Abstraction in Action Eduardo Costa: Acciones en la calle https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/eduardo-costa-acciones-en-la-calle/

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Artists: Vito Acconci, Artur Barrio, Rosemarie Castoro, Eduardo Costa, Cris Gianakos, Victor Grippo, Stephen Kaltenbach, Leandro Katz, Rosemary Mayer, Ana Mendieta, Marta Minujín, Hélio Oiticia, John Perreault, Regina Vater.

Acciones en la calle: Street Works in New York and Latin America circa 1970
Curator: Gillian Sneed
October 26 – December 4, 2015
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery
SUNY College
New York, NUY, USA

“Acciones en la Calle” considers the conceptual and performative strategies employed by artists in the 1960s and ’70s that rejected institutional spaces in favor of the street as the context and subject of their work. The exhibition’s point of departure is the six-part Street Works (1969-1970), a series of events during which numerous artists utilized urban public spaces in New York City’s streets as their performance and exhibition venues.

While New York is often considered the birthplace of this genre, street actions had also taken hold in Latin America, and relationships between Latin American and U.S. artists, critics, and curators developed. Latin American artists who sought exile from dictatorships or had been awarded grants came to New York, while many U.S. artists traveled to Latin America.

“Acciones en la Calle” demonstrates resonances and disjunctions between the works and their political, practical, and theoretical concerns. While the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests provided the backdrop against which street works emerged in the U.S., in Latin America limited art markets and repressive regimes left only the streets as venues for artistic intervention. These artists investigated the complex intersections of political repression, violence, and social marginalization in ways that challenged the traditional “center/periphery” model so often employed in canonical accounts of Latin American and U.S. conceptual art. Curator Sneed explains: “The relevance of these works could not be more urgent today, as activists across the Americas have returned to the streets to take action.”

The works in this exhibition revolve around three themes related to the urban setting: Site, Drift, and Debris. Site considers street works that mark or highlight the location where they unfolded; Drift engages works that wander through urban networks to produce dérives, or flows; and Debris explores what is revealed about a city’s inhabitants by the refuse that accumulates on their streets.

October 27, 2015 Raquel Rabonivich: Collaborative Performance https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/raquel-rabonivich-collaborative-performance/

Emergences 9, Port Ewen, low tide

Artists: Raquel Rabinovich, Jule Manna, Linda Mary Montano.

7 Hour Collaborative Glandathon: Dance, Pray, Bless at Nancy Donskoj’s
August 29, 2015
The Storefront Gallery
Kingston, NY, USA

A SEVEN HOUR EXPERIENCE GIVING GRATITUDE TO THE 7 GLANDS

Actions:

. Manna will move and dance for seven hours

. Montano will pray sounds for seven hours

. Rabinovich will give offerings (mud drawings) from her hands to everyone for one hour (6-7pm)

Each hour will reference one of the seven glands.

Image: Raquel Rabinovich, “Emergences (Hudson River)”, 2012-2014, Series: Emergences, Site-Specific Sculpture, On-site stones, Dimensions variable, Lighthouse Park, Port Ewen, New York, USA, Collection Town of Esopus, Photo credit: Camilo Rojas.
August 26, 2015 Richard Garet: ce.onl_0011 https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/richard-garet-ce-onl_0011/

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Artist: Richard Garet

ce.onl_0011
Live Recordings
Contour Editions
On line recordings

Contour Editions will be presenting a series of recordings of Richard Garet performing live. This online release is the latest development of the labelʼs effort to present works that explore the various possibilities of sound, while also engaging with studio experimentation, materiality, processes, and diverse techniques to create and treat material and media. The labelʼs objective is to reach listeners and spectators on a personalized level while facilitating the independent distribution of sound and visual artistʼs work that are often hard to experience within the local community or the cultural landscape of the world at large. 
 
Richard Garet’s approach to working with sound live focuses on creating processes that interact and activate sonic material such as electromagnetic waves, treated tape and audio cassettes, cracked media, sonification of light and data, information noise, and computer processing. Over the years his work has evolved from laptop playing to a more hands on type of approach, focusing on sound and material that could encompass a more tactile malleability and less playback. Garet’s preparations to working live with sound evolve from studio practice and these developments establish the artist’s material and set of possibilities to work and interact with in front of an audience.“It is really pointless trying to coin a term for working with sound live. I feel that adjectives and names describing audio art today apply to a certain degree but it does not represent a practice that uses broad methods and techniques. Much goes into the mix, and much goes into consideration. There are moments of improvisation but then there is a control-and-memory at play. There is much knowledge involved as well triggering things as much as the desire to run faster than the mind has time to dictate the next move. Therefore during a live set there is much space for risk and discovery. There are preselected methods and there are elements of surprise. There is electricity. There is analog and digital but most importantly there is hope and there is optimism! And overall there must be progress. Presenting sound live for me has always had a fixation to time, and it involves more than one time, more than one memory, and many approaches to craft-and-media tailoring ideologies for listening that also challenge reception and notions of listening, physicality, and awareness. I like to think that making this work embodies imagination and action that embraces sculpting in time as a dominant understanding of physical space and physicality shifting within space. It is also fascinating how material objects that create sonic energy, shred air, and change and affect a temporal situation. It is like having additional arms and legs for voicing out wordless forms that carry out powerful communication. Performing live with audio to me consists of piling efforts that sum up to a temporal temper that interconnects people within a particular environment and time capsule. It can make you as aware of sound as it can of its absence and yet be felt besides being heard. It is a directness that not only produces a faculty to touch others but also a vehicle for experiential transcendence, psychological connections and thought that leaves the room with you. Performances become alive inside a space or with the absence of one but most importantly are also collectively lived.”
Richard Garet, 2015
March 2, 2015 Rossana Martinez https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/rossana-martinez-2/

I am interested in creating an experience, and a dialogue between the body and common materials. The process and result are raw and unedited.  I investigate subtleties of balance and movement, breath and anatomy—based on the connection between a running and yoga practice, and my interest in dance, conceptual abstraction and performance art. My intention is to allow viewers to interpret and question the work according to their expectations about what art is and how it should appear.

 
Traducido del inglés

Me interesa crear una experiencia, un diálogo entre el cuerpo y los materiales comunes. El proceso y resultado es crudo e íntegro. Investigo las sutilezas del balance y del movimiento, de la respiración y la anatomía, basadas en las conexiones entre la práctica de yoga y correr, así como mi interés en la danza, la abstracción conceptual y el performance. Mi intención es el permitir a los espectadores interpretar y cuestionar la obra de acuerdo a sus expectativas de lo que el arte es y cómo debe verse.

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January 27, 2015 Omar Barquet: Ghost Variations https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/omar-barquet-ghost-variations/

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Artist: Omar Barquet

Ghost Variations
June 18 -20, 2014
Performance: June 17, 2014
MAAS Performance 
Long Island City, NY, USA

“Ghost Variations” is an interdisciplinary proposal launched in 2012 by artist Omar Barquet (Chetumal, México 1979), comprising a sequence of five projects organized like the movements of a symphony, as well as a series of five subprojects generated from experimental collaborations understood as “fugues”. Together they pose an analogy to the distinct evolutionary phases of a hurricane, emulating its intensities and movements, like the sketch of a spiral shape, mainly reflecting on the perception of time through the transformation cycles of a landscape.

2nd Fugue: The Groans of White Noise, brings forth an environment of tension which occurs at a sonorous and performatic level, carrying the spectator’s imagination into the most intense part of a hurricane. It is a project which is based in the emotional and physical tensions experienced in this phase of the meteorological phenomenon, occasionally verging on moments of delirium and using the acceleration of the pulse of the breath as patterns to elaborate the evolution of intensity.

This sonorous action also uses as reference a few fragments of the poems of Licofron, El Obscuro, where he constructs a labyrinth of associations around the ravings of Cassandra, Greek mythological character and Trojan princess.

This epiphany of catastrophe articulates a connecting link in which madness constitutes a repetition of certain phrases of the poem in a sort of mantra, whose progressive acceleration and intensity drift into meaninglessness, generating a confused and dense state, similar to the most intense phase of the storm creating a soundscape. The performance and sound experimentation will be in collaboration with sound and visual artist Richard Garet, and with experimental musician Javier Barquet. Both artists are based in New York City.

5th Fugue: The Broken Poem, is an action taken through video, based on a phrase from a poem by Paul Éluard. It is conceived from fragments of broken chairs, articulating a sculptural typography which quotes the poem slowly, and in fractures. Simultaneous to the projection of these phrases, there is a mound created randomly with the remains of the broken chairs, on a floor soaked with water, corresponding to the flood – the final phase of the Ghost Variations project sequence. Both these fugues depict an analogy of the storm and the chaotic nature of thought, where human emotionality manifests as an unstable and complex phase of the renewing energy of life cycles – a breath which changes in intensity, and as such, the state of things.

Omar Barquet was born in Chetumal, México, September 10th 1979. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from ENPEG La Esmeralda, in México City. He has exhibited in various national and international forums, in cities like New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Lima, Miami, Basel, Madrid and México City. He is a founding member of the Segundo Piso art collective, composed of Augustin Gonzales, José Luis Landet y Moris. He was the recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores Arts and Culture Fund National Grant, as well as the Arte Actual Bancomer MACG Grant. In 2009, he obtained a two-month residency in Capacete, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2010, he performed his solo show REVERB, at the Museo Experimental El Eco, and in 2011 was commissioned to develop the LAPSES installation for the brand Hermés Paris – México. In 2013 he completed his residency for Casa Tomada art ists, which concluded with his solo show, entitled Ghost Variations’ 1st Fugue: “The Flock”, in Kunsthalle, Sao Paulo. For the second half of 2014, he is preparing a series of solo shows starting at the MACAY Museum in Mérida, Yucatán, a residency for his first solo show at Mandragoras Arts Space in New York, and a solo project at 123 Space in México City.  Since 2013, he collaborates in GRAMA RUINA, a visual and sound experimental collective with Fernando Soberanes, Javier Loyola, and Xavi Cunilleras.

June 13, 2014 Aníbal López A-1 53167 https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/anibal-lopez/
Translated from Spanish

My work consists in propose to people a way of thinking that with plans or without them could unveil doubts or solutions. I would like to open a discourse where we could discuss themes that could help us solve our lives as a community. Basically, my work consists of questions and perspectives about the world with projections to the future, where armed conflicts are kids’ toys, for children that have faith in living and not in hating (to live without hate). Without forgetting to judge the ones who have brought us to these poverty conditions and misinformation. I do not consider myself conceptual or minimalist, but utilitarian of these mediums, as a precise way of approaching concrete subjects without much paraphernalia.

 

Mi trabajo consiste en proponer a las personas una forma de pensamiento que, con planes o sin ellos, descubran dudas o soluciones. Me gustaría poder entablar un discurso donde podamos discutir temas que nos ayuden a solucionar nuestras vidas en comunidad. Básicamente mi trabajo radica en interrogantes y perspectivas de un mundo con proyecciones al futuro donde los conflictos armados sean de juguete sin para niños que tengan fe en vivir y no en odiar (vivir sin odio). Pero sin olvidar juzgar a los que nos han llevado a estos estados de pobreza y mala información. No me considero conceptual ni minimalista, sino utilitario estos medios como forma precisa de abarcar temas más concretos sin tanta parafernalia.

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November 7, 2013 Adán Vallecillo https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/adan-vallecillo/
Translated from Spanish

Painting to me exists as an extension beyond the space-time limits where I put to test anti-epistemological values that aim to question some essentialist posture of the symbolic domain. They are sets, or sometimes equations that arise from a deliberate economy of resources and studies that explore the consequences of modernity in the representation of identitarian images (for example Casta paintings from the 19th century), or the conceptual limits of the history of modernity itself.

 

Para mi existe la pintura como una extensión más de los límites espacio-temporales donde pongo a prueba valores contra-epistemológicos que buscan cuestionar algunas posturas esencialistas del dominio simbólico. Son escalas, a veces ecuaciones que surgen de una deliberada economía de recursos y estudios que exploran las consecuencias de la modernidad en la representación de imágenes identitarias, (como por ejemplo la pintura de castas del siglo XIX) o bien, los límites conceptuales de la historia misma de la  modernidad.

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November 7, 2013 Jorge de León https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/jorge-de-leon/
Translated from Spanish

My work relates to everyday life in the city, specifically of a city like Guatemala, which is considered to be one of the most dangerous in Latin America. I try to take the behavior of a society, portraying the everyday in different ways.

 

Mi trabajo está ligado a la vida diaria de la ciudad, específicamente de una ciudad como Guatemala, considerada una de las más peligrosas de América Latina. Trato de llevar el comportamiento de una sociedad, retratando de diferentes maneras la cotidianidad.

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November 7, 2013 Pepe López https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/pepe-lopez/

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  • 2014: “New Territories: Design, Art and Craft from Latin America 2000-2013”, Museum of arts and design New York City, USA.
  • 2014: “5×5 Real un-real”, Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts, New York City, USA.
  • 2013: “Utopías de ilusión”, Kiosco, NUBE gallery, Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
  • 2012: “5×5, Real-un real”, Museo de arte Acarigua-Araure, Acarigua, Venezuela.
  • 2012: “The wave”, Molaa, Los Angeles, USA.
  • 2012: 6emme Bienal d’art contemporain de Marcigny, France.
  • 2012: “País en vilo”, Faria-Fábregas, Caracas, Venezuela.
  • 2012: “Línea crítica 2”, Artepuy, Caracas, Venezuela.
  • 2012: “Blanco y negro”, Galería Fernando Zubillaga, Caracas, Venezuela.
  • 2012: “Gego, testimonios y vigencia”, Museo de arte Contemporáneo, Caracas, Venezuela.
  • 2011: “Línea crítica 1”, Artepuy, Caracas, Venezuela.
  • 2011: “Dibujo reposicionado”, 39 Galería, Caracas, Venezuela.

October 16, 2013 Mariela Scafati https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/mariela-scafati/

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October 8, 2013 Fabiana Cruz https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/fabiana-cruz/

Translated from Spanish

Music in movement: dance. Music in poetry: song. Music in writing: a score. How to translate Music into painting? My work is born from the deep necessity to fuse my two vocations: music and visual arts. I first memorize a song, I study it. Then I choose a common place, on the sidewalk, on a wall… and I draw the music—how I hear it, how it comes out of the chalk, how I see it.

 

Música en movimiento: la danza. Música en poesía: una canción. Música escrita: una partitura. ¿Como traducir la Música en pintura? Este trabajo nace de una necesidad profunda de fusionar mis dos vocaciones: la música y las artes visuales. Primero memorizo la canción, la estudio. Luego escojo un lugar cualquiera, sobre la acera, en un muro… Y dibujo la música. Como la escucho, como nace bajo la tiza, como la veo.

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October 5, 2013