PROGRAMS AND EVENTS INFORMATION SUPPORT PRESS SPACE RENTAL
Exhibitions Festival Outer Space Artist Opportunity Workshop Past Programs & Events
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PROGRAMS AND EVENTS INFORMATION SUPPORT PRESS SPACE RENTAL Exhibitions Festival Outer Space Artist Opportunity Workshop Past Programs & Events |
Holy Holes: Absolute Stalls Curator's Talk: July 27th, 2008, 6 - 7 PM |
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Joseph Bennett, still from video Untitled (2007) Holy Holes: Absolute Stalls is a multimedia exhibition exploring different viewpoints on the relationship between religion, power and economics. This show looks at religion from a humorous, poetic and critical perspective, subverting traditional expectations and inviting viewer to interact, transform, or reflect on the relationship between religious rituals and consumerist everyday practices. Among the more general ideas gathered in this show is how religious rituals and dogmas are used to sustain gender and ethnic differences, and to claim absolute power through propagandistic consumerist strategies. The other end of the spectrum here is how believers react. Whether individually or collectively, more intimately or overtly, and whether we are believers or not, most of us are usually caught in the web of religious imagining, as receptacles of divine inspiration or intervention, or as messengers of absolute power. Another aspect of how believers react is in the fluxes of social change through language and culture assimilation, re-contextualizing and reshaping language structures, which leads to competing and shifting positions of power. Some dogmatic languages are kept untouched, while others result from the mixing of sub-cultural trends into the mainstream via the many cultural industries of a free market society. In this show, absolute messages are equated with anarchic demonstrations, self-conscious humor and a bit of deep reflection, bringing the viewer to a contradictory duality of cathartic interaction and religious critique. Artists: Denise Carvalho is an art critic, curator, and independent scholar based in New York City. As an art critic, Ms. Carvalho’s contribution includes more than 80 published articles for magazines such as Flash Art, Sculpture, Art Papers, Review, Journal of Contemporary African Art, and more recently, Afterimage and Art in America. She is also an essayist, with several published essays in artists’ catalogs. Her experience as an independent curator includes major multimedia projects such as “Infinitu et Contini” (2007) and “RAW” (2003) at Smack Mellon, New York,“Hybrid Dwellings” (2001) at the City Gallery of Bialystok, Arsenal Gallery, Poland, and “Fairy-Tale” (1999) at the Center for Metamedia, in the Czech Republic. Ms. Carvalho’s curatorial projects have been featured in magazines such as Time Out, New Yorker, New York Arts, Sculpture, Brooklyn Rail, Springerin (Austria), Umelek (Prague), Journal of Performing Arts (MIT), and in articles and reviews on Polish and Czech local television, radio and newspapers. Her education includes a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies and three Masters in Art—art history and cultural studies, from the University of California at Davis, and anthropology from Hunter College (NY), as well as a B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts (NY). As an educator, Ms. Carvalho has taught at Pratt Institute, College of Staten Island CUNY, San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University, Columbia College, and will be serving as a Director of Independent Studies at The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts beginning February 2008. |
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