Gallery Archive
Roxana Pérez-Méndez, Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib, Brent Wahl, Ricardo Miranda, Jason Schiedel
Images
EXHIBITION DATES: March 7 – 30, 2008
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, March 7 from 6-11pm
GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday 12-6pm
GALLERY TALK: With Irene Hoffman, Executive Director, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Sunday March 23 at 1pm
Vox Populi presents exhibitions by members Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, Roxana Pérez-Méndez, and Brent Wahl. The Video Lounge features Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga’s Transmitting Ideology, and in the 4th Room Jason Schiedel’s So Long (Philly) continues.
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Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib
Black Hole
Hironaka and Suib present their first collaborative work--Black Hole. Shot on hi-definition video and incorporating a surround soundtrack made in collaboration with sound artist Eugene Lew, Black Hole presents an obstructed view of confinement and isolation that rests uneasily between noir and horror film genres. Shrouded in darkness, Black Hole directs attention to the construction and subsequent control of narrative that lies at the intersection of moving image culture and politics.
Hironaka has exhibited her video and installation work widely and is the recipient of fellowships from both Pew Fellowships in the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Suib's media-based work has been exhibited recently at the 2007 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and in the form of a commissioned project for the 2007 PhotoMiami art fair. As a curatorial team they founded and program Screening--Philadelphia's only gallery dedicated to the exhibition of cutting-edge works on film and video.
Roxana Pérez-Méndez
Larga Distancia, Memoria Corta
In his 1957 book The Colonizer and The Colonized (1957), Albert Memmi classifies the colonizer as a man who “endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories." To what end has the past been snuffed out and what past will rise from these long scattered ashes? Has the gap between space, time and country, cut our collective memory short? Roxana Pérez-Méndez's new work revisits and re-imagines the colonial past of America, of Philadelphia and of Puerto Rico, poetically suggesting a narrative with a bitter end.
Puerto Rican performance and installation artist, Roxana Pérez-Méndez, received her MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2002. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (’03), among other residencies nationally and internationally. Roxana is an artist/member of the collective Vox Populi Gallery and works as an adjunct Assistant Professor at Temple University and at Drexel University.
Selected for solo shows Fleisher Memorial Challenge (’06), Painted Bride’s 4-Sites series (‘07) and for the Powel House Museum’s Landmarks Contemporary Projects (‘07), Roxana’s media installations, performances, documents, and digital imagery juxtapose, reflect, deconstruct and isolate the strains of difference associated with Puerto Rican culture, class and geopolitical position, the strains that define one as the Other. Using a wide range of tropes and models of modernization and globalization, she builds a “history.”
Brent Wahl
Interplanetary Death Star
Brent Wahl works most often with photography, installation, and time-based media. His work focuses on conjuring the undercurrent of our reality; he is interested in connecting various cultural phenomena, abstraction, magic, time, illusion, and the spectacle.
Brent holds degrees from Pratt Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and his work has been exhibited at Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), Arcadia University Gallery (Glendale, PA), Sackler Center Gallery, Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), the Schafler Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC).
GUEST ARTIST
Jason Schiedel
So Long (Philly)
So Long (Philly) is the second installment of a serial video project by Canadian artist Jason Schiedel. Shown on a television tipped on its side, So Long features a video of a helpless man (played by the artist) falling or flying through a series of everyday landscapes. So Long plumbs the familiar nightmare of a complete loss of bodily control. Its protagonist zooms like a haywire missile past suburban shopping malls and downtown city streets, narrowly missing everything in his path. An ongoing project, So Long incorporates footage from every city in its exhibition history, gradually becoming a piecemeal portrait of the American landscape. A lo-fi disaster movie by way of Looney Tunes and Buster Keaton, So Long also transposes national anxieties about the world stage into our very back yard.
Jason Schiedel holds degrees from the Ontario College of Art and Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work has been featured in exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including Foreign Body at White Columns, New York (2000), Animations at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA (2001), Observatori: 7th International Festival of Contemporary Art in Valencia, Spain (2006), and recently in Pull My Finger at Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts (2007). Currently he is a research affiliate of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
IN THE VIDEO LOUNGE
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga
Transmitting Ideology
Transmitting Ideology will present an installation of 20 wooden guns outfitted with radios broadcasting declarations on freedom and transformation in our society. By manipulating historical and contemporary speeches that have targeted mass audiences, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga presents a poignant critique on the construction of consciousness through the rhetoric of ideology and the refrain of leadership. The radio transmissions framed in hand-crafted wooden AK47s and Uzis point to the power that mass media wields in the dissemination of information.
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga was born of immigrant parents and grew up between Nicaragua and San Francisco and holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been presented around the world most recently at the House of World Culture, Berlin; Laboratorio Art-Alameda, Mexico City; the National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; the New Museum and Momenta Art in New York City.
AT SCREENING
Deborah Stratman
In Order Not To Be Here
Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not To Be Here is an uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. An isolation-based fear (protect us from people not like us). A fear of irregularity (eat at McDonalds, you know what to expect). A fear of thought (turn on the television). A fear of self (don’t stop moving). By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness…an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.
Deborah Stratman is an award-winning filmmaker and artist based in Chicago. She received her M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts and her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1990 she has completed more than a dozen film projects, both on sixteen-millimeter film and on video. These works have been shown at international film festivals—including the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, and the Vienna International Film Festival in Austria—and at art institutions such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
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