THIS MACHINE KILLS__________________
The title of the show directly references American folk legend Woody Guthrie’s iconic guitar text “ This Machine Kills Fascists”, itself a protest piece recreting the musician’s leftist political views. The phrase has been repeatedly adapted by artists and activists, most recently by punk royalty Buzz Osborne of the Melvins for a 2014 solo album named "This Machine Kills Artists". In 2012, journalist Andy Greenberg published a novel titled This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers. A reference to the phrase has also been made in the post-apocalyptic themed video game Fallout 4 in which the words “WELL THIS MACHINE KILLS COMMIES” is etched into the side of a rifle. The title for this exhibition has been intentionally left incomplete, leaving interpretation open to the artist and/or viewer.
Guthrie originally wrote the “patriotic” ballad “This Land is Your Land” as a social commentary on what he saw as fascism in America. He penned politically nuanced songs but generally sided with Communist ideals. His experiences during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era parallel what many citizens are experiencing in modern day America.
“This Land is Your Land” contains often redacted lyrics containing references to borders and food lines for the poor. In an untitled song, he criticizes real estate magnate Fred Trump, the father of presidential candidate Donald Trump. The lyrics were written at a time when he himself was living in tenements owned by the elder Trump. Guthrie’s lyrics reflected his thoughts on Trump’s unethical business practices:
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!
This Machine Kills_____ seeks to explore the relationship between art, music and politics during a volatile election cycle. Featuring artists from Arizona, California and Mexico, the exhibition utilizes the historically significant function of protest art as an opposition to technologically prolific forms of media. Most works will consist of propaganda style posters and prints, though there will be several types of media represented. The gallery will be screening a new film by artists Bruce Yonemoto and Karen Finley in conjunction with this exhibition.
Film Screening by: Karen Finley and Bruce Yonemoto (LA) and Rembrandt Quilballo (AZ)
Opening night performances by: Phoenix based art collective Radio Healer.
Artists in the show: Mely Barragan (TJ), Cindy Santos Bravo (San Diego/LA), Gomez Bueno (LA), Temoc Camacho (Guadalajara), Robbie Conal (LA), Jeff Chabot (PHX), Sean Deckert (PHX/LA), Karla Diaz (LA), Victoria Delgadillo (LA), Veronica Duarte (LA), Cristian Franco (Guadalajara), Jason Gonzalez (Mesa), Olga Gutierrez (Guadalajara), Carlos Hernandez (LA), Luis G. Hernandez (SoCal/Mexicali), Julio Cesar Morales (Tempe, TJ), Ann Morton (PHX), Karl Petion (LA), Radio Healer (Mesa), Daniel Ruanova (TJ), and Christopher Vena (AZ).
Mely Barragan
Mely Barragán has been exploring the role of identity in contemporary society through her composite musings since the mid-1990’s, utilizing assemblage, collage, painting and various other media forms to comment on social and behavioral norms. Barragán’s is a personal correspondence with entitlement, resonance and composition, making effective use of ingénue properties to satisfy a relationship with independence.
“I utilize the appropriation of images to resignify their use, upon finding myself in a by-product world where we are inundated by concepts of identity based on consumption, I become empowered by this imagery without playing its game. I search for more honest visual formulas that question imposed visual formulas (industry, society, tradition, etc). I describe my process as reflections on the absurd, obsessive, fateful, grotesque, beautiful and fragmented,” affirms Barragán. Dichotomy becomes autonomy in a homesick, knife-wielding life abroad, a muscular reflection on the notion of imagery and archetypes. Barragán’s wordplay transcribes indiscretion over windows of pinched symbolisms, producing palettes affected by human relationship and time, her philosophy surfacing over found idealisms and broken models. “I learned how to speak in two languages at the same time, my identity is constructed by thousands of copy-pastes. Juxtaposition is natural for border people,” she states.
Bio: Cindy Santos Bravo
Cindy Santos Bravo (b. 1978) is a San Diego-based interdisciplinary artist. Bravo explores the language of peripheral cultures repositioning the in-between experience of race, gender and identity in her practice. Working in a variety of formats, she has orchestrated exchanges involving music and dance practitioners, collaborated on sculptural designs with custom boot makers in Mexico, installed wall-scale paintings that consider the mastery of rotulo sign-makers, as well as videos that socially engage with narratives of transition.
In 2007 Bravo created the site-specific work The High and Lows: Notes on Bronzeville 1943-1945 at LA Artcore in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, CA. The installation of word play panels incorporated the first of a series of videos interpreting the complexities of improvisation and melody—within the genre of hard bop—to the arrangement of socially constructed space. The video The High and Lows: One Essential was invited to show in the group exhibition Common Ground at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA.
Her most recent installation, The Distinctions Remain, the act of forced negotiation is in parallel position with the “frozen” quality of the disavowal examined by Gilles Deleuze as, “the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it.” The installation space is a two-room experience that draws from hostage negotiation principles, social psychology, and psychotherapy to address human interest in liberation through awareness and affirmations that encourages confrontation and complexity to complete the human experience; the installation offers commentary on behavioral practices of (non)conformity.
Bravo grew up in Dallas, Texas, received her BA in Painting and Drawing at the University of Dallas, and received her MFA in the Program of Art at CalArts in 2006. Bravo’s work has been selected to show in international and national group exhibitions in Goods to Declare in Tel Aviv, Israel (2006); two Mexicali Biennials (2006 and 2013) in Mexicali and Monterrey, Mexico; Here, There and Beyond (2010) Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, Texas,; Unpopular Inbetween (2012) Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Ejercicio del Diálogo #1, Casa Vecina, Mexico City, among others.
Bio: Gomez Bueno
Born in Cantabria, Spain (1964). Bachelor degree in Fine Arts from
Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife) and Universidad Complutense (Madrid).
He has lived between Los Angeles and Europe since1988.
The beginning of Gomez Bueno´s career was marked by very conceptually oriented work with projects that analyzed the way our society functions. He ran for the White House in "GB for President" (1992). In "Padre GB" (1993) he created a fictitious religious cult with real followers in California. "Classifieds" (1995) was a project where he placed personal ads in newspapers around the world. He choose from more than 500 letters and photos to paint 50 portraits of love seekers which he exhibited next to the actual introductory letters explaining their interests and personalities. As the years passed, Gomez Bueno was interested in reaching bigger audiences and started painting murals, billboards, cars, boats, sails, skateboards, snowboards…etc. From this point forward his paintings got closer to the pop esthetics. His work is complex, ironic, and charged with social commentary. Creating art that is constructed like games, it is at once innocent and perverse, at times the spectator is the subject of the work without knowing it.
His work has been reviewed in magazines such as Neo2, Vanidad, Swindle, Surfing, Surfer, The Surfer´s Journal, Tres60, Surfer Rule, Heckler, Thrasher, Slap, Glide, Sotileza, Arte y Parte, Relax, Mono, Via, Vogue, Lodown, Juxtapoz, Artweek, SuperX, Relax, Atlántica, Free&Easy, El Europeo, AM, Grab, Tokion, El Punto, Borncelona, La Cruda, Rojo, Coagula, Primera Linea, Big, ABC, New Art Examiner, Grab, Art West, Think Design, LA Times, LA Weekly, and major newspapers around the globe.
Gomez Bueno's work has been exhibited at museums including the Museo de Bellas Artes of Santander, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo of Madrid, Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, Centro de Arte of Tenerife, Centro de Arte La Regenta (Las Palmas), Grand Palais of Paris, Laguna Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), LACE (Los Angeles) San Jose Museum, Chiso Museum (Kyoto) and the Harwood Museum in Taos (NM). As well as at commercial galleries in Spain, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, England, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, China and USA.
Bio: Temoc Camacho
Guadalajara, México, 1987
Artista visual multidisciplinario. Vive y trabaja en Guadalajara. Estudió Artes Visuales en la licenciatura de Artes de la SCJ, le interesa el trabajo en colaboración con artistas o grupos sociales.
La línea de su obra toca temas como el sabotaje, la hiperproducción de imagen y la transformación del cuerpo en un sistema económico global.
Ha colaborado en diferentes proyectos los cuales se han presentado en España, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia y México.
Bio: Robbie Conal
Robbie Conal grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. Raised by union organizers who considered the major art museums to be day care centers for him, he spent his formative years immersing himself in art history at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other great local art institutions of New York City. He attended High School of Music and Art, and later received his BFA at San Francisco State University (1969), and his Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University (1978).
In 1986, angered by the Reagan Administration’s rabid abuse of political power in the name of representative democracy, he began making satirical oil portraits of politicians and bureaucrats and turning them into street posters. He gradually developed an irregular guerrilla army of volunteers, who helped him poster the streets of major cities around the country. Over the past 24 years, Robbie has made more than 80 street posters satirizing politicians from both political parties, televangelists and global capitalists. He has also taken on subjects like censorship, war, social injustice, and environmental issues.
Robbie is considered one of the country’s foremost satirical street poster artists. His work has been featured on “CBS This Morning”, “Charlie Rose” and in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, People Magazine, Interview, and the Washington Post—which dubbed him, “America’s foremost street artist”. He’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, a Getty Individual Artist Grant and a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Individual Artist’s Grant (COLA).
Most recently, his work has been collected by–and featured in exhibitions at–LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Art, and his beloved hometown favorite, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. He has authored three books: Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Poster Artist, 1992 (HarperCollins); Artburn, 2003 (Akashic Books), and , with wife Deborah Ross, 2009 (Art Attack Press). He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.
Bio: Jeff Chabot
Jeff Chabot is an artist, teacher, writer, and curator based in Phoenix, AZ. His recent work deals with the landscape, suggestions of human affect, migratory and adaptive sustainment, and the fallibility of technology. Chabot works in various mediums including photography, video, text, sculpture, and occasionally watercolor.
Bio: Sean Deckert
Sean Deckert was born in Culver City, California in 1984 and moved to southern Illinois with his mother and sister in 1990. He left in 2008 to attend Arizona State University for a Bachelors in Photography. His upbringing in a small town on the edge of a seemingly endless view of locally owned farming plots directly contrasted the impersonal land designation visible in the Phoenix-metro area. After producing work in Arizona for six years he returned to Los Angeles in 2015. His work continues to investigate atmospheric color relative to perceptions of personal and public space. His projects frequently manifest through collaborative efforts with his network of friends ranging from scientists to local community organizers that advise and assist him during the research phases of his work. He volunteers extensively in his local arts community, including his membership with the Artlink, Eye Lounge Collective and In Focus at Phoenix Art Museum. He received the 2013 Emerging Artist Award by Contemporary Forum and Phoenix Art Museum. His work has been featured in Art Ltd, Arid Journal, Photo District News and has been exhibited at the SF Camerawork, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art as well as international locations in Beijing, Jerusalem and Concordia.
Bio: Victoria Delgadillo
Victoria Delgadillo works in various forms of visual art (painting, print, digital art, film), but her main art praxis is in engagement and collaboration with collectives and communities through participatory art (Social Public Practice). She believes that by displaying her art work in non-traditional community accessible spaces, she invites the under-valued audience to participate in the art discourse. Delgadillo is an artist and activist graduate from the University of California, San Diego. In 2003, Victoria’s written account on the curatory process for the first international exhibit on the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico was published through UCLA press. For her work on creating public awareness through art, Victoria received awards from the Los Angeles City Council, the University of Sinaloa, Mexico and the Cultural Institute of León, Guanajuato, Mexico. In 2009 Victoria received the University of California, San Diego's Gracia Molina de Pick Feminisms grant. In 2011, she (and a handful of activists) received Self Help Graphics & Art's first award for saving their studios and programming from permanent closure. As a presenter and panelist, her body of work has been featured on PBS television, National Public Radio, Salon.com, and Duke University’s publication “Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations,” as well as numerous periodicals in the United States and Mexico. Victoria Delgadillo has exhibited in the USA, China, Scotland, Cuba, France and Mexico. Her work is in the permanent collections of the LA County Museum, Laguna Beach Museum and The National Mexican-American Museum in Chicago, as well as various important Chicano private collections.
Bio: Karla Diaz
Karla Diaz is an artist, and a writer. She was born in Los Angeles and raised both in Mexico and L.A. Her work uses performance and writing to question institutional power, investigate language, and social practices, explore cultural relationships, create collaborations and provoke dialogue. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2003. She has exhibited her work in local, national and international venues including MOCA, LACMA, MD2011 Medellin Colombia, Museo Cervantez in Spain, the Whitney in New York, the ICA in Boston, 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. She is co-director and founding member of Slanguage Studio, an artist community space/collective formerly located in the harbor area of Los Angeles. Her work has been published in several magazines, books and journals including Artforum, FlasArt, Beautiful Decay, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Radical Actions, and Vice Magazine. She received several awards for her work including a city of Los Angeles Arts Recognition Award and recently an Art Matters award for her “Prison Gourmet” project in which she works with prisoners to recreate commissary food recipes.
Bio: Veronica Duarte
Veronica Duarte is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. Her artwork is expressed through digital media, and sculptural installations, using archaeology, design and museographic strategies as tools to convey ideas about personal and cultural space. Duarte earned her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. She has participated in exhibitions which include Managing Modality at PØST, Mexicali Biennial at the Vincent Price Museum, and ‘Heuristic Memories: Intimate derivations and other spectres in the archive’ at Cerritos College Art Gallery, among other. As an extension of her art practice, Duarte curated “Topical Constructions: Paperworks + Actions,” a binational group exhibition exploring contemporary drawing and the overlapping of artistic activity occurring in Los Angeles and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Bio: Jason Gonzalez
Hola! My name is J. Gonzo. I am a Chicano artist who resides in Mesa, AZ, though I was born and raised in Cypress, CA. Artwise, my formative years were shaped by the rigid tradition and Byzantine iconography of the Catholic school I attended juxtaposed with the DIY aesthetic of the late 70s, Orange County Punk counterculture peppered with the bright, bold, Hispanic hues of my grandparents generation. My formal art training began in 1988 when I entered the Orange County High School of the Arts’ Visual Art program, but the seeds of what would become my art style had already been sewn. After high school, I moved to Arizona and attended a trade school receiving a degree in Visual Communications (a fancy, non-university term for graphic design). Commercial Art seemed like a good way for me to earn a living being creative without having to be a clichéd starving artist and/or get a straight day job that I would hate, to support my art on some kind of hobby level. So, as is the tradition of flaky artists the world over, upon receiving my degree, I promptly did nothing with it. I instead began a tattoo apprenticeship and would tattoo off and on for the next six years – supplementing my income with a whole host of menial, second jobs. After the birth of my daughter (the first of my two kids – I also have a son), I decided to dust off my graphic design skills and portfolio and quickly found a job in advertising. I vacillated between full-time and freelance with some of the top agencies in Phoenix and worked in-house as the Senior Art Director for McFarlane Toys/Todd McFarlane Productions. After a brief stint as the Creative Director for an Ad Agency (kind of the high-water mark for someone of my skill set outside of starting my own agency), I made the decision to quit, freelance full-time and focus on art, illustration and the completion of my comicbook project – La Mano del Destino.
Bio: Carlos Hernandez
Hola! My name is J. Gonzo. I am a Chicano artist who resides in Mesa, AZ, though I was born and raised in Cypress, CA. Artwise, my formative years were shaped by the rigid tradition and Byzantine iconography of the Catholic school I attended juxtaposed with the DIY aesthetic of the late 70s, Orange County Punk counterculture peppered with the bright, bold, Hispanic hues of my grandparents generation. My formal art training began in 1988 when I entered the Orange County High School of the Arts’ Visual Art program, but the seeds of what would become my art style had already been sewn. After high school, I moved to Arizona and attended a trade school receiving a degree in Visual Communications (a fancy, non-university term for graphic design). Commercial Art seemed like a good way for me to earn a living being creative without having to be a clichéd starving artist and/or get a straight day job that I would hate, to support my art on some kind of hobby level. So, as is the tradition of flaky artists the world over, upon receiving my degree, I promptly did nothing with it. I instead began a tattoo apprenticeship and would tattoo off and on for the next six years – supplementing my income with a whole host of menial, second jobs. After the birth of my daughter (the first of my two kids – I also have a son), I decided to dust off my graphic design skills and portfolio and quickly found a job in advertising. I vacillated between full-time and freelance with some of the top agencies in Phoenix and worked in-house as the Senior Art Director for McFarlane Toys/Todd McFarlane Productions. After a brief stint as the Creative Director for an Ad Agency (kind of the high-water mark for someone of my skill set outside of starting my own agency), I made the decision to quit, freelance full-time and focus on art, illustration and the completion of my comicbook project – La Mano del Destino.
Bio: Cristian Franco Martin
Cristian Franco Martin (Tecate BC Mexico, 1980), lives and works in Guadalajara Jal.He studied at the School of Visual Arts at the University of Guadalajara (1998-2002).
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, among which are: Soucasne Mexicke Video, (1996-2012), Meet Factory, (Prague, Czech Rep.); Tinnitus and Phosphenes, Zapopan Art Museum; (Zapopan, Jalisco); Cannibalism in the New World, Vincent Price Art Museum, (LA California), The People behind the walls, a project in collaboration with Daniel Guzmán and José Luis Sánchez Rull, Platform Gallery, (Guadalajara, Jal. 2012), Art and Politics, The Cube, Centro Cultural Tijuana (Tijuana BC 2012) Everything must go ', Casey Kaplan Gallery (New York, USA, 2011) Transitio Festival, MX 04 Circles of Confusion: Social Chaos and Fictions Key, Image Center (Mexico City 2011) Evidence Of Absence, Death by Kind Gallery (Melborne, Australia, 2011); MexiCali Biennial, Ben Maltz Gallery (Los Angeles, USA, 2010); Effect Dracula Poplar Museum (Mexico City, 2010) , Empty urban Architecture Triennale (Lisbon, Portugal, 2008) Standing on one foot, Triangle Project Space (San Antonio, Texas, United States, 2007); Performances et performancesvideo, Points d 'Impact (Geneve Switzerland, 2005), Mexico Alight, Albrigtht Collage (Reading, Pensilvanya, United States, 2003). Individually presented: Victor Huerta Carrillo Gil Art Museum (video cabinet, Mexico DF 2012) Respect the rights of others is the ability for the animal organism, Sinaloa Art Museum (Culiacan, Sin. Mexico, 2012), Rural Kaos, Curro & Poncho Gallery (Guadalajara, Jal. 2009), Greatest Hits, Clemente Jacqs Laboratory, Guadalajara Jal. 2005). He received the Young Artists Scholarship FONCA (2011), and young artists scholarship FOECA in emissions (2009 and 2001). His pieces are part of the Jumex Collection, Collection Gilberto Charpenel, Collective Soul Collection, among others. Cristian Franco is represented by Curro y Poncho in Jalisco, México and currently lives and works in Guadalajara, México.
Bio: Radio Healer (Cristobal Martinez)
Radio Healer is a Native American and Xicano artist collective in Phoenix, Arizona. The collective is Edgar Cardenas, Raven Kemp, Fernando Lino, Cristóbal Martínez, Meredith Martinez, and Randy Kemp. As a group, these hacker-artists create indigenous electronic tools, which they use with traditional indigenous tools to perform indigenous reimagined ceremony. Through their immersive environments, comprised of moving images, tools, regalia, performance, and sound, Radio Healer bends media to position visual and sonic metaphors that make the familiar strange. Radio Healer is particularly interested in the seemingly ordinary semitoic systems that, when observed, become irrational, ineffficient, deceptive, and contradictory. These systems encode assumptions, ideologies in discourses, and dilemmas that concretize the cultural systems that shape notions of reality. The collective's goals are to disrupt these notions by creating environments that provide audiences with opportunities to engage in a heightened sense of criticality about the systems we create, maintain, and adapt. The collective strives to mediate complexity capable of catalyzing public discourse, and to demonstrate indigenous self-determination through an indigenous knowledge systems approach to designs and uses of tools for hacking semiotic systems. Through these goals, Radio Healer performs inclusive re-imagined ceremonies during which the public is invited to reflect on human exigencies and dilemmas tied to obsolescence, acceleration, warfare, borders, hyper-surveillance, land use, cybernetics, market systems, historical amnesia, hi-velocity global multi-nodal networks, and the trans-mediated market valorization of human bodies.
Radio Healer is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Arizona Commission for The Arts, Artist Research and Development Grant, and is a project in residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Radio Healer has performed immersive environments throughout North America, in Australia, and in Namibia. Radio Healer is partners with the Arizona State University, Center for the Art and Science of Teaching, Arizona State University Art Museum, and CALA Alliance.
Radio Healer acknowledges the important contributions of previous collaborators: Sam Anderson, Robert Esler, Fabio Fernandes, Joe French, J.C. Golding, Zarco Guerrero, Fernando Lino, Aileen Mapes, Meredith Martinez, Ryan McFadden, Jessica Mumford, Stjepan Rajko, Janie Ross, Maritza Montiel Tafur, Lisa Tolentino, Monty Walters, and mac n. zie.
Bio: Julio Cesar Morales
By deploying a range of media and visual strategies, Julio César Morales investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales works with whatever medium lends itself to a particular project. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced neon signs, reenacted a famous meal, all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives.
Morales’ artwork has been shown at venues internationally, including the Lyon Biennale, France; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Prospect 3 Biennale, New Orleans; the Istanbul Biennale; Los Angeles County Art Museum; the Singapore Biennale; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Rooseum Museum of Art, Malmo, Sweden; Fototeca de Havana, Cuba; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Nordic Watercolour Museum, Skärhamn, Sweden; muca-Roma, Mexico City. In 2016, Museo Carillo Gil, Mexico City will open a solo exhibition of his work.
His work has been featured in publications, including Flash Art, The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Art Nexus, and Art in America. His work is in private and public collections including The Los Angeles County Art Museum, The Kadist Foundation, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Deutsche Bank, among others.
Morales was adjunct professor at The San Francisco Art Institute and associate professor in Curatorial Studies at The California College for the Arts. Morales is an advisor and writer for The San Francisco Quarterly Art Magazine; from 2008 to 2012 he was adjunct curator for visual arts at Yerba Buena Center for The Arts in San Francisco. Morales was a contributing curator for the Japanese pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale and is currently curator of visual arts at Arizona State University Art Museum.
Bio: Ann Morton
After a 35+ year professional career as a graphic/environmental graphic designer, Ann earned her MFA in 2012 from Arizona State University's Herberger Institute - School of Art. Currently, she is a practicing artist and educator at Arizona State University and Paradise Valley Community College in metropolitan Phoenix. Arizona.
Her work has been shown and recognized nationally and internationally – Phoenix Metro area; Tucson; Los Angeles, CA; Golden, CO; Grand Rapids, MI; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Cairns, Australia; Jerusalem, Israel; and Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
The Ground Cover project was selected by the Americans for the Arts, Public Arts in Review for 2014 and received the 2014 Arizona Forward Crescordia award for art in public spaces, and selected Best of Show in the 2015 Surface Design Association international show, Materialities, juried by Namita Gupta Wiggers, American crafts curator, educator and former head curator for the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon. The Collective Cover Project was selected in the top 5 Juror's picks for the 3D category in the 2012 ArtPrize - Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was awarded the OxBow Residency by Lisa Freiman, former senior curator and chair of the Department of Contemporary Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art – currently Director for VCU’s Institute for Contemporary Art. The Collective Cover Project was featured in a solo exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in 2015-2016. Ann's work has been published in FiberArts Magazine, 1000 Artisan Textiles (Quayside Publishing Group), American Craft Magazine, and Surface Design Journal.
Bio: Karl Petion
Karl Jean-Guerly Petion uses symbols from Haiti, his country of birth, as well as imagery suggesting the extremes of wealth and poverty which exist there. He holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA from CalArts. In 2011, he participated in “Debating Through the Arts” at the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, and his work was recently exhibited at Lambert Fine Arts in New York.
Often quoting theoretical texts drawn from Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and others, he refuses any simplistic reading of Voudoun symbology: Marcel Duchamp is stepping on Jean-Michel Basquiat! Petion's depiction of power plays directly invokes the contemporary art scene itself in assemblage and mixed-media sculpture and painting. These pieces issue demands for a new reading of gods and commoners, hope and despair.
Bio: Daniel Ruanova (bilingual)
Daniel Ruanova's irreverent and involved style of border art-making rose to prominence in the later half of the 1990's; his eye-popping statements further cementing his hard-earned reputation as a mischievous, politically-minded experimentalist during Tijuana's exposure boom in the 2000's. Ruanova creates a variety of objects, images and situations that encourage the public to re-think their own position on “everyday politics of aesthetics,” usually focusing in on the pleasures that meaningless violence and aggression create in overindulged societies. He is currently involved in creating greater awareness of border culture, the Mexican diaspora in the United States and vice-versa.
//////
El estilo irreverente y participativo de Daniel Ruanova llegó a prominencia en la frontera como creación artística en la segunda mitad de la década de los 90; sus discursos llamativos consolidaron aún más su reputación merecida como un experimentalista travieso y con mentalidad política durante el auge de la exposición de Tijuana en la primera década del 2000. Ruanova crea una variedad de objetos, imágenes y situaciones que invitan al público a repensar su propia posición sobre "la política cotidiana de la estética", por lo general se enfoca en los placeres que la violencia y la agresión sin sentido crean en las sociedades sobreprotegidas. Actualmente está involucrado en la gestión de una mayor conciencia sobre la cultura de la frontera, la diáspora mexicana en los Estados Unidos y viceversa.
Bio: Bruce Yonemoto
Bruce Yonemoto’s work as a video and digital media installation artist, educator, writer and curator (many of the works done in collaboration with his brother, Norman) began in the mid 1970's. The body of single channel video work was created from 1976 to the late 1980's examined the effects of the mass media on our perceptions of personal identity (sexual, ethnic, and political), romantic love, melodramas and soap operas to TV commercials and the electronic metatext (the ultimate products of Hollywood's search for audience identification and manipulation), desired to manipulate audiences while making them aware of that manipulation. Since 1989, his solo work has been exploring experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography and sculpture. He has continually been a strong proponent of the integration of fine arts and media. For the past twenty-28 years he has developed a body work which positions itself within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, of the gallery world and the television screen. Yonemoto believes that the composition of mass media has become a new historical site of the domination of human behavior.
His recent work developed with funding from Creative Capital deals with the discovery of the real and poetic convergence between two phenomena specific to Argentina. It is the site of one of the few growing glaciers in the world as well as the last growing Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. His recent photo and video work was developed and produced in Vietnam. He is currently developing a performative project in Taiwan and a project exploring Cinema Novo in Rio de Janeiro. Bruce is currently developing a major work in collaboration with artist, Karen Finley.
Yonemoto has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. In 1999 Yonemoto was honored with a major mid-career survey show curated by Karen Higa at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles Bruce's solo installations, photographs and sculptures have been featured in major one-person shows at the ICC in Tokyo, the ICA in Philadelphia, the St. Louis Art Museum and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City and his work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris, and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, , the 2008 Gwangju Biennial. Pacific Standard Time, Getty Research Center and most recently an expansive survey show in Kanazawa, Japan.
Bio: Karen Finley
Karen Finley is a New York-based artist whose raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has presented and performed her visual art, performances, and plays internationally including at Lincoln Center, Guthrie Theater, American Repertory Theatre, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Steppenwolf Theatre, and Theatre Bobino. Her artworks are in several collections and museums including the Pompidou in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Art’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Obies, and two Bessies.New York Times art critic Ben Brantley has praised her work saying “here’s no denying the genuine rage and pain behind her performance, nor her ability to find voices that reflect those feelings in disturbingly visceral ways.”
Bio: Rembrandt Quiballo
Rembrandt Quiballo was born in the city of Manila in the Philippines. His family was compelled to leave the country amidst outbreak of revolution. After briefly living in Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, his family immigrated to the United States. He received a BFA in Painting/Photography and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Arizona. He recently received his MFA in Photography at Arizona State University. Through the moving image, his work explores mass media and its effects on social and political history.