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Ugly car door ding:
spring’s broken nose
can’t be made new.
Civilian Art Projects & Curator’s Office, Washington DC, team up to present ‘Craigslist’. Featuring the work of Jason Horowitz, Jason Zimmerman, John & Joseph Dumbacher. From the press release:
craigslist explores how four artists utilize this renowned community website as a conceptual component in their artistic practice. The exhibition features works by the artist team Joseph Dumbacher & John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz, and Jason Zimmerman and is co-curated by Jayme McLellan, Director of Civilian Art Projects, and Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator’s Office. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, March 21 from 7 - 9 pm.
An essay by Andrea Pollan will accompany the exhibition. The artist team of Joseph and John Dumbacher solicit willing models on craigslist to meet them in movie theaters where they create haunting and identity-obscuring photographic portraits. Similarly, Jason Horowitz advertises for models to pose in his studio where he shoots extreme close-ups of their body parts and then explodes the scale of the image to create an unsettling nexus of anonymous portraiture and landscape. Jason Zimmerman exploits images posted by users on craigslist.org as his raw material. He creates digital photo albums of hundreds of individuals who publicize their sexual availability by uploading images of their naked bodies but with their facial identities distorted or obscured.
Civilian Art Projects, Curator’s Office, Craigslist
Image: Jason Horowitz, Liz #4, archival digital print, 42″ x63″, ed. 1/5, 2006
This image held here
Hype cycle graphs can be sourced for consumer e-learning and a host of techie phenomena. What’s curious is what other social trends they might be applied to…
This year is the fortieth anniversary of the student protests and worker strikes that marked 1968. Given contemporary art’s current fascination with tropes of re-enactment and restaging as ways of addressing past political moments and unrealised opportunities, it seems likely that these events will be re-looked at this year.
I discovered recently, quite by accident, that one of the students I lecture in my history of visual culture class attended the same art institution I did, then at a different location, in 1968. It struck me as uncanny, that I am in a position of lecturing such a person about the situationists. Me, who was not even alive in 1968, and she, who actually participated, if only tangentially in the events of time.
I carried out a short interview with her, extracted below, that touches on some of these ideas about memory, particularly its possibiltites and overlaps with fiction. This will likely develop into a more substantial piece of work in the future… many thanks to Linda for her time and conversation.
‘Ethnographies of the Future takes into account the vast geographies impacted by colonial rule by bringing together artists whose works present a critical relationship to post-colonial identity politics. The artists in the exhibition, with their diverse historical reference points, make clear that the terms of cultural identification are unstable. In installations, videos, and mixed-media works, they suggest an ever-shifting discursive field where the possibilities for defining ethnography are unending. Drawing on histories of the Caribbean, South Asia, Israel, China, Korea and Japan, the South Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, the exhibition addresses colonial rule from a contemporary, global perspective.
Ethnographies of the Future is staged in two parts: a gallery installation that resembles a museological presentation of ethnographic objects and a video screening. Both components of the exhibition capture the time-based aspects of post-colonial identity politics where locational identity, cultural history, and the body as territory, set the stage for a discussion on the construction of identity.’
Artists include Elia Alba, Rajkamal Kahlon, Seung Young Kim and Hironori Murai, Simone Leigh, Ohad Meromi, Marc Andre Robinson, Pak Sheung Chuen, Allison Smith Sriwhana Spong, Roberto Visani with John Movius. On April 16, film and video works by Pedro Barateiro, Lene Berg, Nao Bustamante, Katia Kameli, Grace Ndiritu, Sriwhana Spong, and others will be screened.
Image Credit: Ohad Meromi, Moon Colony, 2005, video still. Courtesy of the artist and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York.
Curated by Sara Reisman, March 18 - May 5 2008 at the Bric Rotunda Gallery
I am currently involved with a research project to result in site-specific artworks in the area where I live. I am finding this difficult as I’m having to confront head-on my position within the imagined polarities of rural/ urban, insider/ outsider, and art that is made for ‘here’ and ‘there’.
A week or two ago I accessed the Irish Times archive and compiled the series of articles written by Emer McNamara, about her move from Dublin to Leitrim in the late nineties (every second Thursday September 1999 – June 2000).
This series was called ‘Living on Main Street’ and contain detailed descriptions that move from observations about people and life in the town (names included), to the author’s personal life, to the sense of the broader social changes happening in the country as a whole, and the northwest in particular. They make interesting, if slightly uncomfortable reading – I can identify with her migration from the east and its economic pull, but not her decision to make such a very public diary. It feels raw to me, and I can only wonder at the social and emotional conflicts that must have played out within the micropolitics of the town.
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