VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

DiverseWorks invites you to Solution, Curated by Janet Phelps.  On display March 6-April 18, 2009 in the DiverseWorks Main Gallery.

The notion of progress is much more than a simple idea; it is a question -- a 10,000-year-old experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled.  Humanity has reached a tipping point. Solution poses questions about the nature of progress and offers theoretical solutions intended to head off the potential for self-destruction. Jeffery Gibson, Christopher Ho, My Barbarian, Joseph Smolinski, Simon Vega and Michael Waugh consider the warning signs that signaled the demise of previous civilizations. Each artist confronts humankind's relationship to progress and the ability to respond to change.  Through the use of abstract symbolism, discussion, personal reflection and political discourse, these artists explore the meaning of progress and its implications on civilizations of the past and present while offering theoretical solutions for humanities’ relationship to change and progress.

About Janet Phelps
Janet Phelps successfully conceived and mounted several high profile alternative art fairs including Meat Market Art Fair in New York, Fast FWD Miami, artpoint and The NADA Art Fair, all in Miami Beach. Her curatorial ventures have focused on experimental and collaborative projects, working with of some of the most intriguing artists of the time. Phelps curated Fight HIV/AIDS at MACO, the contemporary art fair, Maco Mexico Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, which was sponsored by MTV Latin America, MAC Cosmetics, Maco Mexico Arte Contemporaneo and the Pan American Health Organization. She was curator for the Starwood Urban Advisors collection in Washington DC started in 1998 where she oversaw the assembly and selection of contemporary art for the collection, which showcases and promotes the works of emerging artists and features work in all media. She continues to advise the company - now UIA Management, LLC, based in Miami Beach, Florida. The collection includes artists Stephen Vitiello, Jason Rhoades, Rachel Harrison, Amy Sillman, Tom Saks, Marco Maggi, and Ronald Moran, among others.

Phelps consulted with a variety of organizations such as Visual AIDS, Friends of the High Line, Debs & Co., The American Federation of Arts, Parsons School of Design Fine Arts Department, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council - all in New York and The New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn. She serves on the Board of Directors for Momenta Art in Brooklyn and her writings have appeared in several artist catalogs and publications.

In 2007 she served as juror and guest curator at MARTE (Museo de Arte de El Salvador). Phelps invited Jason Middelbrook and Stephen Vitiello to collaborate with the local artists and while there, both artists created new work and donated that work to the museum. This year, Phelps curated an exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, which included artists David Humphrey, Angela Dufresne, Medrie MacPhee, Sheila Pepe and Suzanne Wright. She recently returned to El Salvador and mounted a video installation of seven Central Asian artists this summer at MARTE. She is currently working on a traveling exhibition that will feature artists from Central America.

Janet Phelps has been an independent curator and consultant in New York for the past 18 years. She moved to Houston in 2006.

Solution artists:
Jeffrey Gibson A painter and installation artist living in Brooklyn, New York, Gibson has made nine new works for Solution, including three mixed media sculptures that incorporate found and made objects, and six painted digitally printed canvases. Seen together these works form an installation that present objects in their original form as part of larger hybrid sculptures, digitized and repeated images, reconfigured further by using abstract expressionist painting strategies. Gibson asks which came first and does the original form offer any more of an authentic experience than the mediated form, or what new and unique information does each representation offer? Gibson studied at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and continued to complete his Master of Art degree from The Royal College of Art in London. He is a 2005 recipient of a visual arts grant from The Creative Capital Foundation and has been selected as an Eiteljorg Museum Fellow for 2008-09. His works can be viewed online at http://www.jeffreygibson.net.

Christopher K. Ho Reflexive in character and often sited, Ho takes pleasure in examining the situations from which art emerges. In Solution, the New York-based artist attempts not to create based on humanity’s environmental concerns, but to direct attention toward issues outside of concrete, conventional matters and beyond the anthropocentric viewpoint, in favor of a closer look at temporality. Ho is offering three pieces to Solution, including his romantic and thought-provoking Lesbian Mountains in Love (2008) – a split-screen projection detailing a love affair between Mount Rainier in Washington State and El Popo in Mexico City. Once part of the same land mass 150 million years ago, they communicate in sentimental texts borrowed from novels of Nicholas Sparks. His works will include The Sight of Death, – a digital print he says like Lesbian Mountains works to engage one in “slow looking” -- and Monumental Compost Heap, a compost heap with a perimeter made of recycled wooden pallets, the footprint of which recalls the Sam Houston equestrian statue at Hermann Park. Ho divides his time between New York City and Providence, where he occasionally teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. He received his B.F.A. and B.S. from Cornell University and his M.Phil from Columbia University. Visit http://christopherkho.com  for more on Ho and his work.

Nina Katchadourian Born in Stanford, CA., Katchadourian grew up spending part of every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. In January 2006, the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland, featured a solo show of her works made in Finland. Katchadourian has always taken a hybrid approach to her work, which often looks at the human relationship to the natural world using sculpture, video, photography and sound. She is represented by Sara Meltzer gallery in New York and Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco. Katchadourian is also active as a singer/songwriter. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally, and recently the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of her video installation works (July 2008). Her projects can be viewed at http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/.

My Barbarian Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade founded My Barbarian, a Los Angeles-based performance collective, in 2000. The trio performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts and theatrical situations that play with the spectacular while engaging viewers critically. Their interdisciplinary projects explore and exhume cross-cultural mishaps and misadventures drawn from history, mythology, art and popular culture. Solution will include Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT), Sorry Again, a video based on a two-week residency at the New Museum in June 2008. My Barbarian conducted workshops with a group of local artists, musicians, and actors resulting in the original performance, Post-Paradise, Sorry Now. The video, edited from footage of the workshop and its July stagings, explores the process of collaboration, creation, performance, and agency through the teaching of the five principles of PoLAAT: Estrangement, Indistinction, Suspension of Beliefs, a Mandate to Participate, and Inspirational Critique. For more, visit http://www.mybarbarian.com/.

Jeanine Oleson's practice incorporates performance, film/video, installation, and photographic work marked by an interest in the conflict between the civilized and natural worlds as a metaphor for the instability of knowledge and often involves performative participation. Oleson recently masterminded the Greater New York Smudge Cleanse, a public art project which utilized smudging – the act of burning sage for cleansing -- to rid the city of negative energy. For the exhibition at DiverseWorks, remnants and documentation from the Greater New York Smudge will be featured, as well as Untitled, a gold-leafed fence taken from the unicorn tapestries showing the capture and subjugation of the unicorn by man and Enkidu's Return, a large fur costume made of recycled furs bought from Ebay that reference Gilgamesh's animalistic counterpart - and a fable for the duality in humans between civilized and wild. Oleson attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University.  Go to http://www.nycsmudge.com/the-artist  to view Oleson’s project.

Joseph Smolinski Holding a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Smolinski resides in New Haven, Conn., where he teaches drawing at the University of New Haven. For Solution, Smolinski will show a new animated video and drawing, Taking Back the Jetty, based on pressure by oil companies who want to drill near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. An animated concept video, Tree Turbine , depicting a series of fake trees that spin in the wind to generate useable electricity, as well as a model and video documentation of the 20-foot-tall tree turbine currently on view in the Badlands exhibition at Mass MoCA will also be shown. His credits and work are online at http://www.josephsmolinski.com/ .

Michael Waugh Having formally studied art, history and writing, Waugh employs all three disciplines in his latest drawings, most recently shown at the Shroeder Romero Gallery in New York. His latest experiments include works in micrography – a technique in which he illustrates images through hand-drawn historical texts, much in the same way that Pointillism creates work through points. His new work Decline and Fall is composed of text from Edward Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he says “makes ungrounded assumptions about what is good for humanity.” Waugh’s work can be viewed online at http://michaelwaugh.com/art/michael_waugh.html.

Images Pictured in Gallery (below):

Image #1
Jeff Gibson
All Hail The Collective Failure, 2009
mixed media sculpture, Image Courtesy of the Artist

Image #2
Joseph Smolinksi
Tree Turbine, 2008
high definition digital animation video

Image #3
Christopher K. Ho
Lesbian Mountains in Love, 2009 (detail shown above, as well)
Still from Single-channel split-screen video projection, 43'04"
Courtesy the artist and Winkleman Gallery

Image #4
Chistopher K. Ho
Monumental Compost Heap, 2008
16 recycled wooden pallets, compost
13'L x 9'W x 3'H
Made for the Berkshire Botanical Gardens
location: MASS MoCA at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens

'Monumental Compost Heap' is a perimeter wall of standard recycled wooden pallets in the shape of an Italianate equestrian statue base. The Berkshire Botanical Gardens, where the piece was sited, added to the compost heap inside during the exhibition's course.