Lorena Molina

Lorena Molina

Work from The Reconciliation Garden.

The Reconciliation Garden is currently on view as part of The Regional at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH and will be travelling to the Kemper Museum of Art. The images are from a recent installation at The Welcome Project.

The project also provides viewers the opportunity to donate to the The Coffee Farmers Reconciliation Fund which will hopefully help fund coffee plantation recovery, restoration of 5,000 timber trees, improvement of drinking water supply, improvement of marketing of coffee, scholarships for coffee farmers to study @renacersv among other things.

“At the height of the coffee production in El Salvador, 95% of the country’s income came from coffee crops, yet the land was owned by less than 1% of the population. This resulted in vast land ownership and economic inequalities, especially for those working the coffee fields. Any protest by coffee farmers was met with harsh and deadly force from the government and coffee farm owners. This suppression of protest led civilians to
form a guerilla that resulted in a civil war, which lasted 12 years because the US helped fund it.

The war was fought in small towns, on farms, in forests and jungles and the combat was surrounded by banana plants, coffee plants, mangoes, and palm trees. Reconciliation Garden brings these plants into the gallery to serve as a place for meditation, conversation, and acknowledgement of the history of the US in El Salvador. The exhibition specifically highlights, how our actions that we might take for granted in our daily routines, such as coffee, are loaded with histories of exploitation, genocide, and imperialism. It also questions preconceived ideas about freedom and safety and the price paid for these ideas.

Notably, my practice has taught me that art can provide a space for witnessing and acknowledging difficult histories that we might not be aware of that we’re part of. In order for true reconciliation to happen, we must acknowledge the pain caused in the past, the present, and the pain that we will continue to cause in the future if amends are not made. Pain that whether we like it or not, we are complicit and continue to benefit from it.

Participants in the exhibition are first asked to make a cup of coffee, grown, and picked by coffee farmers in El Salvador and roasted in El Salvador as well.

While they drink their coffee- they watch a short video by Carlos Corado that features Emilio Valenzuela, a coffee farmer in El Salvador. After watching the video, they listen to a 7 mins guided meditation while they drink the coffee in the garden.

After the participants are done with the meditation- they have access to a workbook that includes history and timeline of events about coffee in El Salvador in relation to the civil war, battle over land, and US involvement. It also includes information and history about the coffee farms and organizations we worked with for this project.
The workbook also provides a space for them to answer some of the questions in the meditation.

There’s a wall on the gallery where participants are asked to collectively reflect and respond to the question “How do we make amends for the action of this country?”

This project is possible thanks to a Truth and Reconciliation grant by ArtsWave, with support from the City of Cincinnati, Duke Energy, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Fifth Third Bank and the Arts Vibrancy Recovery Fund. And thanks to the collaboration and input from the following coffee farms and activist organizations: Cooperativa El Espino, Cooperativa San Isidro, Cafe Juayua, Renacer, and Fecoracen . As well as the studio and research support from Becca Moskowitz, Hailey Fulford, Katherine Taylor, Elan Schwartz, Emmaline Carter and Vicky Lee.” – Lorena Molina

Photographs and video by Carlos Corado and Lorena Molina.

Miles Greenberg


Miles Greenberg

Work from LATE OCTOBER (performers and collaborators listed in the link).

“The Black body as infrastructure for the divine, the Black body as a vessel, the Black body as a generative and re-generative terrain, in Permanent Readiness for the Marvellous; the Black body as the liminal; the Black body as the cusp of the cup that runneth over – the threshold is a means of survival.” – Miles Greenberg

Arthur Ou

Arthur Ou

Work from A Day of Times.

“When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being at the place where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line, but in a curve, and that its direction constantly changes.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, from “Culture and Value,” 1929

Brennan & Griffin is pleased to present A Day of Times, a solo exhibition of a new series by Arthur Ou. This is the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery.

Over the course of a day, from dawn until dusk, on October 21st, 2016, Ou made a sequence of exposures from a particular vantage point overlooking the Point Reyes coast in California. These 8×10 inch negatives were then used to produce a series of large scale analog prints that Ou hand tints with waxed pigment. The gradiated palette sits upon the surface like a thin veil, generating a play between color and surface, texture and light, depth and flatness. Each print is a unique work, extending the relationship between photography to the process of painting and drawing. ” – Kathryn Brennan Gallery

Grant Gill

Grant Gill

Work from Primary Magic.

“To be gay, at least during the time and place I came into my own identities, meant a varying level of removal from the heterosexual man. I have observed that the cause of this is for two reasons. The first, I must admit, is my own burden. It is the manifestation of gay desire and the fear of expressing it in visual or physical ways. The second is the expectations and stigma created by the evolution of traditional masculinity into toxic masculinity. Not only does gayness give emphasis to one’s otherness, it becomes conflated with the threat to the heterosexual’s sexuality. What the homosexual represents to toxic masculinity is a temptation of all things that have previously been cemented and understood.

Expressing love or desire with the male homosexual, as a male heterosexual, would, as Foucault once said, ‘cancel everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.’ To love a queer man is to be queer oneself, and this love can exist outside of sexuality. To be romanced and to have sex are not synonymous acts of love, and to see love as such is a dangerous territory to live in.

Primary Magic is a body of photographic work that looks at male friendship as a ritual practice outlined by a number of self-ascribed queer and magical qualities: desire, flexibility, performance, transformation, and the return. Over various excursions and vacations with two male friends that I have come to love dearly, we practiced exercises in intimacy, played out fantasies specific to my own gay desires, and bonded in ways that created new lines of communication that I have never experienced with straight men in the past.” – Grant Gill

Quayola

Quayola

Work from Sculpture Factory.

“Sculpture Factory, the work by Quayola […] extends the reach of these new spaces onto the factory floor. The artist displays the construction of one of his unfinished sculptures as a performative sculpture in itself. For eight weeks, a robotic milling machine chips away at blocks of material, producing a series of ‘unfinished’ sculptures – works which have been extended and dismantled by glitch.

The work brings process – rather than outcome – to the fore. Visitors to the exhibition can see the live translation of code to material, as manipulated digital renderings of Michaelangelo sculptures are whittled from white blocks.

“There is a very complex geometry to it, but actually this is really determined by the size of the drill bit and how it is moving through the block […] This is not something that has been designed on 3D software. It’s just a result of a series of operations and the process of the machine.” – Quayola remarks in an interview with the Creators Project.

The relationship between art and process heavily informs Quayola’s working process. The notion of ‘algorithmic creativity’ could be described in many ways; the sculptures produced by the industrial machines in Sculpture Factory are one such description. Another, more bodily description is the tangible, temporal impact the performance of the machines has on space and materials – the ‘sculptor’ has been programmed to produce something which, by hovering close to classical aesthetic ideas, disrupts them owing to the difference in process.” – text via Sedition Art

Jinwoo Hwon Lee

Jinwoo Hwon Lee

Work from Tell Them I said Hello.

“I was 19, when I came back by myself to the United States since being a toddler.

I did not speak what everyone spoke. I knew no one. People in the small town noticed me by my color. Koreans born and raised in America thought I was too ‘Korean’. People back home thought I was too ‘American’. I was neither one of us nor one of them.

The physical and emotional distance between two homes never resolved. However, learning to cope with a sense of alienation enabled me to see others undergo their own.

The eclectic black and white photographs in this series reflect such emotions. No images in the series fully show a face of a person. Despite taken by the same photographer, no images were taken in the same locations. This signifies the scattered identity and also metaphors the perceptions created both inside and outside. As a citizen and as an immigrant, I never felt fully understood or wholeheartedly considered. Some nuances were always dismissed.

The seemingly disjointed objects and people in the series portray the alienated in different settings. The loose strings among the photographs, as metaphors and firsthand testimonies, invite viewers to imagine their own context of alienation. Despite its disparity, true subject of the series reaches the struggles experienced as the vulnerable; the rejected; and the departed from and within.

This body of work is part of the ongoing ‘Poem-ography’ series, in which both poetry and photography are realized in one medium – regardless of presence of text.” – Jinwoo Hwon Lee

Billie Zangewa

Billie Zangewa

Work from her oeuvre.

“Billie Zangewa’s background is as an engaged artist. A golden-fingered embroiderer, she has gradually garnered recognition on the African and international art scene. Her autobiographical works skilfully combine personal experience with universal subjects, from the hustle and bustle of urban megalopolises to ordinary activities in the life of a woman and mother in today’s world. Daily life thus serves as a pretext to engage in a political reflection on identity which insightfully challenges gender stereotypes and racial prejudices.

The artist is now taking her work in a new direction, moving away from purely domestic scenes to tackle topics with more of a universal and timeless dimension. Scraps of silk and various colourful, shiny textiles mingle delicately in the exhibition’s ten or so figurative compositions, painting narrative portraits that extol love in all its many facets. As the artist explains, ‘The exhibition is entitled Soldier of Love because I believe that especially at this time in history that we live in, universal and personal love is something that we have to fight for. I consider myself a soldier of love.'” – Galerie Templon

Jesse Ly

Jesse Ly

Work from Image Interference @ BasketShop.

“Through the process of both creation and experience of discursive depictions, Image Interference balances both the appearance of indexical truth and anecdotal nature of photographic imagery. Within the foreground lies the viewer transitional experience from presentation to impression. Reckoning with the varying nuances from what once was and now appears before the viewer, but in the form of a flattened and cropped view, allows for changing perspectives that directly create liminal spaces. Adjustments that move the individual view to including and understanding the view of others addresses this gap and expands the photographic dialog from “what is here,” to “how is it here and why.” These concerns and notions further divide these gaps that allow bleeding into more specific concerns in relation to identity. In the case of this work, pertinent concerns directly address facets of relationships, nostalgia, passing moments, racial disparity, melancholy and appreciation. This deconstruction incites a willingness to transcend and further understand these disparities of viewing, in terms of both photographic and actuality. Coming into these compositions from the array of varying and subversive experiences every person holds creates differentiation subjected to the photographs. This questioning within photographic complexity extends the conversation of the continual necessity of image making and instigates these pursuits to further understand what directly comes from and differentiates in these pulls from reality.” – Jesse Ly

Widline Cadet


Widline Cadet

Work from her oeuvre.

“Widline Cadet (b. 1992 in Pétion-Ville, Haiti; currently lives and works in New York) is a Haitian-born artist. Her practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, and Haitian cultural identity from a viewpoint within the United States. She uses photography, video, and installations to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hypervisibility, black feminine interiority, and selfhood.”

Karolina Wojtas

Karolina Wojtas

Work from The Extremely Rich Fauna of the Local Area.

“…No sense in assuming an academic tone, we’re in the woods, after all. Peculiarities abound. Here the hedgehogs can be coniferous or deciduous, occasionally mixed. Vegetarian lions prance through the meadows. Snails and deer: they’ve both got horns. Otherwise you grasp for similarities in vain. A squirrel suffering from amnesia cannot recall where it hid its salubrious nuts last autumn. The butterflies while away the hours tracing nonsensical poems in the heated air. They say that butterflies are the souls of wilted flowers. Most likely this doesn’t concern domesticated flowers—perhaps this is why it is so hard to tame a butterfly. We make all these conjectures, however, with no scientific basis. There are too many butterflies and flowers here to make room for scientists. And only every so often the light flashes, and the woods fall still. The woodpecker stabs his beak into a tree trunk. The wolves stretch open their mouths. Silence falls. The cage closes, everyone keeps on drinking from the mud puddle.” – This text was based upon Zbigniew Batko’s novel Z powrotem, czyli fatalne skutki niewłaściwych lektur [Returning, or: The Dire Consequences of Reading the Wrong Books] (Warsaw, 1985). Edited by: Nadia Dziurdzia via TFHKoncept