Monira Foundation Presents Intertwined
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 8th, 2021
Contact: info@monirafoundation.org
Monira Foundation Present:
Intertwined: an Exhibition at Mana Contemporary Chicago
Many of Chicago’s most promising emerging artists working in new media and technology will be featured in an outdoor exhibition
CHICAGO, IL – On Saturday, September 18th Monira Foundation will present a day-long public exhibition and performance program featuring 12 emerging new-media artists, all exceptionally promising graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a guest artist duo from High Concept Labs. Some of their studio spaces, also on site at Mana Contemporary Chicago, will be open to visitors.
Seamus Carey’s mechanical sculpture will protrude from the housing of a wall-mounted security camera near the building’s entrance. Earfinger is a slightly oversized plastic ear with a human-scale plastic finger emerging from its canal. A microphone coupled with a pan-tilt mechanism enables the finger to point in the direction of any ambient noise. As it surveys the space, pointing and searching, Earfinger rides the line between play and critique, framing the pointing finger as an accusatory gesture and listening as a form of surveillance.
Conrad Cheung and Seamus Carey will present a collaborative project, Posthuman Playground, in which a temporary, disassemblable, participatory installation imagines and invites multispecies play. Inspired in part by the imagined futures of post-humanists and scholars interested in interspecies cooperation (e.g. Haraway on the Chthulucene), they consider what it would look like to leave behind a landscape of furniture, structures, and toys that would enrich the lives and habits of those species that persist after human extinction.
Mayte Gomez Molina contributes Please don’t stop the music, a video poem composed of 3D-rendered images, imagined as the nightmare a mirror would have after realizing it is only the bodies of those who reflect on it. The work deploys 3D software to manipulate representations of the body, and therefore perceptions of identity. Gomez Molina’s narrated poetics approach this experience from an oblique angle, shifting language into an oniric realm that rejects linearity and logic.
Bryan LeBeuf’s Beechwood is composed of remnants of my community, as it combines programming and large-scale 3D mapping to archive each disappearing neighborhood from my home, West Side Detroit. The piece is a real-time simulation, taking the participant through evolving spaces and corridors within each neighborhood. All data from Beechwood is completely free and open-source.
Bryan LeBeuf and Morgan Green’s collaborative work, Grid, is an interactive mobile application that allows the user to create a live-generating recipe schematic, accessed by QR code. It assembles forms from a variety of procedural arenas: circuitry, engineering, cooking, and music composition. By overlapping domestic, industrial, and creative modes of production, Grid interrogates the socialized hierarchies that separate these spaces of work.
Sal Moreno will present a performance of improvisational drumming motivated by digital sounds and visuals which are generated in real-time via a motion-capture suit. The performance will engage the body as a sonic mediator between the physical and virtual spaces. The pandemic prompted Moreno to find alternative and unconventional methods of sharing work with the community. This work is inspired by the accessibility of online streaming platforms, their effectiveness in reaching wide audiences, and the ease of extending technology to incorporate digital and sonic elements into performances.
Jungho Park’s nine-channel pictogram animation, Invisible Watchers, explores the power of signage to compel urban publics. Alive #2, a second work, proposes that the city is a giant organism, with buildings representing individuals that together comprise a social group. Through his artistic practice, Park is committed to studying their life, death, creation and transformation.
Jessica Tucker, aka Fetter, will present an audiovisual performance from her new-media-opera work in progress. Using multimedia, networked, and accumulative performance strategies, she weaves together songs, simulations, and the internet to tell a dreamy story about the permeability of reality. Viewers are invited into a world where the virtual is an apparent, constant layering of translation and connection, a playground for those who live and dream amongst machines.
Cecilia Tyrrell’s Sirens Dawn is a sound installation inspired and arranged from video and sound recordings that the artist gathered at a sound mirror on the southeast coast of England. A sound mirror, also known as an acoustic mirror, is a passive device used to reflect and focus sound waves. Now largely neglected, they were developed during WWII to detect approaching aircraft by listening for the frequency of a plane’s engine.
Ava Wanbli exhibits an interactive game related to the artist’s project Sertraline Dolls. The work situates Gamache’s own body as a virtual landscape and site of sexual expression, exploring the dialectic of transwomen’s experiences with objecthood, fetishization, sexual exploration, and a multiplicity of selves in both physical and virtual spaces.
Yue Xue presents Entryway, a work combining video installation, performance, and sound. In addition to recollecting the intimacy of human connection that the artist misses while under lockdown, the work stages the trauma of quarantine through an interplay of projected images, surfaces, and bodies.
Kio Zhu’s participatory work Sound Perfume allows visitors to don wearable speakers that play sounds generated through synth techniques driven by encrypted data generated by information provided by the audience at reception. The sounds, which mostly have an ambient quality, like humming or chimes, are intended to be an experiment in an acoustic equivalent to cosmetics, perfume, and cologne.
Additionally Yoshinojo Fujima aka Rika Lin (High Concept Labs Fellow Artist) will open her rehearsal to visitors from 12pm-1pm. Visitors can view Yoshinojo and Fujima Ikunojo rehearsing the digital/live/virtual medium which Yoshinojo is exploring to create an interactive dance film, premiering January 2022, with virtual collaborators including filmmaker Subhash Maskara (Mumbai), calligrapher Hekiun Oda (Chicago/Kobe), and musician Matsuya Nozawa (Kyoto).
Mana Contemporary Chicago is located at 2233 S. Throop Street.
Intertwined is made possible by a grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events with funding from the Walder Foundation.
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To learn more about Monira Foundation or to schedule an interview, please e-mail info@monirafoundation.org. Visit the Monira Foundation website at: www.monirafoundation.org.
