TBA:20 IN LIEU OF AN OCEAN (SEND FLOWERS)
Curated by Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Featuring recent video works by:
American Artist
Pamela Council
shawné michaelain holloway
Alima Lee
Yétundé Olagbaju
Sable Elyse Smith
and ariella tai
Dates
September 10 | 6:30 PM PDT - View on picatv.org
September 10 – 27 | Viewing hours at PICA 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM Thursdays – Sundays
September 28 | 8:30 PM PDT - Outdoor screening with Mobile Projection Unit
Location will be announced one day in advance on Instagram @picapdx and in PICA's newsletter. Create an account to sign up.
DESCRIPTION
“my dreams could take
advantage of me and no
one would tell me because
they don’t know where to reach me”
-Harryette Mullen
IN LIEU OF AN OCEAN (SEND FLOWERS) is a program of recent videos by seven artists with corresponding (appropriated) video context borne out of samples of recent American history. At the heart of the program is a range of urgencies, desires, interventions, and extrapolations of time into other kinds of time. Instead of a monologue, it is an overlapping constellation of devices, both literary and cinematic; a conversion of simultaneous conversations into a timeline overloaded by speech as well as the many references within this speech. Interspersed throughout the program are news clips, interviews, and other found “footnotes” connected to as well as, at other times, in contradiction of, the range of experiences manifested in the works of the seven artists included in the program.
Video Works Include:
1.Yétundé Olagbaju
“The Sun, the Moon, & The Fig Tree” 10 mins
2. arielle tai
“cavity” 5 mins
“stain” 2 mins
3. shawné michaelain holloway
“define escalation (?) or what is a ride and how much are they selling it for (?)” 4 mins
“04_position:static;.mp4 (LEAKED)" 1 min
4. American Artist
“Dont Boil Your iPhone in Coca-Cola!” 5 mins
5. Sable Elyse Smith
“END-LESSsestina” 4 mins
“How We Tell Stories to Children” 5 mins
6. Pamela Council
“Swag Surf (Suite) Concept Video” 1 min
“Red Drink: A BLAXIDERMY Juneteenth Offering” 1 min
“The Only Thing I Have To Say Right Now :: (snippet)” 1 min
7. Alima Lee
“Flesh To Spirit” 9 mins
8. Jibade-Khalil Huffman
“Untitled video collage in lieu of curatorial essay(s) because I simply do not have the words in this moment," Various Durations / Total Duration 40 min
ARTISTS' BIOS
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and author of three books of poems: Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2015); James Brown Is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011); and 19 Names for Our Band (Fence, 2008). His recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. (2014); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2015); Jewish Museum, New York (2016); LAX ART (2016); Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Swiss Institute, New York (2017); KMAC Museum, Louisville (2018); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa (2018); The Kitchen, New York (2018); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019). This fall he will present a new body of work along with a selection of recent projects at Tufts University Art Galleries, as well as a solo exhibition at Magenta Plains in New York.
*(A portion of this program is, additionally, indebted to consultation with Kendra Jayne Patrick).
AMERICAN ARTIST (b. 1989 Altadena, CA, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose work considers Black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing. Artist is a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of EYEBEAM and completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. They have exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Koenig & Clinton, New York. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and Art21. Artist is a part-time faculty at Parsons The New School and teaches at the School for Poetic Computation.
Pamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined and under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently an artist in residence at ISCP.
shawné michaelain holloway is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, holloway shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), The Kitchen (NYC, NY) Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL). Currently, holloway teaches in the New Arts Journalism and Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alima Lee is a transdisciplinary afrolatinx artist from New York City and is currently based in LA. Their work explores themes of identity and intersectionality. A recent Frieze LA x Ghetto Film School Fellow and Co-Host of a monthly radio show, "Rave Reparations" on NTS. Working in an uninhibited range of mediums from video installation and performance, to printmaking and sculpture, Alima is on an ever-constant freefall from structure. Their video work is currently on view at HVW8 Gallery in Berlin and has been presented at the Tate Modern, MOCA, Smithsonian African American Museum, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and ICA Boston among other global entities.
Yétundé Olagbaju is an artist and maker, currently residing in Oakland, CA. They utilize performance, sculpture, action, gesture, and video as through-lines for inquiries regarding Black labor, legacy, and processes of healing. They are rooted in the need to understand history, the people that made it, the myths surrounding them, and how their own body is implicated in history’s timeline.
They have shown work at various spaces including Oakland Museum of California, Southern Exposure, and Museum of the African Diaspora. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of the inaugural Nancy Cook Fellowship, the Murphy Cadogan Awards, the Jay Defeo Award, and the Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship.
Sable Elyse Smith’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, with solo shows at the Queens Museum in New York and the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee. In the forthcoming year Smith’s work will be featured in exhibitions at the New Museum, NY, the Wexner Center of the Arts in Columbus, OH, MoMA PS1, NY and she will be an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency. Most recently, her work was on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA as part of Colored People Time, which traveled from the ICA Philadelphia. Her work was included in Great Force at the ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University, and solo shows include Carlos Ishikawa in London (2019) and JTT in New York (2018). Smith was a 2018/2019 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem which culminated in an exhibition at MoMA PS1, NY. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Matthew Brown Los Angeles, the Highline in New York, for which she also curated an event at The Kitchen, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, SITE Santa Fe, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, El Museo Del Barrio, and Andrea Rosen Gallery.
ariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer based in Portland, OR. They are interested in black performance and cultural vernaculars in film, television, and media studies. tai is one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop, and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of black women and femmes in film, video, and new media art. They have shown work at Anthology Film Archives, Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, Northwest Film Center, Wa Na Wari, the Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, MOCA, and Smack Mellon, amongst others. tai’s most recent video work "safehouse" premiered at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, ON.