Sun, Dec 18, 2022 5:00 PM 17:00 Sun, Jan 15, 2023 6:00 PM 18:00
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The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology
1412 W Alabama St, Houston TX 77006

VISITING SCHEDULE

Carolina Otero's exhibit will be open every weekend, from 3 to 5 pm until January 14, except, the weekend of Dec 24th and 25th, the weekend of Dec 31st and Jan 1st, 2023 and Sunday, Jan 15, 2023.

Visits any other day of the week by APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Please email carolinaoterowork@gmail.com and surpik@mac.com.

SPECIAL EVENTS AND HOURS

Sunday, Dec 18th, 2022 / 5 to 6PM
ART TALK with Fabiola Lopez Duran, Phd.
Artist and Rice University Professor. RSVP is requested.
Email: carolinaoterowork@gmail.com or surpik@mac.com.
Sunday, Jan 15th, 2023 / 5 to 8PM
Private CLOSURE EVENT by invitation only.

After years of introspection and decantation, added to the profound silence enveloping the pandemia, Carolina Otero has created one of the most moving tributes to the liminal process involved in listening to her own inner voice, unfolding her infinitely subtle language.as a visual artist. An equally subtle musical electronic composition by Mercedes Otero, from 1983 titled "danza de una flor para el desierto” or “dance of a flower for the desert ”, will accompany the exhibition.

About L'INFRAMINCE:

The term “L’INFRA.MINCE” was initially coined by Marcel Duchamp to note ephemeral nuance in the world… sometimes translated as infra-thin, infra-mince connotes barely perceptible thinness… because of its ineffable subtlety Duchamp implied that infra.mince is impossible to define: “one doesn't dare but give examples… like the warmth of a seat just left is infra.mince, as is the whistling sound made by walking in velvet trousers, two objects cast from the same mold, or reflection from a mirror or glass”.

CAROLINA OTERO: L’INFRAMINCE

By Surpik Angelini. November 2022.
Founding Director of The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology.

The present exhibition of Carolina Otero’s work, takes its title ” L’inframince” from a term coined by Marcel Duchamp to note ephemeral nuance in the world. Sometimes translated as infra-thin, inframince connotes barely perceptible thinness. Facing its ineffable subtlety, Duchamp declared that because inframince was impossible to define “ One doesn’t dare but give examples like the warmth of a seat just left is inframince, as is the whistling sound made by walking in velvet trousers, two objects cast from the same mold, or reflections from mirror or glass.” L’inframince also implies transdisciplinary forms of contemporary art, as presented in a publication by TransArts, a Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Apart from the serendipity of sharing the same name, The Transart Foundation in Houston shares Vienna’s TransArts’s vision where “ Authors and artists capture in text and image fleeting moments in which artistic, theoretical, scientific or everyday cultural elements meet, change or merge with one another.”( Davila, De L’inframince ). Nothing is more fitting than our own example of “l’inframince” in Carolina Otero’s recent work.

Carolina Otero’s viscerally resonant artistic creations flow out of the mystic aura of landscapes that sunk into her imaginary during pivotal moments in her life: the tropical forest of San Antonio de Los Altos in Caracas became a paradisiacal playground during her early childhood, with its exuberant vegetation and misty drizzle melting multicolored clay in her hands. Later on, as an adult, the sonorous silence of Norway’s peaceful winters, the tenuous veils of its snowy fields, the sharply carved fjords and gleaming glaciers took another subliminal seat in her inner being… More recently, in Marfa, Texas the artist recounted being magically transported to the amphitheaters of ancient Greece and the enigmatic ruins of Egypt, while experiencing Donald Judd’s impeccable metal and concrete minimalist boxes in dialogue with their inner and outer luminous surroundings. Thus, far from modernist tenets that stress the autonomy of the work of art, Carolina’s recent work embraces a relational, contemporary vision of the world.

In such a world, language is a constitutive element. As ecologist David Abrams puts it, ”Language is as much a property of the landscape as of the humans who dwell in it.” In this sense, as deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida famously declares, ” There is nothing outside the text.” (Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, p. 125-26 )

So captivated was Carolina by the blanched, winded Texan desert, that she turned her latest visual notations into almost imperceptible marks, something like faint mutterings… marks as gesture, marks as trace, marks as shapes in passing…. they all evidence Derrida’s thoughtful reflection, “If shapes make texts, then the world, which not only contains many shapes, but in fact, consists of nothing but shapes, will have a lot to say.” (pp.126, The Shape of the Signifier) Thus, in Carolina’s own perception of nature as text, a primordial trace or mark on the ground can be read either closely or at a great distance, resembling something as essential as a petroglyph or an urban site plan. Thus, in her photographs we see tree trunks and branches doubling as the course of rivers with its many tributaries seen from the sky.

For Roland Barthes as for Carolina, writing is furthermore a sensual act. Evoking early years when she learned to turn sound into scripted and cursive shapes, writing to her was an exhilarating experience. In fact, we can say that while for Barthes writing had all to do with making marks on paper, for Carolina, writing was mostly akin to making her own musical notation, translating voice on paper. Indeed, beyond representation, isn’t all art fundamentally an act of translating the sensation of one realm of experience into another?

Carolina’s resonant forms aligned horizontally on the wall also seem to invite the outside world to partake in an imaginary collective chant. Mercedes Otero, Carolina’s sister, is the composer of the accompanying electronic musical piece from 1983, titled “ Danza de una Flor para el Desierto” or “Dance of a Flower for the Desert.” As a musician, Mercedes accurately compares Carolina’s visual notations to medieval “neumes” - signs for one or a group of successive musical pitches. A predecessor of musical notes, neumes are the earliest known notation prior to the invention of the five-line staff. Created in the 9th century during the reign of Charlemagne, neumes (derived from the Greek word for breath or “pneuma”) were shorthand, squarish mnemonic aids placed over sacred texts to indicate inflections in the melodic recitation of Gregorian chants.

This spare inflection is what we appreciate in Carolina’s marks and in each one of her hand-hewn pieces, made out of thin slabs of white plaster, laid out in clusters on a horizontal axis along the gallery wall. The space between these forms determines what could begin to evoke a faint sound or a prolonged silence. Furthermore, because of their inframince closeness to the supporting wall, these coded shapes seem to sprout like an efflorescence from the wall itself, emphasizing the subtlety of whispers, murmurs, or a strange rhythmic babble that a wall affixes, but only perhaps for a moment.

It is somehow in keeping with this primordial relation that Carolina’s clusters of neumes were carved by her out of cast plaster slices. Refining the art of unglazed porcelain later on, Carolina chose a spatialized format to arrange her newer compositions of sensual shapes, which only by dramatic illumination are understood as something belonging to material culture. Depending on the distance from which it is viewed or imagined, these compositions can remit to a musical tablature, a Mayan mural, or an architectural layout.

In conclusion, as we follow the various stages of Carolina's unique creative process, we perceive a world translated into different archaic visual notations, some resembling eastern calligraphy, others recalling pictograms, primordial musical notations, or urban configurations. Eco theorist David Abrams, who dedicated a lifetime to study an array of magical phenomena in many cultures, insists that it is our responsibility to renounce the claim that language is an exclusively human property. As Carolina has shown us throughout this exhibition, “we must begin to listen to what the world that speaks wants to say”. (Pp.55 The Shape of the Signifier)

References

Davila, Thierry (2010) De L’Inframince, breve histoire de l’imperceptible, de Marcel Duchamp a nos jours. Editions du Regard, Paris.

Michaels, Walter Benn (2004) The Shape of the Signifier, Princeton University Press.

Schwenger, Peter (2019) Asemic the Art of Writing, University of Minnesota Press.

Carolina Otero's exhibit will be open every weekend, from 3 to 5 pm until January 14, except, the weekend of Dec 24th and 25th, the weekend of Dec 31st and Jan 1st, 2023 and Sunday, Jan 15, 2023.

Visits any other day of the week by APPOINTMENT ONLY at 1412 West Alabama, Houston, Texas 77006. Please email carolinaoterowork@gmail.com and surpik@mac.com.

Download PDF Here

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Sep

to Jan 8

Soledad Salamé: FORCED by NATURE

Fri, Sep 17, 2021 1:30 PM 13:30 Sat, Jan 8, 2022 2:30 PM 14:30
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Soledad Salamé: FORCED by NATURE

Sep 17, 2021 to March 27, 2022

The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology
1412 W Alabama St, Houston, TX 77006

This exhibit will be available for a private viewing by appointment only, from March 24 to March 27, 2022.
Mask required. Please contact Surpik Angelini at Surpik@mac.com

Artist’s Statement

My art is a conceptual and visual exploration of the intersection of science, technology, and issues dealing with social justice defining our present time. Engaged with the political implications of our environmental crisis, my recent work maps vulnerable marginalized communities suffering the greatest consequences of natural disasters.

Working in glass, silk, and paper effectively extended my visual vocabulary, incorporating textual relief elements to underscore our collective negligence regarding climate change, including the rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. Climate change has triggered people’s migration from areas affected by rising water and unstable weather. In the USA, Border security policies intensify the social impact of migration, exacerbating unsustainable environmental practices.

Our world is in constant flux and transformation. The way we communicate our actions’ consequences has been transformed. We once created a tactile object- a newspaper -- providing a richly physical interaction made from plant-based paper; today, with the slow death of print media, we interact with world news through digital reporting, easily distorted or manipulated. Among my most recent explorations: Newspaper, Almost Transparent mimics folded newspapers. On the surface, the engraved images of selected articles capture light and cast still shadow images, preserving the historic instant in an ephemeral shadow on a wall.

I wish to record changes in our environment as a call to action to protect both the earth’s precious natural resources and its people, while pointing to the fragile beauty surrounding us. By magnifying the pleasures inherent in natural materials -- paper, textiles, and even sand-based glass – my work seeks to remind us of the magnificence and splendor that may be lost if we do not protect the environment.

Soledad Salamé: Moving Through the Earth, Crossing Borders and Boundaries

by Edward J. Sullivan

For many years, I have lived with a large-scale print by Soledad Salamé. It is a graphite and acrylic piece from 2006 and belongs to the series called Antarctic Reflections (Fig. 1). These works were first seen publicly in an exhibition called “Aguas Vivas” at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago, capital of Salamé’s native Chile. The tones in the print are pale blues, greys and varying shades of white. “Aguas Vivas” means “Living Waters” and it is important to understand not only the meaning of this term but also, its connotations for the overall concept that the artist deals with in this, and subsequent projects. The waters of the Antarctic, indeed all waters, are alive! They contain the kernels of existence. Not only do they shelter incalculable numbers of organisms, they also provide the sustenance for the flow of life throughout the planet. Water in Soledad Salamé’s art is the essence of existence, but it is also a harbinger of potential disaster and chaos. Droughts, floods, or pollution through such human-created events as oil spills, and all manner of ecological catastrophes are poised to upset the delicate balance of every natural element, including the rhythms and the sustaining foundations of animal and human life on this fragile planet that we inhabit.

The work by Soledad Salamé that I have the privilege of seeing every day, exudes an air of chilliness (naturally) but also one of melancholy. Yet the sense of dislocation that I experience when contemplating this print is hardly the same as when I look at a more conventional work by nineteenth century Romantic era artists who traveled to far-away places in order to experience the awe and grandeur of nature. Soledad’s “inner portraits” of natural environment are not simply renditions of a time or place but acute investigations into the inexpressible qualities that inform the world around us and can only be intuited, not observed. A product of the artist’s expedition to Antarctica with naturalist fellow-travelers, the “Aguas Vivas” series was one of multiple testimonies to a constant theme in her work – intimate engagement with an ever-mutable nature. Salamé’s investigations into the natural world have become more poignant and more urgent, even during the almost-twenty-year span between her initial incursions into the world’s southern-most continent. As climate disasters and subsequent human catastrophes continue to mount, Soledad Salamé has made it her principal concern to document, interpret, suggest, evoke and counsel her viewers as to the imminent risks to the all the earth’s inhabitants, especially the most vulnerable. These include the migrant populations with which she deals in her most recent exhibition, people who must flee their habitats for such impending natural calamities as lack of sufficient water, or human-precipitated cataclysms as violence of all descriptions: political, moral, substance-induced, or simply the inexplicable hatred that can be conceived on the part of one group for another.

As a historian of the arts of the Americas, I have long been drawn to Salamé’s art, (since I was first introduced to it in the early 1990s) for the kinship that it demonstrates with visual, moral and literary concerns that have been pervasive in American culture (south and north) since the late eighteenth century. When Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt made his epic trip to South America and the Caribbean from 1799 to 1804, his recordings and intense involvement with the natural life of the flora and fauna of the Americas, codified for European audiences, the thousands of years of importance that nature and its constant mutations had had for indigenous peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere. In the literature produced during the American Enlightenment and into the later decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the vast pampas of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, the volcanoes of Ecuador and Mexico, the Atlantic and Pacific shorelines and the power of ocean water for transport and river water for substance, all played determining roles in the artistic imagination of the Indigenous, Spanish, Portuguese, English and French-speaking populations, whether tribal descendants or colonists from Europe.

Soledad Salamé is one of the most distinguished artists of our time for harnessing the essential and most urgent messages provided to us by the natural world. With near-shamanic prescience she has understood the warning signals offered by the cataclysmic droughts, raging forest fires, ever-increasing extinction of animal species and many more cautionary chapters in the recent annals of nature. She employs these in order to create images that serve as paradigmatic semaphores for imminent danger. However, I do not wish to suggest that the art of Soledad Salamé consists principally of only topical themes or deals simply with issues of impending disaster. I think of her as a contemporary heir to the concerns expressed by nineteenth century artists from all corners of the Hemisphere who have turned to nature in the spirit of both celebration and caution. U.S. artist Frederic Edwin Church and Uruguayan painter Pedro Blanes Viale understood, in their extraordinary images of waterfalls, that cascading water was more than a picturesque feature of the wilderness. Water’s power may be harnessed for energy – until it runs dry. Mexican artists José María Velasco (as important as a naturalist than as a painter) or the twentieth century volcanologist-artist Gerardo Murillo (popularly known by his assumed Nahuatl name Dr. Atl [meaning “water”] employed representations of volcanoes as metaphors of both grandeur (national and spiritual) and potential destruction (see, for example, Dr. Atl’s many depictions of the eruption of Paricutin that unexpectedly and violently surged in a cornfield in the State of Michoacán in 1943). I would also undoubtedly connect Soledad Salamé with some of the most extraordinary women artists of natural subject matter in the twentieth century. Georgia O’Keeffe is most remembered for her desert landscapes of the U.S. Southwest. While these are impressive modernist icons of visual experimentation they are, at the same time, warnings to her audience of the fragile balance between nature and the incursions of humankind into the desert climes of New Mexico. Similarly, Emily Carr, whose career developed in the Province of British Columbia, Canada, was an assiduous reader of the biological timeclock of the forests and wetlands of Vancouver Island. These and many others form the art historical genealogical chart form which Soledad Salamé descends. Like Velasco, Carr or O’Keeffe, she calls attention to natural realities. Although her means and forms of expression are thoroughly contemporary, with all of the experimental forms and materials that she has employed, Salamé nonetheless forms the most recent link in a long and powerful chain of artists and writers for whom nature and its supremacy over humanity – and its unstable delicacy – stands as the quintessential subject for reflection, meditation and as an implement in a “call to consciousness,” an admonition for all to heed: Nature can protect, but it can also destroy – and be destroyed.

Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at New York University. He specializes in the arts of the Americas in the modern and contemporary eras. He is the author of more than thirty books and exhibition catalogues and has curated exhibitions of Latin American art in various museums throughout the world.

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**Fig. 1.** Detail of *Antarctic Reflection I*; Print Drawing , Graphite and Acrylic on Mylar.

**Fig. 2.** *Antarctic Reflection,* installation at the Museum of Fine Arts Chile, 2006

Soledad Salamé: Considering Boundaries

by Clayton Kirking

Transart, Houston, 2021

In May of 2001 I wrote for Soledad Salamé’s exhibition En el Laberinto de la Soledad a very large installation that was mounted at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile. The show opened on September 12, 2001. The world changed before the opening. Now I write again for Forced by Nature, which will open on September 9, 2021, once again in a world that has changed.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, this country has suffered a nearly catastrophic financial collapse, a presidential administration that evidently intended to mutate the fundamental DNA of democracy, and now a viral pandemic that has rebooted the globe. The relevance of Salamé’s work has not only survived these calamities but transcended them and grown more pertinent.

Throughout her career, perhaps throughout her life, Soledad has viewed the world as being in a state of crisis both politically and environmentally. Her work has sought to pinpoint issues of extreme tension and illustrate them in a manner that emphasizes their vital nature and leads the viewer to a deeper understanding of causes and effects. At age eighteen the artist left Chile and immigrated to Venezuela and her global outlook expanded further, a process that has never stopped. In her installation entitled The Labyrinth of Solitude she laid bare both the fragility and extreme beauty of our global environment. Since 2001 she has witnessed the ravages of increasingly bellicose politics and progressively deteriorated environmental conditions that have forced the flight and migration of millions of people internationally. Then, as 2020 dawned, the world rapidly slid into a pandemic that has left millions dead and yet remains of unknown proportions.

The objects presented in Forced by Nature represent some of Salamé’s most refined work. This refinement is expressed not only in the artistic vocabulary that the artist has developed over the course of her career, but in the variety and use of media. Her extreme facility allows her to express herself in diverse techniques using skills that she has honed in her studio, focused through her travels, and cultured with extensive reading and research. She is able to understand relationships that exist among enormously complex subjects, climate change, immigration and racism, but conceive images that exemplify the more quotidian aspects of life such as agriculture, family stability, craft, social justice and the fragility of interpersonal networks. Some of the work was created before the COVID19 pandemic, other pieces while the virus tore through countries, cities, villages and homes. In any case, what Salamé demonstrates here is an astonishing aptitude of tools, skills and media.

The glass newspaper installations are neither print, nor sculpture but make a profound, eloquent point of the lack of transparency within our culture; embroidered frontpages draw a direct connection between the daily lives and pursuits of migrants and the ponderous weight of the prevailing body politic; sandblasted blown glass works elegantly imply both the depth of our humanity and its fragility. Two new fabric works, both made during the current pandemic, have emerged from that experience. Air, three large screen-printed and hand dyed panels of silk, invites viewers to examine it at close range, to appreciate the color and movement and realize that the menace of COIVID is invisible, in the air, everywhere. For Our Heroes solidifies that fear, picturing washed surgical masks drying in an open window. These can be seen as the culmination of Soledad’s years of consideration, which have resulted in this exhibition: life is fragile, it flows and changes, and is often made manageable by simple, daily heroic acts—washing a mask for a nurse to wear the next day.

Postscript

A work that I believe eloquently captures the essence of Salamé’s intellect is not in the exhibition. It was not made by the artist but collected by her on the Mexico/Texas border. It is an embroidered felt and fabric sleeve that slips over a bottle or glass to keep the drink cool. NO WALL is stitched in bright yellow felt. A border wall does so much more than slowing immigration, it destroys economies, families and lives. Soledad Salamé quickly grasped the fact that this simple handmade tool embodied the politics, lack of transparency, corruption and denial that shape our world and may determine its fate.

Clayton C. Kirking is an independent curator and information manager. In 1992, Kirking became the first Curator of Latin American Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, which established the department that same year. From 2001 to 2015 he served as Chief of the Art & Architecture Collection of the New York Public Library.

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Photographs by Michael Koryta

The exhibition opened for visitors by appointment only, from Wednesday through Saturday through March 27, 2022.

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Nov

to Jun 21

Exhibition

BEING AND EVERYTHING: Works by Dawn DeDeaux

Sun, Nov 1, 2020 6:00 PM 18:00 Mon, Jun 21, 2021 5:00 PM 17:00
the Transart Foundation (map)
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The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology
1412 W Alabama St, Houston, TX 77006
The Museum District across the street from The Menil and Rothko Chapel
By appointment until further notice. Ph. 713 8054207

BEING AND EVERYTHING: Works by Dawn DeDeaux, AN INTRODUCTION

Photos by artist Beatriz Bellorin

BEING AND EVERYTHING:

POST ART by Dawn DeDEAUX

Essay by Surpik Angelini

Founding Director

Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology

Long regarded as a futurist artist, Dawn DeDeaux’s multimedia, interdisciplinary installations overture art, anthropology, philosophy and science to framework a post human, post anthropocene discourse of extinction. (1)

DeDeaux's Post Art trajectory was sharpened by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of her habitat and most of her work, and the escalating extinction rate of planetary species. Her art turned more purposely to the materiality of the object, not as a representation of reality as we know it, nor as a found artifact remitting to Duchamp’s "readymades." Instead, DeDeaux embraces an all-encompassing notion of “object" understood as “everything” - an “everything” where even the causality of all things can be fathomed to radiate from the “object” itself into the unknown. (2)

THE MORNING AFTER: Family Home / AUGUST 6, 2005. Dawn DeDeaux — *THE MORNING AFTER: Family Home* / AUGUST 6, 2005. Dawn DeDeaux

Emerging out of the residue of planetary exile, DeDeaux’s objects are also conceived as a longing, an “algama” (Greek for treasure). With a potentially regenerative DNA for reproducing themselves - anything and everything at any time everywhere - DeDeaux calls to mind Graham Harman's image of an object "like a retrovirus injecting (its) DNA back into every object (it) encounters."

The experience of a “mise en scene” by DeDeaux evokes a subliminal, grander assemblage through the ghostly presence of its parts: rusted tools, shattered glass, debris, charred beams, burned books, postcards, collected ashes, soil from different parts of the world, broken idols, wooden and glass ladders and more. These post-apocalyptic objects no longer belong to the earth’s ecology: they have been excised, cut off, uprooted. But their uncanny appearance paradoxically retain the lost aura Walter Benjamin speaks of in his description of “Art in the Age of Reproduction” - reproduction being key to what DeDeaux’s work entails. Digitally seeping through a translucent printing process, her carefully conjured images reflect the tattered remains of a once-vibrant material world.

DAWN DeDEAUX IN Egypt M 300 1600 pix web.jpg

Dawn DeDeaux / Portrait Holding Dirt, Luxor Egypt, 1986. Photo by Cheryl Koralik

The objects DeDeaux selects and reproduces are neither projections looking forward nor memories looking backwards in time. They have lost forever their context. They no longer belong to culture. Culture - like our earth – is pulverized, evoking the sensation of standing in the sands of Egypt, where mineral particles and minute man-made shards mix indiscriminately in the topsoil -- an epiphany-induced observation for DeDeaux while walking through Luxor in 1982, mirroring Jane Bennett's encounter with a trash cluster of plastic debris and a rat on a Baltimore street that sparked the journey towards her seminal book Vibrant Matter.

Before stripping her own objects bare, in the early 1990s DeDeaux set hard focus on the absence of environmental ethics and the engines of extinction - resulting in the groundbreaking immersive media work that premiered at the 1996 Olympics, The Face of God, in Search of; and her first extensive landscape series - Postcards to Teddy Roosevelt while Thinking of Yves Klein - conceived for the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition Landscape Reclaimed. In the series DeDeaux appears in self-portraiture, appropriating Yves Klein's daring flight far beyond his own Parisian window and into the deep abyss of American landscapes defaced by unchecked industry; standing in stark contrast to Teddy Roosevelt's romanticized celebration of the west.

Decades later DeDeaux’s Post Art again re-kindles the relevance of Yves Klein’s art, if seen through a post human, post anthropocene perspective. Klein’s anthropometries, his uncanny human silhouettes in blue, can now be understood as visions inspired by the ghostly shadows of post-human scenes on the walls of Hiroshima. Likewise, his announcement of mankind’s future telepathic communication can be seen as a presage of art at the end of time. Through powerful rhyzomes such as these, both Klein’s figurative shadows and DeDeaux’s dematerializing figures that vaporize into the void of outer space can be joined through communicating vessels, transcending the years that separate them, as precursors of Post Art. (3)

To conclude my introduction, I would like to quote fragments of a poem written by DeDeaux after her first visit to TransArt, just over a year ago. Her words seem to have sprinkled the seeds found in her TransArt exhibition Being and Everything.

"..the axis of objects...to reflect all things...
the caves within black holes filled with all matter... congealed into the gestalt...
gestures of humility...
being and nothingness...everything...
we must explore
the small universe
that brought us together."

Surpik Angelini / March 2020

THE GLASS FLOOR (detail) by Dawn Dedeaux, 2007 — *THE GLASS FLOOR* *(detail)* by Dawn Dedeaux, 2007

The Vanquished Series: From Mesopotamia to the Stars, 90” x 40” / Dawn DeDeaux — *The Vanquished Series: From Mesopotamia to the Stars*, 90” x 40” / Dawn DeDeaux

SARTRE’S TRENCH: Between Being and Nothingness, Digital Drawing by Dawn DeDeaux, 1994 — *SARTRE’S TRENCH: Between Being and Nothingness,* Digital Drawing by Dawn DeDeaux, 1994

About the Exhibition Title / BEING AND EVERYTHING

The exhibition title Being and Everything is inspired by a conceptual series DeDeaux created a few decades back surrounding historical ironies. Among the series is a work titled Sartre's Trench that highlights unusual circumstances belonging to the relationship between German philosopher Martin Heidegger's work Being and Time (1927) and its influence on French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre's subsequent tome Being and Nothingness (1943).

Sartre spent two years mastering German to read Heidegger’s Being and Time. Ironically, the war broke out between France and Germany and Sartre began his reading of Heidegger from a French trench and finished the book as a prisoner of war in a German camp from 1940-41. DeDeaux’s animated drawings present Sartre as a shadow of a soldier sitting in the trench with a book and lantern. It is accompanied by sound of a man reading aloud in German with a French accent. Additional sounds of gunfire and arsenal explosions prompt flashes of light alternately illuminating backlit words embedded in the two earthen mounds: one offers the word “being” and the other gives only “nothingness”.

*DIRT TABLE #1 / MotherShip: Dreaming of a Future Past, 2014 / Dawn DeDeaux*

SWAN SONGS: As I Lay Dying Room (after Faulkner), 2008. Dawn DeDeaux — *SWAN SONGS: As I Lay Dying Room* (after Faulkner), 2008. Dawn DeDeaux

The Heidegger Thread Continues

Dedeaux shares that “in the decades that followed Sartre, new philosophical movements have emerged - Deconstruction, Post-Humanism, New Materialism… - and throughout most new theory there remains a connection to Heidegger, significantly for his stand to debunk human hierarchy in favor of an equitable inter-connectivity with other forms of life and objects. This is core to New Materialist thinking, and biologists and environmentalists have long since dethroned man as mega-culprit for planetary disruption. Most thinkers now advocate for a level playing field and a readdress of our relationships with animals, plants, inanimate objects and all matter. Vertical math isn’t adding up for me either so I am allowing myself to float within a cosmic current, inside the circular rotation of all matter.”

RANDOM OBJECTS/ Tool discards, rock, coral, and termite eaten wood sections on outdoor shelves/ Dawn DeDeaux compound Camp Abundance, 2019 — *RANDOM OBJECTS*/ Tool discards, rock, coral, and termite eaten wood sections on outdoor shelves/ Dawn DeDeaux compound Camp Abundance, 2019

THE GLASS FLOOR / Installation View, Dawn DeDeaux, 2007 — *THE GLASS FLOOR* / Installation View, Dawn DeDeaux, 2007

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION SELECTIONS

Artist Dawn DeDeaux is an unlikely futurist based in an off-track neighborhood of ole’ town New Orleans. From here she builds spaceships in her backyard, and incessantly accumulates useless objects that fill all the nooks throughout her compound Camp Abundance. For the Transart exhibition she brings to Houston a sampler of obtuse objects and other curious matter such as shattered glass, plastic, dirt, hair, ash, bone, discarded rusted tools, water samples, a Mona Lisa postcard, ladders for escapes, a ring section from her spaceship, and a century-old iron cauldron to stir the aforementioned remnants of the post-industrial / post-colonial world into a new stew to ponder the past, the now and the future tense.

The exhibition aptly runs through the 2020 Hurricane Season, and fittingly presents a selection of works DeDeaux created in the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, acknowledging the climate catastrophes that have assaulted Houston in recent years. Works include her Water Markers series that measure varied flood water depths, and a version of her iconic Glass Floor - an illuminated ton of shattered glass hand-thrown by the artist into the spiral forms of both hurricanes and spinning galaxies. A few selections from her recent two-year-run MotherShip exhibition at MassMoCA will also be on view, including one of her 24' apocalyptic landscapes rendered on aluminum panels, and her haunting human figures deteriorating inside protective suits and ineffective armature.

While in residence at Transart, DeDeaux will further develop her series Souvenirs of Earth - producing newly configured object and matter assemblage grids that will be key feature components within the finale room of her upcoming career retrospective The Space Between Worlds, opening at New Orleans Museum of Art on October 16th (and running concurrent with Prospect.5, the city's international art triennial). These post-anthropocene offerings underway at Transart will include a 10' section of her massive Dirt Bowl Table that unites earth specimens from around the globe to convey the destiny of planetary life and culture; and a wall grid assemblage of semi-obscured, discarded tools in a work titled Objects Veiled.

Transart will also present her 2010 video installation One Drop, a circular projection of a drop of water that vibrates in the wind like an angry globe. The work overtures the global inter-connectivity of waterways and the fragile preeminence of water as the source of life.

TRANSART STUDY / 30’ Ring Angle with Landscape on West Wall / Dawn DeDeaux 2019

TRANSART STUDY One Drop Video (2010) with Escape Ladders (2020) by Dawn DeDeaux — TRANSART STUDY One Drop Video (2010) with *Escape Ladders* (2020) by Dawn DeDeaux

TRANSART STUDY / Old Forster Fell into the Ring, Pyramid and Zeppelin, Shroud, Veiled Objects, Glass Floor (rear) / Dawn DeDeaux, 2020

TRANSART STUDY with "‘Where’s Mary Mural adaptation & sculpture, Dirt Table, Shroud, Tools / 2020

STUDY FOR DIRT TABLE / New Orleans Museum of Art and Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, Dawn DeDeaux 2019

WATER MARKERS / Varied Sizes ranging heights of 10’ to 4’, Dawn DeDeaux 2006-2017

ABOUT DAWN DEDEAUX

Dawn DeDeaux has merged art with new technologies for decades to broaden art and audience engagement. Her work has been exhibited in museums nationwide including the Whitney, Armand Hammer, the Aldrich Museum of Art, Ballroom Marfa, and a recent two-year exhibition at MASS MoCA. The New Orleans Museum of Art is organizing a career retrospective of her work titled The Space Between Worlds opening in October 2020 concurrent with the international triennial Prospect.5.

DeDeaux is an American Academy in Rome Prize recipient as the Knight Foundation Southern Artist, Rauschenberg Foundation Artist in Residence, and 2014 Prospect Alumna Artist of the Year. She was host/producer of Louisiana’s first radio arts program Art Now for NPR station WWNO, founding editor of the journal Arts Quarterly, among the eight original founders of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center and is on the Board of Directors of Prospect New Orleans. As educator she established experimental multimedia art programming for a 6,000 inmate facility and has been Visiting Artist at numerous institutions including Maryland Institute College of Art, University of North Carolina, Princeton University and is advisor / mentor to School of Visual Arts (SVA) MFA Program.

DeDeaux is a native New Orleanian born on Esplanade Avenue next door to the Edgar Degas House and has remained a downtown 7th ward resident throughout her life. In her early teens she studied art with afro-futurist Martin Green, who painted planetary collisions on the walls of his humble "shotgun" home. Among her offerings to the magical surrealism of New Orleans, she is the winner of the 1976 Demolition Derby as the only female in a field of 35 contenders.

New York Times / Dawn DeDeaux: Between Apocalypses by Penelope Green

Q&A: Dawn DeDeaux discusses Forthcoming New Orleans Museum of Art Retrospective with Curator Katie Pfohl

Dawn DeDeaux / Photographer Using Space Travel / Aperture Magazine Editorial by Eva Diaz

Dawn DeDeaux Transart Exhibition / Country Road Magazine by Alexandra Kenon

FOOTNOTES / TRANSART SURPIK ANGELINI INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

(1) I use the term post-humanism in the sense of Francesca Ferrando to refer to any theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. In referencing the Anthropocene, I refer to the proposed geological era when human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

(2) This glimpse of 'The End' was unexpectedly offered to DeDeaux while standing in the disfigured landscape that was once her family home following its complete destruction by the winds and waves of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This witnessing prompted her first large-scale reconfigurations of newly transformed matter such as shattered glass, earth, burnt wood and ash, and the crude mud markings (paintings) she created on salvaged wooden panels. In contrast to her prior year immersed in advanced digital output, she found herself fully 'unplugged' in an unrecognizable world with no form of communication to convey that "Everything has changed...everything." (See DeDeaux's essay for Art in America, ‘The Death of New Orleans' / October 2005.)

(3) The ongoing decade-long MotherShip Series by Dawn DeDeaux was first crafted around Stephen Hawking's hypotheses that mankind has 100 years to either correct the conditions for human life on earth, or figure out an exit strategy. His claim was made in a video interview nearly 15 years ago, and if true, that would give us only another 85 years. Since the claim, and prior to his death, Hawking would occasionally recalibrate his prediction.

Essay on "BEING AND EVERYTHING: a Post-ART" installation by New Orleans-based artist Dawn DeDeaux, by Surpik Angelini. Read it here

An Introduction about Dawn DeDeaux’s Exhibition “Being and Everything”: Selected Notes from Contributors Surpik Angelini, Dan Cameron, Dawn DeDeaux and Roberto Tejada. Download PDF here

ANNOUNCEMENT OF YOU TUBE of ZOOM MEETING.jpg

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Aug

to Oct 18

ECHO CHAMBER: Violette Bule

Sat, Aug 1, 2020 6:30 PM 18:30 Sun, Oct 18, 2020 7:30 PM 19:30
The Transart Foundation (map)
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The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology
1412 W Alabama St, Houston, TX 77006
The Museum District across the street from The Menil and Rothko Chapel
By appointment until further notice

AN INTRODUCTION TO VIOLETTE BULE’S "ECHO CHAMBER”
by Surpik Angelini
Curator / Founding Director
Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology / Houston

Jacques Derrida sees the myth of Narcissus and Echo as the relation between light and speech. He goes on to explain that according to the myth, Echo and Narcissus are cursed by blindness. A blindness that cannot render “otherness” beyond self reflection in a pool of light… a blindness that does not render a distinct voice beyond spoken repetition.

It is a tragic entanglement, entrapped in a Narcissistic echo chamber, haunted by an engrossed self image and loud soliloquies. The Echo Chamber, “The Promised Land” where the Other is banished forever, its edenic beauty defaced beyond recognition.
Violette Bule’s “Echo Chamber” is a requiem to Narcissus, who dies a thousand deaths in the broken mirrors of oblivion.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As an artist-photographer, I move beyond the documentary record by drawing attention to the fantastical within reality and by deploying satire in order to take a critical look at a variety of social issues and power structures. While anchored in photographic practices, I often employ other media ranging from fine art materials to digital technology to commonplace objects such as mirrors, bars of soap, and silverware. Conjuring fictional narratives staged in urban spaces, I seek to question and highlight the often-overlooked complexity of issues such as migration, incarceration, identity, social justice, and nationalism.

I am committed to the power of image-making to spark radical change. Drawing on my experiences as a Venezuelan immigrant to the United States, I examine the structural violence that shapes the everyday life of vulnerable and precarious communities. Often employing documentary forms, I hope to renew and radicalize the modern ideal of blurring the boundaries between art and life as I seek to explore vulnerability and amplify it as a potential form of counterinsurgency, or perhaps, of political power.

SUBVERSIVE ECHOES, A REVIEW BY IRINA TROCONIS
PhD, Cornell University

In The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), Jacques Rancière defines aesthetic acts as “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity” (3). These acts disrupt “the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle” (59). They are interventions that trigger the formation of new networks between subjects, meanings, and the fabric of the sensible and, in doing so, offer the possibility to reconfigure what are given to be facts: the taken for granted and already understandable reality. Stepping into Violette Bule’s Echo Chamber is entering and engaging with the ongoing reconfiguration of what Rancière calls “the fabric of the sensible”: the system of a priori forms that presents itself to sense experience and that, in the context of Bule’s work, defines how Venezuela is conceived within and outside its national borders. The echoes that come out of her installations—each constituting a multisensory experience engaging tangled temporalities and crisscrossed geographies—are pieces in an ever-changing puzzle where the country’s recent history comes together and comes apart. This history—an accumulation of unfulfilled promises of the country’s many revolutions, of the unachieved progress of its “spectacular modernity,”[1] and of recurring clashes between the needs and demands of the population and the power and rhetoric of the “magical state”[2]—is not there as a message, just as the members of the audience are not there as spectators. Bule instead stages a sort of “history in the making”: a work-in-progress that demands not only the attention but also the labor of those who, as they interact with each installation, unavoidably become actors/authors.

REQUIEM200≤, 2020 | Violette Bule — *REQUIEM200≤,* 2020 | Violette Bule

This call to agency and participation is embedded in the logic that structures each piece and that brings together the materiality of the physical/analogue world (recycled wood, metal pots, and iron nails) and the virtual world of social media and digital archives. REQUIEM200≤ is made of a wooden structure painted in black that (mi)shapes the map of Venezuela, punctured by QR codes—printed on small white squares—that the audience must scan with their phones after downloading the application Bule developed for it. Once scanned, each code shows the details of the more than 200 deaths that occurred during the protests against the regime of Nicolás Maduro between February 2014 and February 2017: a picture of the face, the specific location where the person died, their National Identification Number (“cédula de identidad”), and the way in which they were killed.

El Helicoide—also a wooden structure painted in black—is a re-production of the famous architectural building by the same name that became the symbol of Venezuela’s “petromodernity”[3]and that currently serves as a prison where the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) holds both regular and political prisoners under blatantly inhumane conditions. Using a device with a screen provided as part of the piece, the audience must slowly scan the wooden structure in order to find the codes hidden in the dome that will take them to fragments of YouTube videos which do not appear in any order—chronological or otherwise—and which capture moments of the many lives the Helicoide has lived, hinting at (without ever articulating) resonances and continuities between them.

El Helicoide, 2020 | Violette Bule — *El Helicoide,* 2020 | Violette Bule

Lastly, El Guiso is a collection of fifteen pots displayed in a circle on top of a round table made of the same recycled wood painted in black and used in the other pieces. As the audience moves around the table, they lift the lid of the pots and look inside. There, they find their own image—reflected on the surface of a mirror that has been placed at the bottom of each pot—and hear, as if coming from it, the mutterings of a corrupted state: the sounds of a rigged election, the desperate screams for help of protesters who realize they are being murdered, the loud clicking of cameras capturing the moment when the country’s two presidents (Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó) negotiate Venezuela’s fate with their allies, and the banging and hitting of pots in the hands of a starving and angry population.

El Guiso, 2020 | Violette Bule — *El Guiso,* 2020 | Violette Bule

The audience thus finds itself in an echo chamber—as the title of the exhibit promises—, but not passively or comfortably. Rather than encountering already-digested stories that align with preconceived notions about Venezuela, they are unsettled by the attack of noises coming from all directions, places, and times that do not complement but instead battle each other, and that render present sore, dirty, and hidden truths gurgling from the depths of the country’s entrails. Going back briefly to Rancière, it is a disruption of the production of meaning that occurs through a sensorial intervention, the effect of which is the vertigo of dislocation. Not only do the noises generate confusion regarding what is being said and by whom—a confusion that must be worked through—but the hybrid nature of the installations also alters perceptions regarding time and place. The virtual world that Bule gives access to and the fluidity of its time/space weaken the certainty regarding the “when” and the “where” that frame the pieces and the audience. The “when” loses its referentiality as present, past, and future become tangled and refuse to fall into chronological order; the “where” loses its specificity as the reality of the Venezuela that is staged in each piece enters in dialogue with the assumptions, interpretations, and reactions of an audience made of people of multiple nationalities who are simultaneously located in the physical “here” of the exhibit and the abstract “there” of the online world.

This loss of the sense of time and place becomes visible and tangible in the design of the wooden structures of REQUIEM200≤ and El Helicoide. The map in REQUIEM200≤ is not the kind that clearly draws the outline of Venezuela’s territory, making the country legible and easy for the eye to apprehend (and for the audience to comprehend). On the contrary, the map is the map of a wreckage: a country in pieces, a wounded body with limbs sticking out in odd angles, a shattered coffin where nails do not hold anything together but rather tear the wood apart and threaten to cut the skin of those who carelessly approach it. Similarly, the Helicoide in El Helicoide is a work in fragments. The smooth surface of the original structure and the ascending spiral that promised to take the vehicles visiting “Latin America’s greatest shopping mall”[4] to the heavenly heights of progress have been mutilated and reversed. Pieces of wood in all sizes and shapes pile on top of each other, forming a deep labyrinth that folds onto itself, supported by a base in the shape of a spiral that reaches down rather than up, into the depths of a present made of layers of forgotten and unsightly remains of multiple pasts. A cube pierced by copper-toned sticks appears in the center of the labyrinth—forming a sort of “dome”—as if fighting to stay afloat and not be swallowed by the oil drenching the wood. The sticks evoke, on one hand, the people forgotten, left behind, or sacrificed in the country’s journey to modernity: the barrios that serve as background to El Helicoide but that never became part of it or of the wealth it promised. On the other, they seem to represent the audience and the experience itself of engaging with Bule’s pieces: an experience that draws you in, asking you not to watch but to navigate a space that was once familiar but that is now uncertain.

Left: El Helicoide, 2020. Right: REQUIEM200≤ | Violette Bule — *Left: El Helicoide,* 2020. Right: *REQUIEM200≤* | Violette Bule

Key to this navigation is the transformation of sight into touch: the eye, rather than passively observing the display of a quickly consumable spectacle, is forced to linger in the corners, under the panels, and around the nails. It thus “touches” the surfaces, slowing down in order to understand not what is being shown, but what is being said in those textures that, in Bule’s hands, become “texxtures.” Coined and conceptualized by Renu Bora, “texxture” is dense with information about how an object substantively, historically, and materially came into being, thus differing from “texture,” which “defiantly or even invisibly blocks or refuses such information” (Bora in Sedgwick 2003, 14). Texxture is “loud,” it draws our attention to the bumps, blemishes, holes, and rough edges and to the stories that they tell, stories that, in the case of Bule’s pieces, are connected to the equally blemished, rough, and hole-ridden (hi)story of the Venezuelan nation. The texxtures that “deform” the space thus render tangible the temporal layers that accumulate to make up a present that also includes the audience, as the pots in El Guiso explicitly indicate.

In fact, the reflection that appears once the lid is lifted and that changes with each new face that looks inside the pots visibly places the members of the audience at the center of “el guiso.” In Venezuela, this word denotes both a sort of stew that can be made with a wide variety of ingredients, and an act of fraud, corruption, or deception that goes against the law and that is done in order to achieve personal gain. The audience thus not only becomes part of the installation—their faces “completing” the design of the pots—but it also becomes part of the network of questionable acts and decisions that materializes in the sound coming out of each pot. Bule thus subverts the act of consumption of the art piece and of the information provided in it. Rather than automatically absorbing what the eye apprehends—the way you would do when presented with a regular “guiso”—the audience must carefully navigate uneven surfaces and difficult corners while trying to make sense of the echoes coming from them, and of the role each person plays in a spatiotemporal puzzle that refuses to stay still.

In the case of REQUIEM200≤, the role requires accessing an online archive where Bule has stored the “digital remains” of those who died during the protests against Maduro’s regime and whose deaths have either remain in the margins of the state’s official narrative, or become invisibilized through the politization of the media and the protagonism it gives to ideological agendas where the dead are just a number. This archive—put together by Bule through a gargantuan effort of research, fact checking, and compilation of official and unofficial data—is still in the making, open to changes and additions that can come from anyone who has something new to contribute. It is also a ghostly archive, not only because it exists in the margins of the narrative that shapes the institutional memory grounding the political agenda of the government, but also because, being virtual, it escapes that narrative not to deny it or ignore it, but to haunt it. This haunting quality is, according to Andrew Hoskins, a key characteristic of digital remains. In his conceptualization of the “restless past,” he argues that “digital memory has become an awesome new risk in its entanglement in the unimaginable scale and complexity of hybrid personal/public networks and archives, and therein digital traces’ immeasurable capacity to haunt, including after death” (Hoskins 2018, 3). This “immeasurable capacity to haunt” is connected to the fluidity of the digital archive, to the fact that the bodies it stores are not tied to the logic of time/place: they are not geographically anchored and they do not have—or belong to—a past or a territory, but rather restlessly move across spaces and times. As the audience interacts with Bule’s piece, it participates in the preservation of this restlessness. With their phones turned into pocket-sized tombstones for the far-away dead, those in the audience contribute to the creation of an afterlife that escapes the reach of the state and the boundaries of the nation-state, and that produces a memory that “does not stay put but circulates, migrates, travels; […] a work that is continually in progress, rather than a reified object” (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen 2018, 1).

In the case of El Helicoide and El Guiso, the role of the audience, though equally active and dynamic, is not tied to the preservation of a sort of subversive archive but rather to the disruption of the memory narratives that have defined the nation’s identity and that have been repeatedly articulated by those in power. In El Helicoide, this narrative goes back to the progress that the country’s seemingly infinite oil reserves promised and that the Helicoide was supposed to represent and consolidate. To achieve this progress has meant, historically, to dismiss, ignore, and obliterate a past that is always portrayed as primitive, inferior, and shameful by those who, as they come into power, promise to finally transform the country into a modern and wealthy nation. Hence the many lives of the Helicoide, each built on top of the remains of the previous one, the spectacle of the new an easy distraction from the burden of the old. Similarly, in El Guiso, this fetishization of the always-elusive future and rejection of the always-unworthy past translates into a string of revolutions that, in their attempts to lead the country to its unfulfilled independence—as mandated by Simón Bolívar, the Liberator and “Padre de la Patria”—have repeatedly weakened democratic institutions, bypassed the country’s many constitutions, and created networks of corruption that benefit the few and injure the many. These violations—a constant in every government, regardless of political orientation—have been easily ignored, becoming quiet and “inconsequential” whispers amidst the deafening drumroll announcing the arrival of the “New,” the “Great,” and the “True” Revolution.

However, these whispers—and the remains of the Helicoide’s many pasts—are impossible to ignore in Bule’s pieces, where they become loud echoes that surprise the audience and that demand to be acknowledged, handled, and worked through. The goal then is not to feed the audience an already-constructed narrative that “explains” Venezuela—thus adhering to what has been established as “visible,” “hearable,” and “sayable,”—but to present them with the fragments of a history that is yet to be written and that is not oriented a priori towards a bright and well-known future. The work of dealing with these echoes is difficult, in part because they appear as if “out of nowhere.” In fact, in El Helicoide, there is no way to tell when the video will appear on the screen in the scanning device that the audience holds, for the codes that trigger it are hidden in the dome of the structure. Equally shocking is to lift the lid of the pots in El Guiso and find, not a thing, but a sound in it, and one that appears to come from your own reflection, from your own mouth. Furthermore, the fact that the videos and audio files in the two pieces are not organized chronologically means that the notion of a past followed by a present and a future is completely disrupted: there is only the work to be done, in the present, on the remains of not one but multiple pasts. Lastly, the nature of the videos itself dismantles the narrative that, coming from the “magical state,” relies on the grandiosity of power and the allure of the spectacle. Taken from a corner of YouTube that Bule herself calls “la cloaca del mundo mediático en Venezuela” (“the sewer of Venezuela’s media”), the videos are not what we wanted or were hoping to see. They present us with difficult and uncomfortable truths, there are contradictions among and within them, and some are fragmented and of poor quality. Similarly, the audio files coming from the pots produce a jarring effect—particularly if more than one pot is “shouting” at a time—that further complicates the production of a straight-forward narrative.

Passivity is thus not possible for the audience that moves—slowly, carefully, suspiciously—through Bule’s echo chamber. With each sense heightened and without the comfort of a familiar narrative, the only option left is to embrace the task of sorting through the “stuff” the present is made of: the many pasts that never “passed”, the forgotten traces, the good deeds and the bad decisions, the hope that was carelessly buried and the crap that was carefully hidden. In the process, new agencies are activated. Each member of the audience finds their own way around the network of echoes, discovering continuities and contradictions, writing and rewriting the narratives that they will take away with them and that can be as subversive, irreverent, and disloyal (to the dream of progress, to the magic of the state, to the will of spectral heroes) as they dare to be. A possibility thus arises to draft futures for the nation that are truly new not because they do away with the past, but because they are born out of a conscious, painful, uncomfortable, and careful journey through it.

(References and footnotes below)

List of References

Blackmore, Lisa. Spectacular Modernity. University of Pittsburg Press, 2017.

Bond, Lucy, Craps, Stef, and Vermeulen, Pieter (eds.). Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. Berghahn Books, 2018.

Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Hoskins, Andrew (ed.). Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. Routledge, 2018.

Olalquiaga, Celeste and Blackmore, Lisa (eds.). Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s Descent from Mall to Prison.Terreform, 2018.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. Bloomsbury, 2004.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling. Duke University Press, 2003.

Footnotes:

[1] Lisa Blackmore proposes the term “spectacular modernity” to explore the “narratives that prop up political projects and that justify their leaders as indispensable figureheads, the promises of progress fueled by developmentalist agendas, and the behind-the-scenes roles played by political and economic stakeholders to buttress regimes” (Blackmore 2017, 212). In the context of her book, these phenomena are discussed in relation to the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952-1958).

[2] Coined by Fernando Coronil in his book by the same title, the term describes the Venezuelan state as one that “astonishes through the marvels of power rather than convinces through the power of reason, as reason itself is made part of the awe-inspiring spectacle of its rule. By manufacturing dazzling development projects that engender collective fantasies of progress, it casts its spell over audience and performers alike. As a ‘magnanimous sorcerer,’ the state seizes its subjects by inducing a condition of state of being receptive to its illusions—a magical state” (Coronil 1997, 5).

[3] Defined by Stephanie LeMenager as a modernity “fueled and infused by the oil industry where boom-and-bust cycles disrupt event the best-laid plans” (Stephanie LeMenager in Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore 2018, 8).

[4] For a discussion of the history and significance of El Helicoide, see Olalquiaga and Blackmore (2018).

Conversation with Violette Bule & Jose M. Ramirez

View Event →

Nov

to Jan 5

Exhibition

Vicki Meek: Vulnerable

Sun, Nov 17, 2019 12:00 PM 12:00 Sun, Jan 5, 2020 5:00 PM 17:00
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Medicated, Photograph on fleece & paper, 28"x40" & 24"x24," 2016

Oshun's Lesson on Vanity, Photographs & electric candles on shelves, 20"x20" each, 2016.

The Diary Pages 1-7, Photo-collages on canvas & photo on vinyl, 20"x20" & 36"x60,” 2017.

Sleight of Hand- now you see me, now you don't. Photographs on polyester & mixed media 71"x71." 2016.

Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present Vulnerable by Vicki Meek.

Dates: Sunday, November 17, 2019 - Sunday, January 5, 2020.
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday -- by appointment only.

Artist Statement

I rarely create work about myself. My personal angst has always been mine to work out other ways than in my art. However, for the first time since my divorce 25 years ago, I experienced a personal crisis that I felt a need to document in a creative conversation.

I could never imagine myself falling victim to my body. Up until the age of 66, I never had to take a single pill, nor had I experienced any major illness. Having a body that was running out of control because of illness never crossed my mind. But yet in 2016, there I was, inside a body that due to the loss of one small body part, a thyroid, was out of control, or at least that’s how it seemed to me.

Vulnerable is a body of work that examines what it feels like to lose control of one’s body once the main “regulator” of that body goes kaput. The kinds of thoughts one has are very interesting when they’ve lived their entire life being a control freak and in the blink of an eye, they must relinquish control to a little tiny pill. Erratic pains (in places you never had pain before); fatigue that attacks your once boundless energy (putting an abrupt halt to all plans you had for that day); appetite loss (something you never thought possible being the foodie that you are!) is simply baffling to someone who’s been the picture of health her whole life.

So in essence, a simple loss of a little body part triggered the need to totally re- examine what really matters in my life. The body is truly only a vessel that houses the soul; the soul is the most essential element of one’s being. So I’ve documented parts of my body that went haywire and combined the images of these parts with images of various kinds of regulators to visually talk about this phenomenon of a changing body that I no longer control. The use of a shower curtain as one of the elements in the show is a metaphor for being stripped naked as one is when in the shower, leaving me bare and vulnerable to the vagaries of illness. The small repetitive images of body parts with the control mechanisms signifies how the size of an organ isn’t necessarily proportionate to its importance given that the thyroid is tiny in comparison to, let’s say, your liver or your lungs. Yet it regulates the function of every organ, every sensory element, every emotion, in short it regulates you! I complete this body of work with images that represent my surrender to the Universe’s plan for my new life, one that releases my attachment to vanity and focuses on my spiritual being since that is who I am in the abstract and that is the “me”who ultimately connects with my fellow humans.

~Vicki Meek, 2019

Biography

Vicki Meek

Vicki Meek, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a nationally recognized
artist who has exhibited widely. Meek is in the permanent collections of the African American Museum in Dallas, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was awarded three public arts commissions with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Art Program and was co-artist on the largest public art project in Dallas, the Dallas Convention Center Public Art Project. Meek was selected as the only Dallas artists of ten national artists to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Nasher Sculpture Center which resulted in the commissioning of a site-specific installation that is now permanent at Paul Quinn College.

In addition, Meek is an independent curator and writes cultural criticism for Dallas Weekly with her blog Art & Racenotes (http://art-racenotes.blogspot.com). She has curated over 100 exhibitions for institutions like the Arthello Beck Gallery, African American Museum and D-Art Visual Art Center in Dallas, Project Row Houses in Houston, Carver Cultural Center in San Antonio, Kentucky State University Gallery, The Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Treme Museum in New Orleans, and C3 Gallery at Dallas Museum of Art.

With over 40 years of arts administrative experience that includes working as a senior program administrator for a state arts agency, a local arts agency and running a nonprofit visual arts center, Vicki Meek retired in March 2016 as the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center in Dallas, Texas, a full-service African-centered center that is a division of the City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture. She served on the board of National Performance Network 2008-15 and was Chair from 2012-2014. Meek is a voting member of Alternate Roots and currently serves as a Mayor appointed Commissioner of the Arts & Culture Advisory Commission for the City of Dallas.

Vicki Meek is currently working as a full-time artist in Dallas. She also serves as CFO for Usekra: Center For Creative Investigation, a Costa Rican creatives retreat founded by acclaimed performance artist Elia Arce.

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Oct

to Nov 8

Exhibition

INTERFERENCE: Recent Works by Mery Godigna Collet

Sun, Oct 13, 2019 12:00 PM 12:00 Fri, Nov 8, 2019 5:00 PM 17:00
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Boucherie

Cognitive Dissonance

Klein Venedig

Boucherie

BIOGRAPHY

Mery Godigna Collet

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1959. Since the beginning of her career, Godigna Collet explores the coexistence between humans and environment through social and political issues. Her art work is supported by the versatile use of diverse materials, applied in installations, paintings, sculptures, photography and video, challenging the viewer through the use of new techniques and unconventional materials in the making of her art.

Godigna Collet’s artistic proposal is based on four research projects involving ways to concepts into matter. Her work is based in promoting a conscious use of natural resources and technology.

Mery Godigna Collet has participated in 34 solo and 40 group exhibitions in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, New York, Miami, New Mexico and Texas.

Her works are at the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia (MACZUL) in Venezuela, the Galleria D’Arte Moderno Aroldo Bonzagni di Cento (Italy), the Latin American Art Museum, Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin TX, B98 Museum of Marfa, TX, Benson Collection in Austin TX and Petroleum Museum in TX.

She has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Siderúrgica del Orinoco, the Museum of Discurso de Angostura in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, the Centro Rómulo Gallegos of Latin American Studies (CELARG) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela. Monument “la Rocca” in Cento, Italy, the Museum Pallazo Estense, the Centre D’Art Puyguerin-Vayolles, Monts sur Guesnes, France, the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, TX, the University of Texas in Austin, LHUCA in Lubbock TX, the Museum of the Americas in Miami, USA, and the Museo Archeologico di Belriguardo in Voghiera, Italy , as well as permanent and temporary public art works in Venezuela, Texas and Italy.

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“On Mery Godigna Collet’s INTERFERENCE” (PDF) | By Surpik Angelini | Houston, September, 2019

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Sep

to Oct 9

Recent Work by John Calaway

Thu, Sep 12, 2019 6:30 PM 18:30 Wed, Oct 9, 2019 5:00 PM 17:00
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Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present Recent Work by John Calaway.

Dates: Thursday, September 12 - Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday -- by appointment only.

Biography

John Calaway

John Calaway (born 1957, Corpus Christi, TX) is a sculptor and a painter based in Houston, Texas. His three-decade long career as an artist has intertwined with his entrepreneurial work in renewable energy. In the 90’s he was a lead innovator in the creation of computer driven 2D and 3D data visualization. His passion for creating new technology and his gift for taking massive amounts of data and identifying readable patterns are the underpinning of his paintings and sculpture.

Calaway approaches his art with the same kind of driven curiosity that had him excel in new computer technology. After decades of working with found objects and traditional materials such as marble, steel and bronze, Calaway is currently exploring large-scale 3D printing. His printed sculptures can allow for a delicate physicality and grace of form on a massive scale that is unachievable with conventional materials. As he develops sculptures in virtual reality, the cast shadows of these virtual sculptures become a springboard for his paintings. The paintings are intensely physical and read as maps or images of the earth from outer space. Calaway’s paintings explore the beauty of the forms and patterns forms on the micro and the macro level.

Committed to being at the forefront of accelerating technologies, Calaway is currently using hand-held, super high-resolution scanners to capture visual data from any object or surface. This data is then digitally molded and rendered into a 3D model of a sculpture that can be printed to any scale. His sculptures and paintings are fluid meditations on the possibilities of art making in the ever- evolving world of big data.

“I want to free myself from the constraints of armatures and maquettes and think of sculpture like a ballet dancer rather than an engineer. The challenging aspect of this is to manifest physical objects that will withstand the stress of time, while at the same time, have great openness and fluidity. The artist must integrate all aspects of the process.”

Calaway’s work has been shown at the Dallas Contemporary, Blue Star Art Space, Lawndale Art Center, Brookfield at One Allen Center, Winter Street Studios, Sculpture 2000, and Meg Poissant Gallery. He has worked with Flatbed Press in Austin on multiple printmaking series. He was one of the founders of Commerce Street Art Studio. His studio is located in the Acres Homes area of Houston.

(Reproduced with permission of the artist)

DOWNLOADS

The Art of John Calaway (PDF) | By Surpik Angelini, Founding Director of the Transart Foundation for Art & Anthropology | September, 2019

Photography by Thomas R DuBrock.

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Mar

to May 29

Looking for a Hero, or, Whips, Whims, and Wigs, and Gio Ponti is Just an Excuse

Fri, Mar 29, 2019 6:00 PM 18:00 Wed, May 29, 2019 12:00 PM 12:00
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"Metallic Tears,” from the series Looking for a Hero, 2019, Acrylic on Canvas, 60” x 72"

”Cosmic Angel-Constellation 1", from the series Looking for a Hero, 2019, Acrylic/Canvas, 60” x 48”

“Cunaguaro - Contellation 2”, from the series Looking for a Hero, 2019, Acrylic on Canvas, 96” x 120”

"Mop 3”, from the Series Whips, Whims and Wigs, 2019, Transformed mop head into a hairdo on decorated stick, various materials

"Mop 1”, from the Series Whips, Whims and Wigs, 2019, Transformed mop head into a hairdo on decorated stick, various materials.

"Mop 2”, from the Series Whips, Whims and Wigs, 2019, Transformed mop head into a hairdo on decorated stick, various materials.

”Wish I could eat with them”, from the Series Early Birds, 2019, Front (Domestic worker’s uniform modified- hand painted on fabric).

”Wish I could eat with them”, from the Series Early Birds, 2019, Back (Domestic worker’s uniform modified- hand painted on fabric).

"Homesick,” from the Series Early Birds, 2019, Front (Domestic worker’s uniform modified- hand painted on fabric).

"Homesick,” from the Series Early Birds, 2019, Back (Domestic worker’s uniform modified- hand painted on fabric).

”4-30 AM”, from the Series Early Birds, 2019, Front (Domestic worker’s uniform modified- hand painted on fabric).

”4-30 AM”, from the Series Early Birds, 2019, Back (Domestic worker’s uniform modified- hand painted on fabric).

Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present Looking for a Hero, or, Whips, Whims, and Wigs, and Gio Ponti is Just an Excuse, a solo exhibition by Gerardo Rosales.

Artist Statement

For most of my artistic career I have been interested in developing a dialogue about social injustices. Through my art I explore issues of gender, class, race, power dynamics, violence, immigration and post colonialism.

The artworks I produce illustrate and reflect on these social issues that I have experienced personally and as an observer. My idea is to mix aggression with playfulness and to contrast the decorative and the innocent with brutality to reveal the severity of my subject matter. I attempt to show social inequalities by exaggerating reality with irony.

My work is multidisciplinary and my source of reference comes from everyday objects such as wallpaper, wrapping paper, children’s books, the imagery of cartoon drawings, toy models and piñatas. I like the ornamental aspects of these items, the richness of patterns, and the use of flat colors and shapes.

In 2019 my art show Looking for a Hero or Whips, Whims and Wigs and Gio Ponti is just an Excuse will open a dialogue about problems related to domestic labor and immigration. The focus of investigation is centered around my memories while growing up in Venezuela. However, as an adult and living in the USA for 19 years has allowed me to see that this problem exists here and worldwide. Through this body of work, I infiltrate these issues of social inequalities by appropriating the ornamental aspects associated with folk art and geometric abstraction.

HOURS

Open Fridays, 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., through the end of May, 2019; or by appointment. Please call (832) 397-9252.

DOWNLOADS AND LINKS

Looking for a Hero Catalog (PDF)

Looking for a Hero, or, Whips, Whims, and Wigs, and Gio Ponti is Just an Excuse, by Laura August, Ph.D.

Houston’s Spring of LatinX Art | By Laura August | Arts and Culture Texas | March 15, 2019

Top Five by Glasstire | By Christina Rees and William Sarradet | April 11, 2019

Biography

Gerardo Rosales

Gerardo Rosales is a Venezuelan visual artist and educator who has been living and working in Houston, Texas, for 20 years. Rosales first started producing art as a self-taught artist, before attending the Armando Reverón Art Institute in Caracas, Venezuela, where he earned a B.A. in Fine Art. After graduating, he moved to London to study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, where he obtained an M.A. in Fine Art.

During his studies, Rosales became more resourceful with the use of mixed media and began producing more socially conscious work. The themes present in his work confront the viewer with a disarming contrast between the use of pattern and ornamentation (normally associated with decorative objects of everyday life) and images related to issues of violence, repression, sexuality, abuse of power and loneliness.

Rosales has exhibited his work in the U.S. and internationally, including at ArteBA in Buenos Aires, ArtBO in Bogota, and Pinta in New York. The artist is represented, in Venezuela, by Gallery Carmen Araujo Arte. Rosales is currently the artist-in-residence at The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, and was recently awarded the 2019 Support for Artists and Creative Individual Grant from the City of Houston, through the Houston Arts Alliance.

www.gerardorosales.net

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Mar

to Mar 22

EXITIUM (On the Edge of Destruction)

Sat, Mar 9, 2019 6:00 PM 18:00 Fri, Mar 22, 2019 12:00 PM 12:00
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Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present EXITIUM (On the Edge of Destruction), a solo exhibition by María Cristina Jadick.

Artist Statement

Through my work I feel compelled to build bridges that connect people. My art’s main purpose is to evoke compassion while creating a space for dialogue. The conceptual art I make is multidisciplinary in approach; integrating combinations of bricolage, photography, video, printmaking, performance, and installation. It reflects an authentic rather than a traditional beauty aesthetic. My research into particular events uncovers commonalities in human experience and this material helps inform and motivate the art I create with thought provoking perspectives on issues of global concern. Issues such as: cultural identity, social justice, war, displacement, natural disaster and climate change.

DOWNLOADS

EXITIUM, by Surpik Angelini, March 2019

Biography

María Cristina "Cristy" Jadick
b. 1957, Pittsfield, MA, USA

Exploring cultural identity the human spirit and socio-political themes, multi-disciplinary artist Maria Cristina "Cristy" Jadick incorporates photography, video, printmaking and performance in what results in compelling, conceptually based projects. Incorporating found objects and bricolage into her work, Jadick further connects her viewers to a sense of place. Her projects range from large, mixed-media, photo-lithographic prints on paper and canvas to sizable, performative, interactive tableau that integrate photographs, video and sewn, painted, baked and printed elements.

Jadick earned her B.A. from Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA and pursued Art & Social Sciences studies at the Transart Foundation-Houston, TX (with Surpik Angelini and Abdel Hernandez,) The Glassell School-MFA Houston, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, and The Johns Hopkins University- Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

Her artistic career spans over 25 years, with exhibitions at the Fotofest Biennial, Bronx Latino Art Biennial, Museums in the USA, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, at numerous galleries, alternative spaces, public spaces and corporations.

Jadick has received several prestigious artist development grants from Creative Capital (NYC) and DiverseWorks where she served on the Artist Board from 2013-2014. Jadick lives in Houston, TX with her husband and 2 sons.

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Oct

6:30 PM18:30

Book Presentation of "Art Forms in Mechanism" by Linarejos Moreno, in conversation with Dr. Fabiola López Durán.

Monday, October 29, 2018
6:30 PM 8:30 PM 18:30 20:30
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Manipulated and non-manipulated books –Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst, 1932 (Second edition). Included in Art Forms in Mechanism, 2009-2016

Art Forms in Mechanism, 2009-2016, in the exhibition Tabularia. Laboratorios de Ciencia e Imaginación in PHotoEspaña PHE16. Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid (CSIC), 2016

This limited edition is the culmination of the artist’s monumental project, Art Forms in Mechanism (2019-2017). The project, which took the form of an impressive installation composed of photographic images printed on burlap and industrial objects from her family’s factory, was exhibited for the first time at the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Tabacalera Promoción del Arte in Madrid during PHotoESPAÑA 16.

With this volume, Linarejos brings to a close a project that began with an intervention on Karl Blossfeldt’s original edition of Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature, 1932) and would span eight years spent photographing nineteenth-century botanical models from the scientific cabinets of Madrid’s historic teaching institutes. The present edition is intended to be a facsimile of the project, including the original intervention on the Blossfeldt book as well as additional essays by American critics Fabiola López Durán and Surpik Angelini.

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Oct

to Feb 16

The Cloud Chamber (La Cámara de Niebla)

Fri, Oct 26, 2018 12:00 PM 12:00 Sat, Feb 16, 2019 5:00 PM 17:00
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The Cloud Chamber, Alcobendas Contemporary Art Center, Madrid 2018.

On Cosmic Rays, Abstraction and Invisibility, 2017. Manipulated books. Wassily Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, 1955 (First edition1926).

Left. Cosmic Rays photograph, Fermilab, 1970. Right. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, oil on canvas, 1923.

Cloud Traces. Detail. 3x1.3 m. 2017. Printed image on burlap.

Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present The Cloud Chamber, a solo exhibition by Madrid-based artist Linarejos Moreno.

The exhibition, produced at the Alcobendas Contemporary Art Center (Madrid), will serve as a starting point for an artist-in-residence experiment during which Linarejos, together with invited critics, will work toward the production of seminal texts that expand and contextualize her work, while developing her artistic project, How to Catch Cosmic Rays at Home.

Moreno’s practice explores subjectivity as a mode of resistance to reification, focusing on the non-productive uses of industrial spaces and on scientific representation as a tool for interrogating modernity. Her research interests include the sociology of science/technology and the relationship between Capital and contemporary forms of Romanticism.

In the research-based Cloud Chamber exhibit, Linarejos takes advantage of the formal and temporal (1911) convergence of two documents – the first photographs of cosmic rays and Wassily Kandinsky’s first published text – to interrogate the origin of pictorial abstraction as a break from representation. With How to Catch Cosmic Rays at Home, the artist turns to a project that will incorporate everyday, domestic objects into experiments for visualizing cosmic rays. In so doing, the project brings humor, humanity, otherness, and a gender-based perspective to the area of Art/Science production.

The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston is a non profit, private foundation that supports experimental work at the intersection of art and anthropology. The AIA award-winning building is located in the museum district of Houston, Texas at 1412 West Alabama Street, near the Menil Collection. Visits by appointment only.

RELATED EVENTS

From October 26 to February 16: On view, Cloud Chamber by Linarejos Moreno.

October 29 at 6:30PM: Book presentation of Art Forms in Mechanism by Linarejos Moreno, in conversation with Dr. Fabiola López Durán.
November 2 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM: Open House.

DOWNLOAD

“Duchamp and Linarejos Moreno,” by Surpik Angelini

Biographies

Linarejos Moreno

Artist, scholar and associated professor in Design and Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Linarejos Moreno has been an invited Fulbright scholar at Rice University in Houston and a visiting professor of The School of Art in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston.

Her work explores subjectivity as a mode of resistance to reification, focusing on the non-productive uses of industrial spaces and scientific representation as a tool for interrogating modernity.

Linarejos’s site-specific practice focuses on photographic documentation of the interventions that she enacts upon spaces in ruin, and their later expansion in the exhibition space. This practice led her to her doctoral thesis, Ruin as Process: Robert Overby, Francesca Woodman, Gordon Matta Clark and Their Legacy, in which she traces the origins of these practices and their connection with the crisis of capitalism and the development of anthropology. Her research interests include the sociology of science and the relationship between capital and contemporary forms of Romanticism.

She belongs to the research group “Prácticas artísticas y formas de conocimiento contemporáneas” (Artistic Practices and Contemporary Epistemologies, Cod.588, UCM), and she forms part of the I+D+I Project “Interacciones del arte en la tecnosfera” (Art Interactions in the Technosphere, MINECO, 2018-2021). She cooperate as a curator with the National Museum of Science and Technology (MUNCYT). Her recent book, Art forms in Mechanism, was published by Turpin Editorial in 2017.

Linarejos’s work has been internationally recognized and abundantly exhibited, recently in the solo exhibitions The Cloud Chamber, Alcobendas Centro de Arte (Madrid); Tabularia. Laboratorios de Ciencia e Imaginación (Tabularia. Laboratories of Science and the Imagination) 2017 in the Royal Botanical Gardens (Madrid), and La construcción de una ruina (The Construction of a Ruin) 2017 in the Tabacalera. Promoción del Arte (Madrid) – both of which formed part of the international photography festival PHotoEspaña PH16; and Artifactual Realities, 2016 in the Station Museum (Houston). Linarejos is represented by the Pilar Serra gallery (Spain) and the Inman Gallery (US).

www.linarejos.com

Surpik Angelini

Surpik Angelini is a Houston based artist, independent curator, and writer. Her work is rooted in the overlapping disciplines of art, architecture, and cultural anthropology. Trained in art at Mills College and Cornell University (1966-68) and in architecture and urban planning at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1971-76), she obtained her BArch from the University of Houston (1979). With artist-theorist Abdel Hernandez, she founded the Transart Foundation: a workshop for Art and Anthropology based in Houston, TX. Surpik has directed since 1996, pushing the foundation's mission to support artists and scholars involved in relevant social, anthropological and interdisciplinary research.

Surpik’s artistic vision was impacted by her collaborative performances with John Cage and Gordon Matta Clark (1966-68); her theoretical studies with Thomas McEvilley (1990-1994) at Rice University and her association with the Rice Department of Anthropology (1997), when they co-sponsored Transart’s Artists in Trance: New Methodologies in the Work with the Other, a semester program of lectures, documentary films and cutting edge exhibitions of anthropologically based art, she co-curated with Hernandez in 1997. As an artist she exhibited in solo and group shows in Houston. As a cultural researcher, she lectured in universities and museums throughout the country. Her critical essays have been published in art magazines, academic journals, artist's catalogs and monographs.

Fabiola López Durán

Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, Fabiola López-Durán’s research and teaching focuses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary European and Latin American art and architecture. Her book, Eugenics in the Garden: Architecture, Medicine and Landscape from France to Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century, investigates a particular strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, moved from the realms of medicine and law to design, architecture, and urban planning—becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity. Her work analyzes the cross-pollination of ideas and mediums—science, politics and aesthetics—that informed the process of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic, with an emphasis on Latin America.

López-Durán earned her Ph.D in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT. Prior to joining the Rice University faculty, she was the 2009-2011 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. Her awards include predoctoral fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Dedalus Foundation, CLIR, Harvard Center for European Studies, Camargo Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Fulbright Program. Her work has been published in Europe, Asia, South America and the United States.

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Production of these artworks, events and catalogue were funded by the generous support from The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Alcobendas, Madrid and The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture.

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Apr

to May 13

Inauguration Events

Wed, Apr 11, 2018 3:00 PM 15:00 Sun, May 13, 2018 4:00 PM 16:00
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Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”
by Delilah Montoya
April 11 - May 13

Exhibition Viewing Wednesday - Sunday 1 pm to 5 pm

Montoya’s “casta” portraiture critiques as it mimics the Spanish colonial Casta Paintings’ depiction of social hierarchy based on the complex racial mixing of that era’s family groups. Montoya’s present-day portraits of Houston and New Mexico colonial families also capture subjects among material objects. However, instead of using colonial labels like mulatto or mestizo to describe bloodlines she presents their ethno-racial mixes by juxtaposing each family’s portrait with their unique DNA regional ancestry graph and a global map showing their 100,000 years migration. To complete the portrait, each family recorded a monologue about their DNA study and family history. Montoya’s series manifests cultural and biological forms of hybridity in order to understand the impact of race and class distinctions on social, economic and aesthetic choices in the United States today.

Nuestra “Calidad” Round Table Discussion
April 7th, 7:00pm

Tomas Ybarra-Frausto moderates discussions by scholars Holly Barnet Sanchez, Mia Lopez, Delilah Montoya and Surpik Angelini of their essays from the catalog Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad” published by Arte Público Press 2017. Catalogs will be available for sale.

“Patronas y Conductas” Performance by Elia Arce
April 13 & 14 at 8pm

In collaboration with CounterCurrent Festival, Elia Arce will present her new performance, “Patronas y Conductas”. Inspired from a play on the Spanish words “patrones y conductas,” which literally translates to “patterns and behaviors”. In its feminine version, Patronas y Conductas, Elia addresses the norms imposed by employers in the work setting. The performance provides insights to the dynamics of labor relationships.

Elia is an international performance artist and UH alumnus, creates new work, in collaboration with Houston community members. “Patronas y Conductas” responds to the exhibition and ethnographic art project, Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad,” by Delilah Montoya, a Chicana Artist and UH professor. Both the exhibition and performance address the “New World global community paradigm” dealing with themes of identity, colonial power struggles, family history, the optic-unconscious, and biogeographic ethnography. All events are free to the public.

Ticket for Elia’s Performance available at the Counter Current Festival website

http://www.countercurrentfestival.org/project/patronas-y-conductas/

presented by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts

Biographies

Delilah Montoya

Chicana Artist, Delilah Montoya grounds in the experiences of the Southwest and brings together a multiplicity of syncretic forms and practices from those of Aztec, Mexico and Spain, to cross-border vernacular traditions, all of which are shaded by contemporary American customs and values.Montoya's numerous projects investigate cultural phenomena, always addressing and often confronting viewers' assumptions.

Women Boxers: The New Warriors, a book project featuring a collection of portraits is such a project. Funded in part by the University of Houston Small Grants Program and Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County and was published though Arte Publico Press. The work was first exhibited during Fotofest 2006 at Project Row House, and later it traveled to Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Dallas where Charles Dee Mitchell reviewed it for Art in America.Montoya's work has traveled with the International Center for Photography exhibition "Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self" and "Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum."

Her work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She received 2008 Artadia Award and was honor with Richard T. Castro Distinguished Visiting Professorship in 2009. Her gallery affiliations are Andrew Smith Gallery, and Photographs Do Not Bend.

Elia Arce

Elia Arce is an artist working in a wide variety of media, including installation, performance, experimental theater, writing, photo, video, sculptural performance and social sculpture. Winner of the J. Paul Getty Award, Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network National Endowment Fund Award, Durfee Individual Artist Award. Arce was nominated for the Herb Alpert / CalArts Award in Theater and awarded a scholarship by the Ford Foundation to develop a proposal for a new social sculpture project entitled Gulf Coast Art Corridor.

In 2010 she received a Fulbright scholarship to teach a semester of Performance Art at the Theater School of the National University of Costa Rica. She has taught at different universities in the United States and Costa Rica and has taught performance workshops in Mexico, Brazil, Mali, Spain, Cuba and Canada. Arce was the winner of the American Masterpiece Award in 2010 and was invited to the Bamako Photography Biennale in Mali where she exhibited her work at the Multimedia Arts Conservatory. She was invited to the International Festival of the Arts of Costa Rica in 2012 and in 2014, where she presented a short retrospective of her work of photo performance, video performance and sculptural performance. The National University of Costa Rica and its Chamber Dance Company commissioned her an original work in 2012. She designed and choreographed "Río Pirro", a piece performed inside one of the most polluted rivers in the city.

As a teacher, she taught Visual Arts in Choreography within the Master's Program of the Dance Department UNA and a Performance Laboratory and Flashmobs at the School of Performing Arts of the University of Costa Rica. Arce won the prestigious Iberescena scholarship given jointly with Costa Rica and Spain to develop a new body of work in collaboration with his Spanish colleague Orlando Britto: a research on decolonization and towards the creation of a new social sculpture.

Arce is the founder and artistic director of USEKRA: Center for Creative Investigation, which she is creating in the Caribbean area of osta Rica, where artists, academics, anthropologists, sociologists, biologists and other international thinkers; will meet to challenge each other and create art and thought that question the existing standards from an Indigenous, Afro-descendant and / or Asian perspective; cultures that are the pillars of the Talamanca región. Currently a book about Arce´s work, edited by PHD Anabelle Contreras Castro, is being published by the Hemisferic Institute of Performance and Politics from New York University.

Production of these events, catalog, and artwork were funded by the generous support from The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, Cynthia Wood Mitchell Center for the Arts, Hatch Fund, UH CMAS Seed Grant, The Idea Fund, Artadia 2015 ISCP New York Residency and the 2013 & 2017 University of Houston Small Grant.

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Exhibit Archive

VISITING SCHEDULE

SPECIAL EVENTS AND HOURS

About L'INFRAMINCE:

CAROLINA OTERO: L’INFRAMINCE

By Surpik Angelini. November 2022.Founding Director of The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology.

References

Davila, Thierry (2010) De L’Inframince, breve histoire de l’imperceptible, de Marcel Duchamp a nos jours. Editions du Regard, Paris.

Michaels, Walter Benn (2004) The Shape of the Signifier, Princeton University Press.

Schwenger, Peter (2019) Asemic the Art of Writing, University of Minnesota Press.

Soledad Salamé: FORCED by NATURE

Sep 17, 2021 to March 27, 2022

Artist’s Statement

Soledad Salamé: Moving Through the Earth, Crossing Borders and Boundaries

Soledad Salamé: Considering Boundaries

AN INTRODUCTION TO VIOLETTE BULE’S "ECHO CHAMBER”by Surpik AngeliniCurator / Founding DirectorTransart Foundation for Art and Anthropology / Houston

ARTIST STATEMENT

SUBVERSIVE ECHOES, A REVIEW BY IRINA TROCONIS PhD, Cornell University

BIOGRAPHY

Biography

Biography

Biography

Biographies

Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”by Delilah MontoyaApril 11 - May 13

Exhibition Viewing Wednesday - Sunday 1 pm to 5 pm

Nuestra “Calidad” Round Table DiscussionApril 7th, 7:00pm

“Patronas y Conductas” Performance by Elia ArceApril 13 & 14 at 8pm

Biographies

By Surpik Angelini. November 2022.
Founding Director of The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology.

AN INTRODUCTION TO VIOLETTE BULE’S "ECHO CHAMBER”
by Surpik Angelini
Curator / Founding Director
Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology / Houston

SUBVERSIVE ECHOES, A REVIEW BY IRINA TROCONIS
PhD, Cornell University

Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”
by Delilah Montoya
April 11 - May 13

Nuestra “Calidad” Round Table Discussion
April 7th, 7:00pm

“Patronas y Conductas” Performance by Elia Arce
April 13 & 14 at 8pm