Press Release: Artpace San Antonio Announces 2006 Residency Exhibition Schedule

10.04.05

Media Contact: Libby D. Tilley

t 210 212 4900 x122

f 210 212 4990

ltilley@artpace.org

www.artpace.org

SAN ANTONIO, TX rtpace San Antonio is pleased to announce the 2006 International Artists in Residence (IAIR) program. Annually, Artpace invites three guest curators to select three artists ?e from Texas, one from elsewhere in the United States and one from abroad ? take part in a two-month residency in San Antonio. This year?panel of distinguished curators includes Douglas Fogle, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanzawa, Japan; and Tom Eccles, Executive Director of Bard College?Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Following extensive field work and research in Texas and beyond, the guest curators have made their picks for the 2006 residency program. Douglas Fogle selected Edgar Arceneaux (Los Angeles, California), Augusto Di Stefano (San Antonio, Texas), and Ranjani Shettar (Bangalore, India). Yuko Hasegawa invited artists Luz Mar’a S‡nchez (San Antonio, Texas), Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger (Uster, Switzerland), and Do-Ho Suh (New York, New York). To close out the year, Tom Eccles chose Chiho Aoshima (Tokyo, Japan), Katie Pell (San Antonio, Texas), and Allison Smith (New York, New York).

The selected artists reflect a lively diversity of regions, approaches, and backgrounds, taking inspiration from and referencing sources as disparate as jazz, Japanese comic books, and Civil War reenactments. During their time at Artpace, the artists are free to experiment and to imagine new ways to work while receiving the support of Artpace?wood, metal, and video editing workshops as well as technical and administrative support. At the end of their residency, the artists?ompleted projects will be shared with the public in a two-month exhibition. Notably, all work created at Artpace belongs to the artist and often goes on to appear in exhibitions, museums, galleries, and collections worldwide.

New Works: 06.1

March 8 ?y 7, 2006

Opening Reception and Artists?ialogue: March 8, 6:30-8:30pm

About The Artists

Edgar Arceneaux Los Angeles, California

Edgar Arceneaux?multi-media installations create webs of meaning out of disparate people and things. Giving visual expression to wordplay, Arceneaux?drawings, sculptures, and films often critique African Americans?arginalization from the mainstream. His 2004 Borrowed Sun (Critical Juxtaposition Test) places a pencil-drawn portrait of jazz musician Sun Ra on par with sketched representations of Sol LeWitt and Galileo, three legendary creators linked by cosmic connotations. Driven by metaphor, Arceneaux?works subvert the linear logic that ordinarily structures pre-processed information, creating new networks for configuring fact, fiction, history, and memory.

Augusto Di Stefano San Antonio, Texas

Whether working with paint or pencil, August Di Stefano uses stark, deliberate marks to register boundaries that are as psychological as they are physical. The neat, rectangular wedges of paint that inch across the canvases reflect a painstaking process of repeated application and sanding (Behavior and Location (model two), 2004). Similarly labor-intensive pencil strokes are assiduously repeated to create structures resembling defensive walls (Enthusiasm, 2005; Untitled, 2005). Uncomplicated but clever, Di Stefano?works quietly investigate the physical facts of art-making, exploiting paint?sculptural potential and graphite?glossy sheen to advantage.

Ranjani Shettar Bangalore, India

Ranjani Shettar explores the uneasy intersection of industry and nature in installations that evoke technology?encroachment on tradition in her native Bangalore, India. Transforming ordinary materials (wax, cotton, mud, PVC pipes, plastic sheeting) into ethereal sculptures that mimic organic structures (beehives in Thousand Room House, 2000; constellations/spider webs in Vasanta, 2004), Shettar fuses the mundane with the metaphysical. Whether examining the nature of inhabited space or the confrontation between biology and ideology, Shettar?intricate works collapse distinctions between art and craft, yet draw liberally from the histories of both.

About The Curator

Douglas Fogle, Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA

Prior to joining the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2005, Douglas Fogle served for ten years as curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. While at the Walker, Fogle initiated an emerging artists series and a number of group exhibitions such as Stills: Emerging Photography in the 1990s (1997). His most recent exhibitions include Painting at the Edge of the World (2001), solo exhibitions with Catherine Opie and Julie Mehretu, and an historical survey of the conceptual uses of photography entitled The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, which opened at the Walker Art Center in October 2003 and will travel to the UCLA Hammer in Los Angeles before continuing on to Europe. He regularly contributes to journals such as Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, and Parkett.

New Works: 06.2

July 6 ?ptember 10, 2006

Opening Reception and Artists?ialogue: July 6, 6:30-8:30pm

About The Artists

Luz Mar’a S‡nchez San Antonio, Texas

With continued interest in the relationship between people and their environment, Mexico-born, San Antonio-based Luz Mar’a S‡nchez recent video and audio projects entrance while remaining neutral. Organic imagery and sounds?ump truck crushing waste (Untitiled / WM, 2004), a person saying baby (BABY, 2001)?come data modules to be digitally isolated and repeated; the human becomes foreign as it is filtered through technology. S‡nchez?minimal works, installed in tandem or alone, gain maximum power through duration, repetition, progression, and dislocation.

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger Uster, Switzerland

Since 1997 Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger have collaborated on interactive installations and objects that fuse artificial and live nature. In room-sized projects such as The Seed Sounds of the Vegetative Nervous System at the Hydroponic Nector Lake (2001) and Brainforest (2004) they have turned the white walls of the gallery into colorful webs of hanging and floor-generated gardens that combine the organic and the synthetic, the planned and the accidental, and the inanimate and the blossoming. With twigs, blossoms, tape, wires, and sound Steiner and Lenzlinger create living organisms that reflect upon growth and mutation in the 21st century.

Do-Ho Suh New York, New York

Korean-born Do-Ho Suh?large-scale sculptural works explore relationships of the individual and the whole at this global, trans-national moment. Discrete forms are repeated and joined to create projects of powerful proportion. Some/One (2001) features a blanket of militarily dog tags sweeping up to form an oversized traditional Korean dress; Floor (1997-2000) has a sea of army figurines holding up a sheet of glass that visitors walk over them on. Suh?poetic forms eloquently investigate issues of identity, particularly the complexities of cultural similitude and difference.

About The Curator

Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanzawa, Japan

In 1999, Yuko Hasegawa was appointed Chief Curator of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. She currently serves as a board member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art and has been a member of the international jury for the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial (2001), a member of the jury for the 2002 Hugo Boss Prize, Co-Curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale (2002) and commissioner of Japanese Pavilion of the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Recent exhibitions include De-Genderism - de'truire dit-elle/il at the Setagaya Art Museum (1997); Fancy Dance, an exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Artists, at the Sonje Art Museum, Kyonju, and Sonje Art Center, Seoul (1999); and Shirin Neshat (2001), which took place as part of the pre-opening events for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. Hasegawa teaches art history at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

New Works: 06.3

November 9, 2006 - January 21, 2007

Opening Reception and Artists?ialogue: November 9, 6:30-8:30pm

About The Artists

Chiho Aoshima Tokyo, Japan

Chiho Aoshima?mural-sized works reflect not only Zen-inspired birds, flowers, ghosts, and demons, but also the traditions of Japanese comics, animation, and landscape paintings. Though deeply informed by histories of drawing, this colorful world of fantasy, desire, and terror is very much rooted in the technological future through its 21st century vocabulary and computer generated form. Looking both back and forward, Aoshima?cinematic investigations of the meaning of life incorporate hybrid beings, fiery depths, and starry skies to explore issues of sexuality, morbidity, and the environment we inhabit.

Katie Pell San Antonio, Texas

Through drawing, ceramics, performance projects, and comic books, Katie Pell irreverently explores personal and cultural identity, as well as the potential for greatness in everyone. Pell has completed two bodies of work focusing on the dormant fame in each of us. The pastel drawings show ordinary people Mick Jaggar-a-fied, while the comic book humorously tells of the fantastic effect of a Mick apparition on the otherwise humdrum life of a teenager. A more recent series portrays a parallel universe in which women use their disposable income to customize domestic appliances with the competitive zeal of male car fanatics. In these projects, and others, Pell delves into the role of fate and circumstance in creating a disconnect between how we appear and who we would like to become.

Allison Smith New York, New York

Allison Smith?objects and performances mine pivotal events of America?past to illuminate contemporary politics. For The Muster (2005), inspired by Civil War reenactments, Smith enlisted troops culled from artistic and queer communities to address the question, What are you fighting for? with performances blending art and social activism. In Victory Hall (2005), a concurrent gallery installation, Smith used life-sized, cross-dressed female soldiers to celebrate forgotten women warriors and critique recurrent male hijackings of history. Fascinated by the relativity of notions of authenticity, Smith posits art as a public construct that must consistently be reconfigured.

About The Curator

Tom Eccles, Executive Director, Bard College?Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Appointed Executive Director of Bard College?Center for Curatorial Studies in 2005, Tom Eccles had been Director of the Public Art Fund, New York, New York, since 1996. While at the Public Art Fund, Eccles organized engaging and innovative contemporary art exhibitions for many of New York City's diverse and prestigious public spaces including Rockefeller Center, Battery Park City, Park Avenue, and Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park. Eccles initiated In the Public Realm, Public Art Fund?program for emerging artists, and Tuesday Night Talks, a lecture series promoting dialogues between artists, curators, art critics, students of contemporary art and the general public.

About Artpace

Artpace San Antonio serves as an advocate for contemporary art and as a catalyst for the creation of significant art projects. We seek to nurture emerging and established artists and to provide opportunities for inspiration, experimentation, and education. Our programs support the evolution of new ideas in contemporary art and cultivate diverse audiences while providing a forum for ongoing dialogue.

Artpace is located downtown at 445 North Main Avenue, between Savings and Martin streets, San Antonio, Texas. Free parking is available on the corner of Savings and N. Flores streets. Artpace is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 12-5 PM, Thursday, 12-8 PM, and by appointment. Admission is free.

Artpace San Antonio is supported by individual and corporate donors as well as The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, Kronkosky Charitable Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the Ruth Lang Charitable Fund of the San Antonio Area Foundation.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org