calendario eventi  :: 

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20/11/2014

Two Exhibitions

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga

curated by Kristen Chappa
Rachel Mason- Listening Dolls

Focusing on storytelling, character development, and the act of listening in Rachel Mason’s practice, this exhibition will feature selections from earlier bodies of work and debut a new series of collages on paper.

Best known for figurative sculpture and complex performances that incorporate original songs, Mason often elaborates on historical documents and current events to render factual narratives intimate and subjective. Her work expresses a desire to recognize radically different viewpoints and engage with conflicts that are typically experienced from a mediated distance. In this way, the artist mobilizes listening as an empathic and political action. A selection from Mason’s Ambassadors series will be shown, in which the artist presents herself as a mediator positioned between sculptural portraits of political leaders involved in the wars of her lifetime. In a companion performance to the series, Mason embodies the various figures that she depicts, including Fidel Castro, Boris Yeltzin, and Dzhokhar Dudaev.

A grouping of Mason’s Starseed figures will also be on display. These small-scale sculptures pay tribute to powerful women that the artist considers influential to her own work—some of whom, such as Joan Jonas, Mason has apprenticed with. Positioning herself as listener as well as storyteller, Mason encourages the continuation of a specific lineage associated with her narratives. The show’s title refers not only to the artist and audience as listeners, but also to the animistic quality of her objects. The Starseeds reappear in videos such as Doll Audience, in which a doll-sized Mason performs to her heroine figurines. Building upon her earlier bodies of works, Mason’s collages, shown in this exhibition for the first time internationally, represent a nascent trajectory into more fantastical character studies.

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curated by Anne Barlow
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Repair

Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s practice encompasses photography, video, sculptural installations and ephemeral works that are often inspired by the tropes of comedy, performance and media culture, as well as by her ongoing interest in notions of authorship, identity, and public versus private representations of “self.”

This exhibition, Repair—a title that is suggestive both of an attempt to fix something that is damaged or broken, and the act of moving, or retiring, to another space—features existing work alongside new works specially created on site

The world of comedy and its devices are frequently present in Rafferty’s work, not so much as a subject in itself, but more as a formal strategy. Interested in those moments in which individuals reveal an inner self that is typically not manifested, Rafferty exposes the inherent tension between a projected self-assurance and inner fallibility, traits that she ascribes as much to artists as to comedians. In Mono, first shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York, Rafferty cast actor Susie Sokol to perform a script made from actual monologues of three late-night comedy hosts: Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Joan Rivers. By taking away the trappings that accompany late night comedy programs—such as stage sets, music, and the audience itself—Rafferty reduces these personalities to a more human scale. The comedians’ actions and phrases become amplified and isolated through Sokol’s gendered performance, which at once captures but makes vulnerable, the trademark behaviors of their comedic power.

Much of Rafferty’s recent work has taken the form of photographic imagery on clear acetate, the surfaces of which she often ‘attacks’ by puncturing with screws or altering through the use of poured and scraped paints. These visceral images hover between realism and abstraction, presence and absence. At kim? Rafferty will create a series of new works, including printed and ‘screwed’ acetate pieces and a subtle site-specific installation incorporating visible wall-repair.

Image: Rachel Mason, From the series Doll Bones (detail), 2014

Press contact: Aimee Chan Lindquist
aimee@artingeneral.org http://artingeneral.org

Opening: Friday, November 21, 2014

kim? Contemporary Art Centre
12/1 Maskavas Street
Riga, LV-1050, Latvia
Monday: closed
Tuesday: 12:00 – 20:00
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 12:00 – 18:00
The entrance fee is
Adults – 3 EUR
Students (aged 11+) and senior citizens – 1.50 EUR

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