JANUARY 6-29, 2012
Leah Beeferman, Guy Ben-Ari, Catharine Maloney, and Brie Ruais
EXHIBITION DATES: January 6-29, 2012
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 6 from 6 - 11 pm
GALLERY TALK: TBA
GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm
The second of three curated, guest artist exhibitions in Vox Populi’s 2011-12 program, January’s show critically explores art-historical narratives and futuristic tropes - from psychoanalysis, gendered subjectivity, and baroque formlessness, to sci-fi television, physics and geometry.
Brie Ruais’ exhibition Unfolding: Performing Sculpture is an
installation of performance-generated clay sculptures. This series of
sculptures are the result of specific exercises: spreading out her
body-weight in clay, throwing clay into a corner after Serra’s lead
splashes, and sending a wet clay sculpture down river. Her ceramic
work directly implicates the performative body in its form. Her work
engages with the use of clay throughout the history of human
civilization, specifically the persistence of vessel-like and
figurative forms. Ruais’ work investigates sexuality, labor, and
maintenance work, not in contrast to men, but in relation to the
fluidity of women’s roles in society.
For the last three years Catharine Maloney has been combining and recording her interest in men, television, outer space, and play in her photographic series Teleplay, Part I. Bright, makeshift costumes and backdrops are reorganized in awkward collages, displayed alongside lighthearted, glitter, watercolor, blue-tack, and marker pen constructions.
Meant to function as a borderline case for painting, Guy Ben-Ari’s recent work questions its reductive, descriptive, and informative potential to convey philosophical values. Exploring elements of Post-Structuralism and Psychoanalytic Theory, his work takes jokes or visual metaphors for concepts as a starting point. Testing Lacan’s proposition, “The word kills the thing,” Ben-Ari attempts to hold off each painting’s collapse into mere illustration. Ben-Ari’s exhibition is sponsored in part by Artis – Contemporary Israeli Art Fund.
Leah Beeferman’s process is also intellectual and interpretive. Starting with textual and visual research about the universe, laws of physics, and idealized geometry, she uses image-making, animation, and sound to explore these findings. By pairing certain drawings with scientific imagery, Beeferman confuses the idea of an informative discovery with an inventive one.
AT FOURTH WALL
Ellen Cantor
Pinochet Porn (a feature film in progress)
[Curated by Jasmin Tsou]
Pinochet Porn is a soap opera-like narrative about five children growing up during the Pinochet regime, and their subsequent maturation into adulthood. Shot on Super-8, this feature-length film is based on a 2005 hand drawn film script "Circus Lives from Hell". The story while disclosing the intertwined lives of these five characters, also reveals its nature as a microcosm of surrounding political discord, cycles of destruction, and mounting violence. It is at once tragic and comedic. Segments of a particular history are made observable through the circumstances of the lives depicted, all obliquely revolving around the Pinochet regime in Chile. Within this story, childhood fantasy is permeated by structures of annihilation, which the characters later create in their own lives as adults. The story ends with the question: Is tragedy a choice? The title refers to the complex intimate relationships of the characters; but more so, to the regime’s systematic, sadistic destruction of individual lives - policies furtively upheld by the United States, United Kingdom, and the Papacy. This film stretches across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, extending across continents, countries, cities…. It reaches from the shtetl, the barrio, the concentration camp, into a digital age of increasing mobility and globalization. Yet, despite genuine progress, it describes a world plagued by colonialism, imperialism, fascism, and terrorism.
More info here.
[Image above: Catharine Maloney]
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