GRAND OPENING – April 24, 2016
RED SOFA PROJECT
Curated by Pia Cruzalegui and Alba Soto
The inaugural of UnLock Hause showcased video art installations and performance art by international and local artists interested in everyday spaces; containers of intimacy, secrets and memory.
We brought special attention to an interactive RED SOFA, the protagonist of our inaugural opening as well as an honorary inhabitant of this new space . A sofa that has traveled for years from studio to studio, encountering dozens of artists, and inspiring, fascinating, coherent and absurd ideas. It is, by default of its existence, an elder Red Sofa that has witnessed many unexpected events; reason why we believe the time had come to pay tribute to the star object in its new scene.
INVITED ARTIST:
Lia Kohl (USA)
Born in New York City, Lia Kohl is a cellist and performance artist based in Chicago. Her work as a performer is deeply collaborative, and she is constantly seeking the meeting point between creative minds. She has worked extensively with dancers, poets and visual artists, and is inspired by new and different ways of thinking. Fascinated by the antiquated and illusory medium of performance, she endeavors to blur the lines between the pedestrian and the formal, and the obvious and the absurd in an attempt to bring her artistic practice into daily life—and vice-versa. She is a passionate interpreter of contemporary music and an avid improviser. She holds a B.M. and an M.M. in Cello Performance from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and Chicago College of Performing Arts, respectively.
Jessica Cornish (Pakistan)
Jessica Cornish is a dance artist based in Chicago Illinois and has presented work in China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, India, Berlin, Italy, Amsterdam, Chile, Louisiana, New York City and Chicago. Basing her practice on the art of improvisation, performance and choreography, Cornish continues to work with a wide range of collaborators in different disciplines and uses her ever-changing environments as sustenance to create.
Cornish has been the recipient of awards and residency opportunities such as; Freeman Foundation Theatre Award, Beverly Blossom Talented Student Award, Beverly Blossom Alumni Award, LinkUp Residency, Guest Artist in residence at UIUC, Place Residency in LA, Krannert Center for Performing Arts at the University of Illinois Residency and most recently was selected as one of 12 dance artists in the Chicago area to participate in NEFA’s Regional Dance Development Initiative. Currently, Cornish is developing Bridges, a project that will produce performances on top of several of Chicago’s moveable.
Amaya Hernández (Spain)
Amaya Hernández has studied Fine Arts, photography direction in film. Over the course of her career she has received such prizes as Creativity Fellowship 2012 Alcobendas, Madrid, the Generaciones 2012 Award, the Bancaja Award for Digital Art, the Injuve Prize for Young Creators, Honorable Mention in the Purificacion García Photography Contest, the Visual Artists and Photography Circles’ Award from the Community of Madrid and Avenida de America Young Creators’ Initiative. Among her individual exhibitions are Detrás del gris, shown at the Emergent international photography festival, in Lérida, 2010 and Resistencias, shown at the Avenida de América Center for Young Artists in Madrid, 2008.
Many times I think about a site there is in San Bernardo Street. Years ago there was a hospital. One of the rooms had a very special meaning to me. The construction was demolished and there is a big uninhabited hole now. However, when I pass by, I cannot find anything more restless than observing this small floating space in the void… We appropriate space. With architecture, we define, structure and transform the void, turning it into living spaces. We adapt to it and we make it ours. The light that enters in our living rooms is altered and modified, it moves slowly forward reminding us the passing of time… but it is when everything banishes that it becomes vertiginous… we need artifice, simulation and simulacrum.
Nadia DeLane (USA)
Writer, artist and filmmaker, Nadia DeLane is a multi-faceted visual storyteller working in film, print web, and new media. DeLane has produced works for various organizations and institutions that include the School of Visual Arts, Pennsylvania State University and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. DeLane’s independent creative projects include #hairsay, an ongoing visual story project that tells women’s hair journeys through their voices and ink illustration. Her animated film and fine art installations have been featured at SVA Gallery in New York City and the Twisted Oyster Film Festival at Zhou Gallery in Chicago.
DeLane’s Spilt Milk is a stop motion animated film delving into concepts ranging from childhood abandonment to the liquid nature of futures not yet beheld. Fabricating the family unit, DeLane’s handmade dolls, complimentary textures and puppetry visually communicate the emotional side effects of grief, care and longing. Though anchored by change, the clock spins, shifting focus from what is lost with time, to what is gained through growth and experience. The viewer may ask: what is the function of a dream? A nightmare?
Kieran Pavel (Switzerland)
Since 2011, the Mondo Corretto website presents Kieran Pavel’s photographic and filmographic work. Born in 1972, he lives in Geneva, Switzerland. By publishing a photograph each day, he builds a conceptual and narrative work, sometimes developed in serie, or through multimedia projects (photography, film, music, installation, etc.).
Images and movies are not translated and published spontaneously every day, but the result of careful and planned production that develops a pictorialccontinuity deliberately non-interventionist. An abstract and sensitive narrative emerges from everyday stress to release fragments of stories without landmarks, without a beginning and an end of a before and an after.
“RUSH.STUMBLE.FALL” is a sensitiv trip through an ordinary nightmare that focuses less on narrativity and more on the meaning and the dynamics of moving images.
http://mondocorretto.blogspot.ch
Ana Rincón (Spain)
Candidate to Fine Arts student at Universidad de Nebrija in Madrid, Spain. She was awarded the 2016 Santander Scholarship for developing art projects with conceptual artist Mateo Maté.
Ana Rincon’s work is rooted on language, identity and communication. She investigates the limits, construction and intimacy of language using photography and video; and uses the conventional images that she transforms into parallelisms, which invite the viewer to experience irony and double meanings.
UnLOCK HAUSE 