Selling Exhibition: No Longer Yours
Selling Exhibition | April 14-May 12, 2018
Anonymous Gallery | Mexico City, Mexico
This is a past exhibition.
This group exhibition, staged at Anonymous Gallery as part of CONDO Mexico City, explores the parallels between recent histories of figuration and debates about inclusion and diversity that are shaping a host of cultural spheres in the US.
About the Selling Exhibition.
Over the last five years, conversations about diversity within a host of cultural spheres in the United States have taken on a new sense of urgency. From film and television to the visual and performing arts, this emboldened public debate has instigated a push towards more equitable representation for historically marginalized people in creative industries. This push has manifested as producers of color create content for major networks, directors and their inclusive casts guide films to box office-shattering success, and museums stage exhibitions of works by artists too often left out of art history. In short, we are living through a moment when increased visibility seems to be proof of progress made. And yet, like similar times past, questions loom about the intentions and consequences of this urge to be seen.
Do the marked bodies that inhabit these pictures and stories also own them? Are they stakeholders and powerbrokers in the structures through which these images and narratives circulate? Do they benefit from the economies their distribution and mediation generate? A stubborn disconnect seems to remain between the heightened visibility afforded by an increase of institutional support and the notable absence of a similar rise in power. In the realm of contemporary art, this draws unsettling parallels to the brief embrace of multiculturalism during the 1980’s and the subsequent backlash that followed it. Conscious of promises previously broken, it seems urgent, and perhaps even necessary, to consider what the outcomes of our current embrace of inclusivity will be.
This exhibition is the first in a series of projects TMR will stage dedicated to expanding a more candid engagement with the practical complexities that accompany our institutional discourses of inclusion and representation. No Longer Yours takes contemporary art’s resurgent interest in the figure as a point of departure to begin to understand the strategies artists are mobilizing to resist the easy consumption of their work in intellectual and institutional spaces that have historically marginalized it. The show, part of the Mexico City edition of Condo, is a selling exhibition. Half of the proceeds of all sales will go directly to participating artists and the other half to TMR to support future projects like this one that aspire to restructure the relationship between institutions and artists so that risk, power, and resources are shared between both more equitably.
For the artists included in this exhibition, visibility is highly suspect. Their works resist, evade, and undermine the legible body. Their figuration flees from any form of finality through the continuous accrual of marks, the formal privileging of moments of emergence, and a ceaselessly inventive obstruction of the identifiable. The result is a conscious and varied refusal of being-pictured that denies the social and economic compulsion towards accessibility. Instead, these artists create secret forms of value through a visual language of rejection, obstruction, and elusion that stymies the demand for stable representations of difference, but allows intimate knowledges to flourish. To a voracious public, they offer estranged and cryptic forms that resist consumption, deliberately reserving their corporeal histories, gestures, and traumas to themselves and reveling in the unknown pleasures of opacity.
Artists in exhibition: Eddie Aparicio, Susu Attar, Felipe Baeza, Aaron D. Estrada, Young Joon Kwak, Ofelia Marquez, Ronny Quevedo, Fay Ray, and Cosmo Whyte.
For information on available works please email: kris@tmr.la
About the Artist.
Eddie Aparicio (b.1990, US) received his BA in studio arts from Bard College in 2012 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2016. His work explores the visual and conceptual possibilities of global ubiquitous raw materials and products of indigenous knowledge of Latin America. In recent years Aparicio has produced monumental rubber casts that document the social and economic relationships between Latin America and the United. Aparicio has received the Schell Center For Human Rights Year Long Fellowship from Yale University and the Sol LeWitt and Elizabeth Murray Studio Arts Award from Bard College. He is represented by Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.
Susu Attar (b. 1982, Iraq) is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in exhibitions in Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco, Dubai, and Minneapolis, among other cities. In 2018, she held two artist residencies in Los Angeles: one at The Main Museum, and the other as one of the inaugural participants in the +LAB Artist Residency through the Little Tokyo Service Center. She was also a finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Artadia Award. Attar's practice extends to theatrical production and exhibition curating. Notably, she is a member of the SEPIA Collective, a women of color art collective whose work includes a traveling exhibition, ICONIC: Black Panther, in which artists respond to the legacy of the Black Panther Party. She has also co-produced and designed Haram, an experimental theatrical production inspired by the poetry of her mentor Dr. Maher Hathout. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University in Painting and Conceptual Information Art.
Felipe Baeza (b. 1987, Mexico) received his BFA from Copper Union in 2009 and he will receive his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in the upcoming year. His work aims to reconstruct history through the reassembly of colonial propaganda, indigenous codexes, and consumer print media. Beaza’s practice is informed by reverse anthropology and aims to produce new iconography presenting alternative and relative understandings of immigration, colonialism, culture, and sexuality. Baeza has exihibited extensively throughout the U.S. including at Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, Mass Gallery, Austin TX, Copper Union, New York, and David Nolan Gallery, New York. He is the recipient of The Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship, The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship, and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center Presidential Scholarship. Beaza lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Aaron D. Estrada (b. 1994, US) received his BFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2016 and will receive his MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. He has exhibited at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, REDCAT, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Estrada lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984, US) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design. She is a multi- disciplinary artist working primarily through sculpture, performance, video, and collaboration. She is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/platform for experimental performance collaborations with her community of queer, trans, femme, POC artists and performers, and the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. Kwak has performed and exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Broad, REDCAT, and ONE National LGBT Archives, Los Angeles, Regina Rex and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France. During Summer 2018, Kwak will be the Artist-in-Residence at LACE in Los Angeles, California. Kwak was recently awarded the Art Matters Grant and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Artist Community Engagement Grant.
Ofelia Marquez (b. 1986, US) is a first generation Mexican- American artist based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in sculpture at UCLA and is currently an art restorer at Aleksei Tivetskys Art Restoration and Conservation studio. Her practice consists of woodcarving, sewing, drawing, and assemblage as an assessment of emotions while simultaneously making connections to social constructs and its’ effects on the body and mind. Marquez’s intimate sculptures and sculptural assemblages evoke what at first glance appear to be Pre-Columbian icons, but that upon further contemplation reveal an expansive and original visual language that draws from science fiction, graphic novels, and mystic imagery. She has recently exhibited at; Human Resources, New Wight Gallery, the William Rolland Gallery of Fine Art, Avenue 50, and REDCAT.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Ecuador) received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003. Quevedo’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Drawing Center; the Queens Museum; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Emerson Gallery (Germany), amongst others. He is a recipient of the 2016 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and has participated in residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Kala Art Institute, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Lower East Side Printshop. He is currently an artist in residence at the Socrates Sculpture Park and a recipient of A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art for his project Higher Sails. He has been published in Art Forum for his collaborative project with Harold Mendez, Specter Field.
Fay Ray (b. 1978, US) received her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002, and her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Her work explores the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochrome photomontages and metallic sculpture. For her three-dimensional works, Ray compiles cast aluminum objects, bored volcanic rocks, wire, chain, and natural materials into suspended sculptural masses. Conflating worlds of worship and desire, the works across mediums borrow from the symbolism and composition of traditional religious relics and the visual language of the occult. Ray’s sculptures and collages hint at the presence of a rematerialized body through a mysterious yet systematic organization of abstract form. She has exhibited at galleries within the US and internationally, including Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Louis B James Gallery, New York, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, JOAN, Los Angeles, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills and New York. Ray lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Cosmo Whyte (b. 1982, Jamaica) attended Bennington College in Vermont for his Bachelor in Fine Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art for his Post-Baccalaureate Certificate and the University of Michigan for his MFA. He has exhibited in the US, Jamaica, Norway, France and South Africa. In 2010 he was the winner of the Forward Art emerging artist of the year award. In 2015 he was the recipient of the International Sculpture Center’s “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award” and in 2016 he was the recipient of an Artadia Award. In 2016 Cosmo Whyte participated in the Atlanta Biennial and the recent 2017 Jamaica Biennial. Cosmo Whyte is based in Atlanta, Georgia and Montego Bay, Jamaica and is currently a professor at Morehouse College.
Credits
No Longer Yours is organized by TMR and curated by Cesar Garcia, TMR Executive and Artistic Director, Kris Kuramitsu, TMR Deputy Director and Head of Program, and Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, TMR Assistant Curator.
TMR's program is made possible with the support of its Board of Directors, Big Mistake Patron Group, International Council, and Contemporary Council.
Special thanks to Anonymous Gallery.
Photo Credit: Hernan Cortes. Copyright 2018. The Mistake Room Inc.