Jail Central

4^th Street –  Mecklenburg County Jail Central

by Annabel Manning

4^th Street is a video showing undocumented adult Latina inmates participating in a Spanish-speaking art and poetry project at the Mecklenburg County Jail Central in Charlotte, North Carolina. This program is an ongoing collaboration between the inmates, the Jail Central Special Programs Department, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, and myself. Going forward, we will build on our recent use of iPads to show inmates artworks on display at the Bechtler Museum and next to allow the inmates to use the iPad to curate their own art show at the Bechtler from the jail.

Michael Tauschinger-Dempsey / Corporate Culture Wars

Be Business

Single channel projected video, 4’40″

Statement:
Corporate culture forms a universe parallel to that of normal human interaction. Similarly, corporate culture is also defined by ritualistic behaviors and relational norms, but when taken outside of the framework of best business practices, it can seem awkward, at best and pathetic, at worst. As children, we all learn how to behave in public, in school and at a friend’s house. When we grown up, most of us need to be re-programmed according to the behavioral norms of the business life: how to present oneself in public; how to eat at a fundraiser dinner; how to shake hands; how to effectively move your body and appropriately use language at your next job interview; how to express oneself in a board meeting, etc. In short, we have to assimilate the rules of the ruling (business) class, if we have any hope of reaching for this strata at all. In essence, corporations have created their own experimental meta-community — one that excludes and marginalizes the rest of society.

Empty Boardrooms

Framed image 44″ x 54″

Statement:
Performing a Google Image Search query with the word “boardroom” results in approximately 15,000,000 images of empty boardrooms. Several questions arise: why are spaces designed for human interaction/communication depicted as empty? Why do people take pictures of these empty spaces? What do these spaces and the many images of them tell us about our culture and our concept of business, work, importance, and status? Capital and power beg to be represented in tangible ways, and the imagined ownership of exclusive and available spaces satisfies this modus vivendi desire, if you will. The potential for human interaction and communication is not only embodied in such charged empty spaces, but also simultaneously excluded from such spaces. Boardrooms, empty or not, deny the general public from any kind of democratic participatory agency, which fits nicely into seemingly innocuous but dramatically exclusionary private property clauses. Boardrooms are the sacred spaces of the corporate parallel universe; non-members of the corporate elite are simply not welcome.

http://www.michaeltauschingerdempsey.com/
http://co-operation-corp.tumblr.com/

Jennifer Stratton

HOOPLAH

Jennifer Jacqueline Stratton

Embroidery Hoops (various sizes)

Description: Non-traditional embroidered art inspired by biological imagery.

__________

POWER PLAY

Pussy Noir (w/Jennifer Jacqueline Stratton)
Medium: Performance (living installation)
Location: Blue Parlor

Description: Power Play explores social change with image.  Centered in fashion, décor and social engagement the installation is to project images of power through a series of fashion iconographies.  By displaying one person as such, others are invited to watch and be intrigued by how subtle and explosive power and change can be harnessed into one single entity.

Joe Silver

Ghosts of Katrina 

Joe Silver, video monitor, 3:31.

Ghosts of Katrina is a short film drawing on pre-existing footage from two significant natural disasters that have hit the Gulf Coast region, Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. My aim is to suggest resonances between these two events and those of more recent calamities that have hit the region.

The film is set to a live, solo drum-set performance by Ari Hoenig, recorded at Loyola University in New Orleans on January 18, 2008. Hoenig has adapted for drum set the children’s Gospel song “This Little Light of Mine” by Harry Dixon Loes. Many believe this song was originally inspired by a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus proclaimed: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” 5:14-5:15.

Talena Sanders / The Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities

The Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities

Talena Sanders, installation, 2012

Named for the fourth President and Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities displays a collection of Mormon curiosae, gathered from across the Mormon trail – the path the 19^th century Mormon pioneers traveled in their westward expansion pilgrimage. Wilford Woodruff, Sr. was President of the LDS church during the prohibition of the practice of polygamy, and was a noted diarist.  His daily journals, meticulously kept from the age of 8 until his death at 91, are stored under restricted access at the LDS Church History Archives in Salt Lake City, UT.

A Desperate Attempt to Solve the Mormon Question.

Color Lithograph from Puck magazine, 1884.

Four artists’ takes on the “Mormon Monster”, printed in 19^th century New York City.  Part of the Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities collection.

Laurenn McCubbin

Vagina Detritus (Parlor installation and photo)

This objects are the result of a collaboration with a group of sex workers based in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I have been documenting their lives and their work for four years, and this collection of objects have been curated by them. Each object has a purpose and a reason, imbued with meaning through it’s labor.

My collaborators: (links are NSFW)

Jolene Parton

Arabelle Rapahel

Dylan Ryan

Audacia Ray

Courtney Trouble

Maxine Holloway

Annabel Manning

Elizabeth Landesberg

Together, these three works examine the communities forged between the living and the dead, and among the living for the dead.

Entierros y Exhumaciones is a set of photographs from a larger collaboration with the children and teens who work in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s municipal cemetery – el Cemeneterio General. These young workers engage in both physical and spiritual labor, often acting as mediators between the mourners and the dead.

My Father Was A Comedian is an experiment in re-mediation, and an attempt to convey the often surreal experience of watching and listening to my late father utter tender and loving words about me, then hearing strangers laughing.

Light Shines Forever is a reaction to the gifts, in the form of animated GIFs, left by strangers on my father’s virtual grave in a virtual cemetery called FindAGrave.com.  Stretching them often beyond their recognizable representational capacities gives me the chance to wonder what these gestures mean to me. They are symbols of the care the living take for the dead, but they are also embodiments of our own fluctuations between realms. They are finite and infinite, here and not, all at once.

Brandon Joyce

 In a burst of overheated ideating, I am putting forth a set of proposals— “gimmicks for community”— that attempt to create a greater sense of community at points of fissure or alienation in modern life. I like to imagine that, on some unseen level, all our best ideas go into a great, big cosmic suggestion box. From that, the angels select our possible futures.

Gimmicks for Community

Michael Iauch / Cowboy

Cowboy

I use the consumer video camera as a means of self-representation. I conceptualize its frame as an impossible/possible reality where my desire becomes a raw material, conflating the perceptual, the physical, and the spiritual.

In thinking about experimental communities, I wonder if the spaces we share, our cities, parks, and forests are not held together by an insatiate identification with the spaces we imagine.

COWBOY from Michael Iauch on Vimeo.