Artipedia - Arts News

PARC Foundation Gallery

Practice of Encroachment:
From the global border
to the border neighborhood

Thursday, July 10 - October 25, 2008

Opening reception
Thursday, July 10, 2008, 6-8 pm

PARC Foundation Gallery
29 Bleecker Street
New York

http://www.theparcfoundation.org/

The PARC Foundation will present the work of Estudio Teddy Cruz at its gallery’s inaugural architectural exhibition, from Thursday, July 10, through Saturday, October 25. His research-based architectural studio, located at the San Diego-Tijuana border, has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations for using the neighborhood as a site of experimentation in order to research new forms of affordable housing and social density.

According to Cruz, “The need to reveal territorial and institutional conflict as an operational tool to redefine architecture practice is prompting many architects to research the conditions that can promote the intensification of social relations and public culture at the different scales of the territory, the city and the neighborhood.”

This exhibition will serve as a public platform to discuss the crisis of affordable housing, and the de-funding of public infrastructure in the contemporary city. It will elaborate on the realization that no advances in socially and environmentally sustainable building design can occur without reorganizing the existing political structures, economic resources, and social capital that can produce alternative systems for habitation.

Organized around a series of conceptual and geographic scales, the exhibition takes the viewer from the concept of an increasing global border (coined by Teddy Cruz as the “political equator”) to the micro-scale of the neighborhood on the border of San Diego and Tijuana that has served as a laboratory for Estudio Teddy Cruz in the last few years. The exhibition shows that it is in peripheral areas such as these that conditions of social emergency are transforming our way of thinking about urban matters.

The projects on view include conceptual works, presented through videos, photographs, drawings, models and cartographies, such as “Mapping Non-Conformity,” which questions conventions of land use representations and its exclusion of social interactions to measure density, and “McMansion Retrofitted,” which proposes to alter an existing 8000 square foot single-family suburban house into a mixed-use multi-family dwelling.

Projects of intervention are also included in the exhibition. Some of these projects are grounded in San Diego/Tijuana urban dynamics. In “Living Rooms at the Border”, a project developed in collaboration with Casa Familiar, special zoning accommodations are being negotiated with the city of San Diego to allow a parcel of land that would normally accommodate three single family homes to instead accommodate 12 affordable housing units operating with a shared kitchen, community garden, and a former church transformed into a community center in the border town of San Ysidro. “Manufactured Sites” creates a semi modular frame, produced by a Tijuana maquiladora (manufacturing plant), that serves as a scaffold when combined with salvaged and recycled building parts brought from San Diego to create worker housing. Other projects present how the lessons from Estudio Teddy Cruz’s border neighborhood projects have been translated to interventions in different regions, such as Hudson, NY
, where “Hudson 2+4″ has been produced in collaboration with the PARC Foundation.

About the PARC Foundation:
PARC Foundation was created to raise public awareness of environmental planning and the importance of architectural design excellence. Since its inception, the Foundation has been originating and operating its own cultural programs, and promoting intersections between art and architecture, including working since 2004 in the City of Hudson, NY to investigate new approaches for community re-development. In 2006, the Foundation began a strategic partnership with designer Teddy Cruz to advance its research and to strengthen the mission of providing public, socio-economic and cultural support systems for communities in need.

Media Contact:
For more information, images, or to arrange for an interview, please contact:

Andy Cushman or Elizabeth Reina
Blue Medium, Inc.
T: (212) 675-1800
Andy@bluemedium.com

Espacio AV

Exhibition view. ESPACIO AV, Murcia.
Photo: José Luis Montero

ORLAN + DAVIDELFIN

SUTURE / HYBRIDISATION / RECYCLING

Fold sculptures, clothes and costumes incarnated in the work of ORLAN with the collaboration of DAVIDELFIN

13th June - 28th September 2008

http://www.espacioav.es

ORLAN (Saint-Etienne, France, 1947) is internationally renowned for her interdisciplinary practice cutting across photography, performance, video, sculpture, etc. Her work enacts the most substantial physical and identitarian metamorphosis in the history of art. Ever since 1977, when she began to explore the “status” of the female body within art history and society, ORLAN has been questioning traditional concepts of beauty and identity. In 1990-93, when the artist introduced a video camera in the first of her many operations, ORLAN redesigned her body in several plastic surgery interventions in which the surgical staff were dressed in clothes designed especially for the occasion by Paco Rabanne, Issey Miyake, Charlotte, Galdeberg, Franck, Sorbier Lan Vu…etc. Her practice involved a denunciation against the pressures exerted by the “correct” physical archetypes as well as a reflection on the mutating body and the cultural construction of identity, embodying a singular way
of feminist protest and a questioning of the female body subjected to the pressures of social and cultural canons.

Coinciding with her retrospective show in 2007 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, her hometown, ORLAN decided to hybridise the wardrobe which she had stored for all those years, for which she brought on board the fashion designer Maroussia Rebecq (Andreas Crews). Espacio AV in Murcia is showing the project ORLAN. Sutura / Hibridación / Reciclaje in which the artist has invited the Spanish fashion designer David Delfín to collaborate in the brand Le baiser de l’artiste. Taking the earlier experience in Saint-Etienne another step forward, this latest project consists of the hybridisation of the wardrobe of the French artist starting out from the dresses, trousers and jackets coming from various stages in her personal biography; ORLAN applies this concept to other components of the project. Clothes with a wide variety of patterns and textures are reconstructed as a hypostasis of the skin covering up fragments of the cultural, social and gender identity from differen
t moments in the artist’s biography. This practice might well be described as a process of recycling, hybridisation and suture in which clothes are the basic relational material. Her own body, the source material for all her actions and works, is taken as a disguise she divests herself of, once and again, staging femininity as a masquerade. Her physical and identitarian metamorphosis confirms her personal cultural revolution against consumerist society and reminds us of the always illusory nature of the ideal normative.

For this installation by ORLAN at EAV, David Delfín chose the hook and eye as a suture instrument, a dressmaking element offering the possibility of opening and closing an aperture how and when one wants. Consequently, the opening is metaphorically transformed into a wound charged with a permanent potential for transformation. The ten pieces from ORLAN’s wardrobe hybridised by Davidelfín are presented at Espacio AV as the traces of bodies, interconnected by means of hooks and used to dress a number of transparent Louis Ghost chairs by Philippe Starck. The installation underscores the echo of suture and hybridisation permeating the whole work. The fact that spectators are invited to sit on the Louis Ghost chairs make these clothes into habits and cushions, juxtaposing the search for comfort with the idea of wearing somebody else’s clothes, of assuming her identity from the concept of “the other in oneself” and the harlequin’s metaphor, as acceptance of multiculturalism and l
aiticity in Michel Serres’s texts.

Both in their original wholeness and after their hybridisation, the clothes are then represented in photographs arranged as a frieze around the exhibition gallery, in which they are worn by models posing with their back to us, foreclosing any possible identity and acting as a kind of intermediary body. The images are always arranged horizontally as a way of avoiding the rhetoric of the standardisation of fashion photography and its concept of beauty.

This exhibition in Murcia is a continuation of ORLAN’s Self-Hybridisations project in which the digital replaces surgery, now with David Delfín as the designer in charge of reconstructing the artist’s second skin.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring and analysing ORLAN’s works on “fold sculptures” and clothes made throughout her career, as well as images of the project made in collaboration with David Delfín in Murcia. The catalogue will include critical essays by Rhonda Garlik, Rocío de la Villa, Pedro Alberto Cruz, Michel Serres, as well as an interview by Isabel Tejeda with ORLAN and David Delfín.

For further information, please contact:
Press Office
T. (+34) 91 564 88 56
info@urrozproyectos.com

Espacio AV
C/ Santa Teresa 14, bajo
30.005 Murcia (Spain)
http://www.espacioav.es

Portikus

Martha Rosler
location, location, location

Opening: July 11, 2008, 8 pm
Lecture: July 11, 2008, 6.30 pm
Exhibition on view: July 12 - September 14, 2008
Press conversation: July 11, 2008, 11 am

Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
D-60594 Frankfurt am Main

http://www.portikus.de

Since the late sixties, Martha Rosler has commented on current events and socially relevant issues in caustically critical but also humorous works. With a keen eye for the stuff of everyday life and for social conventions, Rosler deconstructs, layer for layer, today’s “mythologies.” Martha Rosler has created seminal work in the fields of photography, installation, performance, video, and writing; she is also the author of influential critical and theoretical essays. She is not bound by any specific medium and deploys those methods and strategies that seem to her adequate to the individual issue she seeks to address. She thus deliberately uses a language familiar to many and does not shy away even from the burlesque mode. Prominent objects of Rosler’s poignant analysis and dry humor has been the role of the mass media, especially in times of war. Another central aspect to Martha Rosler’s oeuvre is her critical engagement of the urban structures in which we live, as t
he sites of our everyday experience, and their social implications.

For her show at the Portikus, as for documenta 12 and for last year’s Skulpturen Projekte Münster, Martha Rosler has designed an exhibition situation motivated by site-specific features. Following the principle of montage, she examines various aspects that compose, in both a historical and a contemporary perspective, the image of the city of Frankfurt as a metropolis of trade. The exhibition begins at the exhibition site itself, the Old Bridge, as a trading route of historic importance; continues with the history of the former Jewish ghetto, the Judengasse; and then turns to the banking district, which symbolizes the center of European finance. Martha Rosler pursues the question: which components make up the “branding” of a city such as Frankfurt? One commonplace asks “What are the three most important things to look for when choosing a building site?”—and answers: “Location, location, location.”

Portikus
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
Curator: Melanie Ohnemus