ISCP Talk
September 21, 2010

Salon: Stephanie Syjuco (United States) and Theaster Gates (United States)

ON FORMS AND SOCIAL PRACTICES: ISCP Artadia Residents in performance and conversation

Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist whose recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. Her work has been shown internationally, including P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the California Biennial, and the Frieze Art Fair, among others. Upcoming shows include Shadowshop at SFMOMA, an alternative gift shop addressing issues of capitalism and distribution, Particulate Matter: Things,Thingys, Thingies, a solo exhibition at Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago, and a large-scale installation at Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.

In his performances, installations, and urban interventions, Theaster Gates — an artist, musician, and ‘cultural planner’ — transforms spaces, relationships, traditions, and perceptions. Exploring architecture as a tool for mediation and meditation, Gates draws from both urbanism and art to provide what he terms ‘moments of interstitial beauty’. Gates’s work has been exhibited widely. In 2010 alone, he has performed and exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Armory Show in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Pulitzer Museum of Art in St. Louis, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Upcoming projects include solo shows at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, and the Museum for Contemporary Art, Detroit. Gates is a 2010-11 Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
September 7, 2010

Salon: Nicolas Grum (Chile) and Jiandyin (Thailand)

Nicolas Grum will present a selection of video works and I See Nothing, a work in progress developed during his residency at ISCP that addresses ideas of security, paranoia, systems and the absurd. Grum questions the idea of authority and the operation of established systems, and plays with concepts including the unstable, failure, disaster, environment and adaptation. His work is developed through diverse artistic mediums, particularly video, drawing and installation and irony and humor is present in most.

Nicolas Grum was born in San Miguel, Chile, in 1977. He studied visual arts at U.C. Santiago de Chile. In the last two years his work has been part of the Trienal de Chile, 2009; Beijing Biennial, 2009 and several groups shows in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santa Cruz, Berlin and Shanghai.

Jiandyin (Pornpilai & Jiradej Meemalai) will show Stop E-motion, a seven minute stop-motion video edited from everday fragments of the artists’ lives, including photographs, drawings and notes. On Adaptation will also be presented. This 13 minute video shows the artists portraying a couple who struggle and attempt to balance the tension, instability and insecurity in their relationship.

Jiandyin is a duo of artists from Thailand. Their works look at the tension in human relationships. They also project an awareness of ‘living together as an adaptation’ in our rapidly globalizing world. In 2010, they began a participation project called Dialogue, an ongoing collaborative drawing of Thai / Thai American couples who live in United States. They will participate in The Penang Island Sculpture Project, Penang Island, Malaysia in 2011. Upcoming exhibitions include Art Live World at Chair and the Maiden Gallery, New York in September 2010 and a solo show at Kokoro Studio, San Francisco, CA, in November 2010.

ISCP Talk
August 24, 2010

Salon: Stefano Cagol (Italy) and Jonggeon Lee (South Korea)

Stefano Cagol will present two video works part of an ongoing social-practice-based project titled Scintillio e Cenere (Sparkling and Ash). In Taranto, the dirtiest city of Italy polluted by one of the biggest steel works in Europe, Cagol asked inhabitants to give sparkling objects in exchange of ash. He collected the objects during a traveling and standing action (in collaboration with Valentina Vetturi) through the city’s neighborhoods. He then realized a collective sparkling monument, marked by a white flag with the writing ‘Cenere’ (ash). The project is part of Miraggi (Mirages) at the Aragon Castle, Taranto, Italy (July 3 – September 13, 2010).

Through videos, photographs, installations and actions Stefano Cagol touches upon socio-political themes, pointing to the contradiction between beliefs and influences.

Jonggeon Lee will introduce a selection of recent works. Jonggeon’s sculpture and installation focuses on both domestic and public architectural structures, such as staircases or historic monuments that have been displaced from their original contexts. In an effort to capture his experience of cultural displacement, he reproduces components of architectural structures that evoke both the time and space of its origins. Lee distorts and crops the decorative elements of domestic Colonial houses, reconfigures the scale and material of historic monuments, and combines historic architectural structures with everyday objects. In his work, he transforms architectural structures in order to dislodge them from their initial function of structure. As a result, in each of his works, time becomes fixed and isolated from its conventional cycle, creating memories of space.

Participating Residents