Estafetas Temporary Studio presenta:
Artist Talk Sessions I
Jason Mena (Puerto Rico, 1974)
Hannes Zebedin (Austria, 1976)
VIERNES 16 DE DICIEMBRE
17:00 - 20:00 hrs.
Artist Talk Sessions es una serie de presentaciones intercaladas entre artistas residentes en la ciudad de méxico y artistas en tránsito provenientes de otras latitudes. Las sesiones tendrán lugar en Estafetas Temporary Studio entre diciembre de 2011 y abril de 2012.
Sede:
Estafetas 8-15, Col Postal, Benito Juárez, entre Metro Xola y Villa de Cortés (mapa anexo)
55294760 / 04455 25220107 (Isaac Torres)
The Dialectic City [Document | Context]
Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates
Date: November 17, 2011 – December 15, 2011
Place: Laboratorio de Artes Binarios, Parada 18, Santurce, Puerto Rico
“The urban phenomenon and urban space are not only a projection of social relationships but also a terrain on which various strategies clash”
Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution
“To capture a city in an image really means following its movement”
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant
The city is comprised of colliding elements; conflicting mechanisms that through movement create situations and actions. In constant flux and development, these dialectical relationships1 or strategies can be interpreted and reconsidered in spatial or temporal terms. Any given building in a city, measured through its façade and structural components, undergoes constant shifts in perspective defined by social, political or economic changes in the urban fabric. Insofar as social relations are concerned, we can sense a city’s identity, culture and problematics through its streets, collected debris, people, and things. The city is not a place of permanent encounters or exchanges, but a site of temporal conversations, actions and situations. It is always changing, constantly moving. To deny movement in the city would be to deny its very substance and subsistence; movement itself being nearly impossible to imagine without space and time.
Taking as a point of departure this idea of movement and spatial/temporal transformation, “The Dialectic City [Document | Context]” gathers a group of works from 11 artists who seize the city as site and catalyst for artistic manifestations. Directly referencing the conceptual artistic strategy of documentation2, the works on display are documents implying very specific contexts, suggesting either explicitly or implicitly an action or situation that occurred in the city. They are context specific as well as time specific (Bourriaud), remnants and documents of the city, real or fabricated, continuously connoting motion, sign, and activity.
Artists: Francis Alÿs, Alexander Apóstol, Ivan Argote, Adriana Bustos, José Luis Cortés, David Lamelas, Jason Mena, Juan Alberto Negroni, Victor Sosa, Omar Velázquez, Norma Vila Rivero
Sponsors: Contempo Art Foundation Corp., Yellowmedia Group, Trápaga-Fonalledas Collection, GoPrint Puerto Rico, American Paper, Osviarte, Dsnotipo, AREA, Museo de Arte de Ponce
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1 When speaking of the dialectic, I am referring to Heraclitus’ idea of dialectical movement, reintroduced and reworked years later by Hegel. Although Heraclitus never wrote directly about the dialectic, he is known for stating that “all is in a state of flux” referring to dynamic principles of contrasting and conflicting opposites.
2 Conceptual art includes practices where the final work can only be evidenced through notes, photographs or maps.
TPP Presents: Jason Mena - “On the Move” solo moving exhibition opening October 15th
In On the Move emerging artist Jason Mena shows us over 60 different photographs taken during the past years while being ‘on the move’ from country to country exhibiting his work. The photographs are experimental process-based pieces taken by the artist during his international travels while wandering the city by foot; capturing the objects, actions and situations that provoked his curiosity. It is the artistic process that most artists never get to show and most people never have the chance to see; images that provide us with a privileged and highly personal insight into the creative mind of the artist.
Since these photographs do not have a specific methodology and were not developed as part of a series, it is very difficult to exhibit them in a conventional setting. For this reason, these works were selected to be shown at Trailer Park Proyects. TPP is also on the move, making it the ideal environment for this type of work.
Carry-On: Puerto Rico Inspected
September 23, 2011
Collective Exhibition
Contemporary Art from Puerto Rico
Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Tell us a story
September 17, 2011
Location: C/ Ernesto Cerra 626, 00902-0197
Hours: Mon - Fri:10:00 am-6:00 pm
Email: cart.watch@yahoo.com
Phone: 787-647-7461 / 787-239-3040
SF Tropical Pt 2
August 13 - September 3, 2011 Opening Reception, Saturday August 13, 8-11pm//Free and open to the public
As fog hovers over the bay, we lament the loss of summer. Naturally, we physiologically expect warm sunny days, and why not? A tropical San Francisco summer might be nice. By default the tropics are a construction, both by geography and by culture, equally defined by authentic characteristics as well by fantasy, commerce and desire. The tropical, as adjective, sets itself to the constant challenge of balancing its multiple realities and the expectations placed upon its self. Like many other contradictions it faces the very fact that in every cliché there is always some truth close to the stereotype.
The exhibition SF Tropical attempts to explore these realities and work as a hub while playing off stereotypes that will produce two group exhibitions and a series of one-off events during the summer in San Francisco at Queens Nails Projects.
SF Tropical Pt 2: Facundo Argañaraz, Sofía Cordoba, George Kuchar, Eamon Ore-Giron (DJ Lengua), Tim Sullivan and Chris Corrente, Jason Mena, Haden Nicholl and Jenifer K Wofford
Special Music Performance: Juan Luna-Avin and Josh Pieper on Opening Reception, Sat Aug 13 ChuCha Santamaría y Usted on Closing Reception, Sat Sep 3
About the Work: Facundo Argañaraz focuses on works on paper and paintings including, Zodiac and Grid Room that utilize anachronistic elements and discarded images not for their nostalgic value but as remains of 20th century utopias on the act of making. Mostly comprised of found photographs, photocopies, and pages from vintage books depicting modern designs and/or environments, Argañaraz’s imagery as a mark-making tool, already packed and charged with pictorial formal elements. The core forms serve only to organize visual fields into dynamic, constructed compositions that hold a structural relation to the surface they organize. Sofía Córdova most recent project Baby, Remember My Name, Córdova has created a series of music videos to accompany a concept album made under the pseudonym ChuCha Santamaría y Usted. These works draw from the conventions and pictorial language of mainstream music videos, while creating a narrative surrounding specific issues of the Caribbean diaspora and identity politics. ChuCha Santamaría y Usted have created a site-specific installation based on the recording of their new vinyl record.
Eamon Ore-Giron (DJ Lengua) presents an listening station that focuses on his amazing new vinyl record release, Cruzando that combines infectious mix of cumbia, electronic and break beats that explodes boundaries between culture and music. George Kuchar premiers his new Weather Diaries video, in which Kuchar observes weather and food from dreary motel rooms in Oklahoma, revealing alienation and loneliness in the rural American landscape that also resonates with unexpected poetry.
What is Art? LIVE! Is San Francisco’s premiere art-themed television program hosted by Tim Sullivan and Chris Corrente featuring a regular gang of random misfits. For SF Tropical, The What is Art? LIVE! Gang invites you to join them on their summer vacation island tour! This episode will feature live guests, as well as, foreign correspondents covering the global art scene including: Jenalee Harmon covering culture night in Reykjavík, Iceland, Laura Kim interviewing resident artists at the National museum of contemporary art in Seoul. Jason Mena’s Looking Up (2008) took place over the Bacardi Artisan Fair during the peak hour of the event when a plane displaying a banner with the message Todo es mentira (It’s all lies) flew over the Bacardi Rum distillery located in Cataño, Puerto Rico. The flight lasted approximately 30 minutes over a crowd surpassing 17,000 people. The outcome of the project is a series of postcards that will also function as a limited edition take away during the run of the exhibition. Haden Nicholl is presenting a series of drawings and paintings that juxtaposes elements of beauty and danger in nature. The tropical sunset is chosen for it’s resplendent color and sublime magnificence, while the element of peril is present in the form of a variety of insect vectors that are the causes of an array of painful and deadly tropical diseases. Jenifer Wofford is showcasing a set of beautiful drawings and paintings based on the tropical fruit, Durian famous for “smells like shit, but tastes like heaven” bad reputation. The green fruit-like geometric forms of stylized durians (Southeast Asian fruits known for their spiky exterior, fleshy interior, and perversely pungent aroma). Function as a sort of vas hermeticum: a sealed form suggesting an overseas contract worker’s tropical roots, his/her conspicuity in an institutionalized, homogenized environment, a vessel for containment and transference, and a sort of ominous self-protection.
About the Artists: Facundo Argañaraz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied illustration and painting from a very young age and later earned a degree in Law and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. After traveling worldwide for more than two and a half years without a pause, he moved to California to pursue a career as a painter and visual artist. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including recent exhibitions at Queen’s Nails Projects, San Francisco; Untitled Pop Up Gallery, Buenos Aires; David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco; The LAB, San Francisco; MCCLA, San Francisco.
Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, Sofía Córdova received her BFA from St. John’s University in Queens, NY in 2006, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also completed the one-year certificate program at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2006. Currently, Córdova teaches at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in California and New York.
George Kuchar is one of the legends of independent filmmaking. Beginning as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, Kuchar directed movies which upended Hollywood melodramas into small-scale epics, noted for their creative low-budget effects, over-the-top plots, eye-popping performances by their cast of friends, and titles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, Color Me Shameless and Lust for Ecstasy. Kuchar’s classic film Hold Me While I’m Naked is beloved by several generations of fans and filmmakers, and was voted one of the 100 best films of the 20th century by the critics of the Village Voice. In the mid-1980s, Kuchar turned to video making, and created what is possibly the largest single collection (160) of video diaries. This ongoing chronicle of the artist’s life is called “unique in film history” by the scholar Gene Youngblood. In Kuchar’s video universe, nothing is safe from the camera expanding his oeuvre to exploiting his morbid interests and notorious insecurities with his token razor-sharp sense of humor in classics like The Mongreloid and The Weather Diaries.
Eamon Ore-Giron is an artist and musician residing in Los Angeles. His artwork uses a range of media including paintings, video, sculpture, and printed media to make conceptual projects that address possible ways that sub-cultural phenomenon and music morphs and adapts as it moves between languages, cultures, and political systems. Ore-Giron is also one of the original colleagues of the so-called Mission School in San Francisco during the mid-1990’s and is also the founding member of the experimental audio-performance group OJO. His music under the moniker DJ Lengua has gained global praise and success fusing Cumbia with electronic and abstract beats with two vinyl LP’s released on Unicornio Records.His artwork, music and performances have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Deitch Projects, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Museo Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Peres Projects, Los Angeles, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco.
Jason Mena was born in New York City and raised in Puerto Rico. His work entails a multi-faceted approach to contemporaneity that, drawn from conceptualism and minimalism, reveals the complexities and contradictions of art and society, leading to a profound criticism of the constant simulation of culture, the speed of urbanization and the untimely decay of our social and political climate. He has a B.A. from Escuela de Artes Plasticas de San Juan (Puerto Rico). He had shown his work in Puerto Rico, Spain, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Mexico, among other places.
Haden Nicholl is a Colorado born, San Francisco based artist. He has a B.A. in psychology with an anthropology minor, as well as a B.F.A. from the University of Denver. He also earned an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work conceptually deals with psycho/social interactions, coping mechanisms and the relationship between sociology and nature. His art practice draws a great deal of inspiration from firsthand experience working as a counselor in a psychiatric facility for adolescents at San Francisco General Hospital.
What is Art? LIVE! Tim Sullivan is a multimedia artist working in video, photography, performance and installation. Sullivan has spent the last five years completing a series of works exploring the myths and stereotypes of California as informed by television, film, music and literature. He has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Singapore, Ireland and Poland as well as being featured in numerous group exhibitions including the 2006 California Biennial. Chris Corrente is an interdisciplinary artist working across the mediums of video, performance, staged photography, and music. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute new genre’s program, his work runs the gamut of human emotions and experiences, ranging from aggressively dark and psychologically challenging, to absurdist and piss-laugh funny.
Jenifer K Wofford is a Filipina-American artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her MFA from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited in the Bay Area at the Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, Richmond Art Center, and Kearny Street Workshop, nationally at New Image Art (Los Angeles), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum (Salt Lake City), thirtynine hotel (Honolulu), and internationally at Future Prospects (Philippines), Galerie Blanche (France), and Osage Gallery Kwun Tong (Hong Kong).
Queens Nails Projects is a curatorial collective platform that is dedicated to presenting audio, video, and performance-based projects. QNP aims to challenge both emerging and established cultural producers to work outside their ‘normal’ practice in order to produce new and unique projects. Located in the Mission district of San Francisco, QNP is co-directed and curated by, Julio Cesar Morales, Pablo Guardiola, Zoe Taleporos and Kim Silva. Queens Nails Projects3191 Mission St.San Francisco, CA 94110
Gallery Hours Friday and Saturday 1-6pm or by appointment
Hotel Charleroi Artist Residency at B.P.S. 22
From July 4 to July 24, 2011
Hotel Charleroi is a flexible structure initiated by three European artists who would like to live and work in Charleroi. Located 60 km south from Brussels, Charleroi is a decaying industrial town with all associated symptoms - high unemployment rate, raising criminality, corruption affairs, etc. Its surrealistic urban landscape, reminiscences from an intense industrial past (slag heaps, steel factories) along with numerous irrational public infrastructures planned in the sixties (metro, ring road on viaduct), doesn’t fit at all with its relatively small scale (pop. 400 000).
In fact, Charleroi offers a very condensed overview of how Modernity developed in Europe and which social and economical problems resulted from it. The city nearly didn’t change since 30 years, and this makes it a very interesting investigation field for us, as it leaves everything open for a new generation of artists to position itself on its modern -and postmodern- heritage.
We share our interest in the city by organising sleeping facilities in Charleroi and inviting contemporary artists from all over Europe for short or long term residencies. We propose the residents to use the city as a studio or laboratory for interventions of all kinds. We can organise a place to stay and to work, but are not able to provide any financial support as we finance everything ourselves. However, we count on the enthusiasm of local institutions and establishments to create networks and opportunities in Charleroi. We understand our non-institutional status as an advantage to create a dynamic platform, able to adapt itself to every occasion it encounters.
Campo AA, Madrid Abierto, 2009 - 2010
Un espacio de producción, presentación y acción (publicación)
ADAPTIVE ACTIONS - MADRID
El laboratorio de Adaptive Action (AA), iniciado en Londres en 2007 Por Jean-François Prost y SPACE studios y residencia Canadiense Internacional en Hackney, East London, presta voz a causas marginales, estilos urbanos de vida alternativos, contra-conductuales y a la creación artística de la ciudadanía por la cual la imaginación y la creatividad personal influyen en la vida diaria. AA realiza un inventario y revela estas singularidades y acciones ya existentes, y tiene como objetivo animar a otras personas a que participen en nuevas actividades creativas para adaptar la estructura urbana.
