Tag: exhibitions

Past Display – A Museum of Infinite Possibilities

A Museum of Infinite Possibilities

February 25 – April 15, 2012

 
“I am familiar with the surface of things…Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened, swollen, dried, scrawny, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured, battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled, toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting hanging, buried, wedged, jammed, impaled, straggling, stretched, disjointed, disembowled, skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.” (Rosamond Purcell, Owl’s Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, Quantuck Lane Press, NY, NY, 2003, p. 29)

Inspired by Rosamond Purcell’s imagined museums, the ICI opened the drawers to its Ephemera Kabinett and invited the public to unleash its many secrets.

Museum of Obsolete Tools
Museum of Wires
Museum of the Croquet and Musket Ball
Museum of Natural Disasters
Museum of Ruined Landscapes
Museum of Failed Attempts
Museum of Filthy Mail
Museum of Bisected Objects
Museum of Corrosion

Visitors had the opportunity to suggest new categories for the ICI’s Ephemera Kabinett database (“fraying, moldy, trampled, skinned, withered”) as they re-arranged objects from the archive into ever-changing, new ‘museum collections.’

ICI Associate Christel Dillbohner in New Exhibition

Christel Dillbohner, a long-time ICI associate, was featured in a show titled TERRAIN: Exploring the Language of Landscape. The exhibition ‘offered meditations on nature through visual explorations of an inherent language and relationship to the earth that is at once mysterious and sublime.’ It showed at the Berkeley Art Center from February 11 – April 1, 2012.

East Bay Express, a publication out of Oakland, California, recently published a review of TERRAIN: Exploring the Language of Landscape. View it online HERE, or read an archived version on our website.

 

Associate Anna Ayeroff in Exhibition

ICI associate Anna Ayeroff work was included in a recent exhibition titled Myths of Progress: Utopic Dreams/Dystopic Realities. Her work included a multi-media installation that explores her family’s personal history in Clarion, Utah—a Jewish farming colony that was originally envisioned as a utopian community. The show ran from February 16 – March 31, 2012 at the Kala Gallery in Berkeley, California and included nine artists.

Associate Axel Forrester in London Exhibition

Axel Forrester, one of our founding associates, relocated to England over two years ago. Read about her film, Severance, in a review of a London exhibition curated by Annika Erikson that includes this work.

It follows a string of commuters travelling on the Paris Métro, with eyes closed or staring into space. It is an interesting and visually appealing study of the phenomenon of moving alone in and through public places, being surrounded by people but remaining disconnected.

Read the entire review or check out some of Axel’s videos.

100/10∆1 Froebel Star Folding Workshop and “Listening”

please join us for a

FROEBEL STAR FOLDING WORKSHOP

&

LISTENING

with Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff

Saturday, February 26, 2011; 2-5pm

in the library

the Institute of Cultural Inquiry

reservations required

The Froebel star was designed by Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782-1852), the German educator who developed the concept of ‘kindergarten’ and the Froebel gifts and occupations which inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. As a child, the future architect played with Froebel blocks, “with the cube, the sphere and the triangle,” all of which remained “in his fingers” as he began to design his famous buildings. Fröbel’s building forms and movement games were also forerunners of abstract art, as well as a source of inspiration to the Bauhaus movement.
The star, made from folded strips of papers, is one of Froebel’s “occupations, “ used to help children recognize and appreciate the common patterns and forms found in nature. At the ICI, the act of folding a Froebel star becomes a cipher for creating a unique chronicle of our times. Please join us and help us write (and fold) a history of our world that is “hidden in plain sight.”
While folding, workshop participants will hear an unfolding of the history of failed utopian colony, Clarion, Utah. LISTENING with Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff is a collaboration based on Ayeroff’s installation “Clarion Calls,” on view as part of the first iteration of the ICI’s 100/10 project (100/10∆1: Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff).
Materials will be provided but we encourage you to bring unusual papers to the workshop. This workshop qualifies for researcher membership.