LOCUS REMIX. Three Contemporary Positions
Locus Remix. Three Contemporary Positions: Katie Grinnan- Polaris
September 04, 2008 - October 26, 2008
Opening Reception Thursday, September 4
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Katie Grinnan > Ismail Farouk > Dorit Margreiter
MAK Center Opens 1st Segment of 3-Part Exhibition with Featured Artist Katie Grinnan
In a rapidly changing world where complexity, uncertainty and instability are givens, it is increasingly important to combine precise focus with diverse points of view. Locus Remix. Three Contemporary Positions features three artists who work with place, meaning, and representation. In each case, the artist is drawing from cultural iconography, the poetics and the politics of space, and the sacred and profane in architecture. In three distinct ways, the act of cultural interpretation is questioned and problemitized.
Unfolding in three segments, the exhibition will feature the work of Katie Grinnan from September 5 – October 26, 2008, Ismail Farouk, from November 6, 2008 – January 4, 2009, and Dorit Margreiter from January 15 – March 8, 2009.
Phase 1: Katie Grinnan: Polaris
A free, public opening reception for phase one will be held Thursday, September 4, from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Katie Grinnan, the first artist to be featured in Locus Remix, takes as her main subject Kukulkan's Pyramid in the sacred Mayan city of Chichén-Itzá in the Yucatan Pennisula in Mexico. Focusing on a potent relic of a non-western, vanished culture, Grinnan re-creates a contemporary interpretation of that historical site. The sacred urban architecture of the Mayans is spun into objects that reflect contemporary popular space and culture. The work reveals our own perceptions about “others” through the media of sculpture, video, drawing and sound.
Utilizing both the indoor spaces of the Schindler House and its gardens, Grinnan presents brand new work that nevertheless grows out of themes she has long been exploring. This work will incorporate multi-media elements, including sound, to contribute to narratives of creation and demolition. Grinnan often utilizes two-dimensional imagery derived from photography and videos in her sculptures. Here, too, she will confound two- and three-dimensional representation, using photographs of the sun, the moon, and the Mayan ruins in her re-interpretation of a structure central to Mayan cosmology. Setting a Mayan monument inside a “monument” of Modernism, the Schindler House, Grinnan will exploit the opportunity to explore issues of recontextualization, scale and the relationship of built architecture to landscape.
Upcoming participant Ismail Farouk is a South African artist and social geographer who works in video, photography and performance. Farouk utilizes the urban spaces of Johannesburg to question the occupation of space and what that means in a post-apartheid era. The third participant, Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter, will focus on Habitat for Humanity’s “Global Village Discovery Center,” an educational display designed to familiarize visitors with living conditions of the international poor, as well as to demonstrate the structures the organization is building around the world. In Margeiter’s exploration of the aestheticization of poverty, architecture and interpretation collide to reveal fissures in language. Locus Remix. Three Contemporary Positions is organized by MAK Center Director Kimberli Meyer.
The MAK Center for Art & Architecture is located at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road in West Hollywood. Public hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Regular admission is $7/$17 with the guide book, Schindler By MAK; students and seniors, $6/$16 with book; free for Friends of the Schindler House and on Fridays, 4 to 6 p.m. Parking is available at the public structure at the northeast corner of Kings Road and Santa Monica Boulevard. For further information, the public may contact www.MAKcenter.org or call (323) 651-1510.
-- MAK Center for Art and Architecture
at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
323 651 1510 phone
323 651 2340 fax
visit: www.MAKcenter.org
contact: office@makcenter.org
