ISCP Talk
August 21, 2012

Salon: Rebecca Baumann and benandsebastian

Rebecca Baumann will discuss recent kinetic and performance works. Central to her practice is an ongoing fascination with the complex workings of human emotion and the pursuit of happiness through celebration and ritual. Methodically planned and choreographed, Baumann’s works are a formal and conceptual excursion into the nature of color and materials. Involving an element of activation, the visibility of color is in constant flux, referencing the innate change of our emotional selves and the greater world.
benandsebastian are interested in how meaning becomes embedded in spaces and artefacts in conditions of absence. benandsebastian will speak about the process of re-examining their body of work through their ‘Phantom Limbs’ book project. This project has involved the duo exploring non-linear narratives and working with their studio space at ISCP as the inside of the book.

ISCP Talk
August 14, 2012

Salon: Leslie Shows and Allison Smith

Leslie Shows will discuss the influences, ideas and processes that led to her newest work, completed at ISCP, which includes spectral, reflective images of pyrite rocks reconstructed in engraved aluminum, sand, ink, crushed glass and plexiglass; a floor sculpture cast in sulfur; and a video incorporating Kafka’s short story The Cares of a Family Man. Shows intensifies these pyrite objects through various types of visual deconstruction and re-synthesis, establishing multiple lenses (existential, economic, sensorial, associative) for experiencing objects and other phenomena. Using mixed media but concerned with the materiality of painting, Shows’ work plays the textural, sensorial properties of materials like aluminum, sulfur, or reflected light against their illusionistic, signifying and representational capacities.

Allison Smith will discuss recent works that engage with early American material culture, opening it up, in the words of Judith Butler, for “a different sort of repeating.” Afterwards, she will open her studio to present works done while in residence at ISCP, including hundreds of collages in which images of quotidian objects are meticulously cut out of context and serially collaged onto sheets of handmade paper. These works offer a playful confusion between image and object, proposing pictures of material culture as both physical material and subject of study. Smith’s work takes on an artifact quality through its association with events and engagement with the public, whether through activities of collective making, activation in social space or material transformation from one context to the next.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
July 31, 2012

Salon: Bettina John and Juan Zamora

Bettina John will present her current work that considers how identity is formed as well as Live-Image-Construction, a performative and participatory work that utilizes photography as a tool for interaction. John looks at how people manifest their identity in their appearance as well as what is behind that surface and investigates the insecurities a global life brings about, as well as displacement, isolation, anonymity and the construction of one’s image.

Juan Zamora will speak about his project Play dead, initiated during his residency at ISCP. Play dead is the scientific name of the natural state of paralysis that animals enter into when threatened. As part of the project, Zamora has drawn different animals playing dead, in addition to having a pigeon taxidermied in a final resting pose and displayed in his ISCP studio for the past six months. Zamora deals with issues intimately related to human existence. His work is based on drawing as an artistic position; he investigates complex concepts using simple, basic, gestural, and direct language. Zamora gets close to the viewer through the characters, space and situations he depicts on paper, mixing imagination with reality.