10 Curated Rooms You Can't Miss at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show

The SPRING/BREAK Art Show is a different breed of art fair than the rest of the lineup opening during Armory Week. Instead of building the show around galleries, SPRING/BREAK picks one theme and then lets curators work their magic on different rooms of the Old School, a former schoolhouse in New York.

This year's theme is PUBLICPRIVATE, and 40 curators have gathered the work of more than 100 contemporary artists to explore "how the high visibility of the self in the 21st century everyday—via social network, selfie ubiquity, jealous vacation landscape, video-game avatar, and surveillance M.O.—activates and disinhibits the artistic practice, and that contrary or complimentary production of self which is the artist process," reads the press release. Needless to say, SPRING/BREAK doesn't have the blockbuster feel of the Armory Show, and that's a good thing. From blood painting projected on walls to a drive-in movie experience, this fair invigorates Armory Week with innovation and artistic risk. Here are 10 Curated Rooms You Can't Miss at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show.

The SPRING/BREAK Art Show is open to the public from March 6 to March 9, 2014. The fair's online auction is taking place on Paddle 8.

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Curators: Tracy Causey-Jeffery and Amy Kisch
Room: 6

At first, Jordan Eagles' projections on the first floor of the Old School look like rust-colored lace patterns, but his delicate designs are a lot more sinister; they're made from animal blood. Forming shapes in the sanguine substance, Eagles then uses dated schoolroom projectors to transpose the bloody swirls, drops, and spills. The result is both beautiful and grotesque.

Curator: Benjamin Sutton
Room: 7

The room Benjamin Sutton has compiled is a sensory overload in the best way possible. The floor is dominated by a Sigrid Sarda sculpture of a decaying woman in lingerie using real bones and hair. Enlarged and comical depictions of food, both paintings and sculptures, box you in the space in a way that makes you feel uncomfortably full, but that's the point. And if that wasn't enough, knitted cats from Caroline Wells Chandler dance around the ceiling.

Curators: Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly
Room: 8

Azikiwe Mohammed's hip-hop tapestries call for the freedom of incarcerated rappers. Rooted in the Internet, from Twitter's obsession with rappers to viral images to the creation of the works themselves (which are ordered from online stores), Mohammed composes iconography for imprisoned celebrities. His works speak to the divide between the flesh-and-blood people and their cult of fame.

Curator: Maureen Sullivan
Room: 12

Fall on Your Sword is like stepping into an uncanny time warp. In the middle of the room sits a painted car, which you can enter. The car is facing a screen, like at a drive-in movie theater, and on the screen are iconic movie scenes that take place during drive-in movies. The mirroring here is enough to make you question time and space. On an additional sensory level, you can honk the horn to change the music and vibrate the car while you watch Danny Zuko try to make out with Sandy Olsson.

Curator: Collin Munn
Room: 15

Relying on sound art, visuals, and text, Rin Johnson and Michael Valinsky's works focus on communication. Johnson has created a slideshow of images on an old school projector, some commonplace street scenes and others more abstract. She's also decorated iPhone cases with different texts, moving from an outdated technology to a current one for passing along images. Along with Johnson's images, Valinsky's voice is recorded reading poems to accompany the visual art.

Curator: Yulia Topchiy
Room: 21

Escape to a strange Neverland in Bruno Pogacnik Wukodrakula's silver and floral room. This immersive installation is filled with video works, glitch art, and a creepy sculpture of a skeletal figure. It's a lot to take in, but the result is pure magic.

Curator: Amani Olu
Room: 22

Scott Avery's performance piece is only for the brave of heart. Participants are hooked up to an antique lie detector and filmed answering questions that would make anyone squirm like, "Have you ever slept with someone to get ahead in your career?" and, "Do you think Spike Lee is racist?" in front of a crowd of strangers. For $100, you can purchase your test results, but the true work is in the act of truth-telling itself.

Curator: Larry Ossei-Mensah
Room: 27

Ramon Silva has brought Beyonce to Armory Week. His work consists of images of Queen Bey and videos of the music star dancing with wild graphics and her signature songs. The work is playful, high energy, and celebrates our obsession with Beyonce and her latest "visual album" with artistic beauty.

Curator: Natasha Becker
Room: 33

Curator Natasha Becker has put together a collection of works by contemporary African artists, including video, photography, and drawings. From Dineo Seshee Bopape's glitchy video of faces in front of a Photobooth-like background called is I am sky to photographs of black lesbians to drawings by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, this room shows a diverse range of work from African artists.

Curators: Tracy Causey-Jeffery and Amy Kisch
Room: 38

One of the biggest and most diverse rooms in SPRING/BREAK is the group show curated by Tracy Cause-Jeffery and Amy Kisch. The most striking work is an installation that deals with the Woody Allen sexual abuse scandal called Allegation (Third Rail) by Michael Tharp. The powerful work consists of clips from Woody Allen's films projected across a room above a toy train in the, referencing Dylan Farrow's "Open Letter" to the New York Times. Besides this darkly moving piece, the room is filled with paintings, photographs, and tapestries made from the lids of paint cans by Steven Dobbin.