Posts Tagged ‘Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow’

Welcome All Citizens of the Universe

January 20 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

In 1967, the hamlet of St. Paul, Canada (population 3,000) built a UFO landing pad in the Alberta prairie. This was the town’s contribution to the year-long celebration of the Canadian Centennial. For this activity, Canada’s Centennial Comity baptized St. Paul the Centennial Star.

Artist Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen got interested in this bit of history when she found a medallion presented to St. Paul to commemorate their achievement on Ebay. She bought it and photographed the front and the back, creating a diptych, Centennial Star, currently on view at ICA as part of the exhibition Living Document / Naked Reality: Toward an Archival Cinema. The diptych shows both sides of the medallion: a star inside a circle with the words “Centennial of Canadian Confederation” written around the edge in English and French on the front, and the landing pad, looking something like a round trampoline with a staircase leading down, on the back. Each image is perhaps ten inches across.

The Centennial Star

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, The Centennial Star, 2011. Photograph of found ephemera (coin), archival inkjet on paper (diptych). Courtesy of the artist.

Centennial Star is part of a larger, research-based project Jacqueline is working on. When she traveled to St. Paul to interview its inhabitants and tour the site, she was struck by the impulse behind the landing pad. St. Paul hadn’t experienced any recent UFO sightings in 1967: “It wasn’t built in response to a need,” she says. Rather, the landing pad was intended as a symbolic gesture of the town’s hospitality, tolerance, commitment to diversity, and openness to all. For Jacqueline, the landing pad becomes a “conceptual vessel” for the exploration of issues around multiculturalism: how broadly, for instance, you can think about what “alien” means. (You can—and should—listen to Jacqueline talk about the project here.)

On her way to an artist’s residency in Banff a couple of weeks ago, Jacqueline came to ICA to work with exhibition curator Jennifer Burris on the installation of the diptych. I stopped by as ICA’s Chief Preparator, Paul Swenbeck, was opening the cardboard carton Jacqueline had brought with her. Layer by layer they undid the package: cardboard, bubble wrap, tape, brown paper. “Did you fly with it?” Paul asked.

“No. I took the train.”

Wearing white art handling gloves, Paul lifted each photograph onto blocks, where they leaned against the wall. Jennifer wanted to place the diptych directly across from the entrance to the gallery, so it was the first the thing you’d see when you came in.

“I don’t have a preference for which goes where,” Jacqueline said, as Paul carefully adjusted the placement of the photographs, centering them on the opposite door. Jennifer and Jacqueline backed out of the gallery and peered through the entrance, consulting and considering.

Jennifer and Jacqueline considering

Jacqueline and Jennifer considering The Centennial Star

“I wonder if the star should be on the right?” Jacqueline said.

Paul switched the images.

“A bit more distance?”

Paul took out his measuring tape and moved the photographs two inches further apart.

“That’s better,” Jennifer said. The images weren’t too crowded. The way the staircase was situated drew the eye in.

Now the conversation turned to lighting: exactly how dim (in candles) the gallery would be, the type of glass used in the frames, whether snoods were needed. Jennifer was pleased. “The idea is that the piece is lit so it looks like the moon,” she said.

Suddenly it was time for lunch. Paul climbed a tall ladder and began manually switching off lights. Against the wall, the two medallions leaned, the wooden blocks under them splayed out like feet, the coins and their white frames glowing in the dimness. Meanwhile, out in the galaxy perhaps, patient spaceships zipped and glided, looking for a fabled landing spot somewhere on the Canadian prairie.

ICA, too, welcomes visitors from everywhere. People come from Chicago, California, Berlin, Japan—why not from a distant planet orbiting a faraway star? In our upstairs gallery, the image of the landing pad calls to them.

* * *

Don’t miss Jacqueline’s performative lecture 1967: A People Kind of Place, on Wednesday, February 29, 6:30pm at ICA.

Living Document / Naked Reality: Towards an Archival Cinema will be on view at ICA through March 4.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@ica.upenn.edu.

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Posted in Artists, Installation, Living Document/Naked Reality | 1 Comment »

Virginia Solomon: The Same Things with Different Pictures

July 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“It’s been a happy reason for my dissertation to gather dust and cobwebs,” Virginia says of her year at ICA. We’re sitting around the conference table at her final staff meeting. Virginia Solomon was the ICA’s 2010-11 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow (WLCF), which means that she spent a year here learning the museum trade. She organized a show, helped teach a class, and oversaw much of last year’s programming. The WLCF program, going into its 12th year, has brought many bright young curators to work at ICA who have then gone on to jobs at museums like MOCA and MCA Chicago, or running their own galleries, or working to promote and expand public art. Once Virginia finishes that dissertation at USC on the Canadian artist group General Idea, she’ll be on the job market, looking to become a professor of art history. As though that’s not ambitious enough, she hopes to be a professor who curates too, something she says is more possible now than it used to be: “Rare but doable!”

Virginia, on right, with artists at her opening. Photo: J. Katz

For Virginia, the teaching and the curating seem very much intertwined. “Contemporary art history is in flux,” she says, “and the teaching of it is in flux too.” Working at ICA has influenced the whole package, helping her hone the practice “of putting the object first and the idea coming from the object…Objects don’t always come first in the study of art history.” Being here offered her the opportunity to get her hands into every aspect of curating, not just working with artists but negotiating loan forms, publications, shipping, budgets, transportation.

Virginia’s ICA show, Shary Boyle & Emily Duke: The Illuminations Project, showcased two artists, one of whom works primarily with images and the other primarily with text, working together in a new kind of collaboration, responding to one another’s work but resisting straightforward ideas of illustration or narrative explication. The bright, often violent work that resulted was both political and visceral in its effect. About how making the show affected her, Virginia says, “It made me realize that I’m always talking about the same things, but with different pictures.”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Working with the class “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” Virginia helped the students—Penn freshmen—curate their own show, which was an exploration of ICA’s iconic 1965 Andy Warhol exhibition. She lectured the students on contemporary art, put issues of queer identity and politics on the table, helped them learn to do archival research, and shepherded them through the gazillion details that go into presenting an exhibition.

It was Virginia who asked last winter if ICA should respond to the removal, after protests from the Catholic League and some members of Congress, of the controversial David Wojnarowicz video “A Fire in My Belly” from an exhibition of gay portraiture at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. A week later, the video was on view in the ICA lobby.

What else did Virginia do during her sojourn in Philly?

Drank coffee. Went on studio visits. Rode her bike. “I love the Wissahickon. I went mountain biking there as much as I could with my dog, Georgia,” a large and lovely mixed breed who will miss the friends she made in Clark Park.

What will people at ICA remember about Virginia?

“That I walked around the office in Spandex all the time,” she speculates, smiling.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

That’s true, of course. And who could forget the boxes of fresh vegetables delivered to the museum offices? We will also remember her good humor and positive attitude, her gregarious laughter and her awesome mix tapes. Jenna Weiss, who shared an office with her, said the best thing: “She made you aware of small things like recycling, and big things like being aware of being attentive and sensitive to difference, if you sometimes got lazy.”

Virginia, good luck out there in the world of freeways and movie stars! We’ll think of you when we think about art and politics, and when we drink coffee, and when we laugh.

* * *

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@upenn.edu.

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Posted in Curating and curators | 6 Comments »

Just Right

November 28 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

ICA has three exhibition spaces: a vast ocean liner of a gallery downstairs; a nice-sized fishing boat of a gallery upstairs; and behind that, like the dinghy the bigger vessels tow behind them for rowing to shore, the Project Space—650 square feet where exhibitions of emerging artists or experimental installations are presented. Last week I heard a couple of curators talking about how much they like that space, what a treat it is to organize art for it. Maybe it’s related to the way restaurant appetizers often give more pleasure than the main course. Just a bit of something can be precious—delicious—can be, as in the story of Goldilocks, just right.

Right now the Project Space is hosting Still, Flat, and Far, an exhibition of the work of Erin Shirreff, a sculptor who also works in photography and video. One of my favorite pieces is Moon, a video of that faithful satellite projected onto a screen that angles slightly out from the wall, perhaps to clue us in that something is askew. As you watch the video, the moon appears to wax and wane, yet something is odd about it. The lit portion and the shadowed portion are subtly unfamiliar. It turns out this isn’t a video of the moon at all, but a video of a handful of photographs of the moon that Shirreff took into her studio, shone light onto from various angles, and captured with her camera. It’s quite wonderful to look at it: our familiar moon doing an unfamiliar dance. In its “Picks” section ArtForum, writing about this piece, refers to “the thingness of this particular work,” which I think is wonderful. Every thing should have its thingness.

Shirreff really is interested in exploring what you might well call thingness: how a monument or a landscape (or moonscape) is distorted or transformed by the way we look at it. Certain inaccessible artworks are best known through iconic photographs, and those of us who’ve never seen the Grand Canyon think we know what it looks like because the camera’s limited eye has offered it up to us from a certain point of view. As exhibition curator Lucy Gallun writes, “Shirreff’s work explores how images of extraordinary landmarks and artifacts become seared into cultural memory through their persistent reproduction, and how our vision of them is shaped as much by their reproduction as by our own experience.”

Lucy Gallun is not at ICA anymore. She had a one-year Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellowship (WLCF) with us in 2009-10, and now she is working in the photography department at MoMA and finishing her PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. These WLCFs permit young curators who have participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program to come to ICA for a year to do a kind of apprenticeship. While they’re here we keep them pretty busy. Last year Lucy curated Everyday Imaginary, a video show, also in the Project Space, that explored animation (I’ll never forget those ants carrying bits of bright post-Carnaval glitter over the leafy ground in Cao Guimarães and Rivane Neuenschwander’s Quarta-Feira de Cinzas.) She also helped teach a class for Penn undergraduates called “Writing Through Art and Literature,” coordinated ICA’s education programming, and worked on the “queer” catalogue for Ingrid Schaffner’s Queer Voice exhibition, among other things. We miss her, and we’re excited that Lucy will be back in Philadelphia on December 8 to introduce a conversation between Erin Shirreff and Penn’s new contemporary art professor, Kaja Silverman.

Still, Flat, and Far will close on December 5, and another exhibition, The Illuminations Project, will open in the dinghy in January. From moonlight to other kinds of illuminations: I think that’s just right.

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Posted in Erin Shirreff: Still, Flat, and Far | No Comments »