Summer 2022 International Artists-in-Residence: Opening & Artist Talk
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Artpace
Exhibition, International Artists-in-Residence
Mark your calendars for the opening reception for our Summer 2022 Resident Artists. Meet the artists and curator, then join them in conversation at 6:30pm. The artist talk will be followed by a performance by Megan Solis at 7:30pm.
Hellen Ascoli
(Guatemala City, Guatemala / Baltimore, Maryland)
Hellen Ascoli’s Artpace project, (she re-members) siendosomos, takes inspiration from the artist’s forthcoming book “En loshilosencontré,” a pedagogical resource to support learning and teaching the embedded knowledge of the back-strap loom. Ascoli began working on the book six years ago after working as an educator at a textile museum in Guatemala. Throughout her time there, the artist noticed. Young visitors exploring the museum and saw an opening to how intergenerational knowledge could be reflected and transmitted. In the En loshilosencontré (Threads I Found), written in Spanish and Kaqchikel, and co-authored with Negma Coy, will be digitally displayed in the exhibition through an interactive setting. The installation will also include Ascoli’s explorations of the back-strap loom through poetry, photography, textiles, and more. The multifaceted installation is an extension of her previous work and encourages viewers to position themselves within what the artist calls ‘Weaving Worlds.’
Jonesy
(Los Angeles, California)
For Jonesy’s Artpace project, JONESY PRESENTS HOT ACTION AT ARTPACE, the artist has constructed a room inspired by men’s intimate spaces, such as gay bars, sex clubs, bathhouses, and so forth. At the core of the project is an in-progress film made in collaboration with artist and choreographer Lindsey Taylor and a team of other performers. The film features predominantly women performers to subvert the stereotypical expectations of men’s intimate spaces by focusing on women’s desires and experiences. Utilizing a queer, historical perspective, the performers are sharing their own ideas of what these spaces could be if they were more available to others. Alongside the single-channel video, the gallery space will include objects from the set of the film, a print, and an audio piece by duo Toxic Water playing throughout the gallery. There will bean opening night performance by Megan Solis, assisted by Sarah Fox, and documented by Monae Sims.
Betelhem Makonnen
(Addis Abeba, Ethiopia / Austin, Texas)
Betelhem Makonnen’s residency offering, unsettling narratives, is a meditation that considers presence and place in relation to memory and history within non-linear time. The works, made up of still and moving images, text, and installation, emphasize perception and seeing as a sensing that we do with the body and through the body across time. Throughout the gallery, we see repeating yet different signs of nature emergent from the source photograph and experience its foregrounding across different times and locations (from Southern California to Rio De Janeiro to the Texas Coast), reinforcing the artist’s conceptual foundation that accepts the future and the past as forms of the present, present in the present. unsettling narrativesis an invitation to break with flat linear logic and to connect through a moving focus that opens and rearranges perception across time and space.
Curated by Summer 2022 Guest Curator Andy Campbell
Featured image: Betelhem Makonnen, figures at sea (a ruttier* for unsettling narratives in diasporic time, again and again, future/present/past selves), 1983 – 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
