Please join us in celebrating the New Year with a series of performances and screenings this January at Motel. Each weekend the gallery will be open for various events, hosted by the following artists:

Aria McManus and Raine Trainor, Monday January 25th, Performance begins at 7pm. Raine Trainor and Aria McManus will present feminine tool kit, a new set of unique tools designed to inspire young American girls to pursue careers in construction and art handling. The artists will demonstrate the functionality of the tools and use them with viewers to build a structure within the gallery.


Adam Khalil and Bayley James Sweitzer, Saturday January 16th 7-10pm and Sunday January 17th 1-6pm. Adam Khalil and Bayley James Sweitzer will premiere material from their new project EMPTY METAL, within an installation. The artists welcome the viewer into the world of the film by displaying sculptural elements and props from the making of EMPTY METAL, while simultaneously presenting fragments of the project within the gallery through multiple channels and loops. The project investigates the necessity and the fallacy of reactionary political insurrection in a culture that is permanently under surveillance and control. Corn soup will be available.


Alison Kuo, Saturday, January 9th, 6-10pm. For her performance New Jin Guang II, Alison Kuo will transform the gallery into a replica of Jin Guang House, a Chinese takeout restaurant just a few blocks away. Visitors are invited to purchase food from the real Jin Guang to bring back to the gallery for Alison to restyle in her “kitchen” and re-serve to eat. The performance explores ideas of cultural identity, self-presentation and adornment, addressed with a level of absurdity and humor ubiquitous in all of Alison’s work, perhaps most paralleled in her popular blog Accidental Chinese Hipsters.


Alison Kuo is a Texas native with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY, and a BA from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. She has exhibited her work at CANADA, Beverly's, ICI, Present Company, Cathouse FUNeral, The NARS Foundation, and Superchief in NYC, Eleven Seventeen Garland, SOFA Gallery, Co-Lab, and Domy in Austin, and the UNTITLED art fair and OHWOW in Miami. Kuo is the Art Editor at the Brooklyn literary magazine GIGANTIC, and the creator of the blog Accidental Chinese Hipsters.

Adam Shingwak Khalil is a filmmaker and artist. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Adam's work has been exhibited at UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Museo ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay), and Fine Art Film Festival Szolnok (Hungary). Khalil is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar. In 2011 he graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College.

Bayley James Sweitzer is a filmmaker and photographer from Southern Vermont, currently based in Brooklyn. His practice revolves around a dynamic, high-mobility engagement with the margins; a practice in which techno-formal precision is ALWAYS secondary to heartfelt vigor. None of his films or photographs have ever been exhibited publicly.

Aria McManus and Raine Trainor are New York based artists who have collaborated on a myriad of projects. Their shared love for product design, functionality, and sincere humor has brought them together and the bond proves deep enough to facilitate a productive partnership. Their projects include Heat Exchange, Hygenius, and Instinventions.