Encounters: Portraits & Identity

ENCOUNTERS: PORTRAITS AND IDENTITY 03.18.16 - 04.30.16

Cover Image: Victoria Maidhof. Hotel by the Sea, 2015.

EMBARK GALLERY

Encounters: Portraits & Identity 03.18.16 - 04.30.16

Jamee Crusan | CCA Dan Fenstermacher | SJSU Ninh Filip | SJSU Simona Fitcal | Stanford Willow Griffiths | SFAI Juan Pablo Pacheco | SFAI Lauren A. Ross | CCA Hui Meng Wang | SFAI Leila Weefur | Mills Sarah Woodard | SFSU

Encounters: Portraits and Identity is Embark Gallery’s West coast iteration of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, hosted by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. This juried exhibition prompted artists to submit artwork that captures an aspect of identity, whether it be personal, familial, cultural, political or otherwise.

Our esteemed jurors, Director Kim Sajet and Director of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and Associate Curator of Painting & Sculpture Dorothy Moss, both of the National Portrait Gallery, selected artists who interpret the concept of portraiture broadly, representing the diversity of contemporary portraits in America.

As one might expect from emerging Bay Area artists, many risks were taken. Media ranges from the more traditional photography and painting, to large-scale ceramic work, embroidery, innovative video projection and live performance, through which a broad range of subjects emerged.

The daily struggles of mental illness and its misconceptions are represented in the photography of Dan Fenstermacher, while Jamee Crusan’s conceptual sculpture challenges figurative preconceptions of portraiture and gender constructs.

Hui Meng Wang’s dinner table performance addresses the delicate balance of cultural interaction in a globalized world, as Ninh Philip’s haunting photography speaks to isolation and displacement.

Artists Willow Griffiths and Juan Pablo Pacheco both delve into the familial, showcasing encounters that occur within our own homes. Pacheco’s installation of a darkened family archive denotes the fragility of memory, while Griffiths exploration of her role as a mother explores notions of domesticity and safety.

Video is used in Simona Fitcal’s multimedia installation that explores the “real” self in digital and analog recordings. Leila Weefur uses video to playfully and poignantly address tensions surrounding racial identity. The handmade was well represented, as Lauren A. Ross stitched ephemeral portraits on mulberry paper, a soft material that literally floats off the wall when someone walks by. Contrastingly, Sarah Woodard’s ceramic portraits of friends and family are sturdy and full of detail. Humorous and charming, her sculptures echo the West coast style of UC Davis ceramicist Robert Arneson-- a fitting comparison considering Embark’s mission to connect local institutions.

The resulting exhibition is both an intimate survey of human interaction and a conceptually rigorous offering of local styles. Ultimately, Encounters showcases the state of portraiture in contemporary Bay Area arts, and puts our artists in dialogue with the important conversations started by the Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Competition.

Angelica Jardini | Curatorial Director

Jamee Crusan CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2017

“My current work investigates the realm of understanding identity through gender constructs, their impact and influence within gender roles; the obsession surrounding the gaze; bodies already encoded in a system of heteronormativity, traces and intimate relationships. The significance of making this work now is to bring to light discussions surrounding the centuries of sameness that have been produced surrounding ideas of systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures, around perfection and gender within history. The body becomes a gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.�

Of the Sun and Moon, 2015. Resin cast arm, mixed media.

Dan Fenstermacher SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY, 2016

“These portraits illustrate unique personas of individuals living with diagnosed mental illness.

They convey an authentic and genuine perspective of their lives to viewers. The purpose of this work is to inspire hope that one is not defined by their mental illness, but can overcome adversity. The portraits aim to enhance the viewer’s understanding of mental illness by juxtaposing the realities of people living with a mental illness to societal stigmas. The work humanizes the misconceived perception of mental illness by fostering dialogue and giving voices to an often misunderstood and misrepresented community.�

Auditory Aversions, 2014. From the series “Overcoming Challenges Daily. Digital photograph, archival pigment print.

Ninh Filip SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY, 2016

“Ninh has practiced photography since 1993. His photographic aesthetic has grown out of his studies of literature and painting, as well as his sojourn in Europe. He inspires his models to recreate fictional allusions, or invokes an inner state to create meaningful interior portraits, often lighting them in the subdued colors of paintings he has loved. When traveling, Ninh was interested in sentimentalizing spaces and places in a light that appears more imaginary than real. His tragic life events as a post-war refugee and his dislocation sensibility significantly influenced his work. The duality of East and West experiences had always driven him to practice the arts.�

Undergoing Multi-culture Effort, 2012. Archival injet print.

Simona Fitcal STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 2016

“The central goal of my work is to join elements of the past and of the future through the employment of traditional and digital techniques. Our society constantly switches from real to virtual, therefore I seek to temporarily blend the two realms by interfering with their boundaries. I pursue a suspension of disbelief in order to make the viewer reflect on the physical veracity in the digital era and I find that combining physical objects, video and 3D animation has the potential to achieve this. I am fascinated with the contrast between the indexical nature of the camera, which attests the existence of objects, and the digitally created imagery that has no equivalent in reality. Since the development of technology is so rapid, I freeze and dissect short moments in the experience of a “user”. Thus, the content of my work is often stuck in a transitional stage, where the elements try to adapt to new spaces”

“I.M.U.R� 2015, media installation. 1 min loop; two channel audio.

Willow Griffiths SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE, 2016

“My large-scale paintings are the visual archive of my experiences as a mother, as an addict, a criminal, and an artist seeking to confiscate the authority to speak. These paintings serve as subjugated knowledges that tell how to live in a space of uncertainty, disenfranchisement and violence. My use of the human figure as well as the animal in intimate, crowded, domestic settings are crucial to my project of disturbing stable identities, systems, or the orders that we would like to rely on to define the safety of home and family.“

Curs, 2015. Watercolor on paper.

Juan Pablo Pacheco SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE, 2016 “This collection of dark portraits is the result of the process of transferring original photographs from a family archive I have been constructing into 4x5 negatives. Each frame contains a portrait of a member of my direct family tree, the oldest being my great grandmother’s grandmother.

While the images appear completely black from afar, under closer inspection faint and blurred faces appear. My artistic practice engages with history, memory and the archive. I am interested in the tension between remembrance and forgetting as a fundamental element in the construction of our relationship to time and space, and in our constitution as political subjects. My interest lies in the ability of visualizing the inevitable fragility and impermanence of images, collective memory and identity.�

Absent, 2016. Detail.

Absent, 2016. 18 gelatin prints. Installation view.

Lauren A. Ross CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2016

“How do repetitive actions (weaving, walking, knotting, stitching) become a language spoken when there are no words? My work explores the passage of time in repetitive actions: in the hand-made, the hand-knotted, the hand-stitched. These quiet actions become rituals, meditations, allowing me to approach the time held, paused, and passed in liminal spaces.

Lost in thoughts or absorbed meditation, these individuals look out, but do not engage with us; they are absent from the space they occupy. I attempt to connect to them, through a slow process of deliberate labor.�

Looking Out (Marilyn), 2011-2015. Part of a larger series. Black thread handstitched on mulberry paper.

Hui Meng Wang SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE, 2016 “My work has always been about creating temporary, theatrical moments in a space, and finding a way to document them. Hosting a dinner party is one of the ways to create such moments, and to me, dinner parties carry significant messages in themselves, culturally and politically. Through re-contextualizing the cultural nexus of the dining room, where material culture and theatrical performance meet, I aim to explore how, in a wider sense, dinner parties contribute to the creation of social-class identities.

In the work The Pure Reason We Dine Tonight, I invite four of my friends, who come from different racial and national backgrounds and now live in the United States, to have a 2-hour dinner on an extremely unstable and unbalanced table I made. Even the movement of a small salad fork will change the entire state of balance of the table. The piece interprets the uncertainty, fragility and isolation people experience being at varied states of displacement and immigration, and how it feels to be exposed to and portrayed under a constant gaze during cultural adaptation.�

The Pure Reason We Dine Tonight, 2015, Installation/Performance/Single-channel video.

Leila Weefur MILLS COLLEGE, 2016

“Through the integration of sculpture and video I exploit the confining and dividing elements of racism and cultural identity, to bring attention to it. Each work asks unresolved questions about racial division. No clear answers exist. My work acknowledges the complexities in how we understand cultural identity. I think about what it feels like to put a human in a box and instead I project a video into it. The aesthetics live where division is most apparent, in the language of color. Black. White. Red. Yellow. Brown. Tropes of the colonized and the colonizers.�

Stills from Coloring the Question, 2016. Video installation.

Sarah Woodard SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY, 2018 “Recently I began a project I called my community garden. I requested photos from family and friends, people who I considered the branches that created my own personal community. I didn’t give any specific direction thinking it would be more interesting to see how people chose to portray themselves. They were also unaware that I planned to sculpt them. I played around with the ideas of garden, growth, flowers and what they meant to me. In the end I was left with a sculpture garden of my community.”

Nick, 2015. Ceramic.

Stef and Evie, 2015. Ceramic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Fort Mason Center Lauren Dare Matt Lopez Dorothy Moss Carolyn Nickell Kim Sajet Christopher Squier Brooke Valentine Xiao Wang Zues, Thor & Jasper