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Posts from the ‘exhibitions and workshops’ Category

Animated Music Screening and Talk . May 30

May 12th, 2013

April Durham

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Cindy Keefer, Archivist, Curator & Director . Center for Visual Music

Preserving Visual Music : The Archives of the Center for Visual Music

THURSDAY . May 30 . 4:30 PM . INTN 1113 . Refreshments served .

Cindy Keefer, Director of the Center for Visual Music Los Angeles, will discuss and screen work by pioneers of kinetic art, abstract animation and pre-digital cinema from CVM’s archives. CVM is a Los Angeles archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and abstract media.  CVM preserves and promotes films by Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Charles Dockum, Mary Ellen Bute, Jules Engel, Harry Smith and others, as well as contemporary artists. Keefer will screen work from CVM’s archives by Fischinger and Belson, plus Dockum’s Mobilcolor Projections, Bute’s Abstronics (an early oscilloscope film), a short Bute documentary, and more. She will also discuss Belson’s now legendary 1950s Vortex Concerts, CVM’s work with the Fischinger legacy, current preservation work, and Raumlichtkunst, the new HD 3-screen reconstruction of Fischinger’s 1920s multiple-projector performances, recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Tate Modern, and scheduled for exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in summer 2013.

This is the last event CDH will host for the 2012-2013 season. Please join us for this exciting presentation.

Sound Art and the Transborder Digital Memorial: Luz María Sánchez’ “2487” at the Riverside Art Museum

September 19th, 2012

Carolyn Schutten

In conjunction with the Riverside Art Museum’s exhibition You Are Breathing in It: Alternative Art Practices (YABII), Luz María Sánchez’ 2487, a stereo installation from an 8-channel sound piece, is currently on exhibit in the RAM Alcove Hallway. The sound art installation was curated by Carolyn Schutten, a PhD student in public history from UCR, who took part in the Riverside Art Museum Student Curatorial Council (RAMSCC) pilot program.

2487 speaks the names of the two thousand four hundred eighty seven people who died crossing the U.S./Mexico border . The work employs digital technology and sound as a means for transborder memorialization and protest, imposing the absence of those lost into the public sphere. Sánchez’ immersive sound environment remaps social history as the names of the deceased fly across the border through soundscape and digital media. Drawing from data acquired from activist websites, Sánchez created a sound map of names which she recorded digitally. Her final score, along with the database, has been exhibited widely but lives permanently on the world wide web, in commemoration and quiet protest. Sánchez’ work connects the digital and geographic landscape to the listener’s body, gaining entry through sound and transcending political and physical barriers.

Curator Carolyn Schutten will speak about 2487 and the curatorial process, along with the other RAMSCC students, during a panel discussion on September 21 at 6:00 pm. To RSVP please call 951-684-7111 or e-mail Exhibit Liaison Kathryn Poindexter at: ramexhibitions@riversideartmuseum.org.

2487  will be on exhibit from August 9 – September 26, 2012 in the Riverside Art Museum Alcove Hall. YABII will close on September 22, 2012.

For more information on Sánchez sound project, visit: www.diaspora2487.org

Luz María Sánchez’ 2487 was originally commissioned by Artpace San Antonio as part of the International Artist-in-Residence program New Works: 06.2, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.

Play with Me: Interactive De-Struct[ion]ure at the Museum of Latin-American Art

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cardboard2molaa

April Durham . 17 August 2012

Long Beach is about 20 minutes southwest of the crumbly LA neighborhood where I am spending a sticky-baked summer. I am too tired to drive and Pam prefers to pilot anyway. It’s already needle hot when we leave at 10:23 am. The 110 to the 5 to the 60 to the 710. Aquarium exit to Broadway to Alamitos. The parking lot is mostly empty and (finally) a sea breeze teases us toward the door. The space is so professional, so institutionally proper, with excellent air conditioning, gleaming floors, and very quietly polite security guards. The museum avoids the obvious tropes of Latino-ism, tropical frescoes, colorful tile,  dense installation. Instead, minimal institutional space sanctions resistance, creating a strange, almost discomfiting celebration the ways in which its constituency creatively reflects on its experience of the world: a globalized, not-particularly-supportive, often-exploitative world.

Why interactivity? The term implies, these days, a high level of technological
interface, a mediating of the “natural” world by the tools of the cyber terrain. But there are only two pieces with an overtly technological structure: Deep Thought V.2, by Dream Addictive, brings to mind boardwalk fortune telling machines, where touching bolt-like “sensors” connect the traveller to a machine that renders thoughts as biofeedback, eventually spitting out a slip of paper with a Spanish interpretation of the imagination. The other involves sitting inside a little oval hut made from egg cartons and waving hands in front of sensors that emit the sounds of the Tijuana streets. Neither of these pieces functions with the slick, fault-proof necessity of the digital interface though. The sense is that they repeat where they should progress or they reset because the physical touch is too tenuous, issuing faults or making frailty and apparatic vulnerability transparent to that of the “natural” human. Fear of too much interface drives the interaction with these works more than a streamlining of the meat-to-machine we’ve grown to expect à la Sleep Dealer.

An air bladder made from pages of An Introduction to Psychoanalysis and other books by Freud that the viewer can enter, a candy-finish painting the viewer can touch, and a wall of plastic funerary flowers to which the viewer can add. Only uncertainly interactive, these works seem shy and tentative, failing to invite the masterful engagement humans are used to exercising with their digital partners (AKA computers or games). Appearing as traditional sculptures, the viewer hesitates to touch. The guards stand by looking pointedly to see if you will touch, in fact. But beautifully trained, they kindly, gently encourage, lifting edges, coax the shedding of various bits of clothing, soothingly offer instructions on precisely how to interact.

Pressing on the slick sunset finish of Rubén Ortiz-Torres’ painting, you see the shadow of your hand beside that of your friend and then it fades as if you were never there. The nature of this interactivity is not immersive, not consuming in the way a Gibsonian, jacked-in cybersurfer (or an MMORPG player) experiences/becomes. Rather, it is consuming in the way of a penetrating
glance cast by a stranger in a dark public gathering place that catches the receiver in the middle of the chest and is long remembered, even though it was perhaps the most momentary experience of one’s life. The lingering questions: who, why, what… transmitted in the print, the look, the air between ebb and flow through Memory, layered upon the fading imprint of body heat cast by whatever number of viewers dared to touch the same surface.

If interactivity, in today’s online gaming world and even for more pedestrian users like bloggers, vloggers, and social networkers, implies a certain machine-to-human-to-human interaction, with a performative component, the interactive quotient of these works is shockingly “lo-tek.” The concerns of high and low, however, are shared: what does it mean to navigate the political, aesthetic, and social (aren’t they the same in a way?) terrains of shared space/time? Is is possible to witness the “Other’s” sensations/cognitions, material-semiotic struggles, mediated in objects, subjectivities, and histories encountered in the institutional setting (be that the museum or Google Chrome)? What is the nature of that connection? How to describe it? Faulty, tenuous, vulnerable, pedantic, shrill, violent, contained, noisy, ephemeral, colored, blocked, or elegiac? What about gaps, glitches, non-functionality, errors, obviousness, inelegance, and awkwardness? Does my interface accommodate embarrassment, illiteracy, clumsiness, incompetence? While the stakes in on-line interactivity hinge on these last attributes being ameliorated through the discipline of practice, the works in this show leverage the incapacity of the viewer to prepare her laboring body for skilled engagement. Frailty and inability are prized when succumbing to the floating weight of Freud’s knowledge or the faux-foliage of funerary decor of  Alberto Baraya.

The nest built by Franklin Cassaro of pages from books by Sigmund Freud, taped together with plastic packing material, breathes a welcome to its strange interior. “I could lie in here all day,” says my companion. “Yeah,” I sigh. Highly legible but impossible to “read,” these familiar texts, so important to 20th century thought, culture, and social/psychical understanding float around like a breathing womb, a lung-abyss that allows in light, receives the air from a rotating fan just outside, but does not encourage exit. Even the kindly young guard who so attentively lifts the edge so you can enter, is nowhere to be found when you want to leave. You have to struggle against the rigidity (however frail) of the tape, and the concern for damaging the already creased and worried edges of the text, to trip out awkwardly and straighten your skirt, and wonder about who might notice your dirty knees. While deliciously inviting, the interactivity solicited by this work is precarious, and if not imprisoning, then certainly sticky and all the more maddening thanks to its beauty.

In the lobby of the museum, Federico Herrero offers the closest thing to immersive interactivity in a piece comprised of old, painted cardboard, little boxes, sticks, and styrofoam balls, all dusty and a bit decrepit. This work “translates the mix of colors, shapes, and forms of the streets of San José, Costa Rica—and the tropical landscape that surrounds the city, onto gallery walls,” or so says the museum website. The artist offers a little space, like that in a preschool, where components that might be used to make the throw-away artworks that fascinate my friend and me, comprising each of our own art practices (differently but in a shared context) can be moved around at will, bent, walked upon, hidden under, stacked. I reach out and move a stick as we pass by the jumble and a little tower of stuff tumbles over, almost landing on my foot. Interactivity can be dangerous, first lesson. I look to see if the security guard is ready to wrestle me to the ground, but he goes on checking things on a list and ignores me. “Pam,” I whisper. “I think we can play.” Pam, of course, doesn’t need another nudge and begins dealing out slabs of wasted cardboard in various shades of green in piles that appear random but which are governed by her highly honed aesthetic sense. I move some sticks and a ball into a tight grid at one corner. Then I make a little ramp and hope a ball will roll down it.

We stay here the longest, really playing, really having fun and never at all intimidated, cautioned, or constrained by the fact that we are professional artists, serious women, not-super young, creative urchins lingering between the spaces sanctioned for play and those made political by the kind of gesture exercised within-upon them. We wonder for a moment, loving cardboard, thinking about fish, wishing it could stay this way, desire unmediated in a falling-down structure that is oh so pretty all the same.

crossposted at cyberurchin

Natalie Bookchin at LACE in Hollywood: Update

February 13th, 2012

April Durham

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video still from "He's Out in Public" Natalie Bookchin, 2012

LACE presents Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, a new 18 channel video installation by artist Natalie Bookchin on view 8 March – 15 April, 2012.

Now he’s out in public and everyone can see weaves together found fragments from online video diaries in which vloggers recount a series of media scandals involving African American men. The multiple stories, originally circulated and enflamed by networks of corporate media gone viral, intersect around themes of racial and class identity and explore popular attitudes, anxieties, and conflicts about race. Bookchin’s work creates a critical context for otherwise isolated and scatter-shot online voices, drawing links, making connections, and locating tropes between individual rants and responses. Where the typical viewer of online video is a single person in front of her screen, the installation produces an active social space where multiple viewers navigate through a media environment, piecing together a fragmented and layered narrative told across space and time.

A major new work by Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see was developed over the past two and a half years and is part of a larger body of work in which Bookchin repurposes videos made and circulated online, giving new social shape and form to individual expression. This newest project is spatially and conceptually complex, weaving together many more videos, sounds, voices, narratives, and perspectives into three-dimensional space. This further evolution of form reflects and explores the mix of struggles, conflicts, and harmony in some of the critical stories we as a society are telling today about who we are, and what we aspire to be, and represents a significant step in Bookchin’s practice.

Our recent guest, artist Natalie Bookchin, will present a new work called “He’s Out in Public” at LACE  in Hollywood. Bookchin uses the massive archive of self-expressive texts on youtube, vimeo, and other social video networking sites to render dynamic orchestrations of sociability and networked expression, exploring the problematics and possibilities of baroque public intimacy. Here are the details about the show and a link to the website with more information about the project:

Opening reception: Thursday, March 8 8-10pm . Show runs March 8 to April 15 .

LACE is located at 6522 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90028 . phone 323.957.1777

More details about “He’s Out in Public”