Curation
Ghostly Matters part of the Terrain Biennial | 2019
Terrain Exhibitions was founded in Oak Park, Illinois by artist Sabina Ott in 2011 with a spirit of profound generosity, and community building. Over the course of seven years Ott invited over a hundred artists to exhibit site specific works in her front yard and on the porch at her home in Oak Park that she shared with her husband and author John Paulett. In 2013 Ott created the Terrain Biennial. Ott staged the month long public art event asking her neighbors to host artists she invited to exhibit in the biennial. The 2015 and 2017 Terrain Biennials grew to include host locations all over Oak Park and Chicago with many national and international locations as well. In the summer of 2018 Sabina Ott passed away leaving behind a legacy of radical energy, caring magic, and deep community. This year's Biennial is being held in Ott's honor at numerous international locations.
The exploration of landscape reflected in the study of a fly to the audio visual discovery of childhood memory through internet archives Ghostly Matters will dissect personal histories that function as questions to larger systematic ideologies that control our present terrains. These environments span from the political to the personal and observe how memory and family lineage impact the reality of our current occupied landscapes. The films investigate lost histories that examine communal absence, questions of belonging and ecosystems of inherited traumas that are a direct reaction from colonized oppression. Each work searches over the terrain of the invisible, looking into experiences we cannot claim as our own, yet completely come to find have defined our existence.
Image from Falling by Sarah Ibrahim
PROGRAM
Untitled Anaglyph 3D for 2 16mm Projectors (work in progress) - Christina C. Nguyen, USA, 2019, 7 minutes
Left and right, then right and left. Creating an exterior, beginning from within.
A Study of Fly - Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, USA, 2018, 13 minutes
A Study of Fly is a reflection on the relationship between insect, human, environment, and the universe. The fly in this film can be approached as a living being, a metaphor for human desire to reach beyond, and a state that demonstrates the capacity to move between the realms of life and death.
The Protagonists - Gabi Dao, Canada, 2018, 8 minutes
The Protagonists is a conflation of themes surrounding the intersections of cinema and conflict, time and labour, memory and representation. Throughout the hypnagogic landscape of the video, the associative and symbolic imagery aims to complicate these themes— it proposes a subtext that allegorizes the movement within moving images to diasporic experience.
In the video, the image of the hand— on a clock, on a metronome, the hands of the artist’s family members, the hand of an open-source robot, persists as a motif of measured work and care. They vary between articulate and purposeful, clumsy and inefficient, occupied and then encumbered, keeping time then skipping through it. These hands are then connected to working bodies as family members weave in and out of the frame, preferring not to reveal their faces when going about their day. Explosions and coloured smoke in their suburban garden interrupt the household’s ongoing activities. An unfurled VHS tape and a rapid succession of family photographs refuse the nostalgia inherent in their format. Sampled video and audio clips from Vietnam war movies and user uploaded Youtube video essays collage and ‘conflict’ throughout the footage of the suburban household.
The Isle of Píritu - Edgar Jorge Baralt, USA, 2014, 7 minutes
Three miles off the coast of Eastern Venezuela lies the Píritu Isle, where an abandoned lighthouse stands.
Falling - Sarah Ibrahim, USA, 2019, 1 minute
An existential question can uproot your entire internal landscape. When you fall into this void, what might it look like?
32 + 4 - Chan Hau Chun, Hong Kong, 2015, 32 minutes
The director spent her childhood living apart from her family and knew very little about its history. This changed when she graduated from college and decided to face her parents with her camera in search for answers to questions about her past.
Vague Images at the Beginning and End of the Day - Carl Elsasser, USA, 2015, 8 minutes
A hug/punch eulogy for all things impossible now. Vague Images is a sketch book of images and sounds from the year wrapped around a trip out to Loomis, South Dakota to find the abandoned farm where my grandfather grew up. At the same time the film is a travelogue of my frustrations and understandings of gay sexuality. The two are connected.
How Are You, My Child? - Udval Altangerel, USA, 2018, 6 minutes
Written in Mongolia, sent to the Soviet Union, re-discovered in the U.S. - three letters from three generations of women examine how language can function as a site of alienation.
And the Villagers Never Liked You Anyway | 2015
An archaeological survey of 0.002 acres
Under the direction of Dr. Ulf Hueber
US Geological Survey Quadrangle Code: o40073f8
Location: Knockdown Center, 52-19 Flushing Ave. Maspeth
Sorry Archive chose 8 curators with diverse modes of practice to participate in this exhibition. They were each allotted one 2’ by 5’ plot of land to use in any way they chose. There was no conceptual prompt other than the physical constraints. Sorry Archive has no authority over the results and presents them in situ, organized alphabetically. A positive control plot is curated by Sorry Archive. The last, empty plot is a negative control.
Aeaeae Gallery (Matthew Speedy), Chris Romero (Desiree Leary), Just In Time [Names withheld], Packet Biweekly (Anthony Cudahy, Bridget Collins, Chris Nosenzo, Christine Zhu, Ian Lewandowski, Nicole Reber), SIGNAL (Anna K. Miller), Sorry Archive (Adam Ledford, Alexandra Lombard, Cara Marie Piazza, Carbon Therrien, Carmel Dunlap, Chris Milic, Reade Bryan, Reid Strelow, Sasha Cohen, Saul Schisler, Sophy Naess, Yasunari Izaki), Vanessa Thill (Alexandra Lerman, Laura Miller, Tai Yin Ho), Where (Lucy Hunter, R. Lyon)
Press Release
Exhibition Catalog
Press Release for NYPAC's "Past Present Futures" Performance
[Art in America]
[Blouin Artinfo]
[Hyperallergic]
Interphase | SELECT Fair Miami Beach 2015
A demonstration of cellular interphase in the form of a group exhibition.
Sorry Archive presents a cellular installation in constant biological motion. Each day of the fair, a new oil painting by Eric Wiley joins a new graphic panel on rotating mechanical support by B Thom Stevenson. Joshua Liebowitz acts as an enzymatic agent in the cell, synthesizing digital DNA from the other two images to produce a dynamic video projection that evolves throughout the five day art fair.
Enclosed in a permeable membrane, the booth is manifested as one in a series of independent cells that comprise the latticed structure of an art fair.
Press Release
Cellular Reference Sheet
List of Works
Day 1
B Thom Stevenson, Alt P.O.V. Unit 1
approx. 26” x 18” x 81”, dimensions variable.
Aluminum, steel, marble, electric motor, rubber
(Shown with panel: Jeremiah, Oil enamel on stainless steel, 22” x 17”)
Joshua Liebowitz, E : D1 (from Tangle E)
Split screen, single-channel HD video, 1280 x 720 pixels, 01:12:13, single edition
Eric Wiley, Fascinating, the altar of the eternal good
Oil on canvas, 52” x 40”
Day 2
B Thom Stevenson, Alt P.O.V. Unit 1
approx. 26” x 18” x 81”, dimensions variable
Aluminum, steel, marble, electric motor, rubber
(Shown with panel: Zodiac, Oil enamel on stainless steel, 22” x 17”)
Joshua Liebowitz, E : D2 (from Tangle E)
Split screen, single-channel HD video, 1280 x 720 pixels, 01:12:13, single edition
Eric Wiley, Requiem for the idol against the eternally scaling abyss
Oil on canvas, 44” x 40”
Day 3
B Thom Stevenson, Alt P.O.V. Unit 1
approx. 26” x 18” x 81”, dimensions variable
Aluminum, steel, marble, electric motor, rubber
(Shown with panel: Metal Workers, Oil enamel on stainless steel, 22” x 17”)
Joshua Liebowitz, E : D3 (from Tangle E)
Split screen, single-channel HD video, 1280 x 720 pixels, 01:12:13, single edition
Eric Wiley, Obscure wisps of pure data-stream
Oil on canvas, 50” x 42”
Day 4
B Thom Stevenson, Alt P.O.V. Unit 1
approx. 26” x 18” x 81”, dimensions variable
Aluminum, steel, marble, electric motor, rubber
(Shown with panel: Linking the World for Peace, Oil enamel on stainless steel, 22” x 17”)
Joshua Liebowitz, E : D4 (from Tangle E)
Split screen, single-channel HD video, 1280 x 720 pixels, 01:12:12, single edition
Eric Wiley, Remote rebuttal, forgotten patrol
Oil on canvas, 44” x 38”
Day 5
B Thom Stevenson, Alt P.O.V. Unit 1
approx. 26” x 18” x 81”, dimensions variable
Aluminum, steel, marble, electric motor, rubber
(Shown with panel: Blood Farmers, Oil enamel on stainless steel, 22” x 17”)
Joshua Liebowitz, E : D5 (from Tangle E)
Split screen, single-channel HD video, 1280 x 720 pixels, 01:12:12, single edition
Eric Wiley, The ideals of the deep-thinker dude
Oil on canvas, 20” x 16”
PLASKRIT | 2015
The Plaskrit Corp Fall 2014 Trade Show unveils six new product lines from Speedy, Thill, Potter, Powell, Mirocha, and Horwitz.
Plastics professionals unite for one night only! Join us as we enjoy the truly unique advantages of plastics: flexibility, strength, sheerness, ability to withstand chemical corrosion, low coefficiency of friction, lifelike features, long life and reparability.
Explore new technologies, meet like-minded entrepreneurs, and experience the power of plastic.
PFA | 2014
13 year-old Bred Peterman, imagining an apocryphal armageddon on his birthday, shows off his bedroom posters. Featuring original editions by Ivana Basic, Robert Blair, Mitchell Charbonneau, Henry Gunderson, Paris Hynes, Suhee Kang, Alison Mushalko, Tin Nguyen, Chris Nosenzo,Eric Wiley
Press Release
Invitation
Press | The Wild Magazine
Donkey Show | 2014
Local taxi drivers use this wall space to promote illicit shows with ambiguous objects, in order to appear inconspicuous to local law enforcement. The objects are recognizable only to those looking to attend a show, and will be replaced with each tourist season.
With clues from Alex Lombard, Vanessa Thill, Joie Estrella, B. Thom Stevenson, Stephen Zerbe, June West
Vanessa Thill
B. Thom Stevenson
Joie Estrella Horwitz
Alex Lombard
June West
Stephen Zerbe