Active-Intermission-Composite-Artifact 

Lily Cox-Richard, Vesna Pavlović, Marina Pinsky and Jonathan Boutefeu

1708 and online at ext.1708 (forthcoming)

 

Active-Intermission-Composite-Artifact (AICA) includes sculpture, video, and photography from Lily Cox-Richard, Vesna Pavlović, Marina Pinsky and Jonathan Boutefeu. An intermission is an active pause in which the narrative presented can be examined and the audience can contemplate what is to come based on what has already played out. It is an event that contains multiple trajectories and the possibility to construct new narrative arcs beyond the confines of the initial story. This exhibition is an extended intermission. Shattered, re-composed and unbridled rearrangement of contexts and legacies are prevalent in the work and practices of the artists in AICA. Similarly, many contemporary art institutions are confronting the crumbling conventions upon which they were built and how recent crises will impact their futures. Instead of defining a future of how or should art be exhibited, contextualized, and historicized what we can learn from these artists by asking: Upon what platforms are politics conveyed in exhibition of art and artifacts? Within what buildings? Maintained by what cultural constructs? It is from this pause and consideration we can approach the next act.

 

Lily Cox-Richard

In AICA Cox-Richard’s work draws from her ongoing interaction with materials that undergird canonical art and cultural histories. Her concrete sculptures, reminiscent of fractured sidewalks, are made of aggregate materials often collected from sites of their intended exhibition. And documentation-oriented and found objects like archival images and a semi-truck rear view mirror quietly trace personal journeys, while prominently cultivating new versions of common artistic narratives. Quasi-artifacts are points of departure like classical statues of female bodies in museum education departments to the site preservation of events considered part of Land Art and its presumed authors. Through her own act of material erosion and institutional excavation, she exposes the overlooked composite experiences that make up cultural legacies—their material baggage. Recasting dominant, gendered narratives within art and material histories, Cox-Richard unveils how institutional value systems are often perpetuated by investment in consistency in art history over care, respect, credit, and the sharing of resources.

 

Vesna Pavlović

Pavlović’s photographic series “Collection/Kolekcija” examines the power dynamics deployed through the exhibition of art collections in two buildings that represent political and economic regimes—specifically the Palace of Federation, the former executive branch building of Yugoslavia, in Belgrade and the former Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City. This new installation of photographs and 35mm slide projections document not only the artworks in the respective collections but the physical, interior context within which they existed and circulated. Through this framework, the images diagram the intended function of these art collections in the post-WWII era where anti-Stalinist, socialism of Yugoslavia and capitalism of the United States were extolled. JPMorgan Chase explains in its collection’s mission, “Art at Work reflects and aligns with the firm's 21st-century business principles and priorities: diversity, innovation, technology, sustainability, creativity, and excellence.” And the Tito administration saw the collection as a driver against fascism. The collections are seen in states of suspension, without viewers, and in many ways are indicative of the indecisive moments that occur in the movement between different political administrations and ideologies.

 

Marina Pinsky and Jonathan Boutefeu

Pinsky and Boutefeu’s performance was conceived at the former home and studio of Constantin Meunier—now the Musée Meunier, dedicated to the exhibition of his work. A prominent Belgian social realist artist, Meunier, to contested reception, sought to depict the lives of laborers, industrialization, and the heroism of peoples in plight in the early 20th century. Within this institutional setting Pinsky and Boutefeu question the intention of how contemporary labor and leisure are presented, and mine the ways in which fashionable subcultures grow from the varying levels of class mobility. In the performance, skilled skaters donned uniforms made of composite fabrics and embroidery resembling UHaul packing blankets, and roller skates constructed from iconic seat fabrics from the Brussels tram system and skated their way through the museum and a public skatepark. The work points to the shift from public transportation as capitalist infrastructure to the ride-share world of neoliberalism. Through conflating the inadequate hierarchical categories of art and fashion they undo conventional institutional attempts to compress social narratives into singular moments. Axel Van Hoof and Cecile Gentili designed the roller skates, and Natacha Della Mese and the Textile Lab in Tilburg collaborated on the uniforms. The roller skaters were Charlotte Bucaile and James Convent.

 

AICA will be featured online in early April with additional programming, and the launch of the monograph Vesna Pavlović: Stagecraft published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2021.

 

 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

 

Lily Cox-Richard’s work engages cultural and material histories of vernacular forms and systems, probing questions of value, labor, and stewardship. LCR has been awarded an Artadia grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows, and residencies at the Core Program, Millay Colony, RAIR Philadelphia, and the MacDowell Colony. Recent solo exhibitions include Yvonne (Guatemala City), Artpace (San Antonio, TX), Diverseworks (Houston, TX), Hirschl & Adler Modern (New York), The Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX). LCR lives and works on the traditional lands of the Pamunkey tribe in Richmond, VA, and teaches art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

Vesna Pavlović obtained her MFA degree in visual arts from Columbia University in New York in 2007. She examines photo-graphic representation of specific political and cultural histories, which include photographic archives and related artifacts. Pavlović has exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the Museum of History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. She has participated in a number of group shows, including at the Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011, in Turkey; the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the 13th Havana Biennial, Rios Intermitentes in Matanzas, Cuba; the MAC—Metropolitan Arts Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland; the 5th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina; the Württembergischen Kunstverein in Düsseldorf, Germany; the KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn,  Estonia; Zachęta, the National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland; the City Art Gallery, in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the New Art Gallery Walsall, UK; the Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil; the Bucharest Biennale 5 in Bucharest, Romania; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; Le Quartier Center for Contemporary Art in Quimper, France; NGBK in Berlin, Germany; Photographers’ Gallery in London and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK; and the FRAC Center for Contemporary Art in Dunkerque, France. In the 1990s, in Belgrade, Pavlović worked closely with the feminist pacifist group Women in Black. Vesna Pavlović is the 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. She was the recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award in 2018, George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellowship in 2017, and the City of Copenhagen Artist-in-Residence grant in 2011. In 2013, she was a Marian O. Naumburg Fellow at the MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She was a Southern Prize Fellow in 2018 and has received the 2012 Art Matters Foundation grant. Her work is included in major private and public art collec-ions, including the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Art in Embassies Program in Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey; the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia, among others. Vesna Pavlović’s Lost Art: Photography, Display, and the Archive, edited by Morna O’Neill, was published in 2018 by Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University. Monograph Vesna Pavlović: Stagecraft is published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2021. She is an associate professor of art at Vanderbilt University where she teaches photography and digital media.

Jonathan Boutefeu (b. 1989 Brussels) and Marina Pinsky (b. 1986 Moscow) met in 2016 and have been friends and collaborators since. They have overlapping interests in urbanism, site specificity, and humor. In their individual practices as well, they each tend to make context-specific and socially-driven artistic interventions. The work of Jonathan Boutefeu casts an ironic look at neoliberalism and distorts its codes. His work references play, commodity, and art history--with a nod towards mainstream cultural consumption. In the center of Marina Pinsky's work are mostly historical starting points, from which she picks up individual elements such as architectural forms, scientific representations or image motifs. By first bringing together elements that may be perceived as disjointed, Pinsky makes legible symbols appear. Together, Boutefeu and Pinsky are developing an idiosyncratic joint practice, first formalized with the 2019 project at the Constantin Meunier Museum.