Show # 118
HAUNTED SUMMER
Curated by Jacob Rhodes
Antonia-Marie Kim
KC Crow Maddux
Ruth Rodriguez-Guerrero
Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston
Noelle Timmons
Jesus Treviño
Maria P. Vila
Reception: June 26, 4-6
June 26- July 31, 2021
“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack.
We should not long to return, my friend. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” -Sonya Renee Taylor
This is a Haunted Summer, haunted by white supremacy, haunted by BIPOC deaths, haunted by systematic hate, haunted by pandemic deaths, haunted by capitalism, corruption, privilege, and thousands of other things that undermine our health and abilities to maintain strong, loving communities. All of our summers have been haunted by these, but 2020-21 brought more eyes to these ghosts. Our past(s) seem laid bare as we sit on the precipice of this moment. Will we consume what we have learned and let it nurture our understanding of each other or will we forget the work and slip back to an older season of ourselves?
The artists in Haunted Summer reflect on this historic time and offer the viewer the opportunity to collect and construct the realities brought to the surface over the course of the long 2020.
Antonia-Marie Kim’s “To Carry Bodies You Barely Know (155.3 miles)” speaks to the over 3 million COVID deaths and those left behind in grief and depression. Kim created hand-made replicas of body bags that were placed in rented U-haul trucks due to the lack of coroner storage in NYC hospitals. Here the bags hang open like vacated cocoons, letting the viewer imagine themselves or possibly those who just vacated these hollow containers.
Antonia-Marie Kim “To Carry Bodies You Barely Know (155.3 miles)” , 2021, Steel, wire rope, aluminum wire, plexiglass, and embossed faux leather, 62 x 85 x 96”, Price Upon Request
KC Crow Maddux is interested in acts of persistent triangulation through the symbolic when engaging with others and ourselves. Maddux believes this causes us to limit our ability to see the specific because our imagination is caught up with the general. Maddux’s sculpture Valentine 2021 stands as a new monument to this, softly celebrating and inviting viewers to look closer at cropped images of Maddux body and wonder how stable our assumptions are. Something as simple as hair can dictate a perceived gender, and thus role and limitations within a culture. But this is only the opening of our conversion.
KC Crow Maddux “Valentine” 2021 Resin, Fiberglass cloth, Transparent inkjet transfer, wax, MDF, paint, $7,000
Ruth Rodriguez-Guerrero’s Our Lady Of 2021, finds the artist grappling with decolonizing her European-centric art history education. Drawing on one of her undergraduate oil paintings based on a renaissance pose Rodriguez-Guerrero strips out any ancient medium signs by digitizing and digitally “painting”, collaging and then reprinting the new image on bathroom mat, toilet mat, toilet cover. The viewer is left to wrestle with why these lowly items now ping pong between kitsch sweatshop manufacturing and something that deserves a place in a white box.
Ruth Rodriguez-Guerrero
"Our lady of one" 19" x 31" (rectangular bathmat), digital collage, and acrylic on mat. 2021 $800
"Our lady of two" 15" x 19" (U shape bathmat), digital collage and acrylic on mat. 2021 $500
"Our lady of three" 13" x 17" ( oval bathmat), digital collage and acrylic on mat. 2021 $450
Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston rescued the plywood erected as armor over The Whitney and MOMA from the perceived threat of BLM protests. Using woodcut printing techniques associated with radical political movements, Sidhu and Swainston combined the graffiti left on the plywood with images of the global protests creating multi-layered stories stacked in contrasting colors. The work proposes an exercise for this moment: the more time you spend with the work the more layers unfold, the more you can learn, discover and understand.
Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston “May 29, 2021”, 2021, Woodblock Print on Paper, Unique Artist Proof, Price Upon Request
Noelle Timmons’ painting Wahini (Bets HooHa) looks to a space between present past and future, a longing for ambiguity and a reclamation of chosen identity. She frames a young person of color against an orange, fiery sky, a figure moving toward the uncertain future armed, confident, knowing.
Noelle Timmons “Wahini (Bets HooHa)”, 2020, oil on canvas, 48"x36", $5,400
Jesus Treviño engages art historical genre painting as a structure to talk about the American and Mexican Borderlands.Treviño uses concealment, and disruption in the process of painting to reveal the unresolved tension and agitation in the social geographies of the region in the plight of the people from La Frontera.
Jesus Trevino “Hidden Between the U.S. and Mexico”, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 24”, $900
Jesus Trevino “Asylum Seekers Near Central Blvd”, 2020, Oil on Wood Burned Panel, 24 x 24”, $900
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Maria P. Vila’s “HABITĀR, reminiscences, 2020-present” focuses on creating an artistic event as an experience that occurs in the relationship between participants, artwork, and context. The project began in Santiago de Chile, 2020, with Vila recording testimony about key pandemic issues (sexuality, maternity, mourning, among others.) from all over the world, then editing this material into “Narrativas Colectivas (collective narratives)” which are contained in sonic capsules. For Haunted Summer Vila has taken the next step in this project by writing down the dialogues captured and displaying them as a fragmented manuscript, composed of diminutive samples that still hold pieces of the collective memory. As is customary in Vila’s work, she extends an invitation to the community to actively participate in the piece in order to complete it. As such, we are invited to read the object as if it were a book, activating its performative role; while we are also encouraged to add our own reflections to the collection of psychic samples presented here.
Maria P. Vila’s “HABITĀR, reminiscences,” 2020-present, mixed media, Price upon request