U·turn Art Space
2159 Central Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45214
e: u.turn.artspace@gmail.com

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

 

Palling Around with Socialists: a group exhibition

 

June 5^th – 26^th, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, June 5^th, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

 

Cincinnati, OH—Since its inception, U·turn Art Space has sought to facilitate discourse towards imagining questions about the methods and practices of a functional society. In Palling Around with Socialists, a number of artists and the gallery collective have come together to curate an exhibition that questions the nature of an individual as an autonomous being or as a component to an equitable community. Our nation presently finds itself in a culture war, where language is traversing outside the bounds of denoted definitions: words like socialist, fascism, tsar and terror are volleyed around public debates. While different parties and groups fear a loss of personal freedoms, we may be at greater risk of misarticulating the perceived conflicts with which we are faced. Concerns about the nature of private property, authorship and current intersections between economics, ethics and philosophy will be raised through the work of Shinsuke Aso, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Alton Falcone, David Horvitz, Justin Kemp, Steve Kemple, Julia Schwadron and Steve Lambert. The presented works continue to exercise aesthetic sensitivity, demonstrating a belief in form contributing to the advancement of concepts. Critically playful and directly engaging our community with optimistic, activist strategies, U·turn and these artists seek to contribute to a larger dialogue with art that presents unexpected viewpoints and makes note of abstractions that may expand upon or resituate current discussions about social responsibility, power and control.

 

“The question of social change and art becomes then a problem of discovering the manner in which a new content modifies the conventional manner of expression: the manner in which purely aesthetic changes, occasioned by social changes, modify content to accord with newer forms. But insofar as the formal change may be socially conditioned, we must distinguish between those social changes that operate on the artist directly and those that operate indirectly.” –Meyer Schapiro in his essay “Art and Social Change”

 

I am in Paper Magazine's May issue.

I was accepted to participate in the Opening Engagement conference in Portland:

http://openengagement.info/

However, the Rhizome project for No Soul For Sale is happening at the exact same weekend in London. So instead of participating in the panel, I proposed to create a simple blog that would engage in some questions. I talk with Ceci Moss, Laurel Ptak, Cory Arcangel (ongoing), and there are some others that will be posted in the coming days. Check out the blog:

http://virtualparticipation.wordpress.com/

Friend, editor of Fillip magazine in Vancouver, artist, writer, fellow food enthusiast, Kristina Lee Podesva, has written a blog entry about my recent talk at Fillip last week.

I thought I should post it here:

http://kristinaleepodesva.com/blog/two-events/

This week Fillip co-hosted two events in Vancouver. The first was a talk by the New York-based artist and my friend David Horvitz, which he delivered at the Or Gallery. The second, which was co-presented with the Contemporary Art Gallery, was a poetic grapple with Paul McCarthy's Pirate Project by John C. Welchman, who sits on the Fillip advisory board. I'd like to share some thoughts on each as a post facto mainly because the proximity of both presentations [They took place over two concurrent evenings] occasioned a particular set of questions for me, especially regarding how the role that society, as a hybrid of digital/analogue spheres, does or does not enter into artistic production today.

In Horvitz's talk, which was informal and conversational, we received an overview of recent and upcoming projects, including The Wikipedia Reader, [which Fillip participated in], Kiosk, [to which, in the interests of full disclosure, I contributed], the Drugstore Beetle project, and a work he is developing for Rhizome in the No Soul for Sale exhibition at Tate Modern. During the talk the audience shared a number of insightful observations on the work especially regarding his consistent engagement with systems of distribution and circulation [Holly Ward pointed this out early on in the discussion]. I personally think this is a rather significant feature of the work, which underscores the power of selection and framing in the online universe both in terms of its abilities to open up authorship and data networks, but also in closing down, or authorizing a limited network or set of networks. Part of my thinking derives from the scholarship of Matteo Pasquinelli, whose text on Google PageRank breaks down this phenomena into concrete terms through an analysis of the technology and political implications behind these masters of the (digital information) universe...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Project with Rhizome at the Tate Modern, London during No Soul For Sale.

http://mailnothing.info/
http://mailnothing.info/
http://mailnothing.info/
http://mailnothing.info/

An open call to submit nothing for exhibition at the Tate Modern!

Anyone can send in nothing to this exhibition. All you have to do is send an empty package or envelope to the Tate Modern in London. All received mailings will be exhibited unopened May 14-16 in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Send your mailing with tracking and your name and tracking number will be listed on this site so that your package can be followed while it is in transit to London. All mailings sent from the USA using the United States Postal Service will have their delivery status updated live through a program we have written.

By locating these packages (all with various points of departure and the same location of arrival) at various moments in their transit, one can grasp a mental picture of the vast global infrastructure of shipping - a breathing system of objects in continuous movement. The packages being sent to the Tate Modern, declared to contain "nothing" on their customs-forms as they cross international borders, generate the data of travel with tracking technologies. This data becomes a trace - a trace of nothing (or, of something empty). Mail carriers claim these tracking numbers (and the data) as their legal property, which we are appropriating and exhibiting in this project.

New Xiu Xiu Tour Photo Project.

Check the site for all the information.

Will be happened on the upcoming European Xiu Xiu tour.

"A Tagging Project"


http://davidhorvitz.com/may2010/
http://davidhorvitz.com/may2010/
http://davidhorvitz.com/may2010/

We have as much time as it takes

Lower and Upper Galleries | May 6–July 31, 2010

We have as much time as it takes calls attention to the multiple conditions that determine artistic display in the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. As an art gallery located within an educational institution, the Wattis Institute requires the steady production of tangible, professional results. Responding to this situation, We have as much time as it takes presents practices that
expose, directly or symbolically, the often unquestioned and overlooked systems and economies related to such a situation. The show features 10 international artists and collectives working in a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Many of the works are new, site-responsive commissions created especially for this exhibition.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Nina Beier and Marie Lund, David Horvitz, Jason Mena, Sandra Nakamura, Roman Ondák, Red76, Zachary Royer Scholz, Tercerunquinto, Lawrence Weiner, Christine Wong Yap

Designed by Jon Sueda / Stripe, the exhibition catalog features interviews with each of the artists; a project by Matthew Rana, a student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies; and texts by the local poet Jasper Bernes and the writers Erica Levin and Daniel Marcus. The publication is available as a downloadable PDF.

http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/whamtait
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/whamtait
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/whamtait
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/whamtait