FAMILIEN IGLESIAS: LOOPS AT A SPOOL
September 15 - October 14, 2018
Opening: September 15th 6 - 9pm
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce LOOPS AT A SPOOL, a project by Familien Iglesias, recipients of OyG’s most recent Open Call. Born and raised in Queens, NY to Norwegian/Dominican parents, the collaborative team of artists and sisters Lisa and Janelle Iglesias work together as Las Hermanas Iglesias, a moniker that locates their identity within the historical and philosophical contexts of feminism, teamwork, and multiplicity. Over the past ten years of the artists’ collective art practice, Las Hermanas, have worked formally and informally with their mother Bodhild as well. For their latest project at Ortega y Gasset, Las Hermanas Iglesias have further expanded this familial cooperation, actively including Lisa’s son, Bowie, in the development and creation of LOOPS AT A SPOOL. The exhibition features a dialogic call and response between the four family members, across 3 generations and multiple mediums.
LOOPS AT A SPOOL features works on paper, created by Las Hermanas Iglesias, alongside textile counterparts that function as visual translations, knit by Bodhild. As the matriarch of the Norwegian-Dominican family, Bodhild has long played the role as translator, the only member who speaks Norwegian, Spanish and English fluently. Growing up in rural Norway, Bodhild cultivated a deep intimacy with knitting and other textile traditions such as weaving and embroidery, techniques she now instrumentalizes as translational processes.
Her youngest grandchild and namesake, Bowie, is six years old. Understanding his role as co-conspirator and interpreter, Bowie’s contributions are mischievously placed throughout the gallery, serving as echoes and responses to the specific forms and stories he discovers in his collaborator’s work. This exhibition marks the first time that Lisa, Janelle, Bodhild and Bowie are exhibiting work created in concert with each other as Familien Iglesias.
While childhood has been imagined as the most fearlessly creative time in one’s life, children are often regarded as a major distraction to a professional, critical practice. Eschewing this notion as well as the tradition of the solitary (and usually male) cultural producer, Familien Iglesias is interested in exploring and celebrating the ways in which the multiple members influence, distract, reshape and finish each other’s aesthetic sentences. Like the palindromic title suggests, the works in LOOPS AT A SPOOL are motivated by a rhythmic back and forth dialogue, a sense of play and an exploration of how ideas translate between different materials, laying bare the commonalities and glitches between objects and phenomena.
ABOUT FAMILIEN IGLESIAS:
Las Hermanas Iglesias is the project-based collaboration of Lisa and Janelle Iglesias. For their project at Ortega Y Gasset, the artists have extended their collaboration to include their mother, Bodhild, and Lisa’s son, Bowie, under the collective name Familien Iglesias.
Bodhild Brendryen Iglesias was born in Folldal, Norway, and moved to NYC when she was 20. Shortly thereafter, she fell in love Bienvenido, a political scientist from the Dominican Republic, whom she married and raised 4 daughters in Queens, NYC with. Bo worked as a NYC Public School teacher for 12 years, has been skiing since she was 2, knitting since she was 9, and has collaborated with her youngest daughters off and on for the past 10 years. She is the only Iglesias family member who speaks English, Norwegian and Spanish fluently (in addition to some German and French).
Lisa received her MFA from the University of Florida where she is now an Assistant Professor of Drawing & Painting and mother to Bowery Katskill Gerlitz Iglesias. Janelle earned her degree in Sculpture from VCU and and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Carnegie Mellon University.
Lisa and Janelle’s individual & collaborative work have been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum, Sculpture Center, Abrons Art Center and other spaces. As a team they’ve been artists in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts through LMCC’s Paris residency program, Fanoon: Center for Print Research at VCU Qatar and Stoneleaf Retreat in New York. Their individual and collaborative work has been supported by the Queens Council for the Arts, NYFA, NALAC, The Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Las Hermanas maintain an ad hoc studio in Queens while working on projects in lots of places.
The Skirt
Threshold – Adam Liam Rose
September 15 - December 2, 2018
Opening: September 15 6-9 pm
Adam Liam Rose's Threshold is an installation of objects, video, and a tunnel constructed of collapsible frames. While site specific, the work is built as a film set in flux, with the idea that it may operate in another context. The installation turns the gallery’s entryway into an underground “safe” space or shelter, continuing the artist’s exploration of physical, economic, and social accessibility within space, and pointing to invisible systems that create limited access. The work recalls Israeli bomb shelters, convict escape tunnels, smuggler routes, brutalist bunkers from WWII, and catacombs. As the architecture of the gallery does not allow for indiscriminate entry, Rose is interested in highlighting the failures of infrastructure and of the language of inclusion within art spaces and other sites of public exchange. While marking a ceremonial transition of the body from the street into the “sacred” space of the gallery, the threshold in this installation refers to a line of access, a point of entry, and to a point of no return. In this way, the work alludes to the precipice between life and death.
In the case of a natural disaster or nuclear explosion, whose bodies are most protected? In what ways do communities deal with these dangers, and in what ways does culture relegate them to the imaginary, the screen, and the immaterial? How does one's relationship to a given environment transform in the physical body versus the screen? What dangers are perceived? What spaces, if any, are safe?
Adam Liam Rose (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, photography, video and installation. Born in Jerusalem and raised mostly in the United States, his works investigate the aesthetic systems of power embedded within architecture. Rose has exhibited at museums and institutions including the Jewish Museum (New York, NY), the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Marinaro Gallery (New York, NY), Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Sullivan Galleries (Chicago, IL) the Pfizer Building (New York, NY) and others. He was awarded residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), A-Z West: Institute of Investigative Living (Joshua Tree, CA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (Chicago, IL). In 2018 Rose acted as a Fellow within the Art & Law Program (New York, NY), he received an Artis Contemporary Residency Grant, and will be a participant in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM Program. Rose received his BFA in Fiber & Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago ('12) and an MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University School of the Arts (‘17). He Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
ONLINE EXHIBITION
Second Daytime
an online exhibition of performance art on video
February – October 2018
Martha Daghlian, Michele Jaquis, Mónica Palma,
and Cayla Skillin-Brauchle
www.oygprojects.com/second-daytime