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Washington Post
Hot Off The Presses: A Pot Full Of Issues
 Photo credit: By Dave Gustine Transformer Gallery |
By Rachel Beckman,
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 19, 2007; Page C01
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Last week at Transformer Gallery, people were eating "newspaper soup," a boiled mixture of water, chicken bouillon and strips of newspaper. Artist Carolina Mayorga served the chunky, inky concoction to a few brave attendees, one of whom said it tasted like "dirty chicken."
Transformer's Executive Director Victoria Reis sipped the newspaper soup broth but "didn't go there with the chunks," she says.
"I figure the alcohol kills the toxic stuff," Reis says, gesturing to her glass of white wine.
Mayorga was inspired to create the art installation, called "New Trends in South American Cuisine," after hearing about people eating newspaper soup in Colombia, where she is from.
"It's about poverty because people do that out of starvation," Mayorga says. "It's also playing with the idea of consumerism."
Her show included a video of a mock infomercial for the soup and packages of the ingredients, on sale for $1.50. Mayorga would sell only one package per customer because "you only get what you need," she says. She sold about 45 packages at the opening reception.
The soup's list of ingredients takes a jab at the media: Each package says it contains two cups of advertisements, one cup of sports and only 1/2 teaspoon of art and culture (she used The Washington Post for all of her soup).
During the reception, Mayorga played merengue music and cooked under a picture of palm trees at sunset.
"I wanted to play with the stereotype of Latinos being dancers and always festive," she says.
Mayorga's installation kicked off a series of week-long exhibitions at Transformer called "E4: Station to Station." The series features the four participants in this year's Exercises for Emerging Artists program, which links artists with mentors for biweekly critiques.
Tonight, Arlington-based video artist Rob Parrish will present his new work, "Jack" (as in Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland's character in TV's "24"). Parrish combines footage from "24" with the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded threat advisory system. It's a video about lying, and it critiques both "24" and the advisory system as "absurd propaganda," Parrish says.
Inside the gallery she'll play recordings of the swish-swoosh of herself ice skating. Outside on P Street, she'll draw figure eights by attaching chalk to in-line skates. Adams plans to skate each day around 2 a.m. to avoid cars.
Toosi is setting up a faux accounting firm called H&R CABBAGE to calculate gallery visitors' personal carbon emissions. She'll be at Transformer full time from Aug. 1 to 4 for this performance piece, titled "You're Not as Green as You Are Cabbage-Looking."
Toosi says she's poking fun at the trendiness of environmentalism and also giving people a tangible idea of their carbon footprints.
"I'm usually interested in things that are in the spotlight because they come and go," she says. "In fact, it's a very long-lasting issue."
"E4: Station to Station" runs through Aug. 4 at Transformer Gallery, 1404 P St. NW. Wednesday-Saturday, 1-7 p.m. Free. 202-483-1102.
Express: A Publication of The Washington Post
Back-to-Back Art
July 12, 2007
Mentor Exercise: Transformer's developmental program offers support to up-and-coming artists.
By Zoe Pollock
Posted: July 5, 2007
“ ‘Emerging’ is such an odd buzz word,” says Victoria Reis, executive director of Transformer and co-founder of the gallery’s Exercises for Emerging Artists program. “It has more to do with experimentation than with younger artists. Artists can be emerging at all different stages of their careers.”
That’s certainly true for 43-year-old Rob Parrish, one of the artists in Transformer’s upcoming exhibit, “E4: Station to Station.” Parrish, who’s been creating video art for the past 16 years, joins three other artists participating in the latest installment of the four-month developmental program. Launched in 2004, Exercises brings artists together to discuss ideas and processes, as well as to undergo peer and mentor critiques on a bi-weekly basis. The whole project culminates with an exhibit of their work.
“It’s an opportunity for artists to connect with their peers and mentors, once they’re outside of the art-school experience,” Reis says of the program. “Unless you’re being nurtured by a gallery, you’re not always engaged by fellow artists....We provide support for them, whether it’s finalized projects or just a presentation point.”
Reis says she initially sought out guest curator Niels Van Tomme—who serves as the co-director of the International Curators Program Antwerp and, in April, curated the four-day “Multimediale” arts festival here—because of his background in film and mixed media. He and an assortment of artists, including visual artist Alberto Gaitán and Corcoran Curator of Photography and Media Arts Paul Roth, offered guidance and feedback to the program’s artists as they developed their work. The idea is that work will be first shared within the immediate circle of the participating artists, then with the mentors, and then opened to a public audience for feedback, says Reis.
“It was a little nerve-wracking, allowing perfect strangers to look at things that aren’t finished,” Parrish notes, before adding that “the process branched me off into some other projects that wouldn’t have bubbled off, left to my own devices.”
Due to space restraints and the expansive nature of multimedia, Van Tomme decided early on that each artist would require a four-day solo installation. “We knew it wouldn’t be a normal exhibition with paintings or photos, but an experiential space for each station of work,” he says.
“E4” opens with Carolina Mayorga’s “New Trends in South American Cuisine” (July 11n14), which explores themes of social politics and protest through video, performance, and installation art. Parrish’s “Jack” (July 18n21) mixes television and archival footage in the examination of propaganda and manipulation. Former figure skater Rebecca C. Adams analyzes the pedantic tracing of figure eights in “Compulsory Figures and ∞” (July 25n28). In her environmental performance piece, “You’re Not as Green as You Are Cabbage-Looking” (Aug. 1n4), Fereshteh Toosi will calculate carbon emissions for audience members.
As Reis’ program continues to develop up-and-coming talent in the D.C. area, it also continues to solidify Transformer’s reputation as a site for experimentation, capable of both creativity and professionalism. “In their approach, Transformer is very European and reminds me of alternative, underground art spaces in Brussels and Antwerp,” says Van Tomme. “Many times art tries to take itself so seriously. Transformer does take art seriously, but they are also rock and roll.”“E4: Station to Station” opens Wednesday, July 11, and is on view from 1 to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, to Saturday, Aug. 4, at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. Free. (202) 483-1102.
dcist.com
SiteProject Sets Up Shop on 14th Street
June 18, 2007
[excerpt]
"New Arrivals (pictured) by Caroline Mayorga is on display at Garden District, a neighborhood nursery. The piece places bright green cutouts of praying mantises on a brick wall outside of the store. The installation is one of the more purely aesthetically pleasing, as is an untitled bamboo sculputre by Piero Passacantando that hangs above the entrance to Muleh. The piece resembles a large windchime and gives an organic feel that is an affecting contrast to the rigidity of its surroundings. Other pieces of note include Cycles, Elements and Spaces in Between, a multimedia interactive design by Roberto Bocci that is on display at Metropolis at 14th and P, and Michael Lease's The Lack of Words, a photographic piece at the old Church of the Rapture at 14th and T."
washingtonpost.com
Added 'Dimensions'
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2004; Page WE28
DON'T TAKE too literally the title of the exhibition "Sculpture in Four Dimensions" at the Art Museum of the Americas. In the words of Sculpture magazine Managing Editor Twylene Moyer, who organized the juried show with museum director Ana Maria Escallon from submissions that were both international and local (more on this later): "Don't expect any concrete representations of the hypercube's abstract geometry here." In other words, even though some works incorporate such airy-fairy media as "time" (one of the ingredients in David Meyer's "False Theory"), this is a show in which the definition of the titular dimension falls closer to something like "poetry" or "unexpected possibilities" than anything that can be measured with a yardstick, albeit a theoretical one.
What this also means, in practical terms, is that the most successful pieces, at least in terms of hewing to the theme, are those that are the most difficult to see.
I'll start with one example, which a casual visitor might easily overlook, if for no other reason than the fact that it's unlabeled. In fact, if you walk outside the museum to get to the garden behind it, where several of the sculptures have been installed, there's a good chance you'll find yourself standing on this particular artwork. There is no sign -- at the request of sculptor Carolina Mayorga of Colombia, I'm told -- because the artist didn't feel her piece was successful.
She's wrong.
Called "Grass Clock" and consisting of words "written" in brown sod that the artist had previously covered up next to the museum's outdoor pool, the simple work is as conceptual as it is sculptural. On the afternoon I visited, just before the opening reception, this message in patches of dried grass was faint but discernable: "As this sculpture fades, 22,500 children will die in war." By the time you see it, more of the once-green ground cover will assuredly have filled in, making it even harder to read, just as Mayorga's prophecy will have assuredly drawn closer to its sad fulfillment.
Other works vie with Mayorga's in subtlety, if not political punch, among them Katherine Kavanaugh's "Air," a gorgeous, site-specific installation -- no, make that flock -- of sewing needles stuck into the wall near the second-floor bathroom. Along with Margaret Boozer, Lynden Cline, Chas Colburn, Carolyn Jean, Erin Root and others, Kavanaugh is one of several fine Washington area sculptors whose works are showcased here. The show itself is one of several in an ongoing celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Washington Sculptors Group, who in this case have been paired with artists from the Americas (e.g., Argentina, Chile, Peru). I particularly liked Boozer's "Cross Eye Bird," a composition whose central, unearthed root, framed by an old wagon wheel, is a Duchampian departure from her more familiar ceramic art.
Intriguingly, the women outnumber the men here more than 3 to 1.
Could this perhaps account for that certain -- oh, I don't know -- delicacy alluded to earlier? It's probably sexist to even suggest that, yet it's easy for the thought to cross one's mind when encountering works incorporating feathers, hanging rayon paper, flour (and flowers), lipstick, optical fiber, porcelain, velvet, salt and dead bugs embedded in sheets of resin. To be sure, some of these materials appear in pieces by men, and there are certainly women in the show who work with steel -- as well as other, more "rugged" material.
Gender aside, though, the truest reason for this daintiness is the show's theme, which emphasizes ineffable qualities that go beyond length, width and height. As is often the case, the more unorthodox the material -- or, more specifically, the more fragile and ephemeral a work is -- the more it draws our attention away from what it's made of to the immaterial. Sharyn O'Mara's "Untitled: corner 1," a gossamer-like cloud of shimmering optical fiber and monofilament that suggest a beatific visitation, is such a piece. So is Lucy Norman Spencer's "Her Jewels," a sweet little nest of burnt wood containing egglike balls of Kosher salt and paraffin wax.
In a town known for its earthbound sculpture gardens, memorials, monuments and equestrian statuary, "Sculpture in Four Dimensions" is a welcome respite. The airiness and ethereality of its art do not, for the most part, connote a lack of gravity. Yes, there are some clunkers in this jewelry box of a show, but there also are some real gems.
SCULPTURE IN FOUR DIMENSIONS -- Through Sept. 30. Art Museum of the Americas, 201 18th St. NW (Metro: Farragut West). 202-458-6016. www.oas.org/museum. Open Tuesday-Sunday 10 to 5. Free.
Baltimore City Paper
High Impact: Death, Suffering and Salvation at School 33
By Mike Giuliano
Baltimore City Paper
February 14, 2001
[excerpt]
The three artists featured in the current exhibit at the School 33 Art Center's Gallery I, New Work, have Latino backgrounds that are reflected to varying degrees in the art they make.
Alexandria, Va., artist Carolina Mayorga's mixed-media works directly refer to the combustible political situation in Colombia. Woodcuts by Washington, D.C., artist Naul Ojeda include quotations from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. And Baltimore artist Luis Flores, who usually incorporates specific personal references in his work, has an installation here that's loosely autobiographical at best.
Mayorga's varied offerings plunge us into the bloody specifics of an uncivil society. Her pieces include "Mortal Journey I," a series of 24 wooden panels on which the combination of printed male names and splattered red paint makes us think about individuals brutally cut down. "Mortal Journey I Floor Game" involves red footprints lined up on the floor as if to invite your feet to walk a certain path, game "rules," and biographical data about murdered and missing young men from the pages of a Colombian newspaper.
There's no denying the power of her artistic approach, but Mayorga's best pieces are allusive rather than so bluntly graphic. In the wall-mounted, mixed-media construction "US," a wooden panel serves as the backing for a padlock and the soles of a pair of shoes. In several related pieces, the affixed objects include barbed wire and baby shoes. These pieces resonate in a more poetic and yet no less visceral manner than the "Mortal Journey" pieces. There's a sense of sorrow that assumes a particular loss and also extends to a more universalized sense of oppressed and truncated lives. By way of analogy, consider how gun-control activists in our own country have made their point by lining up the shoes of murder victims along the marble steps of legislative buildings--a subtle tactic more effective than distributing grisly crime-scene photographs might be."