Metamorphosis of Borders
Painters, sculptors, photographers, from USA, Armenia/Germany present the collaborative project—Metamorphosis: Mediated Bordering. Working with the medium of video based installation, artists address the idea of feminine as a globalized cultural construct, exploring how societal, economic and cultural institutions construct feminine identity, its representation, and its ideal.
The project participants come together from very different cultures to explore the idea of metamorphosis as the vehicle for shifting boundaries, closing the divides, dispelling the preconceived differences. These artists articulate, subvert, or negate the stereotypes and address the contradictions of feminine identity as one of the vital issues in contemporary art. Leaving the viewer to project his or her own phobias and fetishes onto the images, the artworks remain autobiographical and personal, but also symbolic, allegorical, and historical, and encourage viewer’s interpretation and appropriation.
Eva Harut and
Mariana Smith
collaborative video art installation investigates crossing the histories and geographies where the distances fluctuate between the physical, geographic, and cultural. Poetic ephemera of video projection transform the banal food preparation activities into a shadowy dance that conflates the feminine domestic space and that of the art—the revered“ white cube”.
Mariana Smith
She presents the video interpreting the subject of immigration, displacement, and memory. This work is based on her experiences, and Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark—a collection of essays about city of Venice. She started working on this project during the January 2013 Venice Printmaking Studio residency and finished it during summer 2014 residency at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia in Venice, Italy. Shifting between documentary reconstruction and poetic melodrama, this works’ formal relationships of picture plane and cinematic space intermingle with personal, artistic, and political ambitions, raising questions about the nature of immigrant dislocations and the unrealized dream of homeland.
Elena Harvey Collins and Liz Roberts collaborate on an ongoing project, "My Body Your Landscape", which responds to the ways that the built environment constricts behavior while promoting a certain kind of performance--that of family life, leisure, and shopping. Within this project we have made works that explore driving as a way of seeing, the theatricality of car-oriented spaces, and the potential within them for other kinds of performances--all carried out while motherhooding.
Melissa Vogley Woods
She presentsMonochrome Suite an exploration of painting icons, their mystique and the male gaze as a search for connections in the genres of painting and video. With a direct reference to artist Yves Klein, Monochrome Suite investigates painting and performance by reclaiming: “his” Yves Klein blue to reveal its messy relationship to the female body and it’s intended serenity. Using the foot as metaphor for the body, she explores not critiques the fetish video and its support system, the Internet and a lineage of woman artists who navigated video, sexuality and painting in their work. The confined tableau of the frame holds a place to confront and play with degrees of sexuality, object-hood and the charisma of art history.
participants
Eva Harut
Mariana Smith
Melissa Vogley Woods
Elena Harvey Collins
Liz Roberts
Curators
Eva Harut
Mariana Smith
Participating artists
Eva Harut
Eva Harut is an artist, who makes journalist career and is keen to writing. She was born in Armenia.
She has received her degree in Academy of Fine
Art (Yerevan, Armenia).
Since 2011 she is working on an international multimedia project “Metamorphosis.” In her works, Eva seeks the balance between the complexity of the human subconscious and the external, socially prescribed pressures. Painting, installation, and video art presented her with the formal language to renegotiate the feminine identity as cultural, social, and political construct.
Eva Harut works both on paper and on canvas, besides she expresses herself by performances, experimental films and stories. Her film «Metamorphosis of a Woman» explores how woman's roles shift in contemporary Armenian society. This film was translated and exhibited in Dresden, Germany ( 2013 ). The Film-performance "Die Realisatoin " was exhibited in Museum of modern Art in Yerevan ( 2014 ).
This is the bases of her 4 personal projects: 2012 – Narekatsi Center (Yerevan), 2013 – Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), 2014 – Modern Art Museum (Yerevan), Pictura gallery, Dresden. In 2014 Eva Harut participated in OSTRALE'14 in Dresden, Germany.
She is a participant of international projects, biennials, and residences in Germany, Armenia, Latvia, Austria, Latin America and Russian Federation.
Mariana Smith
Mariana Smith Mariana Smith is a professor at the Stockton University, NJ. She received a 2002 BFA in fine art and miniature painting after she received a BFA form Columbus College of Art and Design and a MFA from Cornell University.
Her works is bringing together painting, printmaking, drawing, and video installation in order to inspire a dialogue about identity, locality, time and memory.
Smith’s work has been exhibited in USA, Italy, China, Ireland, and was displayed at the State of Ohio Governor’s Mansion in Columbus, Ohio. Artist residencies include Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia, Venice, Italy, residency, International Printmaking Workshop, Xi'an, China, GCAC Dresden Residency, Dresden, Germany, Venice Printmaking Studio, Venice, Italy, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, Moscow College of Applied and Industrial Arts, and Fedoskino Lacquer Miniature Factory, Russia.
link to the video
http://marianasmithart.com/artwork/3382420_Time_Thickens_in_Venice.html
http://marianasmithart.com/artwork/2336339_I_thought_my_fire_was_out_and_stirred.html
Elena Harvey Collins
Elena Harvey Collins is a Cleveland based artist from London, England. She completed her MFA in 2012 at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, working with multi-channel video installation. She has participated in exhibitions at Roy G Biv Gallery, Columbus (2012) SPACES Gallery, 2012) and Survival Kit (2013), both Cleveland. In 2014, her work was screened at “Videoholica”, Varna, Bulgaria. She is Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and her writing has been published in “Temporary Art Review”, “Arthopper”, and “Urban Infill” (Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, KSU Press 2014).
Elena Harvey Collins
www.elenahcollins.com
Liz Roberts
Liz Roberts is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Ohio, where she completed an MFA at Columbus College of Art & Design. Utilizing the moving image as a medium - film, video, and expanded cinema installation - her work has screened/exhibited at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, New York Exposition of Short Film and Video, Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn), Wexner Center for the Arts (Ohio), Grand Rapids Art Museum (Michigan), the Film-makers' Coop (NYC), and elsewhere. As an educator, she has been a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Cinema and a visiting artist in Studio Art at Denison University; she is presently faculty in Cinematic Arts at CCAD. This artist was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY2015.
Liz Roberts
lizrobertszero.com
Melissa Vogley Woods
Melissa Vogley Woods, received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and MFA from Ohio State University. While she received a painting undergraduate degree and printmaking graduate degree, Vogley Woods maintains a diverse multidisciplinary practice that crosses between painting, drawing, sculpture, video and installation. She had exhibited nationally and internationally in Berlin and Dresden, Germany.
Her art practice and teaching extends to curatiorial practice and social practice through community-directed program development such as C.A.M.P. Community Arts and Mural Project, international exhibitions such as house WARNING, held at Hopkins Hall Gallery at The Ohio State University; Object/Imprint at the Urban Art Space; and Rooms to Let I and II and III, an annual site-specific exhibition held within different empty houses in Columbus other cities.
Vogley Woods had received numerous awards for creative excellence including Greater Columbus Art Council and Ohio Art Council. She is the founder of the Ohio chapter of the Tracers Book Club—the national feminist organization. Melissa Vogley Woods currently teaches at Columbus College of Art and Design and Columbus State Community College.
link to the video
The project will open august 2015 in Museum of Aslamazyan in Gyumri
I know who i am
Film-Performance by
Eva Harut and Mariana Smith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Fh-BZwyo8&feature=youtu.be
