The exhibit will look at ways a few regional artists regurgitate objects, images and associations from the media saturated landscape into works of art as a strategy of defense and meditation.
Curated by Kevin Darmanie.

Artists include:
Ayana Evans
LNY
Mark Fox
Jodie LynKeechow
Nyugen Smith
Gerald Arthur
Victor Davson
German Pitre

Index Art Center
237 Washington Street
Newark, NJ, 07102
index.gallery@gmail.com
862-218-0278

Viewings by Appointment

DAY 3 @ The Newark Museum: PART TWO

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Silvana DMikos: The Spirits of Candombe (Uruguay) 6:30
The Spirits of Candombe video, forms a connection between music, fantasy and religion and shows us how similar music can have different realities. Candombe had its roots in African religious music and was brought to Uruguay by slaves in colonial times. They played music together, to substitute for more traditional religious practice, and from this music created the traditional Uruguayan popular Carnival music. When Candombe is played in other South American or Caribbean countries like Brazil and Cuba it’s known as Candombe, and only heard at religious services and celebrations.

Peter Mack: Playing My Favorite Shapes (USA) 1:30
Various guitar notes (or ‘shapes’) played and animated by Peter Mack.

Mark Franz: Rocking Mirror (New World Symphony and AIGA)- (Ohio ) 3:00
This visual interpretation of Rocking Mirror from Takemitsu’s Yureru kagami no yoake references the tradition of visual music, and the work of artists such as Oscar Fishinger, Hans Richter, and Wassily Kandinsky, by creating a synesthetic experience based on non-objective imagery.

Mauricio Saenz: Of Islands and Unicorns (Mexico) 7:30
The idea of “island” is visually like a panorama showing two distant points, each one producing its own sense of fiction and reality. In such isolated territory, utopic thinking functions as ideology, limiting what can be seen to only that which is at hand.

Rui Hu: Metropolitan Triangle Garden (China / USA) 3:53
In this experimental animation, statues in the museum participate in a destructive performance triggered by software glitches and misused simulation, turning the space into a madhouse theater with classical beauty and digital chaos, attempting to provoke the sense of history, turmoil, and technological sublime.

Peter Mack: Alphabet (USA)
The English alphabet animated and performed by Peter Mack.

Carlo Ferraris: I’m No Longer Obsessed With Winning (NY) 3:55
The title “I am not more obsessed with winning” expresses the apparent criticism of the super competitive context of the world of contemporary art The video explores the relationship between visual arts and music, declining a simple sound typical of Hip Hop culture with the resumption of a short walk through the streets of New York

James Chrzan: Conversation In Somerville, MA (Chicago, IL) 1:17
A confused memory of a conversation with a friend.

Edward Ramsay-Morin: Lithics (USA) 3:51
For this film, I was interested in creating an origins story that employed imagery of stone artifacts. Origin stories are often set in a timeless, ambiguous space populated with archetypal characters. The imagery used in “Lithics” was selected to parallel these motifs. Stone artifacts from Paleolithic, Neolithic, Cycladic, and Greek periods reside in the same space with mid-20th century computers. Non-corporeal entities act as agents of transformation. Imagery captured from mid to late 20th century telescopes serve as the backdrop for each scene. The stone in the opening scene, once transformed, returns to its original state at the end of the animation, suggesting a process a regeneration and renewal.

Pik-Shuen Fung: Oceans (NY) 2:15
Scenes of women in my family playing mahjong are punctuated by clips of the ocean. Oceans is a meditation on life, death, and the things we do to pass the time between.

Mark Franz: Body Without Organs (Ohio) 2:34
“Body without organs” is an experimental animation that explores the mystical singularity of the body in terms of its separate functioning parts. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use this term to refer to the “cosmic egg” of life.

Nancy Wyllie: Reenactments (Rhode Island) 2:30
Footage shot over a four year period in a variety of settings including Ford’s Theater, battle reenactments in Pawtuxet Village, RI in celebration of the 1772 sinking of the British schooner The Gaspee as well as dispatch exchanges during the Aurora Colorado Theater shootings and an actual student account of the Sandy Hook massacre provide the narrative lineage for this experimental short. The use of surveillance and the invasion of privacy are set against a security breach at Ford’s Theater in a face off with the Second Amendment. Gun violence in the United States has reached unprecedented levels. Gun control debates continue to divide the country and call into question the contributing historical, cultural and sociopolitical factors that have entered into the national conversation. As a Professor of Art & Digital Media at the largest community college in New England, my job now includes active shooter training. It is the voice of RI State Police Tactical Team Commander Derek Borek heard in the background of ‘Reenactments’ that makes this American crisis ever more chilling as he describes the strategies that faculty and staff members should employ in an effort to protect themselves and their students during critical moments while waiting for police to arrive.

Neil Needleman: Two Landscapes (NY) 3:00
The conflict between the landscape the eye sees and the one the mind remembers.

Dominique Duroseau: Baldwin’s Nigger and I Listen (Newark, NJ) 2:40
This video shows a woman of color (the artist) in blackface make-up, listening to James Baldwin as he talks about the word “Nigger”. It’s a charged and multi-layered piece that collapses many issues and references from different points in time; each time through, it ends with a revelation.

Greg Leshe: Flying In The Museum (NJ) 2:30
This is a private performance I made in the Newark Museum during my residency in 2004.

DAY TWO: Saturday, April 23, 6 – 10 PM

Jean-Michel Rolland: HANG ON (France) 00:59
In Marseille, six phone handsets, relics of a bygone era, are swinging like hanged men at the end of a rope. “Hang on” describes a city life where time escapes without one being able to catch up.

Michael Moreno: When You Least Expect (New Jersey) 6:00
A man running out of his supply willing to take anything that a stranger would give him. The results were something that we never saw coming.

Moke Li: Soma Pill V.2 (New York) 00:59
Moke Li is one of a new generation of Chinese artists who works in a variety of mediums, including digital media, painting, sculpture and installation. Li has received a BA from China Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Digital+Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally. Li has been focusing on critiquing social issues in expansive, non-didactic ways. She explores the boundaries between physical existence and mediated space created by computer technology, and also plays with concepts of hyper-reality, fluidity and sexuality.

Barbara Jeanne Jenkins: No Flowers (Chicago, IL) 00:59
My work explores the domestic, feminism, the feminine, and psychological spaces. This video is a very small sample of a body of work that I created between 2009-2012.

Stacey Larkins: In-Between Scripts (New Jersey) 5:23
An experimental film about A male suffering from mental health issues, and his physical and psychological experience with anti-psychotic medications

Catherine Goodheart: Erin (New Jersey) 1:53
This video shows my friend Erin doing “The Cup Song”. I met Erin when I moved into a recovery house in PA., June 15th 2016. She had been living there for months and had many months clean. Our paths didn’t cross much in the first months but we became close. I heard her do this song one night and was impressed at her voice and passion when doing the song. I also feel it speaks volumes to those I lived with in the house, and people I have met in my path to recovery.

Teresa Braun: What Power Art Thou (New Jersey) 9:00
Here lies a foundational fable, where cycles of reproduction and digestion overlap in The Mother, The Father, and Two Daughters. The story originates with a Cottonwood Tree planted by The Mother over the graves of Two Daughters. She gathers their blood as a sacrificial act of Mourning, Sustenance, and Procreation.

Liz Rodda: Total Body (Texas) 2:35
Total Body is a two-channel video comprised of preexisting video and audio. The video Total addresses the extreme irreconcilability of each “small fraction of a human that is human” mentioned in its voiceover.

James Chrzan: Suburban Street, 1998 (Illinois) 1:13
A brief look at a typical suburban street, reconstructed from memory.

Heejoo Kim: Unwearable Functional- Akinetic Mutism (Ohio) 5:00
an experimental animated film depicted a woman in society through virtual transformed garment and states of Akinetic Mutism.

Jennie Thwing: Song (New York) 3:54
“Song” was created at the Muriwai Earthskin Artist Residency in 2015 in New Zealand. This film was shot on various locations in Muriwai Regional Park. The film is about the fear of losing my identity to parenthood.

Jim Tuite: ‘Ascension’ by Orchestra (New Jersey) 4:24

Liz Rodda: Island of the Young (Texas) 1:13
Island of the Young combines preexisting video footage through rapid edits. The work addresses themes of emergence and submergence.

Lucia Burrafato and Georgina Diaz: (Untitled) New Jersey 2:11
Lucia Burrafato is a Fine Artist who is working with ideas within the realm of self identification and exploration of the internal conflicts within our minds. She graduated from St. John’s University with a BFA. Lucia is currently in the process of doing a series performance video pieces, which questions the borders of her own conscience. Her hopes are to identify with human experience and compel audiences to question the transcendence of life itself. Georgina M. Diaz was born in 1991 and raised in Middletown NY. She is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated with her BFA from Saint John’s University in 2014. Pry to graduating from Saint John’s University she also finished the one-year certificate program in general studies at the International Center of Photography. Georgina’s work expands across many medias including photography, video, and performance, often dealing with identity. She is interested in the experiences that form our identities both in the individual and collective. Her work often stems from her own experience.

Mauricio Saenz: Casa Iceberg (Mexico) 3:41
“Casa iceberg” explores the idea of displacement, both physical and mental, as a result of longing a renovated perspective on one’s existence. The social isolation produced by a specific place evokes the need for movement and transformation to a territory that could revert such condition.

Mike DiFeo: Perceptual Distortions (New Jersey) 1:18
In this process oriented work I corrupted the code of my self portrait with wikipedia entries on depression and other maladies. The different glitches in this animation are representative of the distortions I experience in my perception.

Peter Mack: Donuts / Music (Massachusetts) 4:15
Reflections on donuts and music

Carlo Ferraris: Return From Jupiter (New York) 00:59
Return from Jupiter – a whimsical poetry with numbers describing the interactions between the artist and a woman seated before him at a table. The woman claimed to have a superpower mind (perhaps she was from Jupiter). To prove it, the artist wrote a series of numbers on paper and showed it to her. She was able to recite all the numbers exactly without any difficulty in seconds.

INTERMISSION

Gozai Master: Unsub (New Jersey)

Sarah Sitzler and Angeli: Sibyl of Cumae: I Can No Longer Make You Smile (Brooklyn, NY)3:00
Using the epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as source material, this film explores the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl through the lens of the speech act “I can no longer make you smile.” This speech act is distorted through the gesture of toothbrushing, an everyday ritual of care, as an act of resistance to the aging body.

Olivia Accardo: R U FLiRTing With me (New Jersey)

David Bradburn: The Night Before the Morning After (Illinois) 15:00
Unaware of her past, Anne’s friends do their best to help her get over a failed relationship. When the pressure becomes too much, Anne’s repressed traumas explode in a cathartic moment where she makes a choice that is both horrific and heroic.

Rui Hu: Proposition in A Void ( ) 6:20
Composed entirely using stock footage, “Proposition in A Void” is an exploration into the false invitations pervasive on the internet, such as ads for online games or fake download links of sexual contents. Floating on the waves of beautiful yet illusory imagery of the web is particularly enchanting for a naive user new to the internet, as if standing in a long hallway with each door down the way promises to lead to an exciting journey, before the realization emerges that all the doors are painted images and the void of the hallway becomes a trap.

The Sarahs and the Stevens: The Dawn of Fontsman
Mostly handmade video and music

William Oliwa: The Grey Men (NJ) 1:23
Long After machines fail to guide humans to a perfect society, they have become spiritual guides for those left with nothing else

Hearty White: Hearty White’s Tai Chi Shemp (Florida) 2:15

And / Or: Tight Pants (NJ) 6:25
A genuine woman is driven mad by her TIGHT PANTS. A Sneak Peak of the upcoming short film anthology, Sugar Honey Iced Tea.
and / or is a duo of anally tight and inflexibly sadistic Christian feminists who are putting the “Art” back in “Jesus (Art)”. With conservative hits such as “God Made It Ugly for a Reason” and “The Dictionary: Redefined” in their Bible belts, they’ve turned their talents toward outsider art to showcase – quite generously – complex works of unknown genius.