LOUD Silence | September 6, 2014 – December 6, 2014
Main Gallery and Project Room Gallery
LOUD silence
Curated by Amanda Cachia
September 6 – December 6, 2014
SEPTEMBER 6
6PM – Artist Talk: Alison O’Daniel
7-10PM – Opening Reception
gallery@Calit2, University of California, San Diego
January 22 – March 13, 2015
LOUD silence offers the opportunity for viewers to consider definitions of sound, voice, and notions of silence through a deaf perspective. The exhibition displays prints, drawings, sculptures, videos, audio works and several film installations, and features work by four artists who have different relationships to deafness, including Shary Boyle, Christine Sun Kim, Darrin Martin, and Alison O’Daniel.
These four artists explore how the binary of loudness and silence might be transformed in politicized ways through deafness. The stereotypical view of the deaf experience is that they live a life of total silence, where they retain little to no concept of sound. But on the contrary, deaf people actually know a lot about sound, and sound informs and inhabits their world just as much as the next person.(1) Through these artworks, the artists aim to loudly explode the myth of a silent deaf world, and they seek to trouble just how €˜inaudible’ sound really is through their own visceral experiences of it. They mobilize a type of trespass within the territory of sound, given they re-imagine the agentive capacity of those not normally €˜permitted’ equal access to it.
In this project, the artists consider questions such as, how is silence interpreted from both a deaf and non-deaf perspective and manifested in a contemporary work of art? How is sound made accessible or inaccessible through vibrations, personalized musical scores, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters or ambient noise in our urban or rural environments? What new noises might emerge from acts in which sound is composed and performed in new ways in order to provide us with alternative concepts of sound and silence itself? How might the radical acts of these artists change the soundscape and most critically, how does an artist who is hearing and one who is deaf make loud silence or silence loud?
Music theorist Joseph N. Straus has discussed how the concept of €˜deaf hearing’ may seem like an oxymoron.(2) He says, “hearing does not necessarily involve a one-to-one mapping of sense perceptions onto a single sensory organ; rather, hearing can be a much more multi-sensory experience.”(3) The distinction between the deaf person and the hearing person in their relationship to sound is the extent to which deaf people use senses other than the auditory to understand what they are hearing. Sound is felt and sound is seen.
Indeed, the artists’ €˜deaf hearing’ in this exhibition often involves sensory input from a variety of sources, and is not simply confined to the ears. Ultimately, the work in LOUD silence offers an avenue for eradicating deaf oppression, where new ways of listening might be developed.
1. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, “The Meaning of Sound” in Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988), 91.
2. Joseph N. Straus, “Prodigious Hearing, Normal Hearing, and Disablist Hearing” in Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 167.
3. Ibid.
59 Days of Independence: Pakistan | August 14, 2014
Main Gallery
59 Days of Independence: Pakistan
August 14, 2015
Installation/Performance coordinated by Heather Layton and Brian Bailey
Grand Central Art Center hosted an event celebrating Pakistan Independence Day, organized by artists-in-residence Heather Layton and Brian Bailey, part of their current year long project 59 Days of Independence. They are here in residency through the generous funding support of the GCAC artist-in-residency program provided by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The day including a “Malala Trilingual Book Reading for Kids,” with children’s stories of Pakistani-American and Mexican-American culture read in Spanish, Urdu and English, with projections of the illustrations.
Recent Orange County School for the Arts student Miguel Pulido (Class of 2014, beginning Pitzer College this fall) helped to organize the activities, as well as participated in the reading and performed on guitar. His contributions to the event brought a joyful spirit and energy through music.
The afternoon provided an opportunity to view an assortment of craft objects that reflect the development of Pakistani visual culture from traditional to contemporary. A hands-on activity table was set-up within the space, with both children and adults sharing their creative skills. Delicious traditional food for all in attendance was available from Noorani Halal Restaurant.
In addition to Heather, Brian and Miguel, Grand Central Art Center thanks the following individuals for making the celebration possible: Ifra Khoso, Sheba Akhtar, Almas Asif, Farhan Aziz, Anila Ali, Monica Mouet, Pam Solorzano and the Irvine Pakistani Parents’ Association.
We concluded the day with a GCAC Dutch Treat Dinner at The Robbins Nest Wine Bar here in downtown Santa Ana. A great group of individuals, including CSUF grad students and faculty members, four current GCAC artists-in-residence, a curator and artist coming down for the night from Los Angeles and many of our creative collaborative community members, all joining us for the event. Thanks toLisa Robbins and her wonderful team for allowing us to take over a big part of her restaurant for the evening of great conversations and connections!
We thank you all for your continued support of GCAC and look forward to having you join us for upcoming programs and receptions.
Daniel was joined during the day by Los Angeles based filmmaker Emily Forman, who was there at the ceremony to help document the event and individual interviews, and GCAC Director John D. Spiak, who assisted with the “burial” of the capsule.
The ten year Santa Ana Time Capsule is a collaboration among the community, artist, GCAC and Santa Ana Public Library’s History Room, organized by Daniel and library archivist Manny Escamilla. Members of the community were encouraged to attend the event and contribute items to the time capsule they felt helps to answer the question “What is Santa Ana like in 2014?”
In Daniel’s research, he discovered that many time capsules are buried, and then become forgotten. In an attempt to prevent this from happening, instead of an actual burial, it was decided that the capsule would be hoisted in a more publically visible space of the Grand Central Art Center where it will remain for the next ten years. The capsule is secured with three individual locks, with the artist, library and GCAC in possession of the keys to an individual lock. In the year 2024, all three keys will be brought back together, the capsule will be lowered, each of the three locks removed by their responsible individual, and the contents revealed at a public ceremony.
We look forward to having you join us at GCAC in 2024 as we come together to celebrate the time capsule!
Daniel is in the process of editing a film documenting his research, process and travels during his GCAC artist-in-residence, as well as a publication with critical writing from multiple perspectives, so we will keep you posted as these develop.
Jody Zellen: Time Jitters | June 7, 2014 – August 10, 2014
Main Gallery
Jody Zellen: Time Jitters
June 7 – August 10, 2014
Time Jitters is an exhibition of a series of artworks that take their point of departure from world news images from the New York Times. Included in Time Jitters are gouache on paper paintings, digital images and a two-channel video installation.
Time Jitters is a two channel video projection that juxtaposes a grid of 25 looping animations with a single channel narrative.
The various components in Zellen’s work serve as building blocks that can be reconfigured for different mediums. A line drawing is scanned and used in a digital collage, which becomes a template for a painting, a page in an artist’s book, an image in an iPad app as well as an animation in which the drawing process is made visible. Drawing and the relationship between how the computer generates a line in contrast to what is created by the hand is central to Zellen’s explorations.
Also included will be a series of gouache on paper paintings. These 22 x 30 inch works illustrate the cycle of regeneration – birth and growth, death and decay – collectively becoming a representation of the passage of time. While the specific events may not be discernible, the works poetically and metaphorically alter these cyclical images. The translucent pastel colors of the paintings contrast with the harsher opaque tones in another work; a grid of 40 small digital prints collectively entitled If. If is also a 40- page limited edition artist’s book whose sequence reads as a poetic narrative.
The opening reception will take place on June 7th, 2014, 7-10pm, during the First Saturday Art Walk.
Flora Kao: Wind House, Abode That A Breath Effaced | June 7, 2014 – August 10, 2014
Project Room Gallery
Flora Kao: Wind House, Abode That A Breath Effaced
June 7 – August 10, 2014
The Mojave Desert is a space of tenuous order and inevitable decay. Shacks in varied states of ruin punctuate the scrubby expanse of sand. Allowing homesteaders to claim up to five acres of expendable public land, the Small Tract Act of 1938 spawned a mid-century desert land rush. The majority of these homes were eventually abandoned due to the extreme living conditions. In Wonder Valley, a collapsed shack seems to have melted into the ground. A single gable stands erect, surrounded by an explosion of white shingles.
Wind House, Abode That A Breath Effaced explores the poignant associations of this fallen form through a life-size rubbing of the homestead’s debris field. Executed on a thousand square feet of white silk, gestural black marks map the house at a specific moment of decay. This rubbing is transformed into an installation of eight panels suspended askew across the gallery. Upon entering, the viewer is immersed in a sensuous drawing that can only be comprehended in fragments over time, never at once. With each turn, one’s experience oscillates between compression and openness, as new vistas are framed and cropped, lines advance and recede, and textures unfold.
Capturing the physical evidence of failure, Wind House, Abode That A Breath Effaced archives the effect of entropy on an architecture of economy. Mapping absence and presence, the rubbings present a visceral encounter with erasure and accumulation. Breathing with the viewer’s movement through the space, the installation suggests the precarious balance of a structure on the verge of collapse. Referencing shrouds, fossils, and grave rubbings, the installation’s black wood grain and white fabric suggest sails, shipwreck, and surrender, linking the vastness of the ocean with the extremes of the desert. Ultimately, Wind House, Abode That A Breath Effacedmeditates on the fugitive nature of home and the ease of loss in a land of new beginnings.
The opening reception will take place on June 7th, 2014, 7-10pm, during the First Saturday Art Walk.
Artist Susan Robb€˜s Wild Times merges new media, social engagement, and a 2,650 mile hike as an invitation to explore wildness as a geographic ideal and a state of mind.
Robb will walk the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, making and sending digital artworks to Grand Central Art Center and collaborating West Coast museums and art centers.
Only 3% of the contiguous United States is still considered protected wild space.
As our culture increasingly pressures us to maintain a personal “brand,” be in constant contact, and snapchat every moment, maybe it’s not just our geographic wild spaces that are endangered, but our internal wild spaces as well.
Artist Susan Robb€˜s Wild Times merges new media, social engagement, and a 2,650- mile hike as an invitation to explore wildness as a geographic ideal and a state of mind.
Beginning in mid-April 2014, Robb will embark on a 5-month adventure from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. Using the trail as a nomadic studio and her experiences as inspiration and medium, she will create digital works—photos, videos, and 3D files—periodically sending them to Grand Central Art Center and a series of additional West Coast art venues. There they will be printed, projected, and installed, evolving into cumulative exhibitions, a meditation on what it means to be wild today.
To further deepen the conversation, Robb has collected stories from “everyday explorers,” individuals who investigate or embody wildness by their own light and mettle. These media-rich features, shared online and in print, explore disaster edens, portray the life of a dominatrix, and consider the social and emotional toll of wild fires, among other subjects. Together, they depict diverse paths taken in pursuit of, or in response to, the wild.
The exhibitions, programs, and participatory website will enable venue visitors and the public at large to serve as collaborators—interacting with the project, with Robb, and the broad Wild Times community.
From the untrammeled spaces of the PCT, and with the host venues and her collaborators, Robb hopes to plot the coordinates of wildness in contemporary life. Through Wild Times, she offers her body and work as a conduit between gallery and wilderness, public and trail, form and formless, as a way to cultivate the wild terrain that resides in us all.
Wild Times is a project of Creative Capital and is supported by Grand Central Art Center, Palm Springs Art Museum, 826 Valencia, Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Susan Robb’s work is an ongoing investigation of people, place, and our search for utopia. She orchestrates temporary, site-responsive, and socially-engaged projects to transform contemporary concerns—climate crisis, social isolation, high-speed daily living—into opportunities to re-envision and re-connect. Her projects include The Long Walk, ONN/OF “a light festival”, Parking Squid, Sleeper Cell Training Camp, and Warmth Giant Black Toobs. Robb’s work has been funded by a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, two Artist Trust Fellowships, a Stranger Genius Award, 4Culture, and the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. In 2013, she received a Creative Capital grant to produce Wild Times. Her work has been collected and shown nationally and internationally.
Borderblaster (SNA): Cognate Collective | March 5, 2014 – December 21, 2014
Throughout Downtown Santa Ana
Borderblaster (SNA)
March 5 – December 21, 2014
Installation/Audio Recordings by Cog-nate Collective
Cog•nate is pleased to announce that recordings from Borderblaster (SNA) are now available as an Audio Paseo throughout downtown Santa Ana!
Borderblaster (SNA) collects the oral testimonies of local residents, artists, community leaders and 4th Street business owners, to reflect on the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of redevelopment in the Downtown core of Santa Ana. These narratives are dispersed through the physical fabric of 4th Street as an “Audio Paseo” or audio promenade. You can embark on this paseo by following the trail of “Borderblaster” markers in storefront windows along the route indicated by the map below. Scan the QR code on the front of the markers with your smartphone to listen to testimonies about the past, present and desired future of Downtown Santa Ana. Inside of participating shops, you will also find bilingual transcripts that give readers further historical and personal accounts about the heart of Downtown.
Visit the GCAC front desk to view a copy of the full transcripts or pick up a map of the paseo with more information about the intervention.
Heather Bowling and Amanda Patenaude: You Are What You Concede | March 1, 2014 – April 13, 2014
Education Gallery
Heather Bowling and Amanda Patenaude: You Are What You Concede
Curated by Kimberly McKinnis
March 1 through April 13, 2014
East Coast artist Amanda Pantenaude teams up with West Coast artist Heather Bowling, for a first time collaboration, creating a site-specific installation made from recycled materials collected within the Santa Ana community. The artists are interested in social awareness and have created previous participatory projects in the hope to educate the public about current and pressing global issues.
The collection of materials will be organized through a series of community events, collaborating with local individuals and organizations. Hands-on workshops, panels and programs are being developed for the course of the exhibition.
Julia Haft-Candell: Fast and Slow
Curated by Yevgeniya Mikhailik, GCAC Curatorial Associate
OPENING RECEPTION – MARCH 1 from 7-10pm
March 1 through May 11, 2014
Julia Haft-Candell€˜s sculptures are physical records of their making, and a reflection of their own history. Using small components to build larger forms, the artist continually invents, reassesses and makes endless decisions about how the work takes shape. Ultimately the goal is to form a composition that most effectively speaks to the ambiguity of perception and the complexity of being.
Using forms inspired by nature and the body, as well as ideas derived from quick doodles and sketches, she focuses on the space in between two contrasting concepts as a metaphor for my experience as a human being. In Haft-Candell’s words “I express contradictions. I seek the intersection of the conscious and subconscious, construction and destruction, fast and slow, serious and funny, hard and soft.”
Julianne Swartz and Ken Landauer: Miracle Report January 19 – May 11, 2014
Julianne Swartz and Ken Landauer spent their Social Studies residency at the Arizona State University Art Museum looking for miracles. The artists explored the miraculous through people’s perceptions of it in their lives, interviewing students, school children and community members of all ages and backgrounds. They combined their findings in an installation of fleeting vignettes playing on all of the available sound and video equipment in the museum’s possession. In the words of the artists, “Our installation strives to embody some beauty, some hocus-pocus and some unexplainable magic.”
The artists’ decision to focus on people’s hands provided the comfort of anonymity as participants shared intimate stories. They filmed at various locations, using only the Arizona sun to highlight the hands against a shrouded background, an effect that preserves and enhances the mystery of the miracle. Throughout their reporting on miracles, the artists grappled with the balance between the sacred and profane, belief and skepticism. This complexity is reflected throughout the installation in the video vignettes, the darkness of the gallery and the layering of sound.
Using all the available sound and video equipment at Grand Central Art Center, the artists created this new site-specific installation of the work.
Miracle Report was first realized at the Arizona State University Art Museum and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of the Social Studies series. John D. Spiak initiated this project. Upon Spiak’s departure to accept his new position at Grand Central Art Center, Heather Sealy Lineberry with Nicole Herden curated the exhibition at ASU Art Museum.
The artists and curators thank the following for their assistance and participation: the staff of the ASU Art Museum; Andrea Feller, Curator of Education; ASU School of Art intermedia faculty and School of Art Director Adriene Jenik; Peter Bugg; Robert Madera; Sean Deckert; Christian Filardo; Ben Mack; Barbara Perez and Tesseract School students; Amy Hardgrove and students from Academy with Community Partners High School; J. Eugene Clay and Mark Woodward from the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies; Beth Ames Swartz and John Rothschild; and especially all of the people who lent their stories and viewpoints to this project.
MIRACLE REPORT Mission Statement
We spent our Social Studies Residency at Arizona State University Art Museum looking for miracles.
We sought the miraculous through other people’s perception of it in their lives.
We interviewed many local residents and asked each to “describe a miracle you have experienced.”
Interviewees were of varied ages and backgrounds. We gratefully recorded anyone who wished to retell his or her own miracle.
We recorded audio and video from these interviews, but identities were obscured.
The recordings were edited into fleeting vignettes that attempt to establish “the miraculous” through entirely subjective perspectives.
To display the recordings, we use all of the institution’s available audio and visual equipment.
Our installation strives to embody some beauty, some hocus-pocus, and some unexplainable magic.
