download PDF:
http://polvo.org/july2006/artpapers.pdf
see art papers web site
see her show here
Friday, July 28, 2006
http://www.artext.org
if you missed the entorno show then you can see it online here
"Entorno" by Brian Griffis
Polvo, Chicago, IL April 28 - May 20, 2006
from ArtUS Magazine
Chicago is currently undergoing efforts to become the greenest city in the country.Thanks to Mayor Daley's green agenda, new building projects receiving city tax breaks will now be required to have a "green roof" partially or completely covered with plants. This green-roof architecture will provide partial yet massively scaled solutions for urban water drainage and energy consumption. Given the current national direction of environmental deregulation, such policies should be applauded. But as greening movement they also need to be considered within the ongoing historical and political setting of the city along lines linking and separatingall the colors in the rainbow coalition.
Polvo Art Collective's "Entorno: Grass Grows Greener on the Other Side" takes on the spatial and historical politics of color, where so-called green urbanism meets racial redlining. Meaning "environment" in Spanish,"Entorno" immediately situates itself in the ambivalent engagement between American green values, be it of the suburban lawn variety or more current ecological fronts, and a largely divided population. Organized by Polvo founders, Eivia Rodriguez- Ochoa, Miguel Cortez and Jesus Macarena-Avila, the exhibition brings together an array of artifacts by 14 artists and collectives, from performance to mixed-media installation to documentary, which attempt to solicit invested perspectives rather than universalizing totalities.
One critical sub-theme concerns the bureaucratic language used to represent and facilitate spatial planning. For example, Miguel Cortez's 2006 City of Chicago Displacement Map combines personal utterances with a map of Chicago's evolving housing program. The point is that even though cartography is used to disperse traditional public housing residents into genuine neighborhoods, critics of the program use the same techniques to reveal that such dispersion actually maintains the very racial segregation supposedly being challenged. As one map denizen states, You feel like everyone is staring at you, saying mmmhmmm, she's a section 8." Area Chicago,a recently inaugurated political cultural publication, contributed a series of city maps created by readers and other local participants. Drawn, printed,and collaged onto a minimal template provided by Area, the maps included multi-layered and serious investinations of land use in the citv as well as the idiosvncratic interpretations of local high schoolers. Chicago-based performance and spoken-word artist Anida Yoeu Esguerra's What's Green? (2006) juxtaposed her animated body with loaded imagery of disposable plastic "Thank You" bags and street-level city views. Jesus Macarena-Avila's Extinction of a ghetto Artist (2006) presented us with a small cassette player atop an uncomfortable memorial mound. Suspended from a telephone wire several feet above the piece was a pair of sneakers, pointing uneasily to the conspicuous absence ofa contingent body.
Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has written about the "politics of .. verticality"-the vertical delineation of boundaries governing things like access to airspace, transportation, and water. Weizman's analysis of Israeli spatial militarism seems to have something to offer in consideration of Chicago's racialized spatial politics. Are the Mayor's proposed rooftop naturestrips yet another way the city can continue to ignore the environmental health of its citizens? And is the height of telephone poles an appropriate distance from which to police the city with surveillance cameras, a policy highlighted by a Mess Hall Collective exhibit? "Entorno" also includes "uncomfortable" civic projects like the Citizen and Voter Training School, Pilsen Ayuda, and Pilsen Environmental Rights Organization. Perhaps what we're seeing now, with the growth of environmental justice movements, is an integration of horizontal and vertical perspectives, those able to see where the neighborhood lines are drawn but also where vertical slices of the pie are shared.
**download the PDF scanFriday, July 14, 2006
CarianaCarianne, Zarathustra, Nietzsche and the Son of Godmini-exhibit: Coralina Cataldi Tassoni(New York)
flatscreen dvd: Tatjana Seserko/ Nela Trifkovic (Melbourne, Australia)
Opening Friday July 21, 2006 from 6pm-10pm
July 21 - August 12, 2006
CarianaCarianne, Zarathustra, Nietzsche and the Son of God is the second solo exhibition by CarianaCarianne at Polvo. In this new multi-media installation CarianaCarianne will investigate the invisible line that connects Zarathustra, the first known prophet and the originator of monotheism, with the contemporary monothematic body. This work will address notions of pluralistic embodiment, imposed history, and the complexities and contradictions of being alive.
CarianaCarianne are a collaborative which respond through a conscious duality, embracing a shared body that contains two internal selves – Cariana and Carianne. They are specifically interested in how the body and the representation of the body are constructed, viewed and negotiated. Combining installation, performance, text and video, they develop works that address self and under what circumstances self-invention becomes unbelievable or even illegal.
Cariana received an MFA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 and Carianne received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Their installations, objects and videos have been exhibited extensively across the United States, as well as in Croatia, Hungary, Germany, Belgium, Canada, England, Spain, France and Turkey. Their works have been included in the Istanbul Biennial, The Drawing Center, the European Media Arts Festival and the Dallas Museum of Art. Their solo projects include Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Croxhapox Gallery (Belgium), Chicago Cultural Center, and Polvo. Most recently their work was featured in the DVD publication ASPECT Vol.7: Personas & Personalities – which is available at most major museums.
This project is partially supported by a Community Arts Assistance program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
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mini-exhibit: Coralina Cataldi Tassoni(New York)
Artist’s Biography :
Born in Manhattan. She is the product of American/Italian/Argentinean heritage. As a child she moved to Rome where she spent most of her life. Coralina performed in her father’s opera company as a child through her teens. Her first singing role was in " La Boheme " at the age of three and one half . Among numerous venues around the world , she also worked closely with her father as his Assistant Director . While attending the University of Rome, she was cast as the lead in a TV film for R.A.I. that was a springboard for her success as a motion picture actress . She has worked with many of the most renowned European Directors and producers such as Dario Argento, Pupi Avati, Lamberto Bava , making her a cult favorite with a large international fan following. Despite her film success , her passion for music and painting as a self taught artist went a step further becoming a personal form of creative _expression . Her debut album " Limbo Balloon " contains original bilingual and electic works embodying an array of influences from classical to rock and roll. Coralina has recently returned from South Africa filming the movie " Ghost Son " directed by Lamberto Bava , including Oscar nominee Pete Postlethwaite and John Hannah from "Sliding Doors " . Included among her numerous major acting roles : " Demons2 " (Lamberto Bava ) … "Opera " (Dario Argento ) …. " Phantom of the Opera " ( Dario Argento ) …. "Via Paradiso" (Luciano Odorisio ) . Coralina currently resides in NYC and Rome , Italy . For more info, check out her site: http://www.coralina.net/
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flatscreen dvd: Tatjana Seserko/ Nela Trifkovic (Melbourne, Australia)
Tatjana Seserko is a visual artist who is currently conducting research in the field of cross-cultural performance. In her work, the temporal environments question the (im)possibilities of representation of memory and place. How do these visual syntheses leave traces on the current sense of self and ideological perception in our immediate surrounding?
The collaborative project "Seize Me By The Hair Of Forgetting," was from my perspective perceived as an experiment in which we explored notions of "performer" and "performance." The preconceived notion of these terminologies became reflected in the duel between the artists through their necessity to perform and their antagonising sense of desire. The sense of this antagonism was deeply reflected in the poetry this project initially was derived from. This project explored depths of our (to quote Nela) 'delicately explosive' Yugoslavian identity, as much as our artistic ones.
Nela Trifkovic is a musician and performance artists who is kept alive through her ongoing engagement in multi-disciplinary artistic discourses. she sings, composes, exists and shares it with as many others as possible form old friends to acquaintances strangers and other explorers and travelers....
polvo
1458 w. 18th st, 1R
chicago, il 60608
773.344.1940
www.polvo.org
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