Calendar
Gallery 101& 114
STATES OF BEING
A solo Exhibition featuring the work of second-year MFA Candidate, Andrew Somoskey.
Exhibition Reception Friday, October 6, 6PM-8PM
Artist Statement
At its core, my work examines identity and social constructs within society through the language of abstraction. Does the individual form society, or does society form the individual? What constitutes identity and the values of society; and ultimately determines who one is? What is the true representation of ‘self’; is it physical or digital? Is meaning gained or lost through these multiple representations?
My process is heavily influenced by my experience in construction and demolition. I use the grid as a surrogate for humanity and social structures. The grid has a power to harness a multiplicity of identities and existences in various stages of completion. Through these multiple modes of representation, I am not just questioning what makes something complete or incomplete, but what dictates the standard by which it is judged.
Gallery 114
Gallery 101
Galleries 101 & 114
RECEPTION January 19, 6-8PM, REMARKS 7PM
Join us Friday, January 19, 2018 from 6-8PM for the opening reception for In the absence of sight, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Alejandro T. Acierto at (SCENE) Metrospace. Opening Remarks will be offerd at 7PM.
Artist Statement:
In the absence of sight is a new body of work that draws on the erasures of Pilipinx people by American occupiers during the era of US colonialism in the early 1900s. Through an investigation of American archival photographs, postcards, and images housed in various collections in Michigan and Washington DC, this work reimagines erasure as an opening to speculate other forms of presence. While early depictions and characterizations of the Philippines projected a “savage” people “unfit for self-government”, US colonial officers, journalists, and writers used images of Indigenous Pilipinx people as a mechanism of persuasion to justify their sustained occupation to the American public. Though visual abjection often manifested in images of Pilipinx people either dead or in captivity persisting over three decades, this intervention draws on Pilipinx mythology of the Aswang, a shape shifting ghost-like spirit that wreaks havoc on its targets and their communities. In positioning Indigenous and mestizx resistance to US occupation as a metaphorical permutation of the Aswang, this work foregrounds Pilipinx sovereignty as a way to begin to challenge the formations of representation by the American colonial political agenda.