Glitter and Folds
February 6 through March 31, 2013
OPENING RECEPTION WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 6-8PM, FREE FOR ALL!
WALKTHROUGH WITH CURATOR JENNIFER BURRIS AND ARTISTS FIELD KALLOP AND JAYSON KEELING, 5PM (ICA MEMBERS AND DONORS ONLY)
What do we know to be true? That the earth rotates, time moves forward, gravity pulls, and mirrors reflect light. A swinging pendulum traces seismic patterning on a gallery floor, concentric circles that reveal the invisible forces of their making. A single-channel video pulsates kaleidoscopic rhythms against a wall, the multiple reflections of conjoined mirrors echoed by a synthetic soundtrack of needles dropping. But as we move closer, reality seems to shift, and the certainties of perception and experience start to fold. A series of photographs embed the by-products of revelry—glitter, shattered mirrors, glass, and pearls—in soiled wastelands of an uncertain ground, asking us to reconsider seemingly inalienable laws of physics and faith. Elsewhere, the artist's body becomes a litmus test for the violence of social breakdown, a glittering reflection caught in a site of urban neglect.
Glitter and Folds, on view February 6 through March 31, 2013 in ICA's Project Space, presents photography, video, and site-specific installation by four contemporary artists, in whose works glitter appears to reveal a folding of invisible phenomena into material reality. As much as these actions divine the physical forces that structure the tangible fabric of everyday experience, they also reveal breaks in an urban and social landscape increasingly marked by precariousness, fear, and a gamble for redemption in the face of collapse.
ARTISTS
Crystal Z. Campbell, Field Kallop , Jayson Keeling and Carter Mull.
Crystal Z. Campbell (b.1980, Prince Georges County, lives in Amsterdam) received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego and an MA in Africana Studies from the University at Albany-State University of New York. Campbell's work has been exhibited at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, de Appel in Amsterdam, Netherlands and is currently on view in the group exhibition, Fore, at the Studio Museum of Harlem, NY. She is a 2003 graduate of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and a 2010–11 Van Lier Fellow in Studio Art at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Campbell is currently a second-year artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. For Glitter and Folds, Campbell will present a new video work based on archival research into New York City's 1977 black-out and the sonic "birth" of hip-hop.
Field Kallop (b.1982, New York, lives in New York) received an MFA in Painting from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 and a BA in Art History from Princeton University in 2004. An Awards Program Nominee at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, her work has recently been exhibited at Allegra LaViola Gallery, Simon Dickinson Gallery and Mixed Greens in New York, Tompkins Projects in Brooklyn, Gelman Gallery in Providence, and Boston University. Combining a fascination with chemistry, physics, and astronomy with prosaic—often toxic—materials like bleach and diamond dust, and drawing inspiration from 20th-century abstract artists like Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, Kallop's work occupies an uneasy site between the cosmic and mundane. Glitter and Folds is the artist's first museum exhibition.
Through the use of photography, video, and other related media, Jayson Keeling (b.1966, Brooklyn, lives in Brooklyn) creates artworks that provoke and dismantle pop iconography and the accepted politics of sex, gender, race, and religion. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem, The Andy Warhol Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Exit Art, Gavin Brown's Enterprise at Passerby, and The Bronx Museum. Keeling has been awarded residencies from the Art Omi International Residency Program in 2012, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2009 and 2007, as well as the Apex Art Outbound Residency to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2009. His work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America, Art Papers, The New Yorker, Time Out, Beautiful/Decay, Jalouse, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post among others.
Carter Mull (b.1977, Atlanta, lives in Los Angeles) is an artist living in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 and an MFA from CalArts in 2006. Mull's work has been exhibited widely, most recently at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Presentation House, Vancouver, Domaine Departement de Chamarande, Paris, Vilma Gold, London, Gagosian Gallery, New York and in the Venice Beach Biennial, Venice, California. His project intertwines multiple mediums to question the temporality of medias that construct our conception of the world. In turn, the practice recomposes an understanding of our shared, social imagination.
His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, The Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His practice has been discussed in publications and periodicals, including Artforum, Art on Paper, Art In America, Art News, Flash Art, Nero, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Additionally, Mull collaborates under the moniker P & Co., a media production company established in 2009.
This exhibition is organized by ICA 2011-2013 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris, and is accompanied by an illustrated publication.
Related Programming
Field Kallop
and upon each stood a siren, borne around its revolution, 2013
60 minute site-specific performance with residual traces, diamond dust
Wednesday, February 6, 6pm
Wednesday, February 27, 6pm
Wednesday, March 13, 6pm
ICA Project Space
with tomorrow's sun
A Night of Poetry & Performance
Wednesday, March 13, 6:30pm
ICA Project Space and Auditorium
In 1977, New York City plunged into blackness. Mythologies followed. One goes like this: windows broke, stores emptied, technology was accessed, and hip-hop began; the drop-scratch of needles folding sampled sounds into rhythms woven in the dead of night. Elsewhere in the city, the glitter-infused theatre of the ridiculous, led by underground filmmaker Jack Smith, reached its peak of influence within mainstream culture through the figure of glam rock. This ecstatic theatricality of gender ambiguity and social freedom, teetering at the edge of economic uncertainty and political repression, in turn evoked the freewheeling atmosphere of 1920s Berlin: cabaret culture reverberating in the shadow of impending war, an artistic moment best captured by the stylized portraiture of left-leaning Verism.
Experience a historical unfolding of the cultural capital of glitter, a surfacing of shimmering abandon at times of political and economic precariousness. The festivities will begin with a gallery performance by artist Field Kallop, followed by a talk on the exhibition Glitter and Folds by Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris. Philadelphia poet Frank Sherlock—author of Over Here, The City Real & Imagined (2010), and Very Different Animals, among others—will conclude the evening with a reading of his utopian verse.
images: (Top to bottom, background) Crystal Z. Campbell, On the Way to the Moon We Discovered the Earth (still), 2012, digital video, stereo sound, 9:49 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. Carter Mull, Pascal’s Wager (Dream of a Perfect Life), 2004, chromogenic print, 25 x 32 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist. Field Kallop, study for and upon each stood a siren, borne around in its revolution, 2013, site-specific floor performance with residual traces, diamond dust. Courtesy of the artist.
ICA is grateful to Leonard A. Lauder for his generous sponsorship of the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellows program. Additional funding has been provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Dietrich Foundation, Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania. Free admission to ICA for the public is sponsored by the Amanda (C95) & Glenn (W87/WG88) Fuhrman Fund. General operating support provided, in part, by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Barra Foundation. ICA receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. ICA thanks La Colombe for providing complimentary coffee at public events. ICA acknowledges Le Méridien Philadelphia as our official Unlock Art™ partner hotel.