Installation view
Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz
October 21 - November 11, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday October 21st, 6-8pm
Klowden Mann is very proud to present Mariángeles Soto-Díaz's project the Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM) in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. The project will take the form of an art exhibit and event series, held at Klowden Mann from October 21 - November 11, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday October 21st from 6-8pm.
The exhibit includes works from UMM’s Impermanent Collection as well as a Participatory Project titled And Tossing and Turning And. In addition, on three consecutive Saturdays, UMM will present Untested Address, a series of performances and presentations by diverse artists and writers.
About the Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM)
The Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM) is a flexible project space with a playful utopian sensibility, conceived as an intervention in suburban Irvine, California. As a curatorial experiment intended to decentralize circulation of contemporary practices, UMM integrates the sensory, poetic, political and affective dimensions of the everyday. UMM’s mission is to provide a shifting creative platform for contemporary art through exhibitions and social practice in a community setting. UMM is infrapolitics, digging for the pleasure of doubt in the debris of heroic certainties. UMM is a space made visible by iteration over time, a way to simultaneously render and erase the lines dividing private and public, quotidian life and art, a house becoming art space and an art space welcoming neighbors. UMM is slow and shifting, kaleidoscopic and puzzling. UMM is conceived and directed by artist Mariángeles Soto-Díaz.
Untested Address Event Series:
Untested Address is an open-ended platform for in-progress work including poetry, unpredictable improv games, moon absorptions and short experimental work. The series of events has taken place at UMM’s neighborhood and for this exhibition, UMM’s copper-pipe, malleable patio platform has been transposed to the Klowden Mann along with a seating structure designed in collaboration with architect Ed Ogosta. The presenting artists and writers for Untested Address during UMM’s exhibition at Klowden Mann is as follows:
October 28: José Alvergue, Fabián Cereijido, Cognate Collective, Alana de Hinojosa, Jacobo Sefamí
November 4: Jessica Ceballos Campbell, Kristin Cerda, Adriana Johnson, Laura Vena, Semi-tropic Spiritualists
November 11: Los Angeles Road Concerts (Radical Welcome)
October 28
José Felipe Alvergue is a graduate of both the Cal Arts Writing and Buffalo Poetics programs. He lives in Wisconsin where he is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Transnationalism, and is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017).
For Untested Address, he will be reading from precis and from scenery, reflections on subjection and resistance.
Fabián Cereijido is an artist and art historian. Originally from Argentina, Fabián lived in exile in Mexico City for 8 years before moving to NYC, where he studied and worked for 20 years. Fabián earned a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from UC San Diego and is the Assistant Curator of “How to Read el Pato Pascual”, a PST LA/LA exhibit currently on view at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Luckman Gallery in LA. He is a Lecturer at CSU Long Beach, Art Division and Antioch University.
For Untested Address, Fabián will be reading a text in which he discusses the history, poetry and traction of the phrase "Aparición con vida", coined by the Madres of Plaza de Mayo in 1980.
Cog•nate Collective develops research projects + public interventions + experimental pedagogical programs in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region. Since their founding in 2010, their work has interrogated the evolution of the border as it is simultaneously erased by neoliberal economic policies and bolstered through increased militarization -- tracing the fallout of this incongruence for migrant communities on either side of the border. They currently work between Tijuana, MX, San Diego, CA, Santa Ana, CA and Los Angeles, CA.
For Untested Address, Cognate Collective will present: (des)compuestos: An exercise in close-listening, soft-speaking and (de)composing political addresses. An exercise in (de)composing political speech [addresses] through close-listening and soft-speaking.
Alana de Hinojosa is a poet pursuing a dissertation in the UCLA Department of Chicana/o Studies that is concerned with histories of migration, displacement, loss, and erasure. Perhaps most important to her is the (re)imagining of alternative and more just poetic geographies. Her poetry has been published in Huizache, Duende, Four Chambers, Track//Four, and elsewhere. Alana is a graduate of Hampshire College and was raised in Davis, CA.
For Untested Address, she will be reading from her in-progress manuscript of poetry based on her dissertation research.
Jacobo Sefamí, from Mexico City, is Professor at UC Irvine, and Director of the School of Spanish summer program at Middlebury College. He has published as a critic several books, articles and interviews on Latin American poetry. He is also a fiction and non-fiction writer. His novel "Los Dolientes" was translated and published in English as "Mourning for Papá. A story of a Syrian Jewish Family in Mexico City". He also edited "Vaquitas pintadas" an anthology on cows, with poems, short-stories and aphorisms.
For Untested Address, he will be reading from his travel narratives about Syria and Turkey.
November 4th:
Jessica Ceballos Campbell is an indige/me/xicana-afro-euskaldunak poet and interdisciplinarian, a community advocate and activist. Her interests are centered on exploring the intersections of art and personal narrative, and how those are affected by and inform the spaces we occupy. Her written work has been published in various journals and anthologies, and she’s published two chapbooks; Gent Re Place Ing: A Response (Writ Large Press, 2016) and End of the Road (2017).
For Untested Address, she will be reading new material (as process) from her work in progress, Happiest Place on Earth.
Kristin Cerda is a Bay Area interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of language, science, ritual and environment. Her written work has appeared in [out of nothing], Acentos Review, Lumen Magazine, and she is the creator of the hypertext project Half.Life/WretchedSymphony (wretchedsymphony.com). Her writing practice expands into food installations and poetic happenings. She has presented on poetics at SXSW-Interactive, AWP, the National Women's Studies Association, and she was a 2017 finalist for poet laureate for the City of Richmond, California. Kristin holds degrees in writing from CalArts and Naropa University, and she is a sixth-generation Texan.
For Untested Address, she will be presenting experimental work involving sound.
Adriana Johnson was born in Brazil and dragged around through various countries until she ended up in the U.S. She is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine and has written one book about a famous nineteenth century civil war in the backlands of Brazil and is currently working on another one on contemporary film in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Since having children she also became obsessed with issues of infrastructure, resources (water) and labor. She will be presenting an experimental on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s short story “Amor/Love”.
Laura Vena is a writer, artist, curator and translator whose work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Super Arrow, Tarpaulin Sky, Antennae and elsewhere. She is Fiction Editor at Entropy Magazine, and winner of the 1913 Press First Book Award by John Keene for her manuscript, x/she: stardraped, which will be published in 2017.
For Untested Address, she will be presenting experimental work.
Semi-Tropic Spiritualists is a project by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg, started in 2012. This ongoing series of performance works and objects explores the history of spiritual and occult belief in Los Angeles through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that created a campsite meeting place outside the city limits of Los Angeles in 1905. Spiritualism has described itself as a science, a philosophy and a religion. The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists are interested in this system as a model for exploring ideas of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, as well as for the development of a space dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge. They have exhibited their installations and performance works at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; The Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles; Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA; and Chime & Co., Los Angeles, among other locations.
For Untested Address, they will perform "Test Site No. 2," a lecture-based performance with historical Spiritualist Lyceum recitations.
November 11:
In five previous events, Los Angeles Road Concerts has shown work from over 280 Los Angeles artists in unused public outdoor space. In a “road concert” participating artists display installations, perform works, facilitate carpool happenings, host spontaneous readings, and make music in unexpected spaces, such as on the sidewalk, between dumpsters, along streetlamps, on the Expo line, as well as inside the audience’s earbuds as they traverse the path of the road concert. Works can be in one location, many locations, or no location in particular. Through a wide-ranging open call process, LA Road Concerts brings together art school graduates, working artists, local residents and other artists, writers, musicians, performers, to realize a broad array of kinds of interactions with the sites. For this concert, Radical Welcome (National and Washington Blvd.), site-specific works will be performed in various outdoor locations within walking distance of the intersection of National and Washington Blvds.
And tossing and turning and (installation in Klowden Mann’s Project Room)
And tossing and turning and is a participatory project by Mariángeles Soto-Díaz. As with previous projects sponsored by UMM, this work draws on materials collected from UMM’s local neighborhood, in this case from residents responding to the question “What recent news headline has caused you to lose sleep?” Soto-Díaz collected the responses to create an installation using bedsheets also from the neighborhood, as a way to capture the affective dimension of our current political moment.
UMM’s Impermanent Collection
On exhibit in the gallery throughout the three weeks are works from UMM’s Impermanent Collection, which houses works that are made from 90% almost-dumped landfill materials and outmoded media collected from neighbors. These works channel the collective memory of a time, highlighting the importance of this historical moment which will likely be remembered as the end of the mechanical era. As obsolete media awkwardly articulates failure, out of sync but in its own rhythm, analog time rubs slowly and imprecisely against our digital landscape.
UMM has been selected for the Pasadena Art Council's EMERGE program, which offers organizations the ability to seek funding through fiscal sponsorship, and provides guidance by an established non-profit.
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz began her art studies in the oil-producing country of Venezuela, where she was born and raised, and where Modernism’s failed promise felt particularly poignant. She holds a BA in art and psychology from Hampshire College, an MA in Critical Studies from CalArts and an MFA in Painting from CGU. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at venues including MASS MoCA, El Museo del Barrio in NYC, the University of Iowa Museum, and the Wignall Museum, among others, and has been reviewed in publications such as the L.A. Times, Art Nexus and Arte al Día. She is the founder and multi-hat operator of the Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM).
