Katie Herzog in group exhibition at Chapman University 2.11.17

EX LIBRIS

Approaches to a Research Based Practice

Katy Herzog with Andrew Choate
Gala Porras-Kim
Candice Lin
Mona Varichon
Jenny Yurshansky
Curated by Marcus Herse

January 30 – March 5,2017
Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University
One University Drive, Orange CA 92866

The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University is pleased to announce EX LIBRIS – Approaches to a research based practice. Please join us for the artist reception on March 5, 2016 from 3 – 5 P.M.

With the onset of the mass mediated era, a century plus ago, our collections of images and data began to grow exponentially, and so did the curiosity about these alternate realities that would eventually fill the vaults and books. The collage, quickly invented by the cubists, was an early artistic response to this situation, an outlet to deal with the plethora of printed images and texts that could now be found increasingly in magazines and on the cities’ billboards. The collage however was deeply rooted in rather classical painterly questions of pictorial composition and soon the abundant influx of daily fresh material fostered a more objective, removed view of the meaning of these images and text snippets – it became apparent that one way of perceiving this complex of information, its actual content, was inherent in the conditions of its production.

Minimalism and Pop Art deepened the examination of mass-produced base-material, and their experiments with serial and modular arrangements further eroded concerns of composition. Finally by the late 60’s, Conceptual Art formulated the archive as an artistic possibility: A compilation of images, objects or texts that was not first and foremost an aesthetic experience, but a gathering of historical records compiled of modules of information, which could be rearranged or replaced – A democratic endeavor of sorts.

Today grids and lists, once considered subversive and un-artistic forms of representation are not only found in every museum with a modern wing, they are also the reality of our digital lives. The archive in its many forms has become part of the repertoire of contemporary art and the term “research” has long defected from the sciences. But precisely in undergoing this evolution archives emerge as providers of meta motifs. Working with them allows to address abstract social, economical and political processes that are invisible, but which information helps us to see.

The artists in EX LIBRIS- Approaches to a Research Based Practice present their findings in a variety of media, employing video, photography, collage, poetry, sculpture and painting. Grids and lists are still in the mix, but they are part of an undogmatic choreography of styles that embraces a multiplicity of historic influences and their aesthetic (re-) discovery.

Katie Herzog received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2005. In 2011 she cycled from Copenhagen to Berlin in the inaugural Cycling For Libraries, and she currently serves as a Board Director for the Foundation for Monterey County Free Libraries.  She has participated in a number of artist residencies including Skowhegan, The Banff Centre, Bblackboxx, Ox-Bow, and Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations in Berlin, and her work is in the collections of numerous public institutions including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Tom of Finland Foundation, among others. Her forthcoming solo exhibition, titled Research, opens at Private Places in Portland Oregon in March. Katie Herzog is represented by Klowden Mann Gallery in Culver City, CA.

Andrew Choate is an artist/writer who was born and raised in South Carolina. He studied music and literature at Northwestern University and the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of several small press books of poetry, photography, and art criticism and has two books forthcoming in 2016: I Love You More (Insert Blanc), a collection of his texts for performance, and Learning (Writ Large), a self-help/mystery collage. His radio plays and sound works have been broadcast on WDR in Germany, Radio Arte Mobile in Italy, Hipersônica in Brazil, Resonance FM in England, and various outlets in the US. As The Unwrinkled Ear, he produces a monthly concert series dedicated to bringing international improvised music to Los Angeles, and hosts a radio show on KCHUNG every other Tuesday from 5-7pm PST. His Instagram page @saintbollard is an index devoted to photographs of bollards and has over forty-seven thousand followers. He has been invited to present his bollard writing and photography around the world: at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City for Bikini Wax gallery; performing at the Kulcsar Haus in Vienna; organizing a bollard tour for Atlas Obscura in Los Angeles; headlining the Dunedin Fringe Festival in New Zealand – where he won the award for Best Visual/Performance Art as well as the Warwick Broadhead Memorial Award. Articles and interviews with him about his bollard project have been featured by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, the Otago Daily Times (New Zealand), and Atlas Obscura.

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá, Colombia; lives and works in LA) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2009); as well as an MA in Latin American Studies (2012), and a BA in Art and Latin American Studies (2007), from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been included last year in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A., CURRENT the Public Art Biennial, AÚN, The 44th National Salon of Artists in Colombia, FRAC Pays De La Loire in France. She received a Rema Hort Mann Foundation award in 2017, Joan Mitchell Foundation award in 2016, Creative Capital Grant and Tiffany Foundation award in 2015 and a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists in 2013. Porras-Kim’s work will be included in upcoming exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the Getty Pacific standard time LA/LA, at Commonwealth and Council and LABOR in Mexico City.

Candice Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Her work engages notions of gender, race and sexuality, drawing from postcolonialism, citizen science, anthropology, feminist and queer theory. Lin has been awarded several residencies, grants and fellowships including the Headlands Center for the Arts (2016), the CCF Emerging Artist Fellowship (2015), Fine Arts Work Center residency (2012), the Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Börse Residency (2011), Instituto Sacatar Artist Residency (2011), and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009).  Lin’s work has been recently exhibited at the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), La Maison Populaire (Paris), Azkuna Zentroa (Alhondiga Bilbao), Galeria Fortes Vilaça (Sao Paolo), and the Current LA Public Biennial.  She has had recent solo exhibitions at Gasworks (London) and Commonwealth & Council (LA) in 2016 and in 2015 at Francois Ghebaly Gallery (LA), 18th Street Arts Center (Santa Monica) and CAAA (Guimarães, Portugal).

Mona Varichon is an artist based in Los Angeles, currently pursuing her MFA at ArtCenter in Pasadena. Originally from Paris, Mona graduated from Paris Descartes University in 2009
with a BA in Sociology and from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014 with a BFA in Photography. Selected exhibitions and screenings include the Egyptian Theatre, the Echo Park Film Center and Arturo Bandini (Los Angeles), Galerie La Croix (Pasadena), the Cite Internationale des Arts (Paris) and Rod Barton (London).

Jenny Yurshansky is an American artist who was born in Rome. She received her MFA in Visual Art from UC Irvine and was a participant in the post‐graduate Critical Studies course at the Malmö Art Academy. In 2016 she was an Artist-in-Residence at Arts Initiative Tokyo and she was invited by Yiddishkayt to travel as a guest artist to Moldova where she began research on her family’s history there. In 2017 her artist edition book, “Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory (Recollections)” is being published by Pitzer College Art Galleries, it is the final component of the project she realized there in 2015 as part of the Emerging Artist series curated by Ciara Ennis. This exhibition followed her artist residency at Pitzer College Art Galleries the year prior. In 2015 she was also a Guest Artist Researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, which she concluded with a solo show. In 2012 she was an invited Artist-in-Residence connected to the exhibition Odor Water Limo in northern Norway. In 2010 Yurshansky was the first international artist awarded the Maria Bonnier Stipend from Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm. Yurshansky has also participated in group shows at Bonniers Konsthall, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Laguna Beach Art Museum, MAK Center, and LAXART, the Torrance Art Museum, the Armory Center for the Arts, the 7th Istanbul Biennial, the Hammer Museum, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, and the Toyota Museum. She is the recipient of numerous artist and curatorial grants. She is the co-founder of Persbo Studio an artist residency, sculpture park, and creative space in Sweden.

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