CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY PARIS PHOTO 2022 Grand Palais Éphémère Champ de Mars 2 Pl. Joffre, Paris, France
BOOTH B31 Ana Teresa Fernández Nina Katchadourian Deborah Oropallo & Andy Rappaport Stephanie Syjuco
248 Utah Street San Francisco, CA 94103 USA +1 415-399-1439 cclarkgallery.com
Ana Teresa Fernández ANA TERESA FERNÁNDEZ was born in Tampico, Mexico in 1981. Her family emigrated to California in 1992. Since then, she has been based in San Francisco. Her practice explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures that reference land art, performance, and history painting. Her multidisciplinary practice often begins with performance, and expands to video, photography, painting, and sculpture. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Snite Museum of Art, Norte Dame University, Indiana; The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry, Riverside, California; and the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, California and Paris, France.
Major public projects include On The Horizon, which was featured in an exhibition titled Lands End, organized by the FOR-SITE Foundation in San Francisco in 2021. Collaboration is a core value of Fernández’s practice and includes projects such as SOMOS VISIBLES with Arleene Correa Valencia and Truth Farm with Guadalupe Garcia, Correa Valencia, and Ronald Rael. A solo booth of Fernández’s work was featured at the Armory Show in 2022 as part of the Focus section, a special curated presentation of work by artists centered on environments and borders selected by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Fernández has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2021, and her recent solo exhibition, At the Edge of Distance, was met with critical success with features in the San Francisco Chronicle, Juxtapoz, and Squarecylinder. Past projects have been reviewed and cited in the Guardian, Vogue, The Economist, and The New Yorker, among other publications. In 2022, she was chosen as the featured artist in the New York Times: A New Climate San Francisco, a summit about responses to climate change.
Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) documents a site-specific action/intervention in which the artist spray painted the border wall separating Playas de Tijuana, Mexico from San Diego’s Border Field State Park in California in an attempt to “erase” the border wall at a time when Sunday family visits there were prevented. Fernández’s performance was documented as a video work in 2011, and more recently published as a suite of three photographs in 2021. The series was featured in 2022 at the Armory Show in New York. Left: Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) 02, 2011/2021. Pigmented inkjet print. Above: Ana Teresa Fernández, Installation shot, solo booth, Armory Show 2022. Photo: Mikhail Mishin. Background: Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) 03, 2011/2021. Pigmented inkjet print.
Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) 01, 2011/2021. Pigmented inkjet print.
Nina Katchadourian NINA KATCHADOURIAN was born in 1968 in Stanford, California and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Brooklyn, New York. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Accent Elimination, a six-channel video, was included in the 2015 Venice Biennale as part of the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. There are three monographic publications of Katcharourian’s work that are published internationally; Sorted Books, published by Chronicle Books in 2013; Curiouser published by University of Texas Press in 2017; and Opener 11: Nina Katchadourian — All Forms of Attraction, published by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Since her first monographic exhibition at The Tang Museum in 2005, Katchadourian has had several solo museum exhibits. In 2017, a traveling survey exhibition of her work titled Curiouser opened at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, with an accompanying catalogue. Curiouser traveled to the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Provo, UT in 2018 and the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in 2017. In 2020, Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery co-presented Katchadourian’s major public installation Monument to the Unelected, which was installed at both galleries in San Francisco and New York and at multiple museum and non-profit venues across the United States. Her exhibition To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World was presented at Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; Pace Gallery, London; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (20212022). Katchadourian has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Her work is in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, among others. Katchadourian is a Professor at the New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her career has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 1999. Since 2020, she has been co-represented by Pace Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery. Above: Nina Katchadourian, Fake Plant #7, 2022. C-print. Background: Nina Katchadourian, Fake Plant #30, 2022. C-print.
Fake Plants At the onset of the pandemic, Katchadourian began making artificial plants at home using materials like discarded cardboard boxes, paper packaging from food products, disposable medical masks, cardboard toilet paper tubes, ping pong balls, sewing pins, toothpicks, and leftover craft supplies. Fake Plants embodies the artist’s longstanding methodology of working with mundane materials close at hand and intersects with her interest in where the artificial meets “the natural.” Katchadourian harvests the cast-off materials she finds around her home, in her studio, or at local construction sites, transforming them into multifarious and elegant plant forms.
Katchadourian’s Fake Plants are based on her recollection and invention rather than accurate representations of existing species, as if the peculiar flora and fauna belong to unexplored or imagined landscapes. When photographed, the objects tranform into chimeric objects, mirroring the artist’s alechmical process. Much like in her series Seat Assignment, where Katchadourian challenges herself to make something out of nothing, working with what is already at hand, she brings viewers closer to the overlooked and familiar matter that constitutes their daily lives. Works in the series Fake Plants exist both as unique sculptures which were originally exhibitied at Pace Hong Kong, and as editioned c-prints, which are debuting at Paris Photo 2022.
Top: Nina Katchadourian, Fake Plant #24, 2022. C-print. Bottom: Nina Katchadourian, Fake Plant #8, 2022. C-print.
Deborah Oropallo & Andy Rappaport DEBORAH OROPALLO & ANDY RAPPAPORT began their artistic collaboration with the 2018 exhibition Dark Landscapes for a White House. To date, their artistic partnership and collaborative work constitutes more than a dozen projects and large-scale installations. The work has been included in Digital Nature II at the Los Angeles Arboretum, Pasadena, California; Natural Discourse at the Sagehen Creek Field Station, Lake Tahoe, California; and FLIGHT at The Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California. FLIGHT was also exhibited in 2020 at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University, Ashland. In 2020, FLIGHT was acquired by 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky for its permanent collection. In 2021, Oropallo & Rappaport’s collaborative video work, RECKONING (2020), was exhibited in the biennial Converge45 in Portland, OR. Currently, FLIGHT is on view in an exhibition titled Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter at 21c Cincinnati, Ohio. DEBORAH OROPALLO was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1954 and received a BFA from Alfred University and an MA/MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Originally trained as a painter, Oropallo incorporates mixed media techniques, including photomontage, video, computer editing, printmaking, and painting into her practice. Whether still or moving images, the resulting works bear traces of the distortions that evolve or remain from the image manipulation. Her composite works layer visual sources producing dense interplay between time, place, form, and content. Oropallo’s exhibition history includes monographic exhibits at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, the Boise Art Museum, Idaho, Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, California, the San Jose Museum of Art, California; and work in exhibits at the Whitney American Art Museum (Whitney Biennial), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and The Jewish Museum, New York, New York. Oropallo’s work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California. Oropallo began making video work in 2008 and her solo video works Smoke Stacked (2017) and Going Ballistic (2017) are held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive respectively. Oropallo lives in West Marin, California and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2013. ANDY RAPPAPORT was born in New York, New York in 1957 and has had a nearly 50-year long involvement with music. sound, photography, and technology. Rappaport’s collaboration with Deborah Oropallo on the video works for Dark Landscapes for a White House (2018) marked his first foray into music for moving images since scoring student films in the 1970s and draws on his experiences at that time with some of the earliest commercially available music synthesizers. In 2024, Oropallo’s survey exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon will also include collaborative projects with Rappaport, and a monographic catalogue.
REBELLION The five-channel video REBELLION (2021) depicts portraits of protestors from global demonstrations at sites from Hong Kong and Myanmar to Venezuela and Turkey. As the video loops to the sound of labored breathing through masks, viewers see protestors in colorful and even cartoonish masks and costumes that reference popular films about counterculture as well as historical references to resistance figures such as Guy Fawkes. Oropallo & Rappaport note that masks became symbols adopted from global popular culture by a new generation of activists reared on the internet and seek to render the protestors anonymous. Throughout the video, the protesters are surrounded by tear gas, imagined here as a toxic smoke screen. Tear gas was designed to be impermanent–to leave no trace–while rendering people unable to breathe. Police and military forces justify tear gas as a ‘peaceful poison’ with the intent to disperse crowds for civil disobedience. It evaporates from the scene in a way that its damage becomes less apparent on the surface of the skin or the lens of the camera. Oropallo and Rappaport created a separate video representing the tear gas and layered it with the photomontaged images so that the smoke envelopes the protesters.
Pictured: Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport, REBELLION (stills), 2021. Five-channel video with sound.
Stephanie Syjuco STEPHANIE SYJUCO is an American artist who was born in the Philippines in 1974. She received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects have leveraged open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. In 2019/2020, Syjuco was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include Image Trafficking at the The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; White Balance/Color Cast at The Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Stephanie Syjuco: The Visible Invisible at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri; and Being: New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Syjuco is the recipient of a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award, a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. Syjuco’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; Singapore Art Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Saint Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2008.
Afterimages and Fixed Focus (Dead Center) Afterimages and Fixed Focus (Dead Center) are from Syjuco’s series “Native Resolution” that expands on the artist’s research into the problematic construction of American history and concurrent histories of photography that inform deeply biased structures foregrounding whiteness as a normative subject. These works resulted from her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in which the artist spent hundreds of hours embedded in the archives of the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of Anthropology in Washington DC searching for visual evidence of the Philippines and Filipinos in the official American archive. Afterimages is a suite of five photogravures on gampi paper. The images are reproduced and manipulated photographs that were originally cartes de visites for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Syjuco crumples these photos, concealing the identity of the individual, thus protecting them from the viewer’s gaze. Afterimages is co-published by BOXBLUR and Mullowney Printing, and printed by Mullowney Printing, Portland, Oregon. Fixed Focus presents 36 photos mounted in a grid, displaying excerpts from the archival files of Dean Conant Worcester, an early American ethnographic explorer and staunch supporter of American imperialism in the Philippines. At the exact center of each image is a notated correction, evidence of a factual error or typed mistake recorded into the archive. Blown up so that the surrounding text is only legible via snippets, the errors themselves become the central focus, as opposed to the anthropological “findings” that served to support white superiority and early notions of eugenics. By showing these texts as fallible and correctable, Syjuco hints at the possibility for a counter-narrative to also be applied to the form of the archive. Each image is printed at the standard size of a sheet of paper to further reference the official form of institutional documents and records.
Top left: Stephanie Syjuco, Afterimages (Interruption of Vision), 2021. Photogravure printed on gampi mounted on Somerset black 280 gram cotton rag. Bottom left and front cover: Stephanie Syjuco, detail of Fixed Focus (Dead Center), 2021. 36-pigmented inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle Baryta mounted on 2mm E-Panel. Above: Installation shot of Afterimages in Native Resolution (2021) at Catharine Clark Gallery. Photo: John Janca. Background: Stephanie Syjuco, Afterimages (Field of Vision), 2021.
NOTES
CONTACT: Catharine Clark Founding Director cc@cclarkgallery.com +1 415.519.1439
Anton Stuebner Director director@cclarkgallery.com +1 415.728.2368