1989: The Postcollapse in Art and Culture & Feast and Famine - Panel Discussion and Opening Receptions at the Cerritos College Art Gallery
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August 29, 2022
The Cerritos College Art Gallery is kicking off our Fall exhibition program with an exciting evening of back-to-back events on Monday, August 29.
At 6PM, we will convene a panel discussion (held both in-person in FA133 and via Zoom) with the guest curators and a selection of artists from our international group exhibition, 1989: The Postcollapse in Art and Culture. Immediately afterwards, at 7PM, we will host opening receptions for both the 1989 exhibition and the first Window Dressing installation, Feast and Famine by Ashton Phillips.
Both events are free and open to the public. All faculty, students, staff, and community members are invited (please share). Visitors must first check in at approved health-screening kiosks to receive wristbands. Refreshments will be served at the opening reception.
Read more about the two new exhibitions below:
1989: THE POSTCOLLAPSE IN ART AND CULTURE
August 29, 2022 - October 6, 2022
Panel Discussion: August 29, 2022 @ 6PM in Person & via Zoom
(link: https://cerritos-edu.zoom.us/j/97490853068?pwd=RGREYngraEtrUEJUVUVWUitQYVA1QT09)
Opening Reception: August 29, 2022 @ 7-9PM
The Cerritos College Art Gallery, in collaboration with The MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture (MPAC), is pleased to present 1989: The Postcollapse in Art and Culture, an international group exhibition featuring twenty-four artists and art collectives working across multiple media from all around the globe. The main gallery features an exhibition of physical artworks (i.e. paintings, sculptures, etc), while the adjoining projects space has been transformed into a video screening room featuring eleven short documentaries, animations, and music videos (comfortable seating is provided, so visitors can either linger to watch the full 80 minute loop or just pop in for multiple visits to catch a few different videos each time).
To speak of the year 1989 is to speak of revolutions.
For some, it marks the end of history as the last chapter of a long-winded ideological battle; victors promising flashy freedoms. For others, it marks the beginning of a renewed era of force; control societies marching forward in clanking servitude. To speak of 1989 is to speak of collapse. It is to speak of the many befores and the many afters across multiple centers and peripheries. From the fringes of the former West to the afterworlds of an emergent East and across the global South, 1989 rips through the primacy of borders, speaking instead to the absurd and the absolute, the fantastic and the fragmented, that permeate our ever-shifting contemporary ground.
This exhibition brings together established and emerging artists from Russia, Poland, Czechia, Switzerland, Germany, Romania, Moldova, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Turkey, Iran, Mexico, Cuba, Suriname, Hong Kong, China, New Zealand, and the USA. Through a diverse collection of painting, drawing, installation art, sculpture, photography, conceptual emptiness, video art, digital art, and textile, each artist engages the aesthetic, political, and psychological aspects of collapse. Taken together, the exhibition designates postcollapse as a critical framework for contextualizing the contemporary practices of artists from these dynamic regions since 1989.
Guest Curators: MPAC (lknur Demirkoparan and Vuslat D. Katsanis)
Participating Artists: Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu; Music X Habitat X Art (Amelie Jiang, Yaoyue Huang, Scott Lowell Sherman; Peter Christenson with Marta Straži?i? and Tea Straži?i?; Fung Yee Lick Eric; Lenka Holíková; Hagen Klennert; Vladan Kuzmanovi?; Naomi Middelmann; Esra Nesipo?ullar?; Frank Lahera O’Callaghan; Stas Orlovski; Kasia Ozga; Nathaniel C. Praska; Rodrigo Prian-García; Hamed Shafie; Monica Sheets; Maciek St?pniewski; Anna Syarova; Valdrin Thaqi; Igor Vaganov; Kate Walker; Charles Edward Williams; Klara Wo?niak; and Keoni K. Wright
WINDOW DRESSING
WINDOW DRESSING, now in its fifth year, is an annual cycle of short-term installations located in the thirty foot long window vitrine on the exterior of the Cerritos College Fine Arts Building. Each two-week installation is accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Fall 2022 cycle includes installations by eight local contemporary artists.
Feast and Famine | Ashton Phillips
August 29, 2022 - September 9, 2022
Opening Reception: August 29, 2022 @ 7-9PM
The humble mealworm (tenebrio molitor) and its cousin the superworm (zophobas atratus) are the only creatures known to humanity with the power to transform the ubiquitous petroleum-based plastic polystyrene (i.e. styrofoam) into biodegradable components. Synthetic plastic goes in and biodegradable waste comes out. Part of a larger body of work exploring the capacity of nonhuman agents to remediate humanity’s ecological devastation, Feast and Famine focuses on the transformative and poetic power of this lowly mealworm as it consumes, metabolizes, and biodegrades styrofoam waste. Part living art installation, part posthuman catacomb, and part durational interspecies performance, Feast and Famineis an effort, as Donna Haraway has advised, to “stay with the trouble” and think beyond human-centric norms about what is precious, what is beautiful, and what is possible. For its current Window Dressing iteration, Feast and Famine combines chromatic lighting, window-amplified sound, and projected video, as well as mounds of partially-consumed polystyrene foam, interlaced with flowers, and related objects. The modified magenta lighting environment prioritizes the needs and preferences of the insects, which thrive in purple or red light and hide under the glare of full-spectrum light, but it also recalls the effects of stained glass in religious architecture, marking the space as more-than-mundane, while also evoking a kind of queer futurity, an alterior world where everything is bathed in a synthetic, hot pink light. The auditory element transforms the window of the gallery space into an amplification surface for a complex, interspecies sound composition, including the sounds of mealworms consuming styrofoam, humans consuming water out of styrofoam cups, container ships carrying flat pack boxes and styrofoam through the Port of Los Angeles, and the ocean carrying styrofoam debris back to the land. On the wall are projected portrait-like videos of individual insects recorded with digital microscopes and endoscopy cameras, a way of honoring the intimate, embodied specificity of the insects’ transformative labor, while also positioning the creatures on equal or higher footing with the human viewer, in contrast to traditional Western hierarchies that position the human as the closest to God. On the gallery floor lie accumulations of partially-consumed styrofoam, gathered flowers, and related objects, including silver and plastic vessels of mealworm frass. Simultaneously recalling a decaying altar, an adorned gravesite, and Dutch still life painting, the physical installation operates as a meditation on abundance, consumption, decay, and the slippery edges between the sacred and the profane.
