Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.
For their first exhibition in Zagreb, the Antwerp-based artist duo have devised P10, the tenth iteration of their P-series: modular veils or curtains made of identical Plexiglas elements, hooked together with s-brackets, that both divide, distort and reveal (possible) spaces. Their work, always devised according to site-specific considerations, shows how a regular exhibition location can be made to suggest limitless space that shimmers with depth and reflection.
Encompassing practices in video, photography, drawing and sculpture, this exhibition is focused on the notion of ‘field/context’ as a political, historical, spatial, and technological construct.
In order to analyze contexts and fields artists utilize various modes of making. The artists presented do not attempt to resolve or locate their practices within any given mode of representation. Encompassing practices in video, sound, photography, drawing, performance and sculpture the works herein negotiate with spaces both ambiguous and direct.
The participating artists in Open Sessions: Drawings in Context/Field are members of the Open Sessions program at The Drawing Center, which fosters a dynamic, ever-evolving conversation with new drawing practices and practitioners, viewing drawing as an activity rather than a product. The exhibition is organized by Onyedika Chuke, a participant in Queens Museum’s Artist Studio Program and The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions participant.
Schedule of Events:
1-4pm: Video Screenings, in the Theater on 2nd Floor
4-7pm: Opening Reception, Community Partnership Gallery
Note: There will be a free shuttlebus making loops from under the Mets/Willets Point 7 Train Stop and the Museum from 4:30-7:40pm.
OUR ONTOLOGY OF DARKNESS
IS FLOODED WITH DIGITAL LIGHT
Sturtevant
Exposure and camouflage are part of our instinct of survival. The animal kingdom does not lack of examples. Each species has a ritual of seduction in which dances and postures allow to compete and demonstrate who is the fittest for procreation. On the other hand, to fool predators and preys, a fish may appear as a stone, an owl as a tree trunk and a chameleon change color depending on its surroundings.
Since the beginning of the XXI century, digital technologies shed light on a large part of a previously anonymous population. The ability to identify, record, steal and share data increased the tension between institutions and individuals. Similar to a large spider web, the structure of networks needs to feed from the digital identities that remain trapped in it.
Like the conquest of America, the discovery of the new “Internet” continent reshapes human interactions. However, the idea of conquering the other becomes more complex when that other is ubiquitous.
At this threshold, the archaic structures of power and the most individual utopias have found a niche where to exist, but in this ambiguous terrain, this niche can also be a trap.
With this background in mind, this group exhibition wonders to what extent primitive instincts of survival such as hunting and socialization govern the actual hyper technological environment. Throughout the selected works we can observe that the difference between camouflage and exposure dissolves itself. Behind the masks, we can clearly see that the spectacle, multinationals and religions are part of the same system of power.
The artistic proposal of Emilio Chapela has an interest in the mechanisms involved in human communication and how these processes impact society. Also questioned our relationship with various technological tools, such as books, libraries, the Internet and social networks.
Guillermo Santamarina, chief curator of the MACG, explained that aside from what those who view the works of Emilio Chapela may take away freely from the experience of approaching this anthological show, concerted between the Carrillo Gil Art Museum and the artist, certain lines of reflection may be highlighted that lay the foundation for the structure of the New International Boundary Commission, an organization established by Chapela himself, inspired by the nomenclature of the organism created in 1889 by the United States and Mexico in order to enforce international treaties regarding the lands and waters between these two nations.
A correspondence between gazes from either side of a linguistic portal, resolved through a dynamic of critical activism in response to simulations of referential urban order; the development of poetic inspections that lead to resistance, given the terminal conditions that run like shadows behind the nefarious policies that determine obtuse teaching methods, thus perpetuating inequality and social oppression; a conceptual network that refreshes the irrepressible halo of detournement (an artistic technique that consists of appropriating material from normative culture, the art world and consumer society and intervening it in order to divert its meaning); this New Boundary Commission also accredits another column of expression within the cosmos of Emilio Chapela, singularly articulating a complex of reflection in modern art history: art for art’s sake.
“No matter what vortices the observers of this new commission choose to focus on (and not to confine within borders) in order to gain comprehension of the linguistic complex explored by Emilio Chapela, this experience—plural, open and dynamic— finds its recapitulation unified on the scale of a single floor of the MACG, thus assimilating the articulation of a single entity. As in a home. As in a solitary planet, unique in the cosmos. It is constituted by units interconnected simply by curiosity and emotions. Perhaps like that which, whenever one takes a step, encounters the ground…hard, rough, dirty, and even foul at times. Ground, what it should be, what we have always believed it was. The surface that binds us to life. Essence. Meaning. The things that occur when you close your eyes and off in in the distance, distinguish a line. The Horizon, limitless” Santamarina declared
