[spectre] Speculative at LACE, June 16 - August 28

[micha cárdenas]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Speculative

16 June – 28 August, 2011

Opening reception
16 June, 8-10pm

FOR ALL PRESS INQUIRIES:        Robert Crouch 323.957.1777 x12, robert 4t
welcometolace dot org

For images and artist bios see:
http://welcometolace.org/exhibitions/view/speculative/

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Thursday, 30 June, 2011
7-9pm
Performances by Micha Cardenas, Elle Mehrmand, Christopher O’Leary,
Zach Blas, Malcolm Smith & Claudia Salamanca, MAL IDEA (Michelle Lee).

Thursday, 28 July, 2011
7-9PM
Panel Discussion with Christopher O’Leary, Zach Blas, Jack Halberstam,
and Jordan Crandall.

For the complete Thursday Nights at LACE summer schedule of events go
to http://welcometolace.org

Los Angeles, CA (1 June 2011) – LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions) is proud to present Speculative, a group exhibition
curated by Christopher O’Leary and Zach Blas. Speculative will focus
on new modes of art making and of presentation with an emphasis on the
experiential, subversive, and tactical potentials for art in the 21st
century. The projects included in this exhibition engage wildly
diverse mediums from critical software, art-science, social practices,
experimental video, wearable architecture, performance works and much
more.

Featuring work by Casey Alt, Zach Blas, Jeff Cain, Micha Cardenas &
Elle Mehrmand, Xarene Eskandar, Michael Kontopoulos, Christopher
O’Leary, Claudia Salamanca, and Pinar Yoldas, the exhibition takes a
multiplicity of forms and makes use of a variety of technologies
including digital video projection, sound devices, specific lighting
and other digital media to address notions of design, science,
business, sex, gender, death, politics, environmentalism and, most of
all — the future.

Christopher O’Leary’s speculates about an increasingly dystopic vision
of our future, as expressed through popular film, comics and
literature. His work, Blocking the Exits, is a dynamically-edited,
single-channel video project comprised entirely of still photographs
that have been animated through morphing algorithms. Jeff Cain uses
historical, botanical, and geographical research on the invasive
mustard plant spread throughout California by Franciscan Monks to mark
the El Camino Real to propose a 600 mile native biome restoration of
the historic royal road. His installation will use documentation of
original research and visualization of an imagined intervention to
reveal both an optimistic and fatalistic representation of colonialism
and the difficulties of undoing history. Xarene Eskandar investigates
the idea of ‘the fold’ in origami-based clothing designs that relate
the body to an unspoiled landscape. The forms themselves will be
installed in conjunction with media documentation depicting their use.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Today, we see the world we live in as an inviable world, and yet a
world poised for radical reconfiguration.

>From global economic crises to pandemic panics to burgeoning forms of
hatred and control to the ravaging of our earth, new borders and
quarantines haunt and terrorize the world at stochastic levels of the
global, nation-state, informatics, and the biological. Indeed, our
world presents to us the seemingly complete commodification of life,
culture, the body, the planet.

Yet, we find within these very inviabilities the kernels of potential
to enact and push forward new ways, worlds, and lives.

In fact, we see many up-risings emerging everywhere: from the calls to
action of militant groups like The Invisible Committee to the UC
student protests to the insurrections of the Middle East to the
digital activisims of WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

These all point toward living and existing in the world another way.

We see the SPECULATIVE as the uniting force in our artwork that
conjures forth the potential of the world we want, in political,
cultural, social, sexual, technological, biological, economic, and
ecological dimensions.

The SPECULATIVE is that imaginative, aesthetic work done by the artist
to create new possibilities, inspire change, gesture toward a livable
future, and generate new tactics and methodologies.

The SPECULATIVE asks us to use our imagination politically.

The SPECULATIVE allows us to subvert reality; practice new types of
activism; work with the impossible as a political framework;
rediscover the magic of our materials; question what a body and
collective is capable of; locate new sexualities and perversities;
reconfigure capitalism, design, and branding; create new worlds,
peoples, species, and ecologies; find embodiments and other productive
actions that emerge from war, apocalypses, disasters, and death; and
build our dream utopias.

SUPPORT

In-kind support for Speculative has been generously provided by the
UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and the Center for Research in
Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD.


-- 
micha cárdenas
Interim Associate Director of Art and Technology
Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UCSD

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9