New York based artist Virginia Overton discusses working in a site-specific manner, the consideration of materials, and artworks that were made for the exhibition The Disagreeable Object.
The night includes a tasting of Overton’s sculpture Untitled (Ham, Chandelier), a cured Mangalitsa ham from her sister’s Wedge Oak Farm in Lebenon, Tennessee. The ham was previously shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art from June 10–September 25, 2016 and was installed in the dining room of The House.
Overton is the first invited artist for the Visiting Artist Series, a
program that establishes a dialog between the visiting artist and the
David Ireland House, including The 500 Capp Street Foundation’s archive
of Ireland’s artwork and ephemera.
April’s LET’S GET WEIRD! includes our exhibition, The Disagreeable Object with work from our newly launched Visiting Artist Series. Virginia Overton was our first visiting artist, and she made site-specific work for The Garage rooftop and inside The House.
LET’S GET WEIRD! creates an atmosphere for conversation and
engagement among local art enthusiasts and practitioners with different
curated video, music and performance alongside a guest bartender. LET’S
GET WEIRD! is an audio/visual program activated throughout the entire
David Ireland House, co-organized by the Foundation’s curatorial team,
Diego Villalobos and Bob Linder. The idea for the event is rooted in
Ireland’s legacy as an active member of the Bay Area arts community and
as a frequent host to events like this at his 500 Capp Street home.
1991, David Ireland and Felix Gonzalez-Torres were featured in the group exhibition, The Savage Garden, at Fundacion ‘la Caixa’, Madrid, Spain. This exhibition, curated by Dan Cameron, explored ideas of landscape as metaphor, the grey area between abstraction and representation, and the desire to deny categorization in terms of artwork that belongs to a specific medium. Box of Angels, expands on the statuary artworks made by David Ireland from 1991 through 1997.
The title itself is taken from an Ireland sculpture, in which he filled a turn-of-the century museum vitrine with an overwhelming number of reproduction statuaries. “Although this particular artwork will not be on view during the exhibition, Ireland’s expansive vocabulary allowing traditional Western iconography to appear in his work will be the exhibition’s driving force,” notes exhibition curator, Diego Villalobos.
For Box of Angels, The 500 Capp Street Foundation curators, Bob Linder and Diego Villalobos, will recreate and expand upon two Ireland installations, Boulevard, (1993) and Angel, (1997). Traditionally seen as mediators between heaven and earth, Ireland used angels to represent thoughts of divine spirituality, tweaking their classical and romantic traditions while continuing to think about them as abstract forms. Linder and Villalobos will recreate Boulevard, (1993, Mattress Factory), a large-scale installation built with concrete lawn ornaments, within the Jensen Architects’ addition of The David Ireland House. For the original 1993 installation, David Ireland used 130 statues, mostly Venuses, a few statues of David, and some winged cherubs. The current installation will include 80 plus statues, sourced from A. Silvestri Co., the same statuary business Ireland used years ago. Recognized first as temple icons, then museum pieces, and eventually ubiquitous lawn ornaments, Ireland’s use of the statues in his Boulevard installation returned the lawn ornaments to the museum. Covering the staircase with ready-made garden figures, leaving just enough room on the side for visitors to maneuver the steps, Ireland placed such a large number of statuaries into the second floor room of the museum, that it became nearly inaccessible.
In addition to Boulevard, the Box of Angels exhibition features Ireland’s, Angel, (1997). For this work of art, Ireland temporarily deconstructed the grey fiberglass angel created for Angel-Go-Round (1996) and presented the figure horizontally on the wall for his ICA Maine College of Art exhibition. During this exhibition, Angel was given a second life, halted from her overhead rotation in Angel-Go-Round and strapped to the wall like a static David Ireland monochrome. The di Rosa Collection has generously agreed to de-install and loan the angel figurine to The 500 Capp Street Foundation for the Box of Angels exhibition, enabling it to be presented horizontally on the wall for only the second time in 20 years.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Box of Angels is honored to feature “Untitled”(Passport), (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The 23 x 23 x 4 inch stack of blank white paper – a minimalist object embedded with a multiplicity of meaning – temporarily resides in Ireland’s guest bedroom.
In the absence of information and images, the empty pages leave the question of identity, accessibility, and materiality open-ended. “The blank pages, available for the taking, involve more than just audience participation, these works were critical of the difference between outdoor works of art and true public sculpture,” said Bob Linder, exhibition curator. “Untitled” (Passport) is graciously on loan from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
An Evening with Jibz Cameron Thursday, May 25, 2017
Los Angeles based artist Jibz Cameron talks of her days in bygone San Francisco and her alter ego Dynasty Handbag.
Jibz Cameron is a performance and video artist living in Los Angeles.
Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been presented at
international dives both great and small. She has been heralded by the
New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen
in years,” and “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative,” by The
New Yorker. She has produced numerous video works and 2 albums of
original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has also
been seen acting in work by various avant-garde theater groups and in
many comedic web series that remain unpopular. She also works as a
professor and lecturer of performance and comedy related subjects at
Cal-Arts. Cameron recently moved from New York to Los Angeles and is in
development with Electric Dynamite on a television series about a
performance artist that moves from New York to Los Angeles.
Dynasty Handbag, photographed in Brooklyn, NY May 18, 2013. Image: Allison Michael Orenstein. Stylist: Emily Bess
Bureau of Inverse Technology, Judy Chicago, Brian Moran, Charlemagne Palestine, Juliana Spahr, and Gili Tal June 3 – July 15, 2017
The 500 Capp Street Foundation is proud to present AEROSOL, an exhibition in The Garage organized by Patricia L. Boyd, featuring Bureau of Inverse Technology, Judy Chicago, Brian Moran, Charlemagne Palestine, Juliana Spahr, and Gili Tal. In Boyd’s words, “Let’s take an aerosol to be something that can (even momentarily) hold the material and political ‘contents’ of space not usually visible to the naked eye.” The works in the exhibition use atmospheric states such as clouds and fog, and systems of governance such as cybernetics and surveillance, to consider the container that envelops us (air, the ‘nothing’ within which hard objects and bodies are positioned) as a medium through which forms of domination are exerted.
Images by: Bureau of Inverse Technology, BIT Plane, 1999; Image courtesy of the Video Data Bank. Judy Chicago, Campus White Atmosphere, Cal State Fullerton, CA, 1971; Image courtesy of Through the Flower Archive. Charlemagne Palestine, Island Monologue, 1976; Image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
In 1991, Dan Cameron curated The Savage Garden, at the Fundacion ‘la Caixa, Madrid. The exhibition explored ideas of landscape as metaphor, the gray area between abstraction and representation, and the desire to deny categorization between artistic mediums. Amongst the several artists included in the exhibition were David Ireland and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, both of them featured together in Box of Angels, a past exhibition at The David Ireland House. For his talk at 500 Capp Street, Cameron expands on this exhibition and other projects that have informed his curatorial practice.
