“FabLAB(looking for patterns)….” Dorit Cypis
October 23-December 17, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 23, 6-10 pm (18th Street Gallery)
Artist Present at FabLab:
Tuesday- 12 pm-5pm
Wednesday-2 pm-8pm
Thursday-12 pm-6pm
Friday-by appointment
Saturday-by appointment
Cypis’ project, “FabLab (looking for patterns)”: towards an economy of inner and inter action, is a 3-month art laboratory of discovery and experimentation that will consist of research, performative events and interactive workshops to actively explore new participatory and collective models of engagement. This project will be an investigation of her 30 years of work, which integrates meditation and aesthetics to build engagement among individuals and groups with different cultural and personal values. Cypis plans to make visible overlapping aesthetic, conceptual, somatic, and social patterns as gestures, movements, texts and ellipses that may provide the public with tools and models for reflection and social engagement. Cypis will also host a variety of forums among centralized artists to produce a large dialogue for a local Los Angeles public about social engagement.
Dorit Cypis received her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts and has a Masters of Dispute Resolution, from Pepperdine University. Since the 1980′s Dorit Cypis has employed strategies of photography, performance, installation, social sculpture to explore relationships between personal and social identity, questioning subjectivity inrelation to corporeal, social, political and psychological spaces. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Orange County Museum, Walker Art Center, Musee d’Art Contemporain at Montreal, Musee des Beaux Arts @ Bruxelles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cypis has taught on identity, representation and social relations at universities and colleges across the USA as well as in Canada, Holland, France and Israel.
Cypis has generated extensive cultural programming including FAR (Foundation for Art Resources), 1979-1982, LosAngeles, questioning the production of art,the role of artists and the ability of art andartists to penetrate cultural domains. FAR developed partnerships between artists and public, private and educational organizations throughout Los Angeles. She founded Kulture Klub Collaborative (KKC), Twin Cities, 1992-1999, within a large social service agency, Minneapolis Youth Link, to challenge social workers to accept art as a viable discipline for crisis intervention with homeless teens. KKC developed strategies to bridge survival and inspiration, networking between homeless youth, artists and arts organizations across the Twin Cities.
Cypis’ recent study of mediation and conflict transformation pro actively addresses difference, the negotiation of power and reciprocity. Her work today mines aesthetics and ethics. Cypis’ museum exhibitions are immersive laboratories abstracting forms, positions, gestures, and meanings to shed light on the paradoxes of identity. Her public works and actions are social/political extensions, mediating aesthetic abstractions into living life. Founded by Cypis in 2006, Foreign Exchanges offers strategies of engagement bridging personal and cultural differences through aesthetics, conflict resolution and somatic arts, for the arts, culture, education, social service, social activism and innovative business. Foreign Exchanges represents the strengths of Cypis’ work as an artist, a mediator, and an educator. Dorit Cypis has received numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Bush, McKnight, Jerome, Ordway, Durfee Foundations, City of Los Angeles Cultural Arts Department and the Fellows of Contemporary Art. She is a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders, Chair of Mediation and the Arts Committee, Southern California Mediation Association and is on the Advisory Board for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
ARTIST ESSAY
We may see in the other parts of ourselves that we do not recognize and so separate them from ourselves as foreign. This separation silently transforms itself to a bias against others. Foreignness, shaped by both political and psychological forces, is a highly charged contemporary axiom, my sister, the stranger next door, the undocumented worker, the unidentified terrorist. Who is the foreigner? I can hold up a mirror to reality, both outer and inner, but can I see how the two realities end up co-mingling in the reflection? When I look, am I seeing? If I scan, taking in the reflection without commitment. I am consuming, gliding, shopping, desiring, inhaling without exhaling. When I see, I am engaged in an intimate act, recognizing that the one reflecting me is different and at the same time very like myself. How to see?
To witness the simultaneous sameness and difference of “you” requires a commitment from “me” of extra-ordinary proportions, a self inquiry into interior places without which there can be no recognition of difference, only an infinite return to a disguised projection,an mirrored blindness that restrict the possibility of empathy. Seeing is a complex act, somatic, psychological, emotional, social, historical, and political. Our cultural beliefs, held somatically as experience, memory and emotion, are evident in how we see.
I will be looking for patterns over the span of my work the last 30 years to make visible patterns that are driven aesthetically, conceptually, somatically, and socially towards tools of inner reflection and social engagement. The process is a laboratory of discovery and experimentation through performative events, workshops and labs.
1.Research my personal archives of the past 30 years in search of patterns, glimmers and tested tools for reflection and social engagement.
2. Reveal these patterns in a variety of ways, material and digital, textual and visual, dimensional, somatic and inter-active.
3. Invite individuals and groups: artists, activists, educators, mediators, creative leaders in my local communities to inter-act with my patterns, to tease out, to re-form and to apply to their needs.
4.Record these interactions for publication.
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