Courtesy Art Production Fund

"BlueBalls," conceived by the New York–based painter Jackie Saccoccio, is the inaugural project at the Art Production Fund's experimental art lab in SoHo.

Marco Brambilla

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

According to Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen, who launched the nonprofit fund in 2000, the concept for the APF lab, housed in an attention-grabbing, glass-walled space at 15 Wooster Street, was born after they helped organize art installations in the Park Avenue Armory as part of this year’s Whitney Biennial. “Each of those projects were in rooms,” Villareal said. “We took that feeling. Artists come to us all the time with projects, so we wanted to create a space that we could turn over to them.”

“Some projects can last for a day, others for a month or longer,” said Villareal. “It’s all about the artists’ visions.”

The thrifty endeavor is keeping costs low by relying on e-mail messages and its Web site, artproductionfund.org to announce upcoming exhibitions, as well as distributing only a phone number – rather than a catalog – with an automated description of the works by the artists involved. The space itself has been donated to the fund for five years by the Laboz family, owners of United American Land, the developers behind the SoHo Mews, two nearby condominium buildings.

The inaugural project, BlueBalls, conceived of by the New York–based painter Jackie Saccoccio, is already under way. Using "desire" and "denial" as inspiration, 15 artists will paint on the walls of the lab over the span of several weeks. Two or three artists will arrive each week to self-install and work on top of or around what is already there to give the project “an archaeological feel.” Viewers can watch the developments from the street, and the space will open for an official viewing on December 6 and 7. BlueBalls will be followed in January by Cathedral, a multi-layered, kaleidoscopic video by Italian-born, Canada-based artist Marco Brambilla showing Christmas window shoppers in a Toronto mall.