2 July, 2016
Sensoryscapes, Sensory Escape. Curated by Alba Soto
This exhibition offers a suspended moment, in which the viewer experiences a perceptual shift in time and space, while awakening senses usually dormant due to the pace of routine and new technologies.
The exhibited works, in the media of video, installation and live performance, are interwoven entries into a world of sensation, subconscious association, and attention to a re-imagined environment.
GUEST VIDEO ARTIST FROM SPAIN
ARANTXA BOYERO
Arantxa Boyero holds a Higher Diploma in Photography from the Palma de Mallorca Escuela Superior de Diseño. In 2007, she did an M.A. in Photography, Concept & Creation at EFTI in Madrid. Her work has been shown at numerous joint exhibitions in places like the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Matadero (Madrid), C Arte C (Madrid), Centro Português de Fotografia (Porto), and Pollença Museum (Mallorca). Since 2010, solo exhibitions of her work have been held and she has participated in art fairs like Just Madrid and Room Art Fair with the gallery Addaya Centre d´Art Contemporani. She has taken part in international festivals like Nio in Colombia, Region 0 in New York, and PhotoPhnomPenh in Cambodia. She has been awarded grants and prizes at events like Propuestas, organized by the Fundación Arte y Derecho; the “Rei en Jaume” Art Award in Calvià; and the Young Photographers Competition, organized by the Consell Insular de Mallorca. She is a founder member of the 10×15 Fanzine project. She lives and works in Madrid.
Lección nº1 “I am interested in the society in wich I live and the role that women of my generation have within this context. Subject like privacy, relations, consumerism, sexuality, culture and traditions attract me and they form part of my projects. I describe all my work as ‘mini-actions’ and I use techniques like photography, performances, and videos to carry them out. The documentary process that I follow in their creation is based on my autobiographical experiences. I use reinterpretation, reaction and experimentation as tools to reflect on and express everyday thoughts.”
ISABEL PÉREZ DEL PULGAR
Graduated in Geography and in Art Art History at the University of Granada. Studied color theory, painting, drawing, printmaking, digital art and design at the School of Arts of Granada.
In 2007, she started to work with the video media, a way to combine movements, sounds and pictorial visions. Video works are conceived as a continuous fresh, divided into series and stand-alone projects. However, conceptually, it is an introspective look at human beings and the feminine nature. Pictorial moving visions as new realities, mirrors which reflect a subjective image.
Opus Nigrum, is an alchemical formula that indicates the phase separation and dissolution of matter. Alchemy aims to achieve, or at least try to think through a complicated labyrinth or encoding, thus purifying the impure. This process leads to knowledge, a metaphor for the creative process, pushed permanently by insatisfaction, frustration and doubt, and a requiring an unending search for uncoded response.
http://isaperezdelpulgar.blogspot.com/
https://vimeo.com/perezdelpulgar
IURY LECH
Iury Lech is a transdisciplinary artist that has developed his creativity working the last 30 years within the realm of video-art, music and literature, being part of the few pioneers in the Spanish electronic and digital audio-visual scene that in the 80‘s began to develop visual-aural performances and video art works.
Domesticated Domestic Demons_piece #7 THE BATHING DREAMER. Bathing the viewer in intense colors and actions, as well as surrounding the perception with electronic sonic sculptures, Domesticated Domestic Demons seven pieces video art work results in a poetic, oblique and haunting meditation on domestic life, exposing people behaviors in the private environment from dream states to the hyper-reality of certain routine acts, expressing in images the genuine falsehood of reality, representations manifestly false, that aspire to surpass the original one.
LISI PRADA
Lisi Prada is interested in a search for balance between conceptual and sensory, between ethics and aesthetics; also, she uses linguistic polyvalence as a resource for simultaneous multiple layers of meaning. Her work has been showed in Art Beijing [Stand of Instituto Cervantes, China, 2013], Artes Mediales de Chile [Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile, 2015], Klaipedos Parodu Rumuose [Lithuania, 2012], Palace of Industry in Prague [Czech Republic, 2013], ZKM in Karlsruhe [Germany, 2014], Palacio Nacional de las Artes de Buenos Aires [Argentina, 2014], Harpa in Reykjavik [Iceland, 2014], Laboratorio Arte Alameda [México DF, 2015], Schusev State Museum of Architecture [Moscow, Russia, 2015], CC Fabrika [Moscow, Russia, 2016], among others.
Electronic Water. Soundtrack composed by Hatori Yumi
The viewer is expected to listen and to watch until he/she’s abandoned him or herself to aesthetic pleasure; an active gaze which allows itself to be fascinated by the metamorphosis of sound into the traces of light and shadows on the water surface, where vibrations spread according to musical phrases; a dialogue of broken rhythms, metallic fluctuations of the undulating vibrato, sometimes shiny, sometimes as in a whisper. The viewer shouldn’t expect to find only comfort and harmony, since by favouring an unstable equilibrium, the continuum of the sonic net of obsessive corporeality breaks down in a high-pitched noise announcing -in crescendo- other sound layers, colours, distortions and new frictions in the sequential synchronisations: the golden planes accelerate or are fractured by the black & white, or the abrupt appearances of colour, giving birth to various sensations produced by daring sound and visual contrasts.
http://www.produccionesinmateriales.com/
MARTA AZPARREN
Graduate in Fine Arts by Madrid Complutense University, she shares out her artistic activity between video art, visual and scenic arts.
She received the Comunidad de Madrid grant of Fine Arts in 2009 and the follow prizes for her videoart work: Shut Up And Listen! Festival (Viena, 2014), MADATAC 04 Festival (Madrid), Machinima Expo (EEUU), Net.art Festival VISUAL 09 (Madrid). Her work has been shown in Spain, USA, Austria, Italy, Morocco, France, México, Bulgary, China, Scotland, Corea, Argentina, among others.
Odi et amo
I hate and I love.
Why do I do this, perhaps you ask?
I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am tormented.
Cruel principle of extreme lover: build the beloved body in the image and likeness of its desire and its pain. The artistic process is recorded as a metaphor of building a body of pleasure-pain.
Macerated meat at the insistence of pleasure and stroke and repetition. Desire as a place of struggle.
The body generated by violence or extreme desire is an open body. Like Rembrandt’s slaughtered ox, it’s the sacrifice, the piece of meat. So, the goal is to erase the other’s body – the other’s physical identity and memory – and turning it into a ductile object which fits into the own desire and power.
CHICAGO RESIDENT ARTIST
ALLISON YASUKAWA
In her studio practice, Allison Yasukawa explores themes of social encounter, the physical body, and the politics and performance of identity. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at Dak’Art OFF (Saint-Louis, Senegal), the American University Museum (Washington D.C.), and Bronx Art Space (New York) among others. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is soon headed to Los Angeles for a teaching position at CalArts.
BODYCOMPASS DANCE PROJECT
Bodycompass Dance Project, an experimental dance company based in Chicago and directed by Sarah Gottlieb, combines improvisational dance practices, somatic movement research, and queer feminism. The dancers, Christina Martin, Catherine Miller, and Amanda Maraist, work together to create intimate, political, interdisciplinary performances, that are grounded in the belief that movement is transformative on personal and collective levels. Their full-length work Yolk; which explores fertility as a source, and point of exploration of cosmic power; premiered at Links Hall in February 2015, and has been touring ever since, most recently in Puebla, Mexico. Yolk received funding from DCASE, The Judith Dawn Memorial Fund, Links Hall, and was named One of Seven Best Dances in Chicago, 2015. While not touring Yolk, BodyCompass Dance Project has been using somatic practices to devise improvisational scores that neurologically alter trauma responses stored in the body. Part of this movement research has been the development of Tones of Belonging, a durational improvised dance, performed in non-traditional spaces. Tones of Belonging has been performed six times throughout Chicago since May 2015. In conjunction with this work, BodyCompass also leads a workshop series for survivors of sexual violence, entitled What’s Carried Moves, sponsored in part by The 3Arts Organization.
Tones of Belonging takes a hard look at the living effects of trauma by highlighting the body’s navigation of connection, presence, retreat, and transformation.
HOLLY CHERNOBYL
Holly Chernobyl is a body-based performance artist, working as a performer for over a decade, presenting work both nationally and internationally. Holly is interested in creating dreamscape environments for her audience, and disrupting the everyday. Public performances are the most exciting for her. Her work plays with tension between the beautiful and the grotesque, attraction and repulsion, tension and release.
The Electric Girl. The sideshow as horrific and hilarious showcase for the ridiculous, the unthinkable, and the dangerous. Polly Glandular will amaze and delight! The Electric Girl explores the idea that women’s power, whether intrinsic or fabricated, remains too dangerous and must be confined and restrained. The audience joins her, one at a time, to engage with the real and the manufactured. I’ve always been interested in electricity in performance, genetic mutation, and the spectacle of the sideshow.
SARAH GOTTLIEB and ALBA SOTO
Sarah Gottlieb and Alba Soto share their creative processes based in their backgrounds of dance (Sarah) and visual and scenic arts (Alba), in order to form an interdisciplinary language and explore their common interest in physical feminity.
Sarah Gottlieb work combines somatic movement techniques, queer feminism, and performance. Her professional credentials include certification as a Laban Movement Analyst by IMS; extended mentorship with Nana Shineflug, a Chicago-based choreographer who developed a unique training modality focused on the chakras and other elements of the energetic body; and experience teaching Contact Improvisation (CI) in universities and festivals across the United States including serving as the Artistic Director of the largest regional CI festival for two years. Gottlieb’s choreographic works, heavily based in improvisation, have been supported by DCASE, the Judith Dawn Memorial Fund, Links Hall, and 3Arts Chicago. Her latest projects have included an international tour of her full-length work Yolk, a movement series designed for self-identified survivors of sexual violence entitled What’s Carried Moves, and a curatorial stint for a new performance series Making Moves: Sex Gender Performance.
Alba Soto holds a Ph.D in Fine Art. She studied Visual and Scenic Arts, and she is a specialist in interdisciplinary and performing tools for creation and teaching practice. From 2009 to 2016, she served as the chairperson and as a professor of Fine Arts at Universidad Nebrija. Dr. Soto has conducted workshops and seminars at a number of universities around the world. Her work is underpinned by intuition, spontaneity and surprise as a survival strategy and her performances, video art and drawings have been showcased at a number of national and international festivals and exhibitions in Spain, Poland, China, Germany, Italy, USA among others.
De li be ra te. Elements of Force, Effort and Strength inspire investigations into forms of sensuality, sexuality, power, and perception.
Sarah´s background in dance, and Alba´s background in visual and scenic arts, combine in an interdisciplinary language, based in their common interests of physicial femininity.
SARA ZALEK
I am most interested in creative encounters which inspire a collective synesthetic experience. Engaging otherness as it relates to transformative power, I use Butoh training, poetry, automatic drawing, and objects imbibed with curiosity to expose the unknown, often with humor. My intentional focus is on the moment when my self is limitless potential.
Awards/Grants: 2016 DCASE Residency and IAP Grant Award. 2016 RDDI Artist (National Dance Project). 2015 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. 2015 3Arts Artist Project. 2014 HCL Sponsored Artist. 2014 DCASE Grant for Spawned Seeds: Post Butoh Festival. 2012 LinkUp Residency in collaboration with Aurora Tabar. 2007 CAAP Grant for Ghost in the Machine. 2006 SAIC Leadership Award
VERÓNICA RODRÍGUEZ
Verónica Rodríguez is a performer, actress, and director who likes to investigate the depth of the human senses at several levels. How much does our perception and senses control our way of thinking? In 2013 ,She studied with the company Teatro de los Sentidos in Barcelona, since then she has been eager to investigate and explore this new theater form.
In collaboration with Karim Gallici, they took part in the artist residency for the In/ Visible Cities Multimedia Festival in Gorizia/Italy, and this project will be shown at the Festivale della Nuova Danza in Sardenia, September 2016.
Reminiscing in Green. The performance at Unlock Hause will be a journey through the senses in which the spectator’s body will be stimulated in multiple ways. The performance involves people intuition and creates experiences with the spectators body. Since she moved from Spain to Chicago almost 3 years ago, she has been working as a Preschool Spanish and Theater Teacher. This has influenced her to explore into her childhood fantasies to find the child that lives inside everyone, sometimes forgotten.
SUZ EVANS AND SAM CHAO
Sam Chao is a video installation artist as she invents spaces of delays through translations. Sam positions herself as a receiver of a second hand spectator. Her late presence materializes through video, writing and speech. Which is then edited together but fragmented into a landscape. Sam Chao is a Chicago based artist from Hong Kong. She is currently making a family friendly film. The image is blank due to overexposure of the sunlight a summer when Sam collects worn out white cloth shoes named Pat Fan Yu. Where the audio is rich and the subtitles are clear.
http://www.artic.edu/%7Eschao1/buttonnotes/chaosambutton.html
Suz Evans is a performance artist that works with the concept of phenomenology to explore both collective and personal human perception. Specifically they are interested how the language of identity creates associations in the mind. They are currently writing a play about MOIOULA, moments of intentional or unintentional live art. Moioula is very basically the art-potential of every life occurrences. Evans uses this idea as a tool of critical thought in order to examine the unstable areas between art and not-art. Borrowing from other artists and from pop culture is a crucial method of creation. Evans strongly identifies as a failure in the medium of performance art.
http://www.starheartart.net/p/2014.html
Head Smell. This performance will give the audience an opportunity to experience themselves through touch and smell. It is an effort challenge the space between our bodies, and to loosen or tighten tensions in those spaces. We are interested in how participants will approach the body of their partners. Will they use hands on shoulders to steady the nose? Will they cup their face with hands? Will they avoid any contact at all?
UnLOCK HAUSE 