calendario eventi  :: 

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13/1/2012

Four Exhbitions

AMOA-Arthouse - The Jones Center, Austin

Jill Magid
Failed States
January 14–March 4, 2012
First Floor Gallery

On January 21, 2010, 24-year-old Fausto Cardenas fired six shots from a small caliber handgun into the air from the steps of the Texas State Capitol, blocks from the site of this exhibition. Fausto's motivations still remain unknown. Coincidentally, Jill Magid was present as a witness.
Failed States is the artist's exploration of coincidence, poetics, government power and bureaucracy. Magid draws connections between Fausto's futile and tragic act and Goethe's nineteenth-century epic poem, Faust. Magid mines Faust for thematic connections and develops a means of performative exhibition, treating the gallery as a stage to be studied. The artist's first presentation in Texas includes text-based pieces, sculpture containing evidence from the shooting, photographs and offsite pieces in the form of her armored Mercedes station wagon and a published work in the political magazine The Texas Observer.

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Evidence of Houdini's Return
January 14–March 4, 2012
Second Floor Gallery

Participating artists: Sterling Allen, Facundo Argañaraz, Strauss Bourque LaFrance, Katja Mater, Christopher Samuels, Justin Swinburne and J. Parker Valentine
Through the creation of complex visual narratives, the international artists in this exhibition present provocative abstract forms that investigate art's potential to interrupt and/or reconstruct elements of everyday life. Each of the seven artists test the boundaries of working abstractly, with found objects and images, reformed digital technologies, as well as reference traditional techniques. While exploring the potential of objects in space, their ideas coalesce around an opposition to fixed forms. With a wide variety of mediums represented, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, drawing and collage, the artists encourage examinations of context and allow for ambiguous formal and narrative combinations to inform one another. Evidence of Houdini's Return focuses on the value of abstraction in contemporary art discourse today.

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Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
Toute la mémoire du monde – The world's knowledge
January 14–April 22, 2012
Film & Video Gallery

In Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani's two-channel video Toute la mémoire du monde – The world's knowledge, the artists reinterpret French director Alain Resnais' similarly titled 1956 film. However, the jam-packed library seen in Resnais' film is a stark contrast to the sweeping views in Fischer and el Sani's 2006 work—where that knowledge has now vanished. After a new Bibliothèque Nationale was opened in 1996, the Rue de Richelieu building was emptied of most of its collections, creating the ultimate setting for Fischer and el Sani to examine ideas of knowledge and memory. As the camera slowly pans the deserted stacks and exquisite domed reading room, the viewer reacts to the emptiness, the feeling of loss, and the history of the space. This is the artists' first solo exhibition in the United States.

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Niklas Goldbach
HABITAT C3B
January 14–March 4, 2012
LIFT Projects

Niklas Goldbach's video HABITAT C3B explores a nearly deserted urban environment populated only by a handful of identical men engaging in an unknown mission. The clone-like characters chase one man that breaks from the group, recalling stock plot twists from science fiction. Produced at the main site of Georges Pompidou's failed gentrification in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, the video chronicles the implied protagonist's journey through a modern yet despondently barren cityscape.

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Miguel Andrade Valdez
Monumento Lima
January 9–March 25, 2012
SCREEN Projects

Andrade Valdez's video Monumento Lima is a chaotic, rapid-fire visual compendium of the monuments that occupy Lima's traffic circles and pedestrian malls. They range from the forgotten to the futurist, Spanish Mediterranean to the Brutalist architecture, as well as Modernist. In the video, the trapezoid emerges as a very popular shape for monuments in Peru due to its common motif in pre-Columbian architecture.

Image: Jill Magid, Fausto's parking space (site for "Failed States"), 2011. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert, Paris.

Press contact:
Rachel Adams tel. (512) 453-5312 or radams@arthousetexas.org

Opening: January 14

Arthouse at the Jones Center
700 Congress Avenue - Austin
Hours: Monday – Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: noon – 11pm
Thursday – Saturday: noon – 9pm
Sunday: noon – 5pm
Free admission

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