Sylvain Souklaye
Golden calf factory, 2020
sound installation / participatory performance

Golden calf factory is a collective performance about the real-life paradox of thinking and believing in politics. This piece requires headphones. The artists asks the audience to blindfold themselves and turn around in circles (outside of the gallery) while listening to the audio performative object.

Golden calf factory is a conversation between an audio documentary about the celebration of the Biden/Harris 2020 victory in Brooklyn and a sound art piece questioning absent, distant and outcast voices from the rest of the world. Sylvain Souklaye explores the sociology of orgy in the aftermath of the American democratic soap opera. Golden calf factory is an inside representation of an environment (people, culture, economy) defining itself as more important, greater, better and first in the world. While Vienna, Kabul and Addis Ababa were and are still experiencing turmoils, the noise of the American democratic soap opera can't imagine its final season not being at the epicentre of the planet. Golden calf factory is also an echo of… Read more

VIDEO LOOP
Runtime: Approx. 12:30

Ruoyi Shi
Han/琀, 2021

In Chinese traditions, people put jade in the mouth of the dead for blessings in the afterlife. Han represents the wealth people carried; it also functions as a replacement of the human tongue. I use the artifacts collected in the Hubei Province Museum as a reference to make my version of "Han." I attempted to put all of them in my mouth, in order to gather as much fortune as possible for myself. However, the other intention for Han is to keep the dead silent, as their mouths are stuffed with livestock and money, so no words nor secrets shall be told.

JazzyJake Fetterman
Magnificent Corpse, 2020

Magnificent Corpse is a play on the game exquisite corpse focusing on the intricacies of identity development, fragmentation, body dysphoria, and self acceptance. Using the framework of what I have called Queer Architecture, I want to confront notions surrounding the politics of the body, my relationship to both the masculine and the feminine, and how that fits/does not fit within societal binary structures. This work focuses on the growth of identity as something that is fluid and can only exist freely within a spectrum rather than within harsh categorical separation, asking for the reconsideration of how western society structures its understanding surrounding gender, sexuality and identity.

Liz Rodden
Jacuzzi, 2020

Jacuzzi is a found video that originally served as an advertisement for a hot tub. The video is at once mundane and absurd, as well as it is about the body and without the body. In this way it operates in a space that intervenes between things.

Sara Lynne Lindsay
Full Food Storage Disclosure, 2020
Poem for Mothers, 2020
Sara Lynne Lindsay Promo, 2020
Through the Mess Softly, 2020
performance videos from Lindsay’s “Gendering Chris Burden” series, aired as YouTube commercials

In response to the chaos of early 2020, I made a series of video performances inspired from Chris Burden's TV Ads, and I bought YouTube commercial space as a stage for this work. Chris Burden is described by Britannica as a "shockingly masochistic" artist. I thought it was important to recreate these videos from an extreme feminine perspective, focusing on a nurturer's viewpoint. This project brings up issues regarding motherhood: our unrealistic expectations and our innate tendency to compare ourselves to others.

I did not know when I made the videos, that we would soon be in a major pandemic that would shut our country down. This added an unexpected depth that enriched the works. When museums and galleries were shut down, I found a space, YouTube commercials, were I could bring the artwork to the masses. In all, the commercials were aired 75,300 times in Utah and Salt Lake Counties, creating perhaps the biggest audience for performance art in Utah that year.

Jean-Michel Rolland
Sabotage, 2021

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience." –Howard Zinn

The character presented in this video is not wearing a uniform, yet behaves like a soldier. With his fellows, he ends up building an army where everyone seems to obey different orders, a disorganized army which pretends to obey but which in reality does as it pleases.

When disobedience seems out of reach, "misobedience" may be the solution.

Nicholas F. Callaway
Cantarranas sumergido, 2018

In Madrid's University City, near the presidential palace, upon the fields of the Cantarranas sports complex, men and women engage in a playful, symbolic form of combat: rugby. The nearby palace is surrounded by elements of fortification: towers, cameras, fences. Like in a palimpsest – a manuscript with several layers of effaced text – this flat surface is superimposed upon a rough, hidden topography: the lost valley of Cantarranas. Under thousands of cubic feet of earth dumped there around 1967, lie a small valley, a creek, trees and viaducts. Dozens of feet below the rugby players and palace guards of the present, other combats took place, and other fortifications were watched over. What is the shape of all that earth, separating one combat from the other, one fortress from the other, engulfing bridges and streams?

In Cantarranas sumergido, the top layer corresponds to the current terrain and the bottom layer to the terrain in 1939. The underwater appearance of the terrain alludes the involvement in the Franco Regime’s hydroelectric dams by Eduardo Torroja, the same engineer who designed these buried bridges. At almost the same time that the village of Blancafort was engulfed in water behind Torroja’s Canelles dam, his two bridges in Madrid were being covered in earth to create University City.

Markéta Kinterová
What You See Is What You Think, 2020
artist book

Kinterová’s is a Czech artist based in Prague whose work combines photographic, artistic, and research-based approaches. The content of the artist book in this exhibition discusses the dystopia of post-capitalism by means of experiments with the book, the billboard format, and the selection of images. The book is made of blue backside paper usually used for outdoor posters and billboards. Theoretical text reflects today’s experience with public space. How do we see the cityscape and its periphery? What does our urban public space tell us? The present artist book responds to visual strategies deployed in public space with the intention to consolidate and entrench a repressive system of control, turning citizens into consumers. 

DESKTOP WORKS
Please use touch screen.

Tess Elliot
GIF(ts), 2021
code-based animation

Garrett Lynch IRL
A Haunting of Haunts, 2020-2021
https://github.com/Garrettlynch/a-haunting-of-haunts

Leah Sandler
Center for Post-Capitalist History virtual portal, 2020
interactive hypertext game

Jean Hsi
Eye Can’t See (But I Shoegaze), 2020
zine

Please feel free to handle.

Hsi is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice spans photo, video, digital collage and text-based works. The zine in this exhibition explores the experience of being visually impaired. More metaphorically, it aims to question the role of visual acuity in interpreting reality. If one possesses 20/20 vision, do they perceive reality with more clarity? Eye Can’t See (But I Shoegaze) embodies digitally manipulated images to simulate the fracture in certainty in the visual field.

Christina Reenberg Jensen & Karina Søby Madsen
The Squareroot of a Forest Lake, 2021
photography/poetry zine

Please feel free to handle.

In 2019, Danish artists Jensen (a visual artist) and Madsen (a writer) began their artistic collaboration, built upon a common interest in the forest and how it serves as a site for reflection upon the human condition. Since then they have been exchanging images and texts to explore the space between visual art and poetry. For the artist book in this exhibition, three poems are revealed by gently unfolding the piece. They explain, “The shape of the book itself and the photographic image is a dialogue between the mathematical and existential content of the poems. We want to allude to a sense of holding the forest lake in your hands. The work examines existence and relationships with nature. It is as if existence is in a state of upheaval. Togetherness and society are on the verge of a collapse, while mathematical concepts contrast with their regularity. In the background, nature unfolds as both a protector and a threat. This can be seen as an interstice, a space between the controlled and uncontrolled.”

Boyang Yu
Trace (Orange), 2021
leather, thread, pins

Yu is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist based in New York whose work ranges from installations, sculptures, drawings, etc. His work often stems from daily observations. He uses organic materials as a metaphor and starting point to communicate his philosophies on the relationship between nature, human invention, and human intervention. The work in this exhibition is part of Access Control—a series exploring the trace of connections between humans and nature. His work exposes the tenderness between nature and culture, and aims to provoke questions about the values that are centered within human existence.

Spencer Krywy
Whistling Wind, 2019
kinetic sculpture

Please ask for assistance with turning on this sound piece.

Krywy’s elemental sculpture uses three analog oscillators, each one driving its own fan. Each oscillator uses a photocell which protrudes from the back of the sculpture to take advantage of the ambient light in the space as an input. Each fan pulses on and off at a given rate, determined through a combination of light data and analog circuitry to produce three separate “voices” which all combine in chorus. As the light in the room shifts, the sound changes throughout the day, and as water evaporates from the bottles over the duration of the exhibition, the tone evolves as well.

Cristian Tablazon
FLED, THEIR FACES TURNED, 2012
zine/video

Offering the reader an experience both numinous and unsettling, FLED, THEIR FACES TURNED subtitles fragments edited from miscellaneous family photos (mostly shot in the 80s and 90s) with lines violently extricated from their context to create a glossary of dissonant if not poignant gestures and spaces that explore what is left and what is left out, the fleeting and the in-between, the nameless and the invisible, always caught in the very act of meaning and becoming, of being named and being known, never fully arriving, and teetering at the brink of insight and form.

Shan Wu
Declaration of Self-Sufficiency, 2021
505 sheet of US letter size paper, notice of Request for Evidence

505 pages of blank paper are cut through with the shape of a card, creating a window to the Request for Evidence for application for permanent residence (green card). Declaration of Self-Sufficiency offers an interstice into the experience of an immigrant and illuminates the power shifts that occurred between two presidential administrations—shifts that left Wu’s (and countless others’) status as legal immigrants hanging in precarious balance. 

In 2019, the Trump administration enacted a Public Charge Rule that required legal immigrants to submit a burdensome I-944 Declaration of Self-Sufficiency in addition to their application. The form I-944 was used to collect the applicants’ information, which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials would then use to determine whether the applicant can support themselves and not be a “burden” to the US. The rule went in and out of effectiveness in the course of 2020. 

From July 29 to September 22, 2020 a court ruling prevented USCIS from processing the form. During this period of time, Wu submitted her green card application without the form. Then on November 19, the rule went into effect again, and she received a notice of Request for Evidence. Wu submitted 505 pages of evidence to prove her “self-sufficiency,” including her education record, financial status, language skill, credit score, health benefits and more. On March 9, the form I-944 was discontinued under the Biden administration, and USCIS declared it will no longer consider any information submitted with the form.

Anna Haglin
The Fountain, 2018
bronze

Haglin explains, “The Fountain is a counterpoint to Marcel Duchamp's famous readymade sculpture of a urinal. The vagina is the ultimate interstitial space--it's how each of us enters this world. Yet menstruation is still seen as shameful, and women are underrepresented in the fine art world. This tiny sculpture of a menstrual cup brings the sacred, female interstitial space into the gallery. If we can stare at Duchamp's urinal, we should be able to comfortably view this fountain as well.”

Janelle O’Malley
Heaving Mounds, 2019
acrylic, polymer clay, glitter, cupcake wrappers on canvas panel

“The idea of holding onto nostalgia plays an integral part of my exploration into identity making and shared memory experiences. My own experiences with hyperthymesia has given me a particularly interesting outlook on how memory holds sway over us. Hyperthymesia is a state of memory recall where a person's memory of events and time is abnormally detailed and accurate. This phenomenon of vivid memory recall is often activated through sensory stimulation or ephemera. These memory flashbacks often intervene at the most inconvenient times and lead to a nostalgia spiral. The work reflects the mashing of time and space that is created when these events happen.”

Corpus Callosum
Sav, 2020
wood, brass, felt

The viewer is welcomed to experience Sav as a tactile object. By dipping their finger inside to touch the felt, the audience is brought into direct and sensual contact with the interstice.

Corpus Callosum is the alter ego of Chicago based social justice artist Michelle Hartney. Her work under the pseudonym began as an outlet for the exploration of playful works that are driven by her impulse to experiment with pure abstraction and unusual material compositions. Sav is part of a series of intimately-scaled, minimalist sculptures that invite touch and interactivity. In this piece, a palm-sized block of smoothed wood serves as the support structure and frame for a small brass ring, inside which a small patch of raspberry felt is inset. 

Madison May
Sheets, 2021
scent, perfume, bottle, label

Viewers are invited to take a scent wand.

Sheets is one of May’s most recent experimental small sculptures, incorporating the use of scent to recall memory, place, and time. May explains, “While working with the topic of trauma, memory is one of the most harmful and healing senses. To me, memories exist in between real and hypothetical spaces. We recall a place, a space, a time, in our heads when we recognize a scent in the real world. We are transported back to those memories to relive them in a past time. Sheets emulates the scent of clean linens that have become musty from sitting tucked away in a closet for too long.”