Opening Reception: Friday, April 28, 5 p.m. Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College
Strands of Redis inspired by many of the ideas explored in the spring 2017 Faculty Art Show. Specifically, this exhibition addresses the ongoing and reciprocal relationship between artistic practice and natural processes.
Rachel is a sophomore at Pitzer College majoring in anthropology and environmental analysis.
The 2017 Inaugural Curatorial Internship Project #1 by Rachel Moszkowicz ’19 is first chapter in the ongoing series of art exhibitions realized through the Curatorial Apprenticeship course created and taught by Ciara Ennis PhD, Director and Curator, Pitzer College Art Galleries.
Lenzner Family Art Gallery
January 26 – March 30, 2017
Opening Reception:January 26, 5-7 pm
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Distance In/Formation is a collaborative work by Los Angeles-based artists Johanna Breiding, Rebecca Bruno, Yann Novak, and Willy Souly that draws on landscapes in the distance between Los Angeles and Claremont. Featuring two media artists and two dancers, the project focuses on the intersection of dance, video, sound, and aesthetics as a means to explore the extension of body in space. Inhabiting queer identities, the project creates a space in which different architectures, geographies, and subjectivities are manifested and extend beyond the physical constraints of site and the body itself.
This exhibition focuses on the legacy of the Pitzer College Art Field Group and its dedication to progressive ideas around environmentalism and art. Work made by Tim Berg (Rebekah Myers), Sarah Gilbert, Tarrah Krajnak and Jessica McCoy will be discussed in the context of work made by Carl Hertel, David Furman, Michael Woodcock, Kathryn Miller and Paul Faulstich that have contributed to the conversation.
Related Events: Bill Anthes in conversation with Paul Faulstich
Friday, February 17 at 1:30 pm
Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College
Conversation with Tim Berg, Sarah Gilbert, Tarrah Krajnak and Jessica McCoy
Wednesday, March 1 at Noon
Broad Performance Space, Pitzer College
All events are free and open to the public.
The Faculty Art Show is generously supported by art + environment, a four-year project at Pitzer College funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Office of the Dean of Faculty, Campus Life Committee and Teaching and Learning Committee at Pitzer College.
September 12 – December 11, 2015
Curated by Ciara Ennis
Pitzer College Art Galleries
56 pages, with color reproductions, 8” x 7.5”
ISBN: 978-0-9966445-1-8
Essay by Glenn Harcourt
Interview by Ciara Ennis
Catalogue design by Terry Vuong
Photography by Ruben Diaz, Jeff Mclane, Gene Ogami
Images edited by Liat Yossifor
Kang Seung Lee: Untitled (Artspeak?) September 12 – December 11, 2015
Curated by Ciara Ennis
Pitzer College Art Galleries
56 pages, with color reproductions, 11.75” x 9.75”
ISBN: 978-0-9829956-9-3
Essays by Ciara Ennis, Leslie Dick, Jen Hutton
Catalogue design by SoYun Cho
Photography by Ruben Diaz
Environmental scientists have begun to refer to our current era as the anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human activities have become the primary shapers of the earth’s environment and ecological systems, producing climate change, mass extinctions of non-human species and other significant transformations on a global scale. Whether these changes are reversible is uncertain.
On a smaller scale—such as we can observe in our neighborhoods, cities and local landscapes—anthropogenic change gives rise to surprising and unanticipated interactions among species. Mark Dion, Jessica Rath and Dana Sherwood explore these transformations and transactions in the shifting ecotomes—or contact zones between human and non-human worlds—in the multifaceted works included in The Ocelots of Foothill Boulevard.
Brownfield sites and other highly polluted zones, thought incapable of yielding anything at all, have become flourishing habitats for exotic or so-called “invasive” species. Vacant office building, dead shopping malls and decommissioned military installations have become host to new flora and fauna—they are emergent “second nature” habitats in which productive interconnected multi-species communities flourish. One such site exhibiting these unforeseen interactions is the ruin of a historic infirmary, located at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in northeastern Los Angeles County. Built in the 1930s, it functioned for many years as a health facility for students of The Claremont Colleges. Ravaged by fires, earthquakes and other natural disasters, the infirmary was condemned and abandoned by the early 1970s. A recovering landscape, the building and the parcel of land in which it sits is today host to non-native grasses, Coast Live Oaks and a diverse community of biota—mammalian, avian, insect and amphibian—as well as researchers and students who have made their homes and laboratories in and around the shuttered building.
Taking the multi-species habitat of the infirmary as a reference point, Dion, Rath and Sherwood have excavated the shared non-human and human histories that have populated the area during the past 80 years. In addition to this local site, the artists have extended their forensic gaze to other “second nature” habitats of a terrestrial as well as an aquatic nature. Traversing time and temperate zones, these explorations, while acknowledging the deleterious effects of humans on earth, also signal the unintended value that habitat conversions and co-species habitations can have in the anthropocene.
The Ocelots of Foothill Boulevard is generously supported by art+environment, a four-year project at Pitzer College funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College.
Related Events
Artist Lecture Mark Dion: The Wonder Workshop, Jellyfish and Sleeping Bears
Saturday, January 23 at 2 p.m., prior to exhibition reception
Broad Performance Space, Broad Center, Pitzer College
Vocal Performance by Cris Law
Saturday, January 23 at 4 p.m.
Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College
Panel Discussion
Thursday, March 3 at 2 p.m.
Broad Performance Space, Broad Center, Pitzer College
September 12-December 11, 2015
Lenzner Family Art Gallery
Opening Reception
Saturday, September 12, 3-5 p.m.
Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College Art Galleries
Artist Lecture
Kang Seung Lee in conversation with Leslie Dick, artist, writer and faculty at California Institute of the Arts
Wednesday, October 28, 4:15 p.m.
Room Q116, West Hall, Pitzer College
Kang Seung Lee’s installation Untitled (Artspeak?) takes as its starting point ARTSPEAK (1st edition, 1990), the mainstream compendium of “contemporary ideas, movements and buzzwords” from 1945 to 1989. Situating art movements and genres within the context of cultural and historical events, ARTSPEAK provides an overarching view of artistic practice from a Western European perspective that privileges a first-world patriarchal view of art history. In contrast, Lee challenges this narrow interpretation by re-writing the timeline from a critical queer perspective that includes women and artists of color previously erased from the narrative.
In keeping with the page layout and format of the book, artists, Lee invited writers and critics to contribute images and other textural references from the year of their birth that resonate with particular artistic, cultural and political moments. The resulting large-scale works, which are produced by Lee, are populated with his collaborators’ individualized responses that re-imagine history from the perspective of previously marginalized cultures and identities. Functioning as alternative historical narratives, they also operate as portraits of the participants, who include Leslie Dick, Millie Wilson, Gina Osterloh, Yong Soon Min and Jennifer Moon.
In a related project, Covers (2015), Lee excavates the gender and racial demographics of catalogues collected by CalArts Library since it opened in 1971. Comprising five bound books, each representing a decade, Covers documents the number of monographs on women and artists of color. By creating this counter-archive, Covers highlights forms of discrimination implicit in conventional systems that construct and disseminate knowledge.
About the Artist
Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in South Korea and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo and group exhibitions at Centro Cultural Border, Mexico City, Mexico; the Weatherspoon Art Museum at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, Mexico City; SOMArts, San Francisco, CA; Center for Art and Thought, Los Angeles, CA. Lee received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2015.
Saturday, September 12, 3-5 p.m.
Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College Art Galleries
Panel Discussion
“The Politics of Painting”
Wednesday, September 30, 4:15 p.m.
Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College
Panelists: Artists Liat Yossifor and Nery Gabriel Lemus, with Kevin Appel, UC Irvine professor of art and Joanna Roche, Cal State Fullerton professor of art history. Moderated by Christopher Michno, writer, critic and independent curator.
This panel discussion is generously supported by the Frederick J. Salathé Fund for Music and the Cultural Arts.
Artist Lecture
Artists Liat Yossifor and Iva Gueorguieva in conversation with David Pagel, critic, curator and professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University
Wednesday, November 11, 4:15 p.m.
Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College
The Rider (2014); 16 by 12 inches; oil on linen
Although Liat Yossifor’s large-scale monochromatic paintings reference the tradition of Abstract Expressionism through their formal language, they have an entirely different agenda. As such, the exhibition, Liat Yossifor: Time Turning Paint, will explore abstraction as a political form and question the efficacy of both the medium and the genre as well as its relationship to artistic practice in the twenty-first century.
Despite beginning as vibrant blue, red or yellow canvasses, Yossifor’s paintings culminate in somber variations of gray ranging from light slate to almost white. Both tactile and sculptural, these thick impasto paintings are made entirely with palette knives that sculpt, incise and move large quantities of oil paint around on the paintings’ surface. Process-based and performative, these works are governed by a set of rules that delimit the time in which they can be worked on and completed. Produced within three days—the time it takes for the paint to dry—both the color and any discernable representational aspect are erased from the surface, resulting in a void-like space haunted by its expunged referents.
Although Abstract Expressionism is traditionally a male-dominated medium that celebrated the author-as-genius and abstraction as the purist form, Yossifor’s manipulation of the genre as a time-based gendered performance reconfigures the coordinates. In doing so, Yossifor encourages not only an expansion of the vernacular of Abstract Expressionism but also a different kind of meditation on its function and, as a result, its political potential. [clear]
About the Artist
Detail: The Rider (2014); 16 by 12 inches; oil on linen
Liat Yossifor has exhibited nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Liat Yossifor: Pre-Verbal Painting at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2015); Liat Yossifor: Thought Patterns at Amerigner | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY (2012); Liat Yossifor: Falling into Ends at Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany (2010); and Liat Yossifor: The Tender Among Us at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2007). Group exhibitions include Stolen Gestures at Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany (2013) and A Reflected Gaze, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2010).
WORLD IS WATCHING – MANIFESTO
