Office Space

Reset

June 7, 2022 - July 5, 2022 (virtual with the New Art Dealers Alliance)

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“The prompt was: reset. Artists were asked to stop, pause, and reconsider everything that has happened in the last two years. Reset presents 19 international artists who express personal narratives, fantasies, new technologies, and unjust realities. The exhibition includes a variety of media including video, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation. Proclaiming alternative ways of being and pointing to systems of oppression, Reset considers the intersections of an unexpected phenomenon with our political lives.

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In Reset, the works address the absurd, surreal imagery, color, nature, and violence to challenge the ideologies that sustain subjugation. In their paintings, Ali Salazar depicts ideas of memory, nonsense, and child’s play with colorful brushstrokes. Atong Atem’s enigmatic portrait photographs highlight her harmonious use of color to explore her own identity through African mythologies. Similarly, Antwoine Washington’s paintings allude to Black myths, underscoring the importance of hope within the social landscape of both pandemics and racial injustice. Madjeen Isaac uses a figurative approach to depict the magical realism that characterizes her Haitian American upbringing in New York. Timothy Yanic Hunter and Alex Gibson propose new possibilities for an expansive definition of gender and Caribbean history. Embracing non-binary systems, diasporic consciousness, artists take on courage and play through painterly, imaginative, and thought-provoking investigations.

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Some of the artists in the exhibitions reflect on the literal sense of what it means to reset an artwork or change its configuration or meaning. This is the case with Laurie Kang, who considers her works as an ongoing process—an artwork constantly being rearranged. In contrast with this approach, others make propositions that explore avatars and tech-aesthetics to interpret the tensions of the everyday. Maria Antelman’s photographs address how the human body is defined as a collection of data and information, and how this system affects our psyche. Sumire Skye Taniai creates digital collages using pop strategies to point to the rise of Asian-American violence in the internet and beyond.

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Reset grounds the viewer within the artists’ poetic narratives to reconsider what our humanity means to us today. Symbolizing complex emotions and competing realities, the exhibition takes the pulse of how artists working within communities and as individuals continue to negotiate complex social dynamics through artistic practice. The outcome of the prompt was a kaleidoscope of artistic expressions articulating Reset—an exhibition that reflects on the potential of our moment.

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– María Elena Ortiz, Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)”

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Office Space is proud to announce an online exhibition curated by María Elena Ortiz of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) within a group show entitled Reset (https://www.newartdealers.org/programs/nada-curated-reset/viewing-room). Of the pieces submitted from various galleries, three were selected from our roster for Kathi Schulz and Sumire Skye Taniai. The theme of this particular exhibition is that of “reset” as a concept during the post-COVID era, whether it be political, spiritual, etc.

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Kathi Schulz’s playful and science fiction-inspired series of video pieces reflect on the concept of the female digital influencer usually via Instagram or TikTok. By employing a Siri-like voice over futuristic self-portraits, the artist deconstructs how neo-liberal capitalism combined with social media has eroded analog self-identity while opening up new avenues for self-exploration. For this show, two out of six video art shorts were selected as examples of what a post-human feminism would be like as a technological reset of how the public interacts with social media and its concomitant allure. As Jean Baudrillard said in Simulacra and Simulation, “Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”

 

Sumire Skye Taniai, as a Japanese-American artist, uses dark humor via digital collage to reflect on the extraordinary rise in hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans. Invoking pop art, she uses her self-portrait as a strategy to resist commodification of the Asian female body. Within her piece named Go back to where you came from the artist analyzes the nexus amongst the gas + oil industry, the domestication of horses and centaurs as a metaphor for the policing of Asian female bodies, and denial and erasure of Asian female identity as marked in this work by a X-marked door covering the artist’s self-portrait. Even the title acts a nod to racial microaggressions that get defused by Taniai’s gentle humor.

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All of the participants in the group show include the following: Farley Aguilar (Lyles & King, New York), Maria Antelman (Melanie Flood Projects, Portland), Ina Archer (Microscope Gallery, New York), Atong Atem (MARS Gallery, Melbourne), Louis Cameron (Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin), Sandra Gamarra (80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima), Ximena Garrido-Lecca (80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima), Alex Gibson (WAAP | Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver), Monika Grabuschnigg (Carbon 12, Dubai), Nicolas Grenier (Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal), Marina Heintze (MINUTIAE, Los Angeles), Timothy Yanick Hunter (COOPER COLE, Toronto), Madjeen Isaac (Sean Horton (Presents), New York), Laurie Kang (Franz Kaka, Toronto), Jennifer Levonian (Adams and Ollman, Portland), Ali Salazar (Ginsberg, Lima), Kathi Schulz (Office Space, Salt Lake City), Sumire Skye Taniai (Office Space, Salt Lake City), and Antwoine Washington (Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland).

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Kathi Schulz is a German painter and new media artist. She holds an MFA and Meisterschülerin-Award from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently an MFA candidate in Art and Technology and Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts.

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Her work investigates the interdependence between our bodies/minds and digital technologies. Schulz works in media ranging from Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, painting, installation, video, and sound.

Schulz was a panelist and taught workshops at Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf and NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf. Her work has been exhibited internationally in New York, San Francisco, and Germany; and has been shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf/Germany, K21 Kunstsammlung Düsseldorf/ Germany, ARS ELECTRONICA, Linz/Austria, and Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf/Germany. Schulz lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Sumire Skye Taniai was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in Japan, and has been living in the states for 18 years. She received her BFA in painting from University of Missouri in 2016 and received an MFA with a full merit scholarship from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019.

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Since then, she has curated a group show in her hometown in Japan, had group shows at Elmhurst Art Museum, Research House for Asian Art, Chicago, IL, Parlour and Ramp Gallery, Chicago, IL, Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival in Seoul, South Korea, and recently accepted into the Flat Files Program 2020-21 at Collar Works located in Troy, NY. She is also a monthly contributor for ADF Magazine based in Tokyo, covering emerging artists in Chicago and Kansas City.

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María Elena Ortiz is Curator of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she is also spearheading the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI). At PAMM, Ortiz has organized several projects including Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Art Collection (2020); The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019); Latinx Art Sessions (2019); william cordova: now’s the time (2018); Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (2016); Ulla von Brandenburg: It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2017); Firelei Báez: Bloodlines (2015); and Carlos Motta: Histories for the Future. Her writing has been published globally. A recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and Independent Curators International (ICI) Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean, Ortiz’s curatorial practice is informed by the connections of Latinx, Latin American, Black communities in the US, and the wider African diaspora.