Saturday, 1-3 pm, November 16, 2019
at Baahng Gallery
ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts is pleased to present “Writing in the Void,” a mobile of 280 calligraphic marks forged in black and silver aluminum by artist Yooah Park. Organized by ZONE: Chelsea, the exhibition will be held at the Central House of Artists Museum in Moscow, and travel to the Center for Architecture and Design, Mexico City (Aug. 10-Sept. 4).
Trained as a brush painter, Yooah Park explores gestural dynamics in painting and sculpture, combining influences from traditional Korean calligraphy artists, and Western artists such as Franz Kline, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Alexander Calder.
While Western philosophies typically depict the Void as an infinite absence, the Eastern notion of the Void is frequently described as a “formless field” inexplicably acting as the source and sustenance of all creation. In ancient Korean painting, the artist asserts, negative space is more important than positive space, presumably because of its “pre-rational” shaping intelligence. Following this logic, Park has activated and magnified this dynamism by setting her marks in three-dimensional space, mirroring the guided improvisation of John Cage’s chance techniques.
Perpetual motion also conveys the Buddhist belief in spirits inhabiting inanimate objects. Park’s figures cluster together in groups or stand in isolation as human figures do. And since the figures resemble fragments of ideograms, their suspension suggests a primordial arena wherein a language is first coalescing. This suspension reinforces the minimalist esthetic, the slowing down of time, and the sharpening focus – “the mental suspension, not a mental diversion” – experienced in meditation, as noted by Mark Levy in The Void in Art.
In the past, Park’s organic minimalism has employed multiples, such as her shifting grid of 63 ceramic cubes presented at ZONE: Chelsea in 2004. Always evident are her intimate calligraphic marks, which also adorned her chamber of hand-made tiles denoting Korean funeral ritual and the shedding of esthetic identities in “Rite of Passage” at the Gana Insa art Center in 2002. In April 2006, Park’s mobile installation appeared in a group exhibition at the Dong San Bang Gallery in Seoul.
The Central House of Artists Museum is located at 119049 Krymski val 10 exhibition hall #6, Moscow, Russia.
ZONE: Chelsea would like to thank CHA Director Vasily Vladimirovich Bychkov and Senior manager of the exhibition organizing deparment Marina Milishnikova.
Yooah Park
Writing in the Void
June 28 – July 3, 2006, Moscow
The Central House of Artists Museum
119049 Krymski Val 10 exhibition hall #16, Moscow, Russia
August 10 – September 4, 2006, Mexico
Galeria Emilia Cohen
Juan Vazquez de Mella No. 481, Col. Los Morales Polanco
Mexico D.F.C.P. 11510
I am pleased to present “Writing in the Void”, a mobile of 280 calligraphic marks forged in black and silver aluminum by artist Yooah Park. Organized by ZONE SATELLITE, a division at ZONE:Chelsea, Center for the Arts, the exhibition will be held at the Central House of Artists Museum in Moscow (June 28- July 3, 2006) and will travel to the Center for Architecture and Design, Mexico City (Aug 10 – Sep 4,2006).
Trained as a brush painter, Yooah Park explores gestural dynamics in painting and sculpture, combining influences from traditional Korean calligraphy artists, and Western artists such as Franz Kline, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Alexander Calder.
While Western philosophies typically depict the Void as an infinite absence, the Eastern notion of the Void is frequently described as a “formless field” inexplicably acting as the source and sustenance of all creation. In ancient Korean painting, the artist asserts, negative space is more important than positive space, presumably because of its “pre-rational” shaping intelligence. Following this logic, Park has activated and magnified this dynamism by setting her marks in three-dimensional space, mirroring the guided improvisation of John Cage’s chance techniques.
Perpetual motion also conveys the Buddhist belief in spirits inhabiting inanimate objects. Park’s figures cluster together in groups or stand in isolation as human figures do. And since the figures resemble fragments of ideograms, their suspension suggests a primordial arena wherein a language is first coalescing. This suspension reinforces the minimalist esthetic, the slowing down of time, and the sharpening focus ‘The mental suspension, not a mental diversion” experienced in meditation, as noted by Mark Levy in The Void in Art.
In the past, Park’s organic minimalism has employed multiples, such as her shifting grid of 63 ceramic cubes presented at ZONE: Chelsea, Center for the Arts in 2004. Always evident are her intimate calligraphic marks, which also adorned her chamber of hand-made tiles denoting Korean funeral ritual and the shedding of esthetic identities in “Rite of Passage” at the Gana lnsa Art Center in 2002. In April 2006, Park’s mobile installation appeared in a group exhibition at the Dong San Bang Gallery in Seoul.
I would like to thank Director Vasily Vladimirovich Bychkov and Marina Milishnikova, Senior Manager of the Exhibition Organizing Department at Cental House of Artists in Moscow. I would also like to thank Consul General Ramon Xilolt, Karina Escamilla, Program Coordinator at Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, Emilia Cohen, Director of Emilia Cohen Collection and Center for Architecture and Design in Mexico City. Special thanks to Erika Vilfort and Beatrize Ezban for their initial efforts in facilitating Yooah Paws Mexico exhibition and Kiril Milinishikov for his translations for the Moscow exhibition.
Jennifer Baahng ED.D
Director
ZONE: Chelsea, Center for the Arts
“Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.” —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
In his sprawling third novel, Pynchon grasped a tectonic shift in the modern era, as the industrial revolution yielded to the age of information. His international cast of misfits roams the shattered landscape of Europe at the close of World War II, no longer trading black-market cigarettes for weapons, machinery, or other tangible goods, but instead bartering with raw data—documents, patents, and even early computer codes, those ephemeral strings of 1’s and 0’s. One implication of this 1973 masterpiece is that humanity as a species is in danger of drifting from its moorings in the physical world, a condition that has come to pass with the alternate reality of cyberspace (a word that already sounds quaint, though it was coined only 20 years ago in William Gibson’s equally prescient novel, Neuromancer).
Yooah Park works in words as well, her art derived from expressive, calligraphic brushstrokes grounded in those immemorial ideograms first laid down millennia ago in ink on rice paper. Yet her newest work is disembodied; she has dispensed with any supporting surface, leaving her laser-cut steel brushstrokes hanging in midair. But like Pynchon’s “eye-twitch,” they remain beautifully corporeal, images that do double duty as “the things they stand for.”
How did Park arrive at this nexus of ancient symbols and (literally) cutting-edge technology?
One factor, no doubt, is travel, from her native Korea, where she received a degree in Oriental Painting, to graduate study in art history at Harvard and drawing at Columbia University. Another is her exploration of various surfaces as vehicles for her art, which has spanned drawing, painting, and sculpture. In the early nineties Park did a series of drawings that traversed the netherworld between figurative expression and pure abstraction, the form and subject reminiscent of Matisse’s bold dancers. Her images from this period are vibrant—leaping, pirouetting, twisting, and landing forms that spread across five-foot sheets of paper, and crouching, bending, lounging shapes compressed into smaller, one-foot squares. Quick arabesques and spatters of ink breathe life into the figures, and also work entirely as nonobjective form, both contained by and pushing at the boundaries of the paper, compositions that create exquisite tension.
Then came her work on clay tiles—calligraphic flourishes baked into the ash-colored mud, the litheness of her gestures mitigated somewhat by the elegiac gray surface. The stiff brushes she uses leave deeply incised ridges in the wet clay that feel, after being fired in a traditional Korean kiln, like fossils, giving both the image she has inscribed and the idea it conveys a sense of deep time, a shrouded past before the invention of writing, drawing, ink, or paper. Sometimes Park sculpts hexagons from this material: small smoky boxes in rows or scattered on the ground, her brushstrokes like weathered, mysterious inscriptions on tombstones. These shapes revisit her square drawings, retaining their coiled tension between the idea and its expression.
Park’s 2002 installation, Rite of Passage,went even further in this journey through idea and form, eschewing any sense of figuration or ideogram, leaving only walls of ashen tiles and hanging strips of handmade pulp paper to envelope the viewer. This tomblike enclosure returned her to art’s most basic element: a bare surface on which to project one’s imagination. In this case, the idea was writ large—the surface became an environment that at once enclosed and expressed a conscious negation of her earlier tools and techniques. A blank slate, in other words.
Fast-forward to the present. Other artists have hung objects from the ceiling—think of the colorful, playful geometries of Calder’s mobiles and Eva Hesse’s gloppy ropes and distended blobs suspended in mesh bags. More recently, the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa filled a New York gallery with curtains of stainless-steel letters that at a distance overlapped into a shimmering tower of Babel, an incomprehensible jumble of characters; only on closer inspection did it become apparent that the letters spelled out excerpts from the Bible’s Song of Songs.It is the curse of language that letters and words must be joined together to express thought, and that those sentences, paragraphs, and entire books remain intellectual abstractions— symbols—of what they represent.
Park, though, has the advantage over writers (or artists using letter forms) of translating thought and emotion into emphatic form through the bodily gestures of her brushstrokes. This is why the athletic traceries of her earlier drawings and clay pieces feel so alive; like those macho “action painters” the abstract expressionists, the movements of her arms, shoulders, torso—her entire body—come across in her energetic strokes of ink, her forceful scoring of clay. Now she has taken her gestures and removed them from any friction with a ground, be it paper or clay, to exist simply in the air. Cut from dark, shiny steel, these palpable strokes are hung in groups, and work on several layers. First, they are individual shapes, each filled with the verve of the original painted stroke (which is used as a template for the laser). But they also work as a whole, coalescing into various shapes as the viewer walks around and within this fragmented aerie. From some angles they seem a single entity that has burst apart and been frozen in time; from others it is as if they desire to gather together, like filings around a magnet. Always, though, they are physical manifestations of the artist’s search for form—idea, thought, and emotion transformed into a graceful dance.
R.C. Baker is a writer and artist who lives in New York City. His column, Best In Show,appears weekly in the Village Voice.
In Defense of Sloth: An Eclectic and Entertaining Series of Presentations About that Most Philosophical of Vices: A PRIMER
Theories and polemics about sloth have figured widely in Western thought in the work of artists, philosophers, and cultural critics as diverse as Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Malevich, as well as Marx, Kierkegaard, and Wilde. In Dante’s Purgatorio, for example, sloth is described as being the “failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind, and all one’s soul.” A more secular viewpoint on sloth is provided by Paul LaFargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, who authored the influential The Right to be Lazy(1883) and tirelessly campaigned for a three-hour work day. Likewise, in his manifesto “The Praise of Laziness” (1988), Zagreb-based artist Mladen Stilinovic suggests that Western artists are too preoccupied with promotion and production, and are thus less artists than producers.
The project has been organized in conjunction with Slought in New York, an archival exploration into the activities of the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation, on display from November 29-December 15, 2007 at Zone:Chelsea Center for the Arts. The “In Defense of Sloth” project is collaboratively organized by Aaron Levy, Slought Foundation, and Sina Najafi, Cabinet Magazine, in association with undergraduate students in the 2007-2008 Russell Bergman Foundation Curatorial Seminar in the University of Pennsylvania Departments of English and Art History.
In Defense of Sloth: An Eclectic and Entertaining Series of Presentations About that Most Philosophical of Vices: A PRIMER
6:30 – 8:30PM, November 29, 2007
Organized by Cabinet Magazine and Slought Foundation
Slought in New York at ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts
In conjunction with opening of Slought in New York at ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts,
“Should Art Abolish Art?”
Thursday, November 29th, 7-8pm
A conversation with Arakawa + Gins, Arthur C. Danto, Don Idhe and others on the problematics of cultural production after Duchamp.
Moderated by Jean-Michel Rabate and Aaron Levy; Introduced by Osvaldo Romberg
Should Art Abolish Art?
7-8pm, November 29, 2007
Since 1963, artists-architects-poets Arakawa and Madeline Gins(b. 1936/1941) have worked in collaboration to produce visionary, boundary-defying art and architecture. Their seminal work, The Mechanism of Meaning, has been exhibited widely throughout the world. A sequel to that, To Not To Die, appeared in 1987. As a means of financing the design and construction of works of procedural architecture that draw on The Mechanism of Meaning, extending its theoretical implications into the environment, Arakawa and Gins founded the Architectural Body Research Foundation. The Foundation actively collaborates with leading practitioners in a wide-range of disciplines including, but not limited to, experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, and medicine. Architectural projects have included residences (Reversible Destiny Houses – Mitaka; Bioscleave House – East Hampton, Long Island; Shidami Resource Recycling Model House), parks (Site of Reversible Destiny – Yoro) and plans for housing complexes and neighborhoods (Isle of Reversible Destiny – Venice and Isle of Reversible Destiny-Fukuoka, Sensorium City, Tokyo). The Second International Conference on the work of Arakawa and Gins will take place at Slought Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania from April 6-8, 2007 (here for more information). Responding to A + G’s two recent works of theory, Architectural Body (University of Alabama Press, 2002) and Making Dying Illegal (Roof Books, 2006), philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle declared this pair to be the successor philosophers to Marx and Engels.
Arthur C. Danto(b. 1924) is an American art critic and philosopher. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in 1951 returned to teach at Columbia University, where he is currently Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. Danto is the author of numerous books on aesthetics and philosophy, including Nietzsche as Philosopher, Mysticism and Morality, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Narration and Knowledge, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. He has also published several collections of art criticism, including Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992); Playing With the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (University of California, 1995); and The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). Art critic for The Nation, he has also published numerous articles in other journals.
Don Ihde(b. 1934) is a philosopher of science and technology, and a post-phenomenologist. In 1979 he wrote what is often identified as the first North American work on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis. Ihde is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Ihde is the author of thirteen original books and the editor of many others. Recent examples include Chasing Technoscience (2003), edited with Evan Selinger; Bodies in Technology (2002); Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (1998); and Postphenomenology (1993). Ihde lectures and gives seminars internationally and some of his books and articles have appeared in a dozen languages. He is currently working on Imaging Technologies: Plato Upside Down. Ihde is also the Director of the Technoscience Research Group in the Philosophy Department, where he directs ongoing graduate and post-graduate research seminars around the study of technoscience and cutting-edge work in the fields of the philosophies of science and technology and science studies.
Slought in New York at ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts
In honor of Richard Mayhew’s artistic achievements, and his 2009 retrospective solo exhibition at ZONE: Contemporary Art — The MacDowell Colony and ZONE: Contemporary Art hosted a gallery discussion on December 6, 2009 for National Benefit guests.
Gallery Discussion with Richard Mayhew
co-hosted by The MacDowell Colony
3-5pm, December 6, 2009
ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts is proud to present ZONEMA 2006 honoring Mexican independent cinema. Over three days, we will show about thirty films—scheduled features, continuous screenings of shorts and displays of video art.
In recent decades, Mexican directors such as Guillermo del Toro (Cronos,Pan’s Labytinth), Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama, Children of Men) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel) have become international superstars. In this exciting festival, we will be featuring a documentary on the making of Babel by González Iñárritu, as well as “Mexico,” his contribution to the anthology film 11’09”01. But we are also shifting focus to examine the work of independent Mexican filmmakers, presenting many films in their United States premiere. Highlights include Roberto Rochín’s Ulama, Carlos Armella and Pedro Gonzalez’s Toro Negro, Carlos Reygada’s (Japón) second short film Maxhumain,Rodrigo Pla’s El ojo en la nuca(with Gael Garcia Bernal), Enrique Arroyo’s short El otro sueño americanoand Olallo Rubio’s Jodorowsky’s Interviews. Reflecting ZONE’s indisciplinary mission, we will also present documentaries on artists Gabriel Orozco (by Fernanda Romandia) and Javier Marin (by Luis Rochin Naya). Programs are curated by Jose Alvarez(chief curator)and distinguished artists Pilar Goutas, Silvana Agostini and Martin Delgado.
In conjunction with the screenings, ZONE will be presenting an exhibition of inks and digital prints by Pilar Goutas. In addition, the gala opening night reception will feature a performance by Ximena Sariñana Rivera, a celebrated singer who has appeared in films, theater and television.
ZONEMA 2006 is made possible by the generous contribution of Row 26, with additional support by the International Morelia Film Festival, Estación Indianilla, Mantarraya Producciones, Codigo 06140, De mi Arte a Tu Arte, Esto es Tech Mex and the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York.
ZONEMA 2006
Screenings honoring Mexican independent cinema
December 7 – 9, 2006
Opening reception 6-10pm, December 7
December 8, 2006
2 pm
Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu 11’09”01 12 min
Amat Escalante Ammarrados 15 min
Pablo Aldrete Human Sashimi 20 min
Victor Orozco La Letra con sangre entra9 min
Berenice Manjares Camino 30 min
Luis Rochin Retrospectiva
Javier Marin Escultura 14 min
3:40 pm
Enríque Arroyo El otro sueno americano 10 min
Alejandro Ezpeleta Zayak 11 min
Daniela Schneider Pescador 9 min
Cairy Joji Fukunaga Victoria para chino 13 min
Rene Villareal Sus demonios 10 min
Jose Alvarez Venus 20 min
Rodrigo Pla El ojo en la nuca 25 min
5:20 pm
Roberto Rochin Ulama 100 min
7 pm
Gabriela Monrroy Un viaje 10 min
Jaime Romandía Homeward Bound 8 min
Olallo Rubio Jodorowsky Interviews40 min
Julio Fons Benjamín 20 min
Carlos Reygadas Maxhumain 7 min
Teresa Suarez Quién mató a Tarantino 18 min
Michel Lipkes Spitting Against the Wind 2 min
8:20 pm
Pedro Gonzalez and Rubio Armella Common Ground 87 min The Making of Babelby Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu
December 9, 2006
12 pm
Pedro Gonzalez and Rubio Armella Common Ground 87 min The Making of Babelby Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu
1:30 pm
Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu 11’09”01 12 min
Amat Escalante Ammarrados 15 min
Pablo Aldrete Human Sashimi 20 min
Victor Orozco La Letra con sangre entra9 min
Berenice Manjares Camino 30 min
Luis Rochin Retrospectiva
Javier Marin Escultura 14 min
3:10 pm
Gerardo Naranjo The last attack of the beast 14 min
Carlos Cuaron Noche de bodas 5 min
Luis Felipe Hernandez,
Gerardo Ballester and Laurette Flores Coma 2 min
Fernanda Romandía Fénix 9 min
Eugenio Polgovsky Trópico de Cáncer 52 min
Ernesto Contreras El Milagro 15 min
4:50 pm
Enríque Arroyo El otro sueño Americano 10 min
Alejandro Ezpeleta Zayak 11 min
Daniela Schneider Pescador 9 min
Cary Fukunaga Victoria para chino 13 min
Rene Villareal Sus demonios 10 min
Jose Alvarez Venus 20 min
Rodrigo Pla El ojo en la nuca 25 min
6:30 pm
Gabriela Monrroy Un viaje 10 min
Jaime Romandía Homeward Bound 8 min
Olallo Rubio Jodorowsky Interviews40 min
Julio Fons Benjamín 20 min
Carlos Reygadas Maxhumain 7 min
Teresa Suarez Quién mató a Tarantino 18 min
Michel Lipkes Spitting Against the Wind 2 min
8:20 pm
Pedro Gonzalez and Rubio Armella Common Ground 87 min The Making of Babelby Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu
Martin Delgado
Martin Delgado was born in Mexico City in1965. Since 1984 has worked extensively in radio and advertising both as creative director and producer.
In 1990, Martin began producing records and lived in Los Angeles from 2000 to 2005 producing tracks for different artists.
Today, back in Mexico City, he is producing experimental music and video.
Silvana Agostoni
Born in Mexico City in 1968, received a BFA in graphic design from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in 1994, and an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. She has shown her photographic work both individually and collectively in Mexico, USA, Spain, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Japan, Italy, Canada and Cuba. Silvana was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada (2006), and since 1996 has received several awards from the FONCA (national council for the arts in Mexico) such as the Jóvenes Creadores grant in 1998 and 2002.
Alfredo Salomón
TECH-MEX artist born in Puebla, México, in 1968. His work has been shown at festivals in México, Canada, Finland, Malaysia, France and Brasil. At present his work revolves around the performing arts and video installation.
Amaranta Sanchez
México City, 1976. Enrolled at “La Esmeralda” College of Fine Arts, with a specialization at the Multimedia Center of the National Center for the Arts. Recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores grant of the FONCA in visual arts/video, 2001-2002. Her work has screened at the Vid@rte International Festival, México, 2001; Crash, México, 2001; University Museum of Arts and Sciences, México, 2001; Central Gallery and Multimedia Center, CNART, México, 1999, 2000; Videoformes, France, 2002; Interferences, France, 2001, Medioarte, Germany, 2002.
Fernando Llanos
Visual artist from México City, born on May 28th, 1974. He works mainly in video, the internet and drawing. His videos have participated in various festivals such as the Festival of New Film and New Media of Montreal, World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), Transmediale (Berlin), Interference (France), Viart (Venezuaela), INPUT (Panama), Vid@rte (México), Videochroniques (Marseille), Video do Minuto (Brazil), etc.
For the last few years he has been creating internet videoart and live presentations of video manipulation and mixing. At present he is profesor of Digital Art at the Universidad Iberoamericana and of Video at “La Esmeralda”.
Iván Edeza
Born in México City in 1967. Graduate of the “La Esmeralda” College of Fine Arts and curator of electronic media for the University Museum of Sciences and Art (MUCA).
Sarah Minter
Sarah Minter since 1982 is working in 16 mm. independent film , video and video installations, which emphasize: San Frenesi, None is Innocent, Alma Punk, El Aire de Clara, and more recently Intervalos a video installation with 20 screens.
Her work has been exhibited in diverse museums, art galleries, universities, festivals, mainly in America and Europe. In places like MOMA, Museum of the Bronx, N.Y. Museum of contemporary art, Boston, Haus to der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Canal Plus in France, International Film and Video Festival of La Havana, Celda de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City.
She has been fellowship holder at the Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur foundation and FONCA. She has been jury and curator in diverse national and international festivals, as well as cultural foundations. In the 2003 she made an artistic residence in Berlin. In 2006 she made an artistic residence in Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark. Where she began the first of six parts of her project Multiverse about utopian communities around the world.
Ricardo Nicolayevsky
Born in Mexico City. At an early age, started to paint, write and play
music. When he turned 20, he moved to New York City, where he studied Cinema
Studies at NYU. After getting his BFA from NYU, studied music under
different teachers. He premiered his own compositions for piano twice (1987
& 1988) at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall. Since the beginning of
the 80’s to this date, he has composed music for short films, theatre plays
and radio, and has also been involved in cabaret and performance.
His film and video work includes a vast series of portraits in movement,
generally of artists. He himself has created the soundtracks to accompany
these portraits. His collection entitled “Lost Portraits” from the 80’s has
ensured him a couple of prizes in the festival circuit. He has showed
individually and collectively in galleries, museums, festivals and
universities in Mexico, United States, Canada, Brazil, Peru, France, Spain,
Holland, Germany and Belgium. In 2003 he became a fellow of the Media Arts
Program (Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation). In February of 2006
was invited by MoMA to show his film and video work in a solo event called:
“A Night with Ricardo Nicolayevsky”.
Héctor Falcón
1973 -Culiacán Sinaloa, México.
Multidisciplinary artist, he obtained his B.A. in visual arts in México and Japan. He has had approximately 15 solo shows in México, the US and Asia, and has participated in more than 150 collective exhibitions in México and the rest of the world. Falcón’s work often has references to embodiment , personality and social conventions regarding beauty and systems of power.
Rodrigo Loyola
Born in Mexico City on May 4th 1979, studies Visual Arts and Photography. He is benefited in 2000 with the Young Creators scholarship offered by the Arts and Culture Council of México with what he made Flatland. In 2002 he receives the scholarship again with what he made Graphic Work on studies of the Infinite. In the same year he had the Creators scholarship offered by the Arts Council of Querétaro to work on Multimedia and Digital Art. During these years he begins to make electronic Music. In 2005 he went to do an artistic residence in the Fundación Antonio Gala in Córdoba, Spain. He Lives in Querétaro, Mexico.
Colectivo Doble A
Andrea Robles Jiménez
México City (1976)
Studied communications at the Universidad Iberoamericana. During this period produces Sarna en la Cabeza, for UNICEF this work won first prize at el Festival of TV and Video ANUIES, in May 2000.
In the year 2002 forms Doble A with Adriana Bravo.
Adriana E. Bravo Morales
La Paz, Bolivia (1972)
Studies fine arts at UMSA in La Paz, Bolivia and postgraduate studies in art criticism also in Bolivia. Works in printmaking and drawing. Her work has been shown at the X Bienal Iberoamericana de Arte Grabado Iberoamericano Palacio de Bellas Artes, México D.F.
Since 1997 she has received several awards in drawing and printmaking in Bolivia and Colombia. In the year 2000 se moves to México and since 2002 has been working with Andrea Robles.
The work of colectivo doble A has been screened in numerous venues like VIDEOFEST 2K4, Baja California México, 2006, 22nd Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2006, 15th International Electronic Festival Videobrasil, Sao Paulo Brasil, 2005.
Maru de la Garza,
Studies fine arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, UNAM in Mexico City.
To date she has five solo exhibitions lincluding “Episodio Femenino” fotografía + video + instalación Galería de CESIMAC 2006 and “Vivencia / En Paralelo” en el Museo Regional de Querétaro-INAH, 2005. Has participated i n 12 group shows including “Cercanos y distantes” en la Galería José María Velasco en la Ciudad de México y en el 2003 “Our eyes: origen y pasión” en el Centro Cultural Somart in San Francisco California.
Adriana Calatayud
(b. 1967, Mexico City)
Graduated as graphic designer from the UNAM Visual Arts School. From 1996 to 2001 she worked at the Digital Graphics Workshop at the Centro Multimedia, Centro Nacional de las Artes doing research projects about the image. From 2004 to 2005 she worked coordinating technology research area and the Sala del Cielo at the Centro de la Imagen. She now holds the National Creators System grant, from the FONCA (mexican fund for culture and the arts). Among her solo exhibitions in Mexico and abroad are: 2003 PROTOTIPOS 2.1 Antropometría cyborg, presented in the Caja Negra, MUCA, and in the Instituto de México in Paris, France. Photo España, in the Instituto de México in Madrid, Spain, curated by Alejandro Castellote. In 1998 El Hombre Ilustrado, in the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Mexico and then in Galería Belia de Vico Arte Contemporáneo in Guatemala.
Maria Jose Cuevas
Born in Mexico City in 1972. Graphic designer with a very personal signature that revises popular culture. She started making video in 2005, her videos are ironic acid views of society and personal dramas Her video work has been shown in several countries like Spain, Germany, Argentina, France, Canada, Colombia, The United States, South Africa, Venezuela and Mexico. She got a mention for her video “Mal de amores” in the Cuadro Festival of Short Films in Mexico City.
Daniel Monroy
Born in México city in 1980
Studied visual arts at the Centro de Artes Audiovisuales en Guadalajara, Jalisco.
His work has been screened at festivals such as the 2nd Festival de Cine de Morelia 2004 , festival Cuadro in Mexico City. 2005, and Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporanero(FICCO) 2006.
Yoshua Okón
(born in Mexico City, 1970 Lives and works in Mexico City and Los Angeles)
Yoshua Okón’s work, like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera, blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation and puts into question habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality. For example, in Oríllese a la Orilla (1999), Okón convinced cops to perform absurd tasks (twirling their nightsicks, dancing). In another video-taped performance, Coyotería(2003), he re-enacted Joseph Beuys’ 1974 cohabitation with a coyote by confining himself with a human “coyote” hired to act like the canine coyote (“coyote” is Mexican slang for the unsavory middlemen who facilitate interactions between the government and civilians and who also smuggle migrants across the Mexico-US border). Okón has shown his work at the Kunstwerke in Berlin, P.S.1-MoMA and the New Museum in NY, the Istanbul Biennial, Galleria Francesca Kaufmann in Milan, The Project in NY and Galería Enrique Guerrero in Mexico City amongst others.
In1994, he co-founded La Panadería, an independent space dedicated to the exhibition and discussion of contemporary culture, a project which he directed for 8 years. Since 2002, Okón has also been a visiting teacher at the University of California, San Diego.
Accompanying the exhibition “…and Nixon’s coming” | the draft, ZONE: CONTEMPORARY ARTS presented Artist’s Talk and Reading. Mr. Baker read from “…and the Nixon’s coming” | the draft and discussed the works in the exhibition as well as relationship between criticism and fiction.
“ . . . and Nixon’s coming” combines art, fiction, and design to create a multifaceted narrative that arcs from the Moscow show trials of 1937 to President Nixon’s resignation, in 1974. Divided into four sections, the work views the turbulent artistic and social ferment of the mid-20th century through the experiences of the story’s main character, Kirby Holland, and through his artwork, including academic drawings, comic-book illustrations, and amalgams of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and graphics. Whether figurative or abstract, none of the art functions as illustration; rather, the images create a parallel track to the text. Holland progresses from earnest art student to member of an army unit charged with repatriating Nazi loot to comic-book illustrator caught up in McCarthy-era witch hunts to determined and eclectic painter at a time—the 1970s—when painting was viewed by many as irrelevant, if not dead.
The Brooklyn Rail reviews RC Baker’s solo exhibition, “…and Nixon’s coming” the draft
Zhang Hongtu’s works were shown at his solo exhibition, Culture Mixmaster Zhang Hongtu, at The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University: September 25 – December 22, 2018.
Press Release at the Beach Museum of Art.
Internationally acclaimed artist Zhang Hongtu has called many different places home and experienced life as an outsider at different times. Hegrew up in China as a member of the Muslim minority and because of his religious and political backgrounds, suffered persecution during the regime of Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong. In 1982, he moved to New York City to study art and start a new life. This large exhibition, the first solo show of the artist in the Midwest, brings together early and up-to-the-minute recent works highlighting the artist’s endeavors in expressing his hybrid cultural roots.
Zhang’s travels around China as a young artist, most especially his study trip to Dunhuang in the western province of Gansu, proved seminal to his development. Dunhuang was an important stop along the network of trade routes known as the Silk Road, which connected Europe and Africa to the Middle East and Asia. Through the Silk Road, Buddhism traveled from India to China, resulting in the establishment of Buddhist cave temples around Dunhuang between the fourth and fourteenth centuries. The cave temples featured painting styles different from what Zhang had learned in art school and showed signs of the mural artists’ awareness of European painting.Works on display at “Culture Mixmaster” demonstrate Zhang’s lifelong interest in the cycle of travel, immigration, transmission of ideas, and cultural cross-pollination. Included are an oil painting applying the signature style of Vincent van Gogh to a landscape scene from a famous Chinese ink painting, and a ping-pong table that requires players to avoid letting the ball fall through cut-outs in the shape of the head of Chairman Mao.
Major support for this exhibition is provided by a grant from the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation’s Lincoln & Dorothy I. Deihl Community Grant Program, with additional sponsorship by Anderson Bed & Breakfast and Terry and Tara Cupps.
Source: https://beach.k-state.edu/explore/exhibitions/culture-mixmaster.html
Culture Mixmaster Zhang Hongtu
The Mariana Kistler Beach Museum of Art
Kansas State University
September 25 – December 22, 2018
Accompanying the exhibition, CAGE NAM JUNE: A Multimedia Friendship, at the opening night performance on October 5, 7pm, the renowned Cage interpreter, Margaret Leng Tan, celebrate the Cage-Paik legacy with her toy piano/toy instrumental Hommage to John Cage/Nam June Paik.
Program
HOMMAGE to JOHN CAGE/NAM JUNE PAIK
by
MARGARET LENG TAN
toy piano, toy instruments
HOMMAGE to NAM JUNE PAIK (2006) Margaret Leng Tan
(first performance)
SUITE FOR TOY PIANO (1948) John Cage
4′ 33″ (1952) John Cage
from OLD McDONALD’S YELLOW SUBMARINE (2004) Erik Griswold
BICYCLE LEE HOOKER
toy piano, bicycle bell and horn, train whistle
CHOOKS Erik Griswold
toy piano and wood blocks
5’29.75″ FOR SIX TOY PLAYER PIANOS/
Elegy for Nam June (2006) Margaret Leng Tan
(first performance)
STAR-SPANGLED ETUDE #3 (“Furling Banner”) (1996) Raphael Mostel
toy piano, siren, whistle, cap gun
Thursday, October 5th 2006
7pm
Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. Embracing aspects of theater, choreography, performance and even “props” such as the teapot she “plays” in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real,Tan has brought to the avant-garde, a measure of good old-fashioned showmanship tempered with a disciplinary rigor inherited from her mentor John Cage. This has won Tan acceptance far beyond the norm for performers of avant-garde music, as she is regularly featured at international festivals, records often for adventurous labels such as Mode and New Albion and has appeared on American public television, Lincoln Center and even at Carnegie Hall.
Born in Singapore, Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Juilliard, but youthful restlessness and a desire to explore the crosscurrents between Asian music and that of the West led her to Cage. This sparked an active collaboration between Cage and Tan that lasted from 1981 to his death, during which Tan gained recognition as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Cage’s piano music, partly through her New Albion recordings, Daughters of the Lonesome Isleand The Perilous Night/Four Walls. After Cage’s death in 1992, she was chosen as the featured performer in a tribute to his memory at the 45th Venice Biennale.
Tan takes a lively interest in the musical potential of unconventional and unlikely instruments, and in 1997 her groundbreaking CD, The Art of the Toy Piano on Point Music/Universal Classics elevated the lowly toy piano to the status of a “real” instrument. Tan is certainly the world’s first, and so far, only professional toy piano virtuoso. Since then her curiosity has extended to other toy instruments as well, substantiating her credo “Poor tools require better skills” (Marcel Duchamp).
Tan favors music that confronts and defies the established boundaries of the piano and her toy instruments and has collaborated with like-minded composers to create works for her, such as Somei Satoh, Tan Dun, Michael Nyman, Julia Wolfe, Toby Twining and Ge Gan-ru; she is also a favorite of composer George Crumb. Tan’s authority on matters of Cage has evolved from that of an expert interpreter to responsible scholar protecting the textual integrity of his work; Tan edited the fourth volume of Cage’s piano music for C. F. Peters and in 2006 gave the premiere of his newly discovered 1944 work Chess Pieces, which she also edited for publication. Tan’s Mode DVD of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes includes a video in which she examines the original, 1940s era preparation materials for the work. Photogenic and comfortable with the camera, Tan is the subject of a feature documentary by filmmaker Evans Chan, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan,which receives its New York premiere at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater on September 23/24.
Accompanying the exhibition, CAGE NAM JUNE: A Multimedia Friendship, ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts presents:
Panel Discussion in Paris during Digital Video Art Fair
Moderated by George Quasha
Panelists:
artist Jackie Matisse
author Charles Stein
artist Gary Hill
artist Molly Davies
artist Tom Johnson
Saturday, October 28th 2006
6pm
at Theatre La Reine Blanche
2 bis passage Ruelle, 75019 Paris, France
Molly Davies
Molly Davies started making experimental films in the late 1960s in New York City. For multi media performance pieces she has collaborated with artists including John Cage, David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, Lou Harrison, Michael Nyman, Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, Suzushi Hanayagi, Sage Cowles, Polly Motley, Jackie Matisse and Anne Carson. Her work has been presented at such sites as the Venice Film Festival, the Centre Pompidou, Musee de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musee Art Contemporain Lyon, The Getty, Theatre Am Turm, the Whitney Museum, the Walter Arts Center, the Kitchen, La Mama Etc., Dance Theatre Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and the Indonesian Dance Festival. Her work is in the collections of the Getty Research Institute, the Musee Art Contemporain Lyon and the Walker Art Center. She teaches courses in design for inter-media performances at universities in the United States, Europe and Asia.
Gary Hill
Gary Hill is one of the most important contemporary artists investigating the relationships between words and electronic images — an inquiry that has dominated the video art of the past decade. Originally trained as a sculptor, Hill began working in video in 1973 and has produced a major body of single-channel videotapes and video installations that includes some of the most significant works in the field of video art. His first tapes explored formal properties of the emerging medium, particularly through integral conjunctions of electronic visual and audio elements.
His installations and tapes have been seen throughout the world, in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Documenta 8, Kassel, West Germany; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Video Sculpture Retrospective 1963-1989, Cologne, West Germany, among other festivals and institutions. Hill’s work has also been the subject of retrospectives and one-person shows at The American Center, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 2nd International Video Week, St. Gervais, Geneva; Musee d’Art Moderne, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gary Hill created new large scale works for his solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, October 27, 2006 – February 4, 2007.
Jackie Matisse
Born in France, Jackie Matisse lived in New York until 1954. Since then she has lived in Paris making frequent visits to New York. Between 1959 and 1968 she worked for Marcel Duchamp, completing the assemblage of the “Boite en Valise”. At this time using her married name, Jacqueline Monnier, she began to make kites “in order to play with color and line in the sky”. In 1980 she showed kites which were created to be used underwater at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, and since then has continued to make kitelike objects intended for three different kinds of space: the sky, the sea, and indoor space, all linked through her use of movement.
George Quasha
Artist and poet George Quasha works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. His axial stones and axialdrawingshave been exhibited in New York’s Chelsea at Baumgartner Gallery and ZONE Chelsea Center for the Arts, and elsewhere, and are featured in the newly published book, Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance(Foreword by Carter Ratcliff) (North Atlantic Books: Berkeley).
For his video installation art is: Speaking Portraits (in the performative indicative),he has filmed some 500 artists, poets, and composers (in 7 countries and 17 languages) saying “what art is.” His video works (including Pulp Friction, Axial Objects, Verbal Objects) have appeared internationally in museums, galleries, schools, and biennials. A 25 year performance collaboration (video/language/sound) continues with Gary Hill and Charles Stein.
In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in video art.
His other 14 books include poetry (Somapoetics, Giving the Lily Back Her Hands,Ainu Dreams [with Chie Hasegawa],Preverbs); anthologies (America a Prophecy [with Jerome Rothenberg], Open Poetry[with Ronald Gross],An Active Anthology[with Susan Quasha], TheStation Hill Blanchot Reader); and writing on art (Gary Hill: Language Willing;with Charles Stein: Tall Ships, HanD HearD/liminal objects,Viewer).
Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He has taught at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Bard College, the New School, and Naropa University. With Susan Quasha he is founder/publisher of Barrytown/Station Hill Press in Barrytown, New York.
Charles Stein
Charles Stein is the author of Persephone Unveiled (a study of the Eleusinian Mysteries), eleven books of poetry including The Hat Rack Treeand the forthcoming From Mimir’s Headfrom Station Hill /Barrytown, Ltd., a long-term poetic project, theforestforthetrees, translations of Greek epic, philosophical, and Hermetic poetry; a critical study of the poet Charles Olson and his use of the writings of C.G. Jung called The Black Chrysanthemum(also from Station Hill Press). His work has been anthologized in such collections as Poems for the Millennium (U. of California Press), Hazy Moon Enlightenment(Shambala),Technicians of the Sacred(U. of California Press),Text-Sound Texts(Morrow), Open Poetry(Simon and Schuster) and has appeared in such magazines as American Poetry Review, Alcheringa, Caterpillar, Conjunctions, Ear Magazine, Perspectives of New Music, Temblor, Sulphur, Open Space,and many other poetry journals. He was the editor of an anthology Being=Space X Action: Searches for Freedom of Mind in Art, Mathematics and Mysticism.
He received an Individual Writer’s Grant from the National endowment for the Arts for 1978-79, and was the winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize in 1973.
He plays Gregory Bateson in video-installation artist Gary Hill’sWhy Do Things Get in a Muddle?and is one of the two performers (with George Quasha) in Gary Hill’s Tale Enclosure. He collaborated with Gary Hill and Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson in the creation of Dark Resonances—a performance/installation at the Colosseum in Rome. For three decades he has worked with George Quasha in the production of “dialogical” critical texts, including three books: Hand Heard/liminal objects: Gary Hill’s Projective Installations—Number 1, Tall Ships: Gary Hill’s Projective Installations—Number 2,and Viewer: Gary Hill’s Projective Installations—Number 3.His other collaborative writing with George Quasha related to Gary Hill’s work has appeared in art catalogues of the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Kunsthalle of Vienna, the Barbara Gladstone Gallery of New York, Public Access of Toronto, the Voyager Laserdisc Gary Hill, etc.
In collaboration with Gary Hill and George Quasha, he has performed at the Long Beach Museum of Art, California, The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, The Rhinebeck Performing Arts Center.
As a multi-media artist and “Sound Poet” his graphic “Text-Sound Texts” have been anthologized and performed by himself and others; his drawings have appeared as accompaniments to his own poetry. He has performed his sound poetry at the International Sound Poetry Festival, The New Moon Festival, The New Image Theater, as well as at numerous University sponsored, music, and literary venues.
His photography has appeared in exhibitions at The College Art Gallery of SUNY New Paltz, The University of Connecticut Library in Storrs, The Arnolfini Arts Center in Rhinebeck, New York, the Robert Louis Stevenson School in New York, New York, and on the covers of numerous books of poetry and fiction.
He holds a Ph.D. in literature and has taught at SUNY Albany, Bard College’s Music Program Zero, and The Naropa Institute.
He currently resides in Barrytown, New York.
