Andrea Emmerich, GO, 2024. All images by Elisabeth Bernstein for Marvin Gardens. 

Curation as Experimentation

Choose your Fighter! ii and a conversation with curator Tif XB 

By NAAVA GUARACA

08.01.2024 

--

Choose Your Fighter! ii, curated by Tif XB
Marvin Gardens (15-40 Decatur Street, Ridgewood, NY 11385)
July 20-August 18, 2024

Participating Artists:
Susan Kim Alvarez, Zoë Argires, Will Bruno, Lee Dawson, Anaïs Isabel De Los Santos, Andrea Emmerich, Ellon Gibbs, Ada Goldfeld, June Gutman, Stephanie Temma Hier, Sally Jerome, Michael Gac Levin, Inés Maestre, Jacquie Meng, Peter Mix, Chris Retsina, Rob Polidoro, Jenna Ransom, Sarah Roche, Amy Tidwell

--

Curator Tif XB is the director at Marvin Gardens, an artist-run gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. Originally founded in 2016 by Anthony Miler, Marvin Gardens comprises two main gallery spaces that one enters through nondescript garage doors on a classic Ridgewood sidewalk—the building’s exterior is covered in graffiti, and the street is lined with artist studio warehouses. Tif moved to New York City to attend college at Pratt, where she majored in Illustration; as we spoke, she told me about feeling out of place in a program so rigorously focused on commercial production and turning to curation as a way of expanding on her artistic interests.

This past January, Tif co-curated a large group show called Friend of a Friend featuring just that—friends, of friends of friends. “It was like three times,” she said about the layers of removal she at first had with her co-curator, Lili Marto. This brief-introduction-turned-collaboration inspired the show, bringing together 82 pieces by 54 artists, with participant ages ranging from 24-70 and artworks lining the walls and columns of a large event space in Gowanus. The driving force behind FoaF was to bring together artists who might not otherwise meet and create a space to present work collaboratively instead of under the guise of specific programming.

The Choose Your Fighter! series has a similar ethos. Inspired by the video game stage where a player is asked to select an avatar before continuing onto the next screen, Choose Your Fighter! ii joins 20 emerging artists from across the globe and is visually rich at every turn. Each piece feels like a different aspect of a larger composite, but they speak to one another about imagination, self-exploration, water, shapes, animals, and situations.

As I enter Marvin Gardens, the show comes alive: a Chris Retsina painting hangs to my right, an Andrea Emmerich mixed-media piece lies directly ahead; an Amy Tidwell painting of an angelic figure with a protruding glob of oil sits to my left, and as I round the corner, I’m confronted with a piece by Stephanie Temma Hier that combines a stoneware chess set with a finely rendered painting of a champagne bottle. These pieces—just a handful from the stimulating collection presented in the show—each captivate my attention. This is one of Tif’s goals: she wants me to look closely, examine the artist’s marks, and begin to unravel my curiosity.


Chris Retsina, Everything Spiraled After Enzo Left, 2024
June Gutman, Brain Scan, 2024
Sally Jerome, Hothead, 2024

Some of my favorite pieces in the show are by self-taught artist Sarah Roche and depict extreme weather in contrast with intensely human spaces. I’m obsessed with detailed paintings like these that begin to tell a story but then withhold information—the use of a tiny brush always leaves me feeling like I’m going to be satisfied, but Roche raises more questions than she answers. In the second gallery space lie intensely realistic paintings by Ada Goldfield alongside painted caricatures by Jacquie Meng. Just when I think the show is absent of any three-dimensional work, three sculptures by Anaïs de los Santos greet me from below my sightline—ceramic lizards sit on the floor and flank an amorphous ceramic form riding a bike. I’m inventing narratives in my head that join together all the figures and objects I’ve seen. The show is like a dream that continually shapeshifts until I can’t remember where it started. But this isn’t to its detriment—rather, I’m captivated by each artist’s individual world.


Sarah Roche, Lone Tree, 2024
Inés Maestre, Hope She Was, 2023
Anaïs de los Santos, Girl Bike 3, 2024

Tif and I met at a nearby cafe for smoothies before the gallery’s Sunday open hours, and I learned more about what inspires her curatorial eye and how Marvin Garden operates. Later, as we walked through the show together, Tif shared specifics about each artist and piece—little tidbits of information and stories living in her brain. She has a closeness to her work that’s reflected in the way she speaks about this show. You can read an excerpt of our conversation below, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

TIF: I knew about Marvin Gardens because someone that I took an elective with [in college] makes really cool work—Dan Mandelbaum, he's a super prolific artist. His main practice is sculpture, but he also does drawings and animation, and he's a musician. When you graduate with a bunch of other artists, it takes a lot of time to grow and get opportunities, but he got found at his thesis show and then was showing with Marvin right when he graduated.

NG: Oh, so cool.

TIF: And when a friend has a show, you gotta go check it out—he wasn't really a friend then, he was just a classmate who I thought had really good work. So I'd been going to his shows, and Marvin had really cool, interesting programming compared to in the city, and I think because the vibe was always really casual, it's less intimidating.

NG: That's what I love about so many of the spaces around here—it's so much less of a deal when you go in and just kind of talk to people. It feels easier and more collaborative and like people are willing to listen to you even if you're just inquiring or just trying to say hi and meet people.

TIF: Galleries in the city are designed to be intimidating in a way, to gatekeep.

NG: Trying to keep a certain kind of person out and welcome a certain kind of person, I just think it's so wrong.

TIF: Yeah totally, ’cause art should be for everyone.

NG: What do you feel like your vision is for Marvin Gardens currently, as you design shows and invite curators in?

TIF: One of the things that I always think about is having a range of styles and mediums. Marvin is still in collaboration with Anthony [Miler]—a lot of the things I program are still in his vision. I show him things and he'll either like it or not. But I think a constant change or growth in terms of not always showing the same types of things. There are some places that specialize, and you know exactly what you'll get, but I like trying different things.

NG: That's what I loved about this show—there are a lot of thematic similarities between pieces, but there's also so much difference. Each piece in the gallery is engaging on its own and sort of feels like it has its own world. What was it like curating a show that was a sequel to the first [Choose Your Fighter!] show that you did?

TIF: This is the first time I've done a second iteration of something. For [Choose Your Fighter!]—the first one I did in September 2022—these two shows were both fully in my vision. I think as I get older, I'll be more dialed in naturally, but I always have a tendency to keep including different things. I don't know if this is just because I'm a Pisces—like, in arguments, I will end up fucking myself over or gaslighting myself. I try to think of all the perspectives of why something happened. 

NG: Try to take it all into account.

TIF: And I think another thing that I care a lot about is creating a situation where people have to spend time to get the full satisfaction of something. I really like abstract art. I like the engagement of maybe not fully understanding something at first and then you go back to it and discover things.

NG: Universality in specificity—things can be huge and small at the same time.

TIF: Get a fluctuation, exactly.

NG: What other things are you looking at and inspired by and thinking about these days?

TIF: Installation, like show-specific installations or things that are really site-specific. Most of the things I've done so far are more like quick exercises to me. I don't know, I think I'll always be doing a bunch of different things.

NG: Totally.

TIF: Inspiration-wise, I also want to include more media like performance and music because that would give opportunities for different groups of people to meet. I am from Hong Kong, but I left home when I was eight to go to Canada to study, and then I went to boarding school. I’ve been thinking about the situations that made me feel included, and trying to create that environment.

NG: Like room for inclusion.

TIF: And encouraging openness to things that you might not understand at first. A lot of young collectors or collectors who aren't in the arts don't understand abstraction because they're like—what's the story?

NG: People want a narrative that they can lay claim to.

TIF: One of my favorite artists, Janine Iversen, she always says, “Oh, these are paintings about painting.” It's about the process, it's about the strokes, it's about how you're building this image, it's just about the practice. I love that. Sometimes people don't understand that that's enough.

NG: Right, they want there to still be a resolution, something that they can lay claim to.

TIF: You could still apply your own feelings to relate to it. Sometimes it's more of an escape for [viewers], so they want to be in someone else's world.

NG: I feel like most art that accomplishes what it's meant to accomplish asks for the viewer to be present within the work as well.

TIF: How you interpret something, too. It's totally subjective.

---

Choose Your Fighter! ii is open at Marvin Gardens until August 18, 2024. The gallery has walk-in hours every Sunday from 1-5pm, or by appointment during the week. You can email tiffany@marvin-gardens.org for more info.