Schedule of Events Richard Newton, Have You Seen My Privacy (18th Street Gallery) February 1 – April 24 Artist Reception, Saturday, February 19, 2011, 6-9pm
Richard Newton held hostage by his broken television, his faded memories of fleeting fame, and his washed up American Dream. The Man Who Could Eat Glass, 1980 photo credit: Eric Engler
Beginning in February 1 through April 24, 2011, Richard Newton will be in residence in the main gallery. His project, Have You Seen My Privacy, will involve multiple presentations of video, ephemera, and correspondence accompanied by public dialogues with artists active in Southern California from 1960 onwards. Newton will actively collaborate with younger artists to develop three performances allied with the presentations. Artist Statement We would like to believe that the privacy risks we artists took in the ‘60s and ‘70s produced a legacy that can be called progress. But in the 21st Century, privacy battles are still raging all around us; perhaps the boundaries have shifted, and on some issues we may have been pushed back. Who would have thought that marriage would be such a big issue? Will we ever accept that women are the keepers of their own bodies? And did we really think Big Brother would be watching as closely as half a million cameras in London, dwarfing the estimated 10,000 cameras watching Chicago? I propose to work with three younger artists or artist groups to revisit or renew our view of what privacy means in America. Artist Bio Richard Newton, a.ka. Ric Marin, was born in Oakland, California, 1948. Mr. Newton has shown artworks, artists’ books, films & video and presented live performances and site specific installations throughout the world. His one-of-a-kind books were shown at DOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany. In the 1975 performance, I take you to a room in Brawley and we smell onions, Mr. Newton presented himself as a bride, a prostitute and an artist enslaved by success. The performance explored objectification, male-female and transgender identity. Some performances by Mr. Newton have found him in unusual places. For the 1980 PUBLIC SPIRIT FESTIVAL, the audience found him performing behind a chained door in a downtown derelict hotel. Titled, Get Under The Table, Don’t Look at the Windows, this performance dealt with family relationships, the nature of infinity and the threat of nuclear destruction or self-destruction by way of alcoholism.
Contributing Artists include:
TANIA KATAN
"Saving Tania’s Privates", Theatre: ACT Seattle. (Photo credit: John Ulman)
Artist Statement Thank You And Good Luck Written and Performed by Tania Katan How far will you go to find true love? Will you agree to be under surveillance 24 hours a day? Are you willing to go to the ends of the earth to search for the sanctity of marriage? Can you find sanctity in a hot tub? Are you prepared to audition for holy matrimony? Are you ready to say, I do? Tania Katan is! She is willing to risk scrutiny, privacy, heartbreak, thorny roses, home-town-dates, jealousy, and gender confusion in order to find true love and hopefully marry the woman of her dreams. In the ultimate audition for civil rights, Tania Katan will expose her entire life for a shot at marriage. She will prove to ABC that she has what it takes to become America’s next lesbian Bachelor. Artist Bio Tania Katan is an author and solo-performer. Here memoir My One-Night Stand With Cancer has received the Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, Stonewall Book Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Rock-n-Roller Melissa Etheridge said of Katan’s book, “This book rocks! It’s passionate, playful, and downright beautiful.” As a solo-performer, Katan has been seen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, ACT Seattle, The Painted Bride Art Center, Comedy Central Stage, Sideshow: Queer Literary Carnival, and more. He solo-show Saving Tania’s Privates will be making its East Coast debut at the Frigid New York Festival in February 2011. Her performances and published work have been written about in The New York Times, BUST Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Running Times, DIVA, and other publications. She is a guest lecturer, topless marathon runner, and a great time at a cocktail party. For more information please visit: www.taniakatan.com SCARLETT ROUGE
Scarlett Rouge, "Magic Trauma Sprinkles", Video performance. (Photo credit: Nicholas Calcott)
Artist Bio SCARLETT ROUGE is a multi-medium artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and Paris. Her first performance was at age 4 holding a sign that read “Nepotism” as she and the band “Visiting Kids” opened for Nina Hagen in Hollywood. Over the next 23 years, she sang, acted, painted, sculpted, modeled, cooked, and performed. As a child, her art practice began with a quest to discover what God really is. She became interested in metaphysics, quantum mechanics and Eastern philosophies while furthering her spiritual development through yoga and magick rituals. Rouge says, “If I found myself in art, it was a combination of my father’s own art practice and my mother saying in her heavy French accent, ‘There are no more philosophers, only artists.’” Rouge has a permanent installation at Owenscorp in Paris and recently had a solo show at The Palais Bourbon in Paris. In June 2010 she was a guest artist in Vaginal Davis’ performance “Speaking from the Diaphragm at New York City’s PS122. Rouge’s work has been shown at Track 16 in Santa Monica, Antebellum Gallery in Hollywood, The Palais Bourbon in Paris and she has participated and performed in alternative spaces. Rouge graduated from Calarts with a BFA in 2002. Her press coverage includes such publications and websites as Dossier Journal, NY Times Magazine, LA Weekly, and Interview. BARBARA T. SMITH
Barbara T. Smith, "Kiss a Spot Forbidden", 1975 black and white photograph, performance documentation Courtesy the artist and The Box, Los Angeles, CA
Artist Bio Barbara T. Smith lives in Venice, California and is a pioneer performance artist. Trained as a visual artist, Smith began her body-oriented work in 1965. By ’68 she was creating powerful transformational performances and has continued to the present. The work often externalizes her inner psychic material in mythic rituals, based on issues of gender, spirituality, and sexuality and are integrated with larger cosmic laws and structures. Many pieces are intimate, personal and participatory often extending over many days. In addition to her performances, she has since 1964 produced collages, prints, paintings, drawings and sculptures frequently related to her performances. Smith has performed throughout the U.S. and abroad and has taught and given lectures at universities and art institutions around the world. A recipient of several awards and grants, Smith was also a founding member of many alternative spaces in L. A. Included in the recent show of LA artists at the Pompidou in Paris, and the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show first at MOCA, later at PS1 in New York, she is currently writing a book about her early performance career. STEPHEN SEEMAYER
Stephen Seemayer, Stephen Seemayer with the television monitor mounted in the cross that he walked to San Diego while carrying in the performance "Pope Video," 1980. The six-day trek explored the notion that blind faith is both a cause and a symptom of depersonalization in an increasing technological society. (photo credit: Steve Fritz)
Artist Bio Stephen Seemayer is a Los Angeles-born performance artist, filmmaker and painter. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has mounted performances and exhibitions at galleries and museums across the United States. As a teenager in the 1970s, Seemayer began exploring the nature of identity in an increasing technological world. Using controversial imagery, such as his Social Security number, aborted fetuses and masks on fire, Seemayer confronted his audience with the question of what it means to be human in a dehumanizing society. Then he was among the first artists in Los Angeles to employ cutting-edge video and computer technology in his work. Now in his 50s, Seemayer has eschewed the gadgets and returned to the intimacy and individuality of painting. Marjan Vayghan
Marjan Vayghan, "Flying with the Cage", The image represents the women of Iran, who have slowly and silently been fighting and protesting for their rights on top of open graves reserved for their children. Creating this image helped me visualize my experience post arrest in Tehran, Iran, during the Summer of 2009 and the political uprising which led to the largest mass murder committed by the governing factions of the Islamic Republic of Iran since it’s conception.
Artist Bio Born to Azerbaijani parents in Tehran, Iran in 1984, Marjan Vayghan emigrated to the United States in the Spring of 1995, settling with her family in Los Angeles, California. Marjan continues to live alternately between Teheran and Los Angeles. Her practice is informed by this context of movement and flexible citizenship across both geographical and cultural spaces, and the multiple realities these spaces engender. The impetus of my creative practice is an effort to bridge diverse communities into a space of creativity and understanding. For Have You Seen My Privacy, collaboration with Richard Newton at 18th Street Arts Center, I will continue a series of exchanges and performances that began to take shape in early 2002. When my work began to transcend rigid notions of borders and classifications, giving me a sense of Home simultaneously creating sensations of displacement and alienation. As I am a condition of hybridity, this exhibition and the February 19, 2011, Funeral Procession (performance) becomes a site where I address the pain I endured after my 2009 arrest in Iran. As always my artistic practice is where I reconcile these conditions of dislocation, and create an alternative space that engenders community and belonging for those existing in between cultures, borders, and sanctions.
Jade Thacker Artist Bio
Jade Thacker is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. By adopting an anti- authoritarian openness, and at times humor, Thacker’s wor k encourages interaction by initiating a venue to explore microcosmic situations for larger social, pedestrian, and aesthetic conditions. Her projects illicit participation in an effort to realize a community of otherwise unrevealed desires, reactions, and secrets. By inducing productive e ngagement, alliances are created to work against the isolation and dissidence of the day to day, every man for himself, lifestyle. Through often deceptively simple engagements that bring people into playful contact with one another Thacker wants her work to propel you to action, to reclaim one’s freedoms, pleasure, and leadership.
Monet Clark
Artist Bio
Butterfly’s Shoe Fetish, 2009
Monet Clark is an artist who utilizes performance, video and still cameras to execute her craft. Distilled down to its essence, her work examines opposites and how they are innately part of the same whole. She engages her viewer to look at the juxtaposition of opposites, like the abject and the exalted, the beautiful and the horrific, or eroticism and repulsion. She is interested in transcendence through looking. Her works are conceptual, and at the same time aesthetic. She utilizes the methodology of framing real life events as performance art and her works are rituals for transmutation. They are raw and at the same time refined; and hold a powerful intimacy.
Megyn Cawley
Artist Bio
Candid Crossed Legs on Bus
Megyn Cawley is a Los Angeles-based video artist who is in the process of earning an MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Her work consists primarily of found footage and explores new technology, female adolescence and the influence of pop culture on the psyche.
Tiffany Trenda
Artist Bio
Terrarium.
Tiffany Trenda’s process is to take technology and create a digital environment with an embodied performance that simulates the human psyche. Her work is an investigation of how we are defined and redefined through the integration of technology. Trenda amalgamates LCD screens and her body making her identity interchangeable. In retrospect, the viewer associates the screen as being human. She questions how far can this loss of the human body be substituted until it loses all human connectivity.
Emery C. Martin
Artist Bio
: Home Network Awareness Program Presentation at The Change You Want To See Gallery Photo Credit: Audrey J. Chan Date: 2008
Emery Martin is a Los-Angeles based artist, educator, filmmaker, and techie. Martin’s work primarily deals with social and political issues in relation to how people perceive and process information. The Neighborhood Network Watch, a simulation of a citizen based, government backed, network eavesdropping group fighting terrorism at the community level.
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