out of actions
Audience members are invited to begin at the Arthur Ross Gallery, the program “hub” space, where exhibition guides and campus maps will be available throughout the day. From the “hub,” audience members can make their way between the various sites on campus where performances will take place. At 4:00 pm, we will gather at the Arthur Ross Gallery for a conversation with the artists about their works.
Schedule is subject to change; please check back here for most current information.
Moving In
Weak Link
Danielle Kovalski Monsonego, Mark no. 2. From the series: I miss you, 2016, C-Print
February 1-23, 2019
Fields Harrington
Ahmed Hasan
Danielle Kovalski Monsonego
Fred Schmidt-Arenales
Curated by Ginny Duncan and Tausif Noor
Incubation Series XII: Hosted by AUTOMAT 319 N. 11th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Opening Reception: Friday, February 1, 7PM-10PM
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday 2PM-6PM and by appointment
In an essay on the artist Cady Noland, the critic Bruce Hainley asks, “What does it mean to make an issue of connection—of what kind of connection, especially when the biographical, art-historical, and political are so knotted—a question of heredity? The family is as much an aesthetic form as a political one.”
The artists gathered in this exhibition take up this question in its many valences, addressing relatedness as a social, political, personal, and formal concern. Through video, sculpture, photography, and installation, the artists examine how ideas that we have now accepted as constructed—including science, race, family, and history—are scaffolded by linkages both secure and fragile.
Weak Link leans into the value of precarious connections and their attendant possibilities. As the tenuous connection that often determines the strength of a system or structure, the weak link can function as a site of generative potential. We’re interested in the ability of weak links to highlight flaws and failures within structures held up by faith, and the contingency of structures on the ideas and people who form them.
At the same time, this exhibition is an attempt to show our own hand. The group show is a format in which connection can be contested: decisions may be formally sound, or theoretically valid; they may be arbitrary, or personally motivated. They may hold water, or they may fail. In embracing the weak link, we offer the potential for connections to be fluid, rather than deterministic, and by doing so, we hope to expand our understandings of what it means to simply be together.
Close to Home
Close to Home
Zach Hill, the egg, 2018, HD video,
October 27–November 17, 2018
Opening Reception: 7–10 pm Saturday, October 27th
Closing Reception: 7–10 pm Saturday, November 17th; Screening and Conversation at 7:30 pm
Gallery Hours: Sundays 1–5 pm and by appointment
Close to home, but just a little bit off. The artists in this exhibition transform domestic objects into lumpy, gooey, and nebulous things. They coax commonplace items out of their usual settings and allow them to exceed their bounds, to overflow or to dissipate. Their uncanny works may remind viewers of a familiar everyday world, while at the same time remaining strange and distant. The unruly creations aim to surprise us, poking and prodding at parts of ourselves—privacy, intimacy, sexuality—that we thought were adequately protected. Their forays into the personal can hit a little too close to home.
In his video titled the egg, Zach Hill turns a sleepy New England town into a world of discovery and disillusionment in which an unlikely visitor attempts to make itself a home. Through his sculpture series crickets in my pant legs, Hill proposes insectoid procreation as model for queer reproduction. Xiaoxuan Liu’s still life paintings straddle the boundary between the organic and the inorganic, giving vibrancy and vitality to staplers, scissors, and cold medicine. Her abstracted housewares even transgress the boundary of the canvas, inhabiting the viewer’s space as cloth-covered sculptures, while her brief video animation brings them to life. Finally, E. Aaron Ross’s ethereal long-exposure photographs turn banal pornographic videos into mists of color where human bodies lose all coherence. His video Oh, Love that Will Not Let Me Go alludes to familial and religious ties that seem both tenuous and overwhelming.
Close to Home is the eleventh exhibition in the Incubation Series, a student-led initiative that fosters new ways of making, exhibiting, and seeing art. Founded in 2015, the Series is a collaboration between students in the Fine Arts and History of Art graduate programs at the University of Pennsylvania. The Series showcases the work of MFA students in focused and conceptually rigorous exhibitions, while also offering an opportunity for art history graduate students to expand their curatorial practices. Each academic year, the Incubation Series team produces several exhibitions throughout Philadelphia’s thriving art scene, allowing participants to build gallery relationships, engage with peers outside of campus, and test exhibition strategies.
Contact:
Jeffrey Katzin, jkatzin@sas.upenn.edu high-tide.us
Emily Leifer, eleifer@brynmawr.edu theincubationseries.com
1850 North Hope Street (14A), Philadelphia, PA 19122
