The ICI is currently closed for reorganization.
Tag: ICI Press Materials
Forget Foucault
DATE: December 1, 2011
LOCATIONS: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles CA and 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, CA
HOURS: 11 am – 4 pm
PARKING: Metered street and paid garage parking at both venues
In conjunction with World AIDS Day, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) is pleased to present Forget Foucault, a tactical event aimed at AIDS awareness and remembrance.
Soon after it was recognized as a disease process in the early 1980s, the struggle to identify, test, and prevent AIDS was brought to public notice by a wide range of AIDS activists—groups such as ACT UP and community projects such as the Names Project AIDS quilt. By 2000, as the numbers of new infections and deaths within the US dropped, so too did the public’s involvement in AIDS awareness. And yet, on the global front the pandemic continues to ravage whole populations. In 2010, the UN AIDS committee recorded 1.8 million AIDS-related deaths, mostly in third world countries, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Even in North America, where the infection rate has remained stable over the last five years, over 1.5 million people are HIV positive, a conservative statistic since, according to CNN, 1 in 5 sexually active adults do not know their HIV status. The public cry of the AIDS activists from the 1990s is well-worn but still true: the AIDS crisis is not over. The ICI seeks to bring this topic back to the forefront by enlisting the public in a simple act of AIDS activism.
Forget Foucault utilizes button badges emblazoned with the names of notable people who have died as a result of AIDS coupled with the either “forget” or “remember.” In addition, two button pairs reflect the global progression of HIV over the last three decades. ‘Forget/Remember an anonymous woman’ and ‘Forget/Remember a parentless child’ reflect the spread of the disease in the last 15 years to non-western populations. On December 1, 2011, World AIDS Day, the public will have the opportunity to take up to two of these buttons from roving ICI representatives at two Los Angeles sites—one button to keep and one to pass on—in a combination of their choice (forget or remember; black or white). Through the simple act of selecting and wearing ICI buttons, individuals will have the opportunity to engage friends and strangers in a discussion about AIDS and the individual’s role in cultural awareness and action.
Forget Foucault builds on the tradition of disseminating political, commercial and/or artistic ideas through a wearable object. Since the button badge was invented in the late 1800’s, these seemingly innocuous objects have been used for everything from supporting political campaigns to advertising products to helping to fuel artistic projects. As economic, portable and wearable signposts, buttons have helped to spread the ideas that fueled the hippie movement of the 1960’s and the punk movement of the 1970’s and 80’s, and many of the major election campaigns of the twentieth century. Thus in this way, buttons have served as a form of social catalyst, a means for the spread of both suppressed and idealized notions. Further, Forget Foucault also draws on related artistic precedents such as the work of Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, and most notably, that of Daniel J. Martinez’s, who’s Whitney Biennial buttons sought to interrogate the hierarchies of our linguistic, socio-political and socio-physical interactions by giving visitors buttons that contained portions of a sentence that together formed the charged sentiment “I can’t ever imagine wanting to be white.”
Over the last 20 years, ICI has remained steadfast in its efforts to raise awareness for AIDS, and has orchestrated numerous projects in order to interrogate the visual culture surrounding the epidemic. Forget Foucault marks a convergence of the ICI’s previousAIDS-related endeavors. The AIDS Bottle Project, started in 1990, utilizes a simple, etched glass jar to memorialize those who have died from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. A separate project, the AIDS Chronicles, which began in1994, is a more activist project that records the (lack of) day-to-day discourse on AIDS in the New York Times. With a strategy outlined in Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy,” Forget Foucault combines the mourning aspect of the AIDS Bottle Project with the militancy of the AIDS Chronicles. By choosing individuals who are not known solely for their AIDS-related deaths or anonymous descriptions that are not solely linked to HIV (an anonymous woman, a parentless child), Forget Foucault furthers the ambiguity of its own guerilla semiotics. The buttons call to question both who and how we remember (or consequently choose not to remember). Can we remember everyone? Should we remember everyone? Can we forget some and not others? And, borrowing one of the ICI’s most famous maxims, ‘who decides’ how and who and what we remember?
Forget Foucault also interrogates the organization’s own historical trajectory. Formed urgently for urgent times, the ICI incorporated in 1994 at the request of institutions that were hosting AIDS-related ICI projects. Forget Foucault not only revisits sites of previous AIDS activism (the AIDS Bottle Project at LACMA in 1991 and the AIDS Chronicles at 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica in 1994) but it forefronts the organization’s own indebtedness to the AIDS pandemic.
The ICI has received public notice in the last decade for its publishing and exhibition programs but it was born 20 years ago in a lacuna created by a virus that ‘disappeared’ some of art’s most powerful voices. The ICI was formed with the conviction that, as Diamanda Galás so vividly etched into our collective consciousness, ‘we are all HIV+.’ AIDS is not only a biological disease but a cultural one as well.
The Individuals featured in the button badges include: Michel Foucault, Fela, Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Easy-E, Arthur Ashe, Isaac Asimov, Alvin Ailey, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carlos Almaraz, a parentless child, and an anonymous woman. Participants will have the opportunity to share their interpretations both in person through impromptu, live webcast interviews, and online at the project’s website. All feedback will later be archived as part of the ICI’s Ephemera Kabinett, and will be available to view permanently via the Ephemera Kabinett blog.
The website for the project will provide updated information and a live feed on the day of the event: www.culturalinquiry.org/blog/forget-foucault. For more information about the ICI and our projects, please visit www.culturalinquiry.org
100/10∆10 Press Release
100/10∆10: Mappa Mundi:
The Earth Project
Project Launch: Tuesday, June 28, 12:00 pm
Coordinated by Jojo Black and Elisa Baek with contributions by terra publica
Free and open to the public
Selections from the collaborative final iteration of the 100/10 project can be viewed online here.
For the tenth and final iteration of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s ambitious project 100/10 (100 days/10 visions), Mappa Mundi: The Earth Project explores the notion that we are all of the earth, allied through terrestrial bounds, living along an assortment of grounds that reflect both the diversity and uniformity of our world. 100/10∆10 is a participatory project of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) that exists with and through the terra publica – the people of the earth – who use the tools and networks of the Internet to collectively re-imagine a world map within the context of human experience.
The Earth Project draws inspiration from the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s “Earth Cabinet”, a collection of dirt specimens from all over the world currently housed in a refurbished communion cabinet. These specimens comprise of dirt, dust, grit, shell, sand and other types of earth material from locations including: Ayres Rock, Australia; Suzhou, China; Stonehenge; the Berlin Wall; Zion, Utah; Jerusalem, Israel; Kanagawa, Japan; Paris Catacombs; the Grand Canyon; Gubbio, Italy; and Giza, Egypt. The “Earth Cabinet” collection brings together a myriad of geographic terrains to reveal where ICI and its publics have visited in the past, as well as where they might go in the future.
Building on the ICI’s interest in exploring the intangible and ever-changing phenomenon known as “culture”, Mappa Mundi: The Earth Project extends the focus of the “Earth Cabinet” by constructing and supporting an online world map where new spaces for perception, memory, history, and time are created by reinterpreting the practices of visual thinking within contemporary society. The project conceptualizes art as an open, cross-disciplinary culture-building activity, where hybrid forms of cooperation and production can emerge freely within the given form. The project’s use of a world map advances ICI’s belief that mapmaking is more about creating and revealing connections through the process of discovery than it is about simply charting areas of the world. With the project’s open-ended directions to help foster the potentialities inherent in participants’ interpretations, the platform of a world map doubles as a public laboratory for cultivating and developing ideas with and through the terra publica.
A unique catalogue will accompany this exhibition, modeled on the New Museum’s catalog for its 2008 landmark show After Nature. Catalogs for the 100/10 shows exist as a dustcover enfolding a slightly used copy of a book that has influenced the show’s curator and artist. 100/10∆10 uses a small, blank sketchbook with field implements, such as small specimen bags and identification tags, nestled between pages. This empty workbook points back to this project’s “potentialities inherent in participants’ interpretations” and calls upon individuals to move out into the “field” of the project, the very earth in which we all inhabit. The catalogs are available online in the ICI gift shop.
—
Beginning January 31, 2011 and running for 100 consecutive business days, the ICI site and its archives is undergoing a multitude of interpretations. ICI has invited ten researchers-artists, writers, and visual thinkers-to set into play ideas that blend contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett, and a 2,500+ volume library along with the nooks and crannies of the eclectic, historically layered ICI space. With two weeks to conceive of their vision, curators will work in a designated laboratory modeled upon the transparent workspaces of 19th-century natural history museums. Each curator will conceptualize a new trajectory through ICI’s body, transforming the ICI display by the end of their residency. 100/10 project participants to date have included ∆1: Alex Harvey with Anna Ayeroff; ∆2: Antoinette LaFarge with Ruth Coppens; ∆3: Norway Nori; ∆4: Karen Frimkess Wolff and Paul W. Evans; ∆5: Pam Posey with Christine Nguyen; ∆6: Christel Dillbohner with Inge Kamps; ∆7: Christian Smith and Rosie Woodward Smith; ∆8: Jeremy J. Quinn and Michele Jaquis of Rise Industries; as well as ∆9: Corey Hitchcock and James Linnehan.
Since 1991, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) has explored the role of visuality in imagining, perpetrating and perpetuating the intangible and ever-changing phenomena known as “culture.” The ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. The non-profit organization also maintains an active publishing program, releasing the critically acclaimed Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald in 2007. 100/10 is the first project conceptualized within the 2011-12 ICI study theme of Phantom Worlds.
Purchase catalog for 100/10∆10.
Read more about the complete 100/10 project.
100/10∆10 Postcard
100/10∆9 Press Release
100/10∆9: James Linnehan and Corey Hitchcock
June 20 – 26, 2011
Online Launch: Monday, June 20, 12pm at www.culturalinquiry.org
Real Time Lecture, Screening and Live Feed: Saturday, June 25; 7 pm (sharp) – 8:30 pm (blurry); doors open at 6:30 pm
LOCATION: Arts & Consciousness Gallery
John F. Kennedy University Arts Annex, Heinz Building
2956 San Pablo Avenue, 2nd Floor, Berkeley, CA
The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) is pleased to unveil the virtual peephole on its website for the ninth iteration of its ambitious 100/10 project (100 days/10 curatorial visions). To collaborate on The Bright Tenderness of Reality, artist Corey Hitchcock and curator James Linnehan created a new “wing” of the Institute, located in the ether of networked consciousness and loosely tethered to the model of Distance Learning. Without recourse to the Institute’s urban and localized physicality and the archives accreted over the Institute’s two decades, artist and curator rummaged through the artist’s videos; fondled text(s) via e-mail and link; unzipped files; employed search engines. Thus far, artist and curator have met in physical space only occasionally and for reassurance. A mere 90 minutes on Saturday evening, June 25th, provides a rare occasion to convene artist and curator, overlay physical and virtual: Institute’s core facility and a satellite several hundred miles away. A lecture and screening will exist in real time at the Arts & Consciousness Gallery at JFK University in Berkeley but it can also be viewed through a peephole via the ICI’s website.
Modes of becoming proliferate in Corey Hitchcock’s video world: edits are imprecise, equations are inelegant, line is not unerring, gravity is inconstant, objects are unintelligent, nature experiments before the camera, narrative is disrupted, illusion falters. Corey Hitchcock is what is referred to in fiction as an “unreliable narrator.” The 21st-century omniscient camera becomes just another object without proper or usual behaviors, as unseeing as the elegantly gloved hand which pokes through the scenery and draws. In these video dioramas the wildlife misbehaves, the scenery crumbles: the artist, revealed through occasional rips in the backdrop, is no more than a blind stagehand.
The Bright Tenderness of Reality brought to the curator’s mind a phrase from James Joyce: “the ineluctable modality of the visible.” The ineluctable is the visible—the real—the artwork—not the artist, not the curator. And bright?—because reality has intelligence and essential qualities; bright in that it has its own light, neither borrowed nor given … and shadows in Corey Hitchcock’s videos are shadows on the moon—pure, clear shadows—not the earthly shadows of cynicism or nostalgia or yearning—these are bright shadows. From June 20 – 26, 201l, they can be viewed via the ICI website by following a link on the directory (landing) page. The virtual launch time is 12 p.m. on Monday, June 20, 2011.
A unique catalogue accompanies this exhibition and extends the Institute’s thinking on W.G. Sebald. Modeled on the New Museum’s catalog for its 2008 landmark show After Nature, 100/10 catalogues exist as a dustcover enfolding a slightly used copy of a book that has influenced the show’s curator and artist. The 100/10∆9 catalog, wrapped around Ivar Ekeland’s Mathematics and the Unexpected, may be purchased in the mobile ICI gift shop at the A&C Gallery or through the ICI website.
James Linnehan defers to Jules Henri Poincaré’s “The Sciences and the Humanities” (1911) for his biography:
Amongst the men who have, always usefully but with differing degrees of brilliance, given service to science, some have received in their youth a solid classical education, refined in some cases, whereas the literary schooling of others has been rushed, incomplete and summary. It is tempting to conclude that literary study is useless to the scientist, since so many of them manage without. But that would be hasty. Is it really true that we can’t make out differences between the work of the one sort and the other and discern their hallmarks, so to speak? Well, that’s a comparison I don’t wish to carry out here. It would require me to name names, and I wouldn’t wish to offend anyone, even the dead. In such matters it is hard to judge, but if, in any case, we were to show that the one type were equally good scientists as the other, what exactly would be proven? The fact of the matter is self-evident. For a long time, it has been difficult to make your name and, in general to rise above your station, without schooling. Those who have succeeded nonetheless have done so thanks to an exceptional energy which has made up for the lack of a range of other advantages, and which has put them on a par with more cultivated individuals of a less sturdy character.
Corey Hitchcock (www.coreyhitchcock.com) was raised until she reached the age of thirteen, in an isolated, suburban compound, without contact from the outside world. All of her visual work began as attempts to understand the larger world she encountered, once she had dug her way out. She received her MFA from JFKU’s Arts and Consciousness program in 2005, and was given a Cadogan-Murphy award for her graduate work. She is a graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies three-year program, has a transpersonal medicine practice, and engages geomantically with the Earth on a regular basis. She explores the shadow zones between worlds to retrieve hidden information about our compromised natural selves to help us remember what makes us most delightfully human.
Beginning January 31, 2011 and running for 100 consecutive business days, the ICI site and its archives is undergoing a multitude of interpretations. ICI has invited ten researchers-artists, writers, and visual thinkers-to set into play ideas that blend contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett, and a 2,500+ volume library along with the nooks and crannies of the eclectic, historically layered ICI space. With two weeks to conceive of their vision, curators will work in a designated laboratory modeled upon the transparent workspaces of 19th-century natural history museums. Each curator will conceptualize a new trajectory through ICI’s body, transforming the ICI display by the end of their residency. 100/10 project participants to date have included ∆1: Alex Harvey with Anna Ayeroff; ∆2: Antoinette LaFarge with Ruth Coppens; ∆3: Norway Nori; ∆4: Karen Frimkess Wolff and Paul W. Evans; ∆5: Pam Posey with Christine Nguyen; ∆6: Christel Dillbohner with Inge Kamps; ∆7: Christian Smith and Rosie Woodward Smith; as well as ∆8: Rise Industries.
—
Since 1991, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) has explored the role of visuality in imagining, perpetrating and perpetuating the intangible and ever-changing phenomena known as “culture.” The ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. The non-profit organization also maintains an active publishing program, releasing the critically acclaimed Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald in 2007. 100/10 is the first project conceptualized within the 2011-12 ICI study theme of Phantom Worlds.
Purchase catalog for 100/10∆9.
Read more about the complete 100/10 project.
100/10∆9 Postcard
100/10∆8 Press Release
100/10∆8: Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI)
June 1 – 25, 2011
Thurs. – Fri. 12- 5 pm; by reservation via website
Saturdays 1-5; no reservations required
Reception: June 11th, 7-9 pm
Free to the public; suggested $5 donation
LOCATION:
1512 S. Robertson Blvd. , Los Angeles, CA 90035
(two blocks south of Pico); street parking available
For this eighth iteration of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s ambitious project 100/10, showcasing ten curatorial visions over 100 business days, Rise Industries co-founders Jeremy J. Quinn and Michele Jaquis begin at the heart of the Institute’s idiosyncratic, evocative holdings. There, two objects lie. One, an industrial Acroprint clock, matter-of-factly clicks off comings and goings according to some indeterminate time zone. The other, a globe, renders Earth as a miniaturized perfect sphere, its pasted political boundaries frozen in time and encased in a grid of latitude and longitude. Both imply—and miss—so much.
Quinn and Jaquis take playful measure of the Institute’s phantom worlds, their gravitational pulls, the ebbs and flows of personal narratives lapping at the ICI collections’ contours. Anachronistic time-keeping devices. A faded 1961 Triple-A Trip-Tik presages Jaquis’ from her 2000 cross-country relocation to Los Angeles. Glass slides of images precipitate a kaleidoscopic sense of déjà vu’s possibilities for mis-(re)cognition: uncannily, Michele can mistake these for those taken by her twin sister, Nicole, in India. Expanding upon these moments of “knowing better,” the curators explore the slippages in our concepts of distance and time, in relation to the ICI collection, ICI’s location in Southern California, the geographic sprawl of their collaborators in Los Angeles, Boston, India, and our absolute/ relative position in the Cosmos.
A unique catalogue accompanies this exhibition and extends the Institute’s thinking on W.G. Sebald. Modeled on the New Museum’s catalog for its 2008 landmark show After Nature, 100/10 catalogues exist as a dustcover enfolding a slightly used copy of a book that has influenced the show’s curators. The 100/10∆8 catalog, wrapped around Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, may be purchased in the ICI gift shop or through the ICI website.
Multidisciplinary artist Jeremy J. Quinn works in installation, video, sound, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and environmental graphics. Trained as an architect, Jeremy looks at spaces in terms of hidden structure or geometries, as well as how they are inhabited and manipulated by people. He is fascinated by the many complex systems of daily life, and tries to find order and clarity beneath the chaos we inhabit. He has focused most recently on interrogating the meaning and representation of landscape, using video and installation to build alternate landscapes in “Mountain” and “Anza-Borrego Expanded Landscape”, and through sound in “Transference”. Jeremy received a Master of Architecture degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Hartford, where he studied architecture and sculpture. He is currently a project manager at Pablo Maida Architect in Santa Monica, CA.
Interdisciplinary artist and educator Michele Jaquis examines the complexities within personal relationships, identity, language and communication through video, installation, performance and digital imagery. She earned her MFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 and her BFA in sculpture and experimental studio with a minor in psychology from Hartford Art School/University of Hartford in 1997. Her work has been presented in galleries, museums, film festivals, conferences, and alternative spaces through the US and in Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Recent awards include a 2011 Otis College Faculty Development Grant, 2011 Creative Capacity Fund’s Next Gen Arts Leader Professional Development Grant, 2009 Vermont Studio Center Artists Residency Grant, and 2008 Director’s Chair Film Festival Best Documentary Award. She is currently Assistant Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Rise Industries Collaborators:
Sarah Rushford is a multimedia artist, designer, and arts administrator living in Boston, MA. She earned her BFA from Hartford Art School in 1998 and MA in Media Studies from The New School in 2001. As a multimedia artist she is currently working in writing, video and alternative print processes, and has recently completed a residency at TAKT Kunstprojektraum in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Berlin and has upcoming exhibitions at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Worcester Art Museum. With previous experience as a Media Arts Teacher and Media Literacy Coordinator, Sarah recently founded Circadia, a web design and production company for artists, small businesses and non-profits. She is also an Assistant in Institutional Research at MassArt and has been a member of Axiom Center For New and Experimental Media in Boston.
Tim Devin is an artist based in Somerville, MA, whose work deals with humanizing public space, and combating the negative effects of urban anonymity. Tim’s projects have involved community, public space, books, zines, maps, walking tours, and giving things away for free. He has shown his projects around Boston and the U.S. as well as in a number of different countries. Since early 2011, Tim has also been a board member of the Somerville Arts Council.
Mike Feldman is an LA-based pianist, composer, and sound mixer. His work spans many genres including jazz, funk, electronic, classical, and experimental. He explores the process of improvisation and its correlation to the subconscious mind, as well as the relationship between sound and image. He is also very interested in the varying frequencies and amplitudes to which the air molecules around his head are vibrating at any given moment. Mike holds a Bachelor of Music from the Hartt School, in Hartford, CT where he studied Music Production Technology and Jazz Piano. He is currently a staff audio editor at Sony Pictures, and is co-owner of audio post-production company Boxing Nuns. He is keyboardist for LA funk band Cousin Junebug.
Nicole Jaquis is a new media artist and teacher, committed to empowering others to utilize various multimedia technologies to explore and share personal stories, ideas, differences and commonalities, in the pursuit of transcending both geographical and cultural boundaries. Since 2001 Nicole has split her time between New York and Northern India, while documenting the Naga Sadhus and Sadhvis of Juna Akhara, (the largest and oldest organization of Shiva worshiping Hindu ascetics). As a founding member of Projectile Arts based in Brooklyn, she was an Associate Producer for their documentary, Take Me to the River. She is now the Founder and Director of Aesthetics With Cameras, which provides multimedia services, tools and training to Juna Akhara. Nicole has a BA in Photography and Philosophy from Lake Forest College; has completed graduate level coursework in Educational Multimedia Development at Harvard University and in Photography at International Center for Photography. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited through out New York, New England, and India.
John Kim is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist, who works with a variety of media to question everyday assumptions and rethink the manners in which we interact with our world. His process is exploratory and often highly whimsical. If asked to summarize his work, he’d likely say he’s “still trying to figure out this art thing,” and “I am not a very serious person but I do take art very seriously… I think”. John Kim received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
Boris Margolin is a computer programmer, writer, and musician. His focus is on structures, physical or abstract, that embody information in unexpected ways. Boris earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Simon’s Rock College and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he focused on security protocol analysis and design. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts and is the chief technologist of a small financial services company.
—
Beginning January 31, 2011 and running for 100 consecutive business days, the ICI site and its archives is undergoing a multitude of interpretations. ICI has invited ten researchers-artists, writers, and visual thinkers-to set into play ideas that blend contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett, and a 2,500+ volume library along with the nooks and crannies of the eclectic, historically layered ICI space. With two weeks to conceive of their vision, curators will work in a designated laboratory modeled upon the transparent workspaces of 19th-century natural history museums. Each curator will conceptualize a new trajectory through ICI’s body, transforming the ICI display by the end of their residency. 100/10 project participants to date have included ∆1: Alex Harvey with Anna Ayeroff; ∆2: Antoinette LaFarge with Ruth Coppens; ∆3: Norway Nori; ∆4: Karen Frimkess Wolff and Paul W. Evans; ∆5: Pam Posey with Christine Nguyen; ∆6: Christel Dillbohner with Inge Kamps; as well as ∆7: Christian Smith and Rosie Woodward Smith.
Since 1991, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) has explored the role of visuality in imagining, perpetrating and perpetuating the intangible and ever-changing phenomena known as “culture.” The ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. The non-profit organization also maintains an active publishing program, releasing the critically acclaimed Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald in 2007. 100/10 is the first project conceptualized within the 2011-12 ICI study theme of Phantom Worlds.
Purchase catalog for 100/10∆8.
Read more about the complete 100/10 project.
100/10∆8 Postcard
100/10∆7 Press Release
100/10∆7: Christian Smith and Rosie Woodward Smith
One Day Event – Saturday May 28, 2011
Free to the public
From 1-7pm, visitors are invited to
collaborate and intervene in tactical activities
Reception from 7-9pm
LOCATION
1512 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035
(two blocks south of Pico); street parking available
For the seventh iteration of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s ambitious project 100/10 (100 days/10 visions), peripatetic curators Rosie Woodward Smith and Christian Smith enlist visitors in an urban forensic caper to map newfound cartographies between the Institute and its surroundings. Where history attempts to reveal (or conceal and distort) patterns of causality, the pair deploys the Institute’s vast trove of visual technologies to construct a display that serves as a two-way conduit. “Voices will find their way in,” they say. “Questions will find their way out. Images and messages will grow their own legs to walk the streets, be posted on walls, thrown in the trash.”
On May 28th, visitors are invited to trawl a square-block area around the ICI, plumbing a microcosm of the city grid for evidence—moments and phenomena, serendipitous coincidences of people, places, and things. A specially designated guest plinth will display selections from these foraging expeditions over the course of the day. The curators have also reconfigured the ICI laboratory space into a workshop for creating posters from the text and images generated in the first weeks of their residency. They will be printing on recycled t-shirts that visitors may bid upon with payment in the form of a reciprocal exchange: services, monies, and/or objects. At twilight the curators will discuss their process. An open microphone will allow guest poets and thinkers to hold forth on the curators’ working theme of ‘life as a mirror.’
A unique catalogue accompanies this exhibition. Modeled on the New Museum’s catalog for its 2008 landmark show After Nature, catalogues for the 100/10 shows exist as a dustcover enfolding a slightly used copy of a book that has influenced the show’s curator and artist. The 100/10∆7 catalog, wrapped around Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, may be purchased in the ICI gift shop or through the ICI website.
Artist and architectural psychologist Rosie Woodward Smith was born to Trotskyist parents in England’s industrial midlands. She has dissertated upon graffiti as a counter-cultural response to advertising, worked with acclaimed interactive theatre group Punchdrunk, produced workshops with Hackney Quest to enable young people to create pieces of spoken word performance, designed theatrical storefront installations, and advocated for prisoners’ freedom of expression.
Christian Smith mines the pedestrian potential of Los Angeles, California, after extended peregrinations through London, Berlin, Istanbul, and San Francisco. Smith’s formative years were spent in Germany, England, Toronto, and a yellow-tinged dreamscape. Committed to the intersections of sound, theatre, and writing, Smith has acted in experimental films, published photo-editorial pieces in Istanbul, and exhibited in London, most recently in a group show entitled Luxury Goods: The Price of Art.
Smith and Woodward Smith, with the assistance of award-winning street photographer Ima Kuroda, are in the midst of an ongoing photography and mapping project, Walking LA, that encourages communities to assemble collections of detail and motif to say something about their own specific locale. In recasting the street as a museum, a place to contemplate the inner beauty of the objects found there, the artists hope to provoke a deeper awareness in ordinary people concerning their immediate environment.
—–
Beginning January 31, 2011 and running for 100 consecutive business days, the ICI site and its archives is undergoing a multitude of interpretations. ICI has invited ten researchers-artists, writers, and visual thinkers-to set into play ideas that blend contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett, and a 2,500+ volume library along with the nooks and crannies of the eclectic, historically layered ICI space. With two weeks to conceive of their vision, curators will work in a designated laboratory modeled upon the transparent workspaces of 19th-century natural history museums. Each curator will conceptualize a new trajectory through ICI’s body, transforming the ICI display by the end of their residency. 100/10 project participants have included ∆1: Alex Harvey with Anna Ayeroff; ∆2: Antoinette LaFarge with Ruth Coppens; ∆3: Norway Nori; ∆4: Karen Frimkess Wolff and Paul W. Evans; ∆5: Pam Posey with Christine Nguyen; as well as ∆6: Christel Dillbohner with Inge Kamps.
—–
Since 1991, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) has explored the role of visuality in imagining, perpetrating and perpetuating the intangible and ever-changing phenomena known as “culture.” The ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. The non-profit organization also maintains an active publishing program, releasing the critically acclaimed Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald in 2007. 100/10 is the first project conceptualized within the 2011-12 ICI study theme of Phantom Worlds.
Purchase catalog for 100/10∆7.
Read more about the complete 100/10 project.
100/10∆7 Postcard
