has been awarded a Public Art Commission through The Queens Museum of Art.

Misha Sklar was born in Kiev, Ukraine. He is a multi-disciplinary artist and architect He is one of the fouding members of vydavy sindikat -m performace art group that started in 1994 in New York. He is also a member of  sound art / noise collective Madeline At Neighbors

Curator Bio

Zahar Vaks born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan is a visual artist and curator. His practice navigates the various levels of fluency in painting, performance, violin playing, rhyming, and video. He lives in New York City. He has had exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Columbus, Las Vegas, Houston, Vienna, on the island of Svalbard in Norway, and, most recently, in Beijing , China. Zahar participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency; the Galveston Artist Residency; and in the Artists in Residence (AIR) program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. He holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art, and his MFA from The Ohio State University.

Vaks joined Ortega y Gasset Projects in the fall of 2014. He has curated numerous shows for OyG and beyond, including “3 Going Through 9 To Get to 27” currently up at The Galveston Artist Residency and includes work by OyG Co-Directors Leeza Meksin and Nickola Pottinger. Last year Vaks Curated Mark Joshua Epstein’s “ A Change in Mood and Weather” a site specific installation in OyG’s project space The Skirt.  In 2020 he curated “In/Flux: on influence, inspiration, transmission and inspiration”.

In 2018 Vaks curated  “The Mahavvidyas and Fields of Ice” a solo show for Jesse Bransford. and “Strange Business” a solo show for Rose Nestler, co curated with Catherine Haggerty. 2017 “I Pine” a retrospective of Rick Briggs, co curated with Leeza Meksin, Will Hutnick, Eleanna Anagnos, Catherine Haggerty, and Eric Hibit.. 2016 “On Knowing Unknowing: A Material Narrative” and in 2015, his first curatorial endeavor “Thinking & Touching Time”  at Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY,11215