Within the context of the Los Angeles Times partnership with Access Books I created a socially engaged 2day multiple performances of variety of LA high school students inspiring elementary students to read through the arts by creating an 8x8x8 cube mural (each day) while other 8 teenagers x 3h (38 students total/weekend) painted literacy-based character in postcard design format to elementary age-students.
Dismantled, 2010-2012
Working with artists S.A. Bachman and Krista Caballero to present DISMANTLED, an innovative visual arts collaboration. As students across California faced tuition hikes, emerging artists from Otis participated in an exploration of public education, critical pedagogy, and the privatization of our school system. This statewide project acknowledged California’s unique history while simultaneously questioning what the future holds if our institutions of learning are no longer shaped by the core principles of accessible and affordable education for all.
DISMANTLED employed outdoor projection and performance to frame key issues such as the severe cutbacks in funding, charter schools, students and families burdened by debt, financial aid, and access to education. Highlighting populations the government and media often ignore, DISMANTLED integrated interviews from a crosssection of Californians with provocative visual analysis. In addition, images of blowing bubble gum, historical footage from Brown VS The Board of Education and superhero school uniforms are utilized to raise awareness and incite questions. Audience members had the opportunity to participate in the project’s ongoing interviews as well as contribute to the creation of a site-specific installation. Projection sites served as gathering spaces for sidewalk conversations and run the gamut from neighborhood storefronts to museums, colleges and libraries.
California educators including Peter McLaren, Gilda Haas, Janna Shaddock Hernandez and Ricardo Dominguez have informed this project. The Scan-Tron Video animation was courtesy of Jen Schmidt.
Read MoreTV News- November 2017: Channel 4, Univision, NBC News
Mujeres latinas de luz y de sombra
http://m.hoylosangeles.com/news/2014/may/01/mujeres-latinas-de-luz-y-de-sombra/
Mujeres latinas de luz y de sombra
Por V. MARTÍNEZ/ESPECIAL PARA HOY
LOS ÁNGELES.- Aquel día de enero de 2014, Spozhmai, una niña de 10 años, cruzaba un río en la provincia afgana de Helmand con un chaleco de explosivos sobre su cuerpo menudo. En el desconcierto de su conciencia, rompió a llorar en medio de las gélidas aguas. La misión suicida que su hermano, un comandante Talibán, le había encomendado, había fracasado. A miles de kilómetros de distancia, la terrible realidad que atraviesa el país del sur asiático tiene eco en la galería Avenue 50 Studio situada en Highland Park, California. Sobre un fondo blanco con siluetas de pájaros resalta la figura azulada de una niña que oculta su cuerpo bajo un burka.
“Las mujeres pueden florecer incluso en los peores momentos”, dice Marianne Sadowsky, la autora de esta pieza realizada con delicadas capas superpuestas de papel Kozo.
El trabajo muestra la ‘dualidad’ de la luz y la sombra en las mujeres. “Hay momentos en los que brillamos y momentos en los que vivimos en las sombras. Lo uno va con lo otro”, asegura. “Pero las dos fuerzas colisionan y retornan como algo positivo”.
La artista mexicana es también la comisaria y columna vertebral de esta muestra titulada Mujeres de luz y de sombra, que plasma las visiones de otras cuatro artistas con fuertes raíces latinas.
Frente a la gentileza de las piezas de Sadowsky aparecen sobre la pared opuesta las fotografías de Olivia Barrionuevo, una artista mexicana cuyos trabajos son conocidos por el gran público latino de Los Ángeles.
La colección, bautizada “Revelaciones”, supone un “regreso a mis raíces, a mi infancia”, explica Barrionuevo.
Sobre las espinas negras de un cactus reposa un zapato de bebé color blanco que pertenece a la hija de la artista. La serie retrata también los vestidos de la pequeña como herramienta para explorar la travesía que recorre una niña hasta convertirse en mujer.
El corazón de “Revelaciones” viene simbolizado por la fotografía de un árbol cuyas raíces brotan de la pared para integrarse con el suelo. Apenas a unos pasos del árbol, junto a la puerta principal de la galería, la luz intensa de unas velas blancas calienta el ambiente tenue del entorno.
Colocadas sobre un altar y flanqueadas por rosas secas, estas velas y el vídeo que las acompaña le dan vida a la obra “Guadalupanas de la Calle”, un trabajo firmado por Cecilia Aguilar Castillo y que plasma la cruda realidad social de la prostitución – un mundo arraigado en el corazón de la Ciudad de México donde colisionan poderosas fuerzas como el arte, la religión y la exclusión.
El fenómeno de la exclusión social puede concebirse también como una extensión y manifestación más de la soledad. A la exploración de este último concepto se dedica precisamente la artista madrileña Beatriz Valls que, frente a la entrada principal de la galería, proyecta imágenes recogidas en coche por las calles del centro de Los Ángeles.
Con un trabajo participativo titulado “Soledad, un nuevo comienzo”, invita al visitante a echar mano del teléfono móvil para ‘conectarse auditivamente’ a los testimonios de mujeres que, en inglés y en español, comparten su cara a cara con la soledad en medio de la vasta urbe angelina.
Para mitigar el sentimiento de aislamiento, desde una esquina de la sala, Ángela Roa comienza a acariciar las cuerdas de una guitarra española. Su poderosa voz rápidamente traslada el sabor de la Bossa Nova, el bolero y los ritmos afro-latinos a los asistentes.
Con una narrativa basada en su experiencia familiar, cobra vida la realidad del exilio chileno del que ella y su padre forman parte. Roa es el eco de las “Mujeres de luz y de sombra”.
“Me llevó un tiempo integrar elementos de mi experiencia en Los Ángeles a mis canciones. Pero la fusión ocurrió de manera orgánica”, comenta la artista.
A Beatriz Valls se le escapan los elogios hacia su compañera. “Sólo con nuestra imaginación podemos poner estas letras en nuestro corazón”.
La poesía cantada de Roa le confiere otra dimensión más a una exhibición que el día de su inauguración, el pasado 8 de marzo, registró el mayor número de visitantes en la historia de la galería.
“Lo que más me gusta es que todas somos mujeres con ‘acento’”, asegura la cantautora entre carcajadas. “Quizá ese debería ser el tema de nuestra próxima exhibición”, le sugiere a Marianne Sadowsky, la arquitecta de la muestra.
Interview, by the curator Ph.D. Bill Kelley Jr.
Your background in Sociology marks your work as an artist as one directed toward intellectual inquiry. How do you make the differentiation between your research as an intellectual and as an artist?
For me, being an intellectual is related to individuals who devote their lives to Knowledge, with a capital K, and try to move the world into a better place through their ideas and methods, and in my case: also practice.
I understand that my background as a sociologist, specialised in knowledge, communication and culture can be felt in my artwork. The relation between human behavior, how it forms Society and its relationship to art is as fascinating to me as it is abstract in its meaning. This is central in my writings and my visual work. I realize I always ask “why” and “how” things occur. I tend to touch the same issues that bring us to question the Self and how individuals create culture and exist in the world.
Visual artist are a thinkers, researchers in their field. As an artist I learn and develop skills and techniques to best express my ideas that come from my, yes, developed background in knowledge. But I do art because I want more. Living is sensations, routine, emotions, change, perceptions, experiences, feelings, tangible senses, frustrations, challenges, etc. These experiences shape my art. Art has the extraordinary power where magic can happen, hope is felt in the air, perception reaches the indescribable, the moment is illuminated, and through surprise people are inspired. What both practices have in common that it is myself doing them. But the method and the form of representation are essentially different. One works from the beginning to pursue a specific truth, and the other expresses possibilities.
Your current project called "Loneliness: a new beginning" is a very personal effort that at times is raw in its emotional frankness, almost like a sociology of the self. Is this indicative of how you work as an artist?
“Loneliness, a new beginning” is a socially engaged artwork based on my personal experience of loneliness and the participation of people sharing their experiences with me through conversation.
I cannot understand art without frankness and sincerity. Art makes that transparency symbolic and metaphoric, an agent of inspiration and transformation for the viewer, as it does for the creator. In this case, the project was born from my real suffering and sincere interior perception of loneliness in my life in Los Angeles in 2011. I am a researcher of myself, I can surpass the limits of pain through the process. I perform. And my interior world was expressed through the video on which this project is based. It is the world of my intense need to understand things and live them in all of their expressions. The fact that the project is personal and that the artwork, explores the depths of personal experience implies an extreme level of sacrifice, both emotional and physical.
I believe this project has common references in my other work, because it is concentrated on the Self and its subject-matter is existentially sociological. For example, “Atacama, (2008)” is a video installation that reflects the natural, slow and painful reconstruction of a dune after a devastated earthquake in the driest in the world. Reality and existentialist conflictive dialogue when a crisis challenges human beings or nature by natural disasters and requires adaptation to change, and are forced to transform themselves in the process. Also, this project explores how my personal living performance becomes another mere and common experience, and meets other people’s loneliness. In the same way, everyone perceives loneliness in its different modes, intensities, times, places, and nobody shares it.
There are several fragments in the "loneliness" video that demonstrate your current city, Los Angeles, as a solitary landscape. Of course, LA has been depicted as a site of isolation and segregation for some time now . What role does the city, its public spaces, and its history play in this project?
As you well state, this project is site-specific because Los Angeles is the city where I currently live and the people I have conversations with are located in the metropolis. But I would like to say that even though I am a strong believer that the environment helps to create someone’s perception of reality, I also think that people experience loneliness in their lives no matter the place. Loneliness is a non-place feeling, it lives within you in a unique way. Loneliness can have at the same time an identity with an emotion and an association with a particular emplacement.
I have a high capacity or physical and psychological suffering. I love Los Angeles. The city and its diverse people have treated me very well, but my artwork is about loneliness. When I just arrived in 2010, I remember I had difficulty recognizing the city, I could not identify it with any other I visited or lived in before. I was struggling to adapt to the move from Madrid to Los Angeles, and to beginning a new stage of studies in my life. Los Angeles is a city inside a multiplicity of cities, a multicultural world, one where everyone tries to survive and execute their dreams. It seems a very unsettled place in constant, unplanned and unpredictable change.
Soon, I made the city of Los Angeles something to belong to. The free possibility of seeing any point of the city when I drive, and the personal conversation with Downtown’s silhouette at the end of the day in my house, enabled me to not be by myself. The city’s urbanistic esplanades made me think of a long distance race, as if you were able to project and observe your own route in a walking race, that race called life. In my video, there is a search to escape the feeling of loneliness. Driving becomes a traveling and reflective action for me. This city reinvents itself incessantly, and dangerously, without resentment. The pleasure of contemplating the views from Downtown becomes a needed interior balance and the image penetrates into my center, that city center I may need to adopt, as I am European, a still and secure emplacement for me.
Los Angeles is invented for driving from your house to work by yourself in your car. Its people and weather are incredibly warm and welcoming, but everyone struggles to survive economically and searches desperately for company. This city can produce harmful and destructive experiences for people. It is true, this city segregates and isolates people. Its infrastructure is planned for segregating people and families and, therefore, isolates persons after a while. Here, it is difficult to socialize. The working and social systems are incompatible, so one’s workmates become your friends, in one’s anxious need to share experiences with someone. But, you can be living in a paradise and may not see it, too. Los Angeles can help to instill in someone any feeling, and in this case, the experience of loneliness. But this germ may have been living in someone’s existence for a while, or it might have been produced by the city.
Alterations, 2013
In collaboration with Suzanne Lacy to recreate her artwork Alterations, 1994. With her oversight Beatriz installed and produced this piece for LA Woman, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow, curated by Joan Adan at Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, CA in 2013.