Talking Points
2016
October 13 – November 2
LNC Gallery
Curator
SUGs Curated
Contributing Artists
Cassandra Davis, Rami George, Shavana Green, Jae Hwan Lim, Luis Mejico, Joshi Radin, Greg Ruffing, Felipe Steinberg, Marcela Torres, Liz Vitlin
Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:
Using the urgency of the current US presidential election as an impetus and entry, Talking Points attempts to provide a constellation of our political reality with attention to the complexities of what is at stake for various populations rather than a singular America. Artists were selected through an open call to the SAIC community with the aim being to provide a plaform to begin a conversation on issues of concern surrounding this election cycle. A conclusion and/or resolution to these issues is not necessary or essential. Rather, the intent of the exhibition id to challenge the audience to consider the implications that each work presents. Talking Points lacks a formally didactic and cohesive structure in favor of mimicking our current messy political reality. Lines are drawn between artworks and their loaded content, allowing them to bleed and flow into one another opening up the often obscured correlations between the issues dissected. Embracing a mode of instability and flux, this exhibition presents a forum for emergent political narratives to converge, complete, mingle, and fuse in order to push the conversation circling our current political situation to higher ground. Artworks and performances rub against each other in the exhibition, implicating each other in a broad, complex network of various issues and ideas. Upon entering the gallery, viewers enounter the work of Rami George (BFA 2012), whose pieces address the tension between visibility and invisibility, belonging and exclusion through verbal and visual language. Continuing to move through the exhibition, the viewer is introduced to the work of Cassandra Davis (MFA 2017) who brings attention to the seeming separation of Church and State in the U.S. through tapestry talking heads and questioning letters; Greg Ruffing (MFA/MA 2017) and Joshi Radin’s (MFA/MA 2017) video installations address the state rhetoric of gun violence; Marcela Torres’ (MFA 2017) pay-per-view screening booth channels the complexities of artists labor and its connection to migrant labor; Felipe Steinberg’s (MFA 2016) exclusive voting website; and Shavana Green’s (BFA 2017) delicate, yet charged sculpture and imagery. These pieces work together to ask: wat is at stake in an election and how can we critically consider the importance of these issues and their overlap going forward? The exhibition is accompanied by an abundant programming and performance schedule that emphasizes the importance of conversation through multiple entry points in attempting to address and complicate these issues. It also acts to facilitate the full life of the talking point, bringing people together to discuss, debate, and engage. Performnce and programming creators include Luis Meijco (BFA 2017), Liz Vitlin (BFA 2016), Jae Hwan Lim (BFA 2017), Pia Singh (MA 2017), and Marcela Torres (MFA 2017). We look forward to engaging the SAIC and CHicago community in an open and productive dialogue, where we can consider the contemporary political climate in which we are embedded. This exhibition was cenceived of and curated by the SUGs directors; McCoy Crawford (BFA 2017), Emily Fenn (BA 2017), Emily Monasterio (MA 2017), Jameson Paige (MA 2018), and Michael Powell (MFA 2017).
Programs
- Opening Reception
- Examining Systems
- In the Complete World: Screening and Community Gathering
- Performative Panel Discussion led by Marcela Torres
October 13, 4:00-6:00 PM
LNC Gallery
Examining Systems
October 21, 4:00-6:00 PM
Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:
“This first program of the Talking Points exhibition is a performance night featuring pieces by Luis Mejico, Jae Hwan Lim, and Liz Vitlin. All three artists will present pieces that interrogate systems of knowledge against the frame of politics. Each piece utilizes a distinct performance methodology, presenting multiple modes of challenging structures of power. Jae Hwan Lim’s work, With You, isolates the physicality of politicians’ gestures as a means to analyze their sinerity and authenticity. In Luis Mejico’s work, Pedagogy of the Positive, the artist takes on the entirety of North American Educationsal systems with the intent to provide a more reasonable alternative. Liz Vitlin will present, Presidential Astrology, a performative lecture that provides as astrological reading of each candidate’s birth chart to predict the 2016 preseidential election. Either in confronting systems hypervisible or obscured, these artists question, expand, and complicate our understanding of the contemporary political landscape.”
‘In complete world’ by Shelly Silver, screening and community gathering
October 28, 4:00-6:00 PM
Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:
“‘In complete world’ is a feature length documentary made by the artist and filmmaker, Shelly Silver, set against the backdrop of New York during the U.S. presidential election of 2008. Silver provides us with an extraordinary document of the uneasy space identity politics occupy within a democracy, posing a host of pervasive questions to her interviewees; ‘Are you satisfied? Are we responsible for the government we have? Waht do you think our goernment should be doing for you personally? …Do you vote?’ The film questions politics framed through the notion of class politics, drawing the essence of the masses through individual portraits that function as ‘real’ testimonies on film. The continuity between individual and collective responsibility moves us to consider how we as citizens within the school reflect on our own outward and inward journeys during this corresponding political moment eight years later in American politics. This screening was been made possible by the Video Data Bank. Moderated by Pia Singh (MA 2017).”
Performative Panel Discussion
November 2, 4:00 PM
Program statement from the SUGs/SITE archive:
“Performative Panel Discussion led by Marcela Torres (MFA 2017) // Every four years the U.S. performs the ritual of electing a president, a personwho can tactfully lead our great nation towards progress. Individual communities throughout the U.S. evaluate what progress means to them and select candidates who they believe most resemble these traits and ideologies. These candidates then perform and embody these beliefs. They continue to perform the traits that made them viable to their constituents, but also try to prove to other communities that they are trustworthy and have their interests in mind. This performing of virtue becomes so over the top that the candidates seem to be performing near absurdity. Within this panel I would like to invesigate the process of creating an ideology and what it means and looks like to try to fit a live person into a hypothetical space. and whether judgement is ever satisfied or if it inherently changes the second we approach it. Using the farme of the art world and the platform of Talking Points, artists and art historians stand-in as political officials in this discussion as a method of examining how we posture ourselves to our audiences.”
Exhibition Material
SAIC’s student-run fnews Magazine covered Talking Points and the exhibition’s programming.
SUGs’ ‘Talking Points’ is Personal, Political, and Thankfully Unpredictable