Category: Artists

On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed and fired upon a group of police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five officers and injuring nine others. This was done in retaliation for police murders of African Americans. In December of the same year White supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans during a prayer meeting in church. He hoped his action would trigger a race war in the USA. Rain Delay is a prediction that similar incidents will certainly follow. 

 

Scalia is a satirical obituary of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia whose positions were extreme and mean-spirited. Atkins v Virginia is a court decision from June 2002 in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but that states can define who has intellectual disability. Justice Scalia dissented, saying, “The fact that juries continue to sentence mentally retarded offenders to death for extreme crimes shows that society’s moral outrage sometimes demands execution of retarded offenders.”

Scalia also believed that executing the innocent is constitutional, saying, “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

 

The title “Never Forget” is a sly reversal of the patriotic intention of the slogan that memorializes the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. The misguided and heavy-handed response of the US government to that event has created a state of perpetual war for the country; a war with no end in sight and no political pragmatism working to do so. The torture perpetrated by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison was proof of the emptiness in American rhetoric—brutality, not justice, is our core belief and first response. 

Lineman (2009)
Digital print
43 x 51 in.

 

Lineman (2009)
Newsprint, 60 pages
11 x 17 in.

My experiential and performative projects question ideas of individual agency and collective action by engaging with unexpected creative partners: construction workers, linemen-in-training, sauna enthusiasts, State Park employees and citrus growers. My work creates specific yet open frameworks that invite people to contribute to the activation of the artwork.

Gaza Before the Law (2017), Single-channel HD video (color with sound), looped.

Gaza Before the Law explores a lawsuit filed against the US Government by Akram Abousharar, a Palestinian-American lawyer based in Orange County, California.  The lawsuit claims US military support of Israel violates the Leahy Amendment to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which bars the US from giving military aid to any country that commits human rights violations.  Gaza Before the Law intercuts footage of Gaza, shot of Abousharar after the 2014 Israeli siege, with notes from the actual hearing, and scenes from Abousharar’s law practice in Orange County to offer a layered examination of the limits to law in matters of politics.  It also delves into the difficult terrain of how the violence of war and occupation is experienced from the Palestinian diaspora.  

Small Treasures, Keepsakes, and Curiosities (2017)

Photographs, flip book, wood block, jewelry case, autograph book, metal tin, plastic hand

Dimensions variables

The 96-year-old Turkish composer İlhan Usmanbaş belongs to the second generation of prominent Turkish modern composers. Usmanbaş has made over 120 compositions to date, but despite his prolific and fearless work he remains surprisingly unknown to the general public in Turkey.

His work “Devr-i kebîr” (Great Rotation) for Percussion Sextet from 1974 alludes to one of the rhythmic patterns found in classical Ottoman music. The composition clearly demonstrates Usmanbaş’s contemporary musical approach through the transformation of the strict rhythmic pattern by the use of different tempi and indeterminacy artifices.

Usmanbaş has continuously engaged in a Universalist style of music throughout his career, while also being employed as a state composer inscribed in a National Republican program. Although Usmanbaş’s music does not undertake to be understood as a manifesto or as an act of resistance, the artist Mike Bode presents ”Devr-i Kebir” here, as a metonymic assertion of Turkey’s unfolding history.

With thanks to Mehmet Nemutlu. 

Original recording by the Siegfried Fink Percussion Ensemble.

I am interested in the human body as a complicated abstraction engaged in a perpetual struggle: corporeally real, yet unknowable. All of my work isolates moments of struggle or violence in a timeless, immersive void. The void as my primary environment is neutral, allowing the suspension of forms in motion–twisting muscle, rupturing explosions, falling, charred masses. My hope is that viewers will feel and experience the work similarly in their own bodies.

Manifestos and Hollow Point drawings, in AR and VR, create a series of “freeze-frames” that articulate a moment of exertion or velocity in stillness. My intention is for viewers to experience self-reflection and wonder as they consider their bodies and the bodies of others as engaged in an ongoing, unsettled contest—filled with vulnerability, strength, discomfort and defiance.

I do not have much but what I do have are my body, my words, and my actions.  When woven together, these humble acts of small gestures become powerful voices of poetic resistance over the course of time.  Since 2011, I’ve taken on a lifelong project entitled The China Outpost, which I define as my nomadic sweatshop of one.  It operates within a migratory framework where I labor on transforming discarded plastic bags into threads—a material I am amassing as one of the core building materials for the eventual reconstruction of my ancestral house.

The work presented in the exhibition maps out The China Outpost’s transcontinental journey across US-Route 6, also known as “The Grand Army of the Republic Highway”.  The map details all the towns intersecting Route 6 which will become sites for the outpost’s sociocultural interventions as make-shift forums that invite passerby to open-ended conversations about migration and the labor of adapting to a new home.

Untitled (2018)

Dimensions variable

The waving sign says “We are a we.” It waves to the viewer, to maintenance employees, to the sign printer, to the person accompanying a friend on a class assignment. It waves to the room, to the light that meets it and filters through, to the door, to the wall, to the silverfish squeezing itself from underneath the floor molding.

I go towards the trouble because I believe the messiness is a way. It makes me cry but I’m stardust like you, they and it. And I honestly don’t know where I begin and end and believe we will survive the anthropocene and capitalism only if we embrace WE: together and different at the same time.

All the artists I invited persist after trauma, bodily struggle, putting their mind and body on the line, survivors of violence, and displacement and are resisting.

Shout outs to Rosi Braidotti, Angela Davis, Donna Haraway, bell hooks and a trillion others.

Bronnard (after Pierre Bonnard) (2017), Oil on canvas

As men are more likely to be color blind, the artist has appropriated the style of a color-blindness test in order to illustrate gender bias. His hand-painted “BRO” is analogous to a secret handshake for a male-only club. Sexism and gender disparity in economic compensation are symptoms of a boys’ club attitude in employment, education and justice.

The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII): An Interdisciplinary Cultural Laboratory

Race is one of the prime ways history lives in us.

Our name “racial imaginary” is meant to capture the enduring truth of race: it is an invented concept that nevertheless operates with extraordinary force in our daily lives, limiting our movements and imaginations. Because no sphere of life is untouched by race, the Institute gathers under its aegis an interdisciplinary range of artists, writers, knowledge-producers, and activists. It convenes a cultural laboratory in which the racial imaginaries of our time and place are engaged, read, countered, contextualized and demystified.

What we do

The Institute will take the form of a moving collaboration with other collectives, spaces, artists, and organizations towards art exhibitions, readings, dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that engage the subject of race. The Racial Imaginary website will function as an online portal to the activities of the Institute. All events at The Racial Imaginary Institute are open to the public.