41 Franklin Street (between Broad and North streets)
April 9 to July 10, 2016
Stamford, CT, 203 595 5211

Intersectionality, an interpretive social and critical hermeneutic, insists that not one, but many identities (including gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality/citizenship) interact and overlap to shape one’s experiences. “All Byte: Feminist Intersections in Video Art,” at Franklin Street Works, takes this feminist framework seriously, demonstrating how patriarchy and feminism shape art making and history while addressing colonialism, queerness, and masculinity. Solicited through an open call invitation, the videos in the exhibition, by nine artists and artist collectives, were curated in collaboration with the University of Connecticut Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Film and Television Program at Sacred Heart University. This unique and smart collaboration is especially fitting for considering collective and interdisciplinary analysis.

Texas-based collective Kegels for Hegel, whose music videos are featured throughout the show, practice their feminism through intellectual cheek, deflating the straight, white, male canon of philosophy with satirical works such as Bite Me (Love Song to Friedrich Nietzsche) (2013), and Thing (Love Song to Karl Marx and Friends) (2016). Lyrics about Marx include “Your material conception of history/ taught me about commodities/ explained that my alienation/ was a form of object subjugation.” Their punk DIY mode and production builds on some of the legacy of third-wave feminists and Riot Grrrls (1990s–present), such as Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, who unapologetically reflect feminist concerns and analyses in their music.

Similarly, Macho Intellectual (2015), a music video by the Mexican collective INVASORIX, features groups of men and women in drag recreating photographs of (mostly male-dominated) art collectives throughout recent history, including the Bauhaus and the Guerrilla Girls. The song lampoons chauvinists and achieves a historical and structural critique of intellectual circles. Both INVASORIX and Kegels for Hegel simultaneously mock and build from the intellectual and artistic movements they reference, including Dada and Marxism.

Michelle Marie Charles’s Explicit and Deleted (2012) uses the genre of hip-hop music videos to satirize black, heterosexual masculinity in drag. Although silly and exaggerated, the video contains pointed analysis around double standards, sexualization, and commodified bodies. The video creates a jolting moment of unexpected language when it asks, outright, but only half-seriously, “What kind of so-called first-world country would even allow their economy to be structured in such a way where [women performing for men in music videos] might be the best viable financial option for half of the population?” While different in tone, style, and narrative, Virginia Lee Montgomery’s The Alien Has to Learn (2015) also explores masculinity, depicting the gendered performance of corporate professionalism at a Las Vegas technology conference — and ending with an ejaculating fire fountain.

Nicole Maloof’s Funny Street Names (2015) recounts the artist’s childhood through a disjointed narrative bouncing off, among other images, Dunkin Donuts, dinosaurs, and racial slurs. She unpacks her identity through references both biblical and historic, with commercials and home videos — all mediated through description using a computerized voice. The video presents onscreen text and narration in both Korean and English, toggling between the two as much as through the disparate mementos. Funny Street Names utilizes the language of computers — including YouTube clips, panning shots of Google Earth, and typing on Microsoft Word –– to write and visually compose a unique, structured narrative. Its (pop) cultural imagery and text reflect on colonialism and successfully translate the public to the personal.

Like Funny Street Names, Sunita Prasad’s Recitations Not From Memory (2014) also centers reading. It depicts men reading aloud, in the first person, the intimate stories of women: experiencing street harassment, gendered housework, workplace discrimination, and marriage dowries. The men read (often awkwardly) from a teleprompter in everyday settings, mimicking the class position of the women who submitted the stories. Prasad tactfully highlights gendered experiences and interrogates the relationship between the way they are spoken , the way they are read, and their materiality. In both Maloof and Prasad’s videos, acts of reading point to feminist concerns of voice, agency, and identity. Maloof and Prasad disconnect the voice of their narratives, respectively deferring to an impersonal computerized voice and the awkward voice of a speaker whose gender differs from that of the author. These displacements underscore the identities involved and create intimacy with the viewer.

A digital video show still draws attention to spatial, material curation. Curator Terri C. Smith’s skillful configuration of space works to create a number of dynamic viewing experiences — from the communal to the individual. Montgomery’s The Alien Has to Learn requires standing, open air viewing, juxtaposing the sit-down-with-headphones consumption of Maloof’s Funny Street Names. Downstairs, Prasad’s Recitations Not From Memory is shown in the gallery’s black box theater. Display technology is also varied in the show, from wall projections to flat screen monitors and to the especially charming retro CRT television playing Kegels for Hegel’s songs.

The show includes an impressive range of tone and approach, refusing one aesthetic or narrative, and instead providing many entry points to the feminist ideas and issues addressed by the videos. Leveraging contemporary video-making strategies, the videos explore and demand a reflection of the personal and political, of bodies and institutions, of history and possibility. The 15 artworks in “All Byte” were all made within the last five years and all by emerging artists. This timeframe, as well as many of the videos’ close relationship to technology –– seen in Charles and Kegels for Hegel’s editing and in Maloof’s stunning technological intertextual layering –– localizes the show within so-called fourth wave feminism. This emerging construct incorporates the intersectionality, queerness, and punk of third wave feminism and brings new possibilities for feminist thought and practice. “All Byte” thoughtfully shows a range of what feminism can look like in video art, and illustrates some of the ways emerging artists and innovative art spaces like Franklin Street Works will continue to play an important role in highlighting evolving feminist politic and aesthetic.

The post Bytes and Biting Satire: Feminist Video at Franklin Street Works appeared first on artcritical.

July 17 to September 13, 2015
50 Orange Street
New Haven, CT, 203 772 2709

This summer marks one year since New York City police choked Eric Garner to death. Since and before then, an uprising of activism and conversation has highlighted systemic racism and its link to criminalization and brutality. Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns,” curated by Sarah Fritchey with Titus Kaphar and Leland Moore, tackles these issues in a group show innovatively framed around seriality.

Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (2011–present) began with the artist discovering a series of other men in the criminal justice system sharing his father’s name. From the project’s Asphalt and Chalk Series, X (2015) overlaps three black men killed by police: Michael Brown, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo; while XVII (2015) stacks three Jeromes on top of each other. The poignant connections made in these pieces through repetition set the tone for the show.

Adrian Piper also explores the connotations of names with Everything #19.3: NYT Portrait of Megan Williams (2007-8). A search for images of a twenty-year-old African American woman named Megan Williams kidnapped by white perpetrators resulted in exclusively white women and men unrelated to the incident. Piper tightly prints the Megans from the image results and repeats the mug shots of the perpetrators.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with how images of death and disaster could be repeated until they became meaningless. His obsession remains pertinent in our contemporary 24-hour news cycles and perpetually refreshed feeds. Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot (1964) reflects upon the persistent question of police brutality. The piece’s appropriation of a Life magazine image feels immediate in its cold, blurred reproduction.

Connecticut-based Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s Grave Marker Series (2014) reads with the pop sensibility of Warhol’s protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat and uses bright house paint, oil sticks, and crayon on recycled paper. The pieces commemorate black parents of murdered sons and allude visually and linguistically to African patterns. The language scribbled and repeated on the markers (“Boo!,” “Y do I frighten?,” “I am ur boogie man”) addresses the systemic fear of black bodies.

Language is also central to Jamal Cyrus’s Eroding Witness 7 Series (2014), four pages of laser-cut papyrus reproducing headlines covering the 1970 shooting of organizer Carl Hampton. These works, which include both mainstream and alternative presses from Houston, demonstrate the range of language used to report the event (“Black Militant Slain on Dowling” contrasts with “Exclusive Eyewitness Accounts: Police Fired First”).

“Arresting Patterns” insists on plain and direct confrontation. Dread Scott’s two-channel video Stop (2008) (in collaboration with Joann Kushner) depicts six men of color from New York and London stating how many times they have been stopped by police. Adrian Piper’s Safe (#1-4) (1990) corners the viewer with four images of smiling black families captioned “We are around you,” “You are safe,” “We are among you,” and “We are within you.” The installation, which contemplates questions of assimilation, includes self-aware audio of the artist talking as a white viewer who is having a “really hard time” with the piece.

The works in the show are as much about looking as they are about looking away: Kaphar’s dizzying portraits contain multiple pairs of eyes; Scott’s stopped men stare; Piper’s black families wave. The show is aware of the things that we can’t look at—either because they’re blurred by Google Maps like the unseen jail in the work of Maria Gaspar (Wretches and Paramount (Extreme Landscape Series; Google study of Cook County Jail in Chicago), 2014-5) or because they’re fading and fragile like Jamal Cyrus’s papyrus newspapers. It knows that we’re constantly doing both.

Along with “Arresting Patterns,” Artspace is also showcasing work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program, this year led by Titus Kaphar, Aaron Jafferis, and Dexter Singleton and inspired by The Jerome Project. The New Haven high school apprentices worked closely with visual and performance artists to create work contextualized by a curriculum and field trips. Kaphar discussed processing the heavy experience of visiting a corrections facility with the apprentices and assuring them that there was art to be made about those moments.

The work impressively echoes the ideas of “Arresting Patterns” and shows a range of approaches: from Ruby Gonzalez’s acrylic abstractions (Untitled I) to Emanuel Luck’s realistic white pencil portrait, Don’t Chalk Your Ancestors. In collective collages (Sinque 1, Sinque 2), the apprentices also addressed complex the history of their city, researching New Haven’s cartography and its role in the Amistad trials to inform their art.

The work of Arianna Alamo, entitled Martyrs and The Prophet (MLK), depicts the mug shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, among others. Using tar paper and white chalk (like Kaphar), Alamo frames the figures in a gold Byzantine halo, achieving an almost Warholian allusion to devotion. Most striking was the halo around King: a pop collage composed of gold, consumerist jewelry.

Artspace’s approach to both shows is effectively interdisciplinary. Looking beyond the language of art and the space itself, the works are contextualized not just through wall labels, but also through takeaway cards with statistics relevant to the ideas presented in the show. Further contextualization is provided with the space’s reading room, which includes a timeline of American racial violence and books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).

The conversation about race and criminalization goes beyond the content of this (or any) show. Less explicit in the works displayed are the patterns of policing femininity, queerness, and nationality—which often also intersect with race and with violence.

Still, Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns” and the work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program make important and engaging connections through seriality, language, and confrontation. No matter the age of the work or the artist, the show’s selections feel immediate and challenging.

In continuing the urgent advocacy activism addressing these layered issues, admitting patterns and highlighting repeating acts—of violence, of incarceration, of policing—will remain critical.

Artspace aims to continue the conversation with a free two-day conference on September 12th and 13th at the Yale University Art Gallery. Visit arrestingpatterns.org for registration and more information.

The post Aesthetics and Social Justice: “Arresting Patterns” at ArtSpace appeared first on artcritical.

June 13 to August 30, 2015
41 Franklin Street
Stamford, CT, 203 595 5211

Over the last few years, Connecticut has passed progressive policies regarding in-state tuition for undocumented students, drive-only permits for undocumented residents, and protections for domestic workers. Franklin Street Works, located in Stamford, one of the state’s most immigrant-heavy cities, is currently exhibiting “Acting on Dreams: The State of Immigrant Rights, Conditions, and Advocacy in the United States.” This group show is curated by Yaelle S. Amir and tackles immigration issues through a variety of political and visual tactics, creating an engaging and moving viewer experience.

The Index of the Disappeared: 34,000 Beds (2015) is a multimedia installation by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani that features a poignant and expansive archive of immigrants who have disappeared since the attacks of September 11, 2001. In shelved binders that viewers are encouraged to flip through, the archive materializes both the scope and the invisibility of the disappearances. The binders’ official documents, secondary literature, and personal narratives highlight systems of deportation, as well as the nature of the language and protocols used. Selected passages are collaged in an accompanying light box, as well as in take-away postcards. Around the shelves are 34,000 silkscreened beds, representing the detention bed quota required by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The prints recall Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, which depicts car crashes, electric chairs, and other disasters in similar, brutal repetition.

A few weeks before the show’s opening, the Connecticut legislature passed the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Marisa Morán Jahn’s (Studio REV-) project CareForce: Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers, Families and Allies United for Sustainable Care Solutions (in collaboration with the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance and Caring Across Generations) utilizes tactics of empowerment, advocacy, and education. The display features an informational video, pocket resources (including Rights and Responsibilities Under the Massachusetts Domestic Bill of Rights & Other Laws, 2015), as well as a photo corner where participants are encouraged to take pictures of themselves as superheroes. Brightness and effectiveness coexist in Jahn’s display. Imagining domestic workers as superheroes and asking viewers to don masks for a photo booth is as playful as it is political. Considering that only seven states have enacted the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights since the first, in Massachusetts in 2004, and even the limited scope of what recently passed in Connecticut, the CareForce remains relevant and timely.

Through photographs, paintings, and souvenirs, Jenny Polak’s work depicts activist efforts against a for-profit detention center in Crete, Illinois. A background in urban planning gave Polak a particular entry point to a case where the decision about the detention center came down to the city’s planning committee. Her multi-media paintings capture city’s mobilization and the hearings (Under-painting for a History: Citizens and Immigrants Converge on the For-Profit Detention Center Site, 2015 and Under-painting for a History: The Village Council Discusses the For-Profit Detention Center Plan, 2015); photographs capture the activists and their allies ((n)IMBY, 2012); and 3D-printed souvenirs ((n)IMBY—Souvenirs, 2012; (n)IMBY—Souvenirs at Home, 2013) capture an effort to historicize the successful campaign. As with the ongoing work of CareForce, keeping for-profit detention centers out of communities across the country continues to be an important endeavor.

Queerocracy’s 2011 Columbus Day action (in collaboration with Carlos Motta) sought to publicly vocalize a timeline the queer migrations, spanning from 1492 to 2013. Newsprint copies of the timeline piled alongside the projection of the action (A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective) served as a gesture of connection and physicality. The timeline’s extensive historical, policy, and organizing milestones communicate how the vulnerabilities of queerness and immigration have constantly intertwined. The piece’s audio — the voices of the action’s participants dictating the events on the timeline — echoes powerfully through the gallery.

Another collective in the show is CultureStrike, co-founded by Favianna Rodriguez, whose Migration is Beautiful monarch butterfly icon has become ubiquitous with immigrant rights. The show includes Migration Now!, a diverse and stirring portfolio of posters by CultureStrike and JustSeeds with messages such as “Dignity Not Detention,” “Deporting and Detaining Parents Shatters Families,” and “Stop the Raids,” as well as a station encouraging the coloring-in of one’s own wings (Migration is Beautiful Coloring Activity, 2013) .

“Acting On Dreams” is insistently interactive. It asks the viewer to not just to look, but to take — to flip through binders, to color, even. Through takeaways like the CareForce resource cards, the Migration is Beautiful monarch, and the queer migrations timeline by Queerocracy, the viewer becomes the recipient of a reminder — of evidence that makes the issues expressed difficult to ignore. The show demonstrates an understanding of mass — mass migration, mass organizing efforts, mass deportations — and couples it with an understanding of individual agency and experience. Although diverse in its media, tones, and approaches, the show retains cohesion.

Perhaps most striking are the ways in which “Acting on Dreams” consistently encourages personal connections to issues that are too often abstracted and made impersonal. It respects and successfully highlights the visual and textual language of activism and couples systemic analysis with individual expression. As Connecticut and the nation continue to address complex immigration issues, the perspectives offered by the works in the show are bound to remain pertinent.

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