ABOUT THIS EVENT
The Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts Presents "Artadia Boston"
Opening Reception: March 26, 2010, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Families Connect Workshop: April 3
Gallery Talk: April 21, 2010, 6:00 p.m.
The Boston Center for the Arts, (BCA) in partnership with Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, is delighted to announce the exhibition "Artadia Boston," featuring the work of the 2009 Artadia Awardees Claire Beckett, Ambreen Butt, Caleb Cole, Raúl González, Eric Gottesman, Amie Siegel, and Joe Zane.
Artadia Awardees were selected through a rigorous two-tiered jury process and a panel of five prominent jurors-Sanford Biggers (artist, New York), Dan Cameron (Director, Prospect.1 New Orleans), Peter Eleey (Visual Arts Curator, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis), Rita Gonzalez (Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and Randi Hopkins (Associate Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston). José Luis Blondet, Curator of Visual Arts at the BCA, organized the exhibition.
This is Artadia’s second awards cycle in Boston, following the inaugural cycle in 2007 and exhibition in 2008, also at the BCA’s Mills Gallery. The current exhibit, "Artadia Boston," features new and recent work by these exceptional Boston-based artists.
Claire Beckett presents three portraits from the series "Simulating Iraq," made on military bases within the U.S. in fabricated spaces designed to simulate conditions on the battleground.
Ambreen Butt revisits old techniques and styles from the Pakistani tradition that she combines with more contemporary practices to create multilayered drawings telling a variety of stories. Using translucent papers and Mylar, Butt’s works veils and unveils issues related to cultural stereotypes, tradition, gender, and power.
Caleb Cole’s portraits always feature the same character-himself-wearing someone else’s clothes, unfolding a series of personas and situations.
Raúl González explores the mythology of the West with a cartoon aesthetic that renders a violently funny and uncanny world of tepees and other cultural stereotypes. His paintings, installation, and video engage the viewer through their darkly provocative sense of humor.
Eric Gottesman’s installation, The Preservation of Terror, consists of different personal photographs, usually passport photos, from collaborators in Ethiopia. The arrangement and manipulation of these pictures on the wall suggests the intersection between the political and the personal, highlighting the active role that photography as a genre plays in the constructions of identity.
Amie Siegel works in film, video, sound, and text. She will present new works at the Mills Gallery, The Modernists I and II, a video and a photograph, respectively, in the EXIT Room of the Mills Gallery. The video is a collection of clips in super-8, from her personal archive, where her mother is posing next to "modern" sculptures photographed by her father. Siegel departs from these images to articulate a discussion about the gaze, touching upon notions of gender and modernism.
Joe Zane questions notions of originality and the exhibition system with a disarming sense of humor. Zane commissioned portraits of himself from a factory in Asia, to present them in the context of an art gallery as self-portraits. His work contributes to the discussion of representation, portraiture, and identity.
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