project by Marcus Civin
Saturday, July 18
12-3 pm
Sea and Space Explorations
4755 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
Join us for something between a poetry reading, an artist talk and an art history lecture.
This afternoon of conversation and presentations will ask: how do artists and writers form relationships between the verbal and the visual? Are there parallel trajectories, mutual problems? More specifically, how do artists and writers approach language and history? ... How can various languages (political speech, scientific language, art theory, etc.) inform and lend form to contemporary art and writing? Also, how might various histories (histories of artists and writers, American histories, activist histories...) directly influence production or lead towards necessary abstractions. What is the language of a fading color? We will imagine certain subtexts, fantasize a few found photographs, and reconstruct some body language... through art and writing."
Guest Speakers:
Andrew Printer
Ginny Cook
Kenny Berger
Kristine Thompson
Maggie Nelson
Marcus Civin
Vanessa Place
Bios:
Andrew Printer was born in Hong Kong and raised there, Texas and rural England; he now lives in California where he is pursuing an MFA at UCI. His practice encompasses photography, performance, video, object-making and writing, all of which engages the shimmering, mutable, perplexing nature of his post-gay identity.
Ginny Cook received her BA in Art History from Emory University in 2000 and her MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. Most recently her work was included in Light & Wire at Circus Gallery (Los Angeles) and Complicity: Contemporary Photography and the Matter of Sculpture, at Rena Bransten Gallery (San Francisco). Cook is also co-founder and co-editor of MATERIAL, a journal of artists’ writings. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Kenny Berger is an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles. He teaches art theory and criticism at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts.
Kristine Thompson lives in Los Angeles with her cat Zami. She makes photographs and works in a photography museum. Her visual art and writing often deals with death, myth, and romanticism. She recently spent a year in Germany as a D.A.A.D. fellow (but still doesn't like sauerkraut).
Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of two works of nonfiction: a critical study about poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007), and a book about her family, criminal justice and media spectacle titled The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2007). She is also the author of numerous books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). Her next book, a work of creative nonfiction about the color blue titled Bluets, is due out this October from Wave Books. A work of art criticism titled The Art of Cruelty is also forthcoming from WW Norton. She has been a contributor to Artforum as well a recipient of an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at CalArts.
Marcus Civin just finished his MFA in Studio Art at UC Irvine. Recently, Marcus’ writing and drawings have been published in David Brazil and sara larsen’s Oakland-based Try! magazine, and at digitalartifactmagazine.com. Marcus performed a new piece, Bounty, at LAXART in Los Angeles, as a part of Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites. Some of the texts from this performance are on view at compactspace LA until July 23, 2009, as part of Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites 2. Marcus is currently teaching an Artists and Writers course to undergraduates at UCI, and preparing a performance/sculpture, collaboration comedy, Johnny Angel, with Sandy de Lissovoy for Perform! Now! in Chinatown, Los Angeles, July 25, 2009.
Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2), and, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse (December 2008)). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press in 2010. Place is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and is a co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”
