• Emergent Reals •

February 2021 Virtual Program
presented in partnership with Woodland Pattern Book Center

During the ongoing pandemic, please support Woodland Pattern by making a purchase through their online bookstore

• Voyage Pathologique • Lisa Marie Schmitt •

14 min 24 sec, video, 2018

Synopsis:
Why do we travel to places of great historical and cultural significance? What draws us there?

"Vous qui partez pour Florence, Venise, Vienne ou Léningrad, méfiez-vous des foules, des pick-pockets…mais surtout des émotions esthétiques!" (“If you are travelling to Florence, Venice, Vienna or Leningrad, beware of crowds, pick-pockets... but especially aesthetic emotions.”) This is advice given by Italian psychologist Graziella Magherini in her book "Le syndrome de Stendhal - du voyage dans les villes d´art".

In 1979 she attributes symptoms of rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion, hallucinations or even physical pain after being confronted with a piece of art to a syndrome named after the French writer Stendhal who describes similar sensations in his book Rome, Naples et Florence.

Voyage Patholgique creates a poetic view on text excerpts from Graziella Magherini describing real cases of people´s individual struggles with certain pieces of art.

Artist Bio:
Lisa Marie Schmitt born in 1991 in Germany is a multidisciplinary artist working with video, photography, sound, text and sculpture by investigating phenomena on the edge of science. In 2017 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken. She was given several scholarships and attended a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2018. Lisa Marie Schmitt currently lives and works in Berlin.

• thank you, thank you, thank you • Chester Vincent Toye •

7 min 18 sec, video, 2020

Synopsis:
“thank you, thank you, thank you”, is a comedic horror performance where Toye and a camera operator walk the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the door to door performance Toye attempts to meet and show appreciation for the residents who have put up signs in support of Black Lives Matter. This performance tests the authenticity of these gestures by making the impersonal personal and by bringing the reality of a Black body navigating private property into focus with these public facing messages of support and solidarity.

Artist Bio:
Chester Vincent Toye (b. 1994, South Orange, NJ) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles who recently received his MFA from UCLA. He is currently in the development stage of his debut short film, Hangtime, which depicts two newly hired Black art workers who learn about the dark side of the fine art world during the delivery of a controversial sculpture. If you would like to learn more and or support the film please send him an email at indistinctarguing@gmail.com

• Puro • alejandro t. acierto •

8 min 31 sec, video, 2019

Synopsis:
Economically tied and chemically addicted, tobacco has established itself among (post)colonial subjects as a force that could only be severed through insurgent tactics outside of colonial and State controlled directives. As was common throughout the Spanish Empire, as well as in today’s contemporary moment, Black, Indigenous, and mestizx peoples often subverted monopolistic control through alternative economies of smuggling, pirating, or through the destruction of plants and products. In defiant resistance, Cuban vegueros (farmers) historically sought to disrupt and dismantle the State’s grip on local economies to claim ownership of the products they manufactured. Within this historical context, the works in the series titled Puro draw on the global obsession with identifying, examining, and locating counterfeit Cuban tobacco products. Working directly from Internet searches and uploaded YouTube tutorial videos, I am interested in both establishing the presence of counterfeit as a form of economic sovereignty and articulating how class privilege and tourism impact the broader forces of the economy at large. While tourists attempt to find “authentic” Cuban experiences through obsessive investigations of identifying counterfeit products, other questions begin to emerge that reveal legacies of colonialism and State sanctioned violence. If counterfeit is as old as the country is, then aren’t the fake cigars also just as "Cuban"? In the obsessive search for authenticity provoked by the presence of counterfeit tobacco, what emerges is a parodic critique of tourism, the inherent privilege of consumption, and the colonial desire for quick consumable moments that are as elusive as the smoke that emanates from the ashes.

Artist Bio:
alejandro t. acierto is an artist, musician, and curator whose work is largely informed by legacies of colonialism found within human relationships to technology and material cultures. He has presented projects and screenings for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Issue Project Room (NYC), MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Echo Park Film Center (LA),  Stove Works (Chattanooga) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham, UK), among others. He has presented multimedia performance works for the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival (Chicago), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), the KANEKO (Omaha), Center for New Music and Technology at UC Berkeley, and The Quarantine Concerts for ESS Chicago. Additionally, his curatorial projects have been mounted at Vanderbilt University’s Space 204 Gallery, Coop (Nashville), and online for the Wrong Biennial.

acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition, and Digital Artist Residency. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He also co-directs CQDELAB, an ongoing collaborative project with KT Duffy that is invested in developing and sustaining queer-feminist digital spaces, systems, and toolsets. Together, they authored the artist book CQDE: A Feminist Manifestx of Code-ing published by Sybil Press and continue to present workshops and installations in digital and IRL spaces. Currently, he is an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media and at Vanderbilt University and recently held a Mellon Faculty Fellowship in Digital Humanities.

• Promo • Azzah Sultan

3 minutes 10 seconds, video, 2019

Synopsis:
Promo is a video installation that is part of the Perfectly Blushed series. Women of color are often encouraged to use methods of skin bleaching – as it promises them a future where they can succeed in their careers, love life and any obstacles that they face. The removal of a dark skin tone is akin to the removal of one’s history and past. Perfectly Blushed is an installation piece that examines the way marketing works to sell this fantasy. The promises of reinventing a woman’s life through skin bleaching and the advertising techniques used to promote these products are heavily known within communities of color. The Southeast Asian community relationship with these products is what I am specifically focusing on. My intention is to have the audience question what it means to change your skin tone: to assimilate yourself towards imposed beauty trends that stem from the antecedents of white supremacy and a long history of colonialism.

Artist Bio:
Azzah Sultan received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and her MFA at Washington State University. She was born in Abu Dhabi and is a Malaysian native who grew up in Malaysia, Saudi, Finland, Bahrain and has spent seven years living in America working on her artistic practice. She has had her art exhibited in The New School, S.A.D. Gallery, The Bushwick Collective, BUFU Studios, The Ely Center, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Blackfish Gallery, Chase Gallery, Terrain 12, KMAC Gallery. She was a panelist for Muslim Women Reclaim Their Identities at Amherst College and a guest lecturer at Chautauqua Institution. She is exhibiting her solo show at Trotter & Sholer gallery, currently on view till Sept 27th at 168 Suffolk St NY. While living in New York she was a program coordinator at Triangle Arts Association and an artist assistant for Artist of Color Block. Before starting her masters she worked as a graphic designer at the Islamic Art Museum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

• Black Ice • Chester Vincent Toye •

5 min 3 sec, video, 2019

Synopsis:
“Black Ice” uses the repetitious act of skating laps as a means to examine the possibility for moments of freedom and embodied joy while being confined and restricted by a given environment. How does one traverse a minefield of oppression to transcend above and beyond it?

Artist Bio:
Chester Vincent Toye (b. 1994, South Orange, NJ) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles who recently received his MFA from UCLA. He is currently in the development stage of his debut short film, Hangtime, which depicts two newly hired Black art workers who learn about the dark side of the fine art world during the delivery of a controversial sculpture. If you would like to learn more and or support the film please send him an email at indistinctarguing@gmail.com