Johalla Projects Update
Hello everyone!
Johalla Projects is currently under construction.
We are excited for our fall programming, with a new exhibition going up in early October!
Check back here or on our Facebook for the most recent updates about Johalla Projects!
“These Moments” Installation Time-lapse Video
Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the installation of Matthew Hoffman’s sculpture These Moments at Pitchfork Music Fest!
Video by Zachary James Johnston.
Mention on WBEZ
We will be posting some our Pitchfork Fest installation mentions and features over the next couple of days, so keep checking back!
Here is one feature on WBEZ 91.5′s website. They posted our time-lapse video!
Check it out here: http://www.wbez.org/blogs/bez/2012-07/pitchfork-day-1-time-lapse-art-installation-100873
Johalla Projects Presents C____ OF THE EYE/ C____OF THE HAND
C____ OF THE EYE/ C____OF THE HAND
New work by Ivan Lozano
July 6, 2012 – July 27, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6th from 7-10PM
By Appointment Only
Repurposing pornographic imagery, Ivan LOZANO reinterprets the superstition and mysticism at the root of human religious impulses, while identifying the processes at work in both the practice of art and faith.
A direct reference to his Catholic upbringing in Guadalajara, LOZANO transforms the gallery into a basilica, the art becoming icons of worship. The “Stations of the Cross” are reimagined through sculptural objects composed of video stills from adult films, reflections of the parallels in all altered states (religious, sexual or otherwise). At the apse of LOZANO’s basilica, whether in pain or ecstasy, the viewer must submit to the subjectivity of his proselytism, as the central altar’s live video feed transubstantiates them into a part of the piece. In C_ OF THE EYE/C_ OF THE HAND, LOZANO transforms Johalla Projects into a temporary autonomous zone for veneration by using ritualistic narrative, cultic imagery and engaging the architecture of the gallery.
IVAN LOZANO – (b.1981, Guadalajara, MX) www.ivanlozano.net Lozano has previously shown with Johalla Projects, however this is his first solo show. He completed his B.S. in Radio, Television and Film at the University of Texas, Austin in 2005 and was the recipient of the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his MFA in Studio Art in 2011. His practice is rooted in folk/religious tradition and uses tech culture and materials such as gay pornography found online, wood, house paint, ribbon, jewelry chains, and mirrors to provide an air of sublimated elegance to his work. His work offers an alternative to the understanding of the world through digital image files that is fast becoming an inescapable condition of the digital age. Ivan lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Public Installation at Pitchfork Music Festival by Matthew Hoffman and Andrea Jablonski
New this year, Pitchfork Music Festival will feature two large-scale art installations from Chicago-based Johalla Projects. Pitchfork enlisted Johalla Projects’s Director Anna Cerniglia to produce the two installations from local-Chicago artists Matthew Hoffman and Andrea Jablonski. Hoffman will create a large sculpture next to the Blue Stage, spelling out “THESE MOMENTS” in eight foot tall wooden letters, elevated twelve feet high and 80 feet wide. Jablonski will transform the VIP Area by covering trees with hundreds of balloons of various shapes, sizes and colors, including glow-in-the-dark and LED balloons, morphing the trees into sculptures and canopies.
For more information, images or interview opportunities, contact Jaclyn Mellini, Johalla Projects Press Manager, at jamellini@gmail.com or 847.209.7426.
Johalla Projects Presents ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
Islands in the Stream
Works by Benjamin Funke & Gabrielle Gopinath
with a performance by Bitchin Bajas
June 1st, 2012 — June 29th, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1st from 7-10PM
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM features DVD projections and photographic stills by multimedia artists Benjamin Funke and Gabrielle Gopinath.
At the exhibition opening, Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan of Bitchin Bajas will perform live in a multimedia performance with real time video editing by the artists.
The videos in the show, titled Water Wrackets and Intervals, began as reinterpretations of Greenaway shorts from the late ‘60s. In both works the auteurs bring precision timing and an acid-etched color palette to the stylishly deadpan depiction of ebbs and flows.
Crowds of art gawkers captured at the Venice Biennale in Intervals, like the Indiana floodwaters that saturate the screen in Water Wrackets, seek the lowest point in the landscape. Crowds and liquids propagate across the screen in trickles and flows to the spacey drones of Crain’s soundtrack.
The soundtrack for Water Wrackets, which came out in 2011 as an LP / DVD set on Kallistei Editions, features episodic arrangements of acid-drenched garage psychedelia drawing inspiration from Ravi Shankar, Sun Ra and 1970s Krautrock.
Crain and Quinlivan will be performing the Water Wrackets soundtrack at the opening, in addition to debuting material from their brand new release on Kallistei Editions, Vibraquatic.
The artists express their thanks to the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Center for Creative Computing, the University of Notre Dame Graduate School of Arts and Letters and Richard Gray for their support of these projects.
Benjamin Funke: I investigate the spectacle of contemporary culture, focusing specifically on forms of masculine performance and collective experience using sculpture, audio/video and photography to inject politicized commentary into my work. First harvesting images from the digital reservoirs that surround us, I then alter these images using both digital and manual methods. By de-familiarizing viewers’ expectations, they can be moved to reevaluate the content and the context of what they see. My earlier works about our collective fascination with professional sports (steroid usage in Major League Baseball®, fatalities in Nascar®) have primed this current interest in making art about popular music and fan cultures.
My work often hinges on specific, historically documented moments in which there is an identifiable change of state. These pivotal moments become the starting points for my investigations of singular and collective experience. These investigations often proceed by contorting and/or expanding the original moments through video and time-lapse photography. Since the work deals with contemporary forms of idol worship, I intend viewers to experience the intense emotional relations that fans develop with their icons. It induces viewers to inhabit what might be called fanspace: a highly charged ambivalent state that oscillates between sympathy and criticism, love and disgust. The work is driven by my sincere love for and identification with the subcultures it represents. Simultaneously, elements of punk aesthetic and attitude seed the work with dystopic implications – suggesting our civilization is in deep decline.
Gabrielle Gopinath studies modern and contemporary art in the postwar period. Her research interests include contemporary art, video and new media. Her book manuscript in progress addresses subject/object relations in early video art. She is currently working on an essay about 1960s performance artists’ engagement with laboratory techniques and operant conditioning. She has recently completed two articles titled “Not I: Oral Fixations in 1970s Video” and “Reversing Time’s Arrow in Nam June Paik’s Guadalcanal Requiem.” She will be presenting the latter at the Universities Art Association of Canada’s annual conference in Ottawa this fall.
