Vox Populi is very pleased to announce a new initiative in our Project Space, supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 

Fourth Wall is a year-long series of new works chosen by a group of four professionals from various locations and backgrounds.  Each month, one of these four curators will present the work of an experimental artist working in video, film, animation, or new media.  Cecilia Dougherty, artist and writer (Brooklyn, NY); Jesse Aron Green, video artist; Kevin McGarry, writer and curator; and Elisabeth Subrin, film and video artist, comprise the team who will head up this program.  Their biographies are below.

Opening on November 5, 2010, from 6-11 pm, and on view through November 28 is a new work by Puerto Rican mediamaker and artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, chosen by Elisabeth Subrin.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Esto es un mensaje explosivo, 2010

Video, 16:36 minutes

Esto es un mensaje explosivo is a film in two parts about the construction and meaning of an event which persists in unofficial and rumored histories of art in Puerto Rico. In 1979 Carlos Irizarry, a Puerto Rican artist, boarded an American Airlines plane and threatened to blow it up in support of the liberation of Puerto Rican political prisoners. The event is sometimes referred to as a work of art, as a political-symbolic action, or as terrorism, and at yet other times the event is stretched around the hazy figure of national hero, or artiste maudite. The film starts off from an interview with Irizarry shot on three different occasions and in which he refers to the action as a work, as a symbolic act, and in which at times he insists in the political meaning of the work to the exclusion of any aesthetic or art considerations, and yet also returns to its symbolic meaning and continues to regard as it as a "work". In a second part, dancers Beatriz Irizarry Gauthier and Carlos Torres López respond to the structure of the event as a set of commands performed in Carlos Irizarry's home and studio. They draw, plan and perform the event, departing from a political, historical or rational attempt to understand the event.  They use the structure to overcome and escape its logic, to break up the taxonomy it is locked into and arrive at a much needed not rational elsewhere.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is a mediamaker and artist living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1997 she received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She works with non-actors to create absurdist improvised performances that comment on social relations. Her work has shown in the US and abroad, including Taos Talking Pictures festival, the Museo de Arte Moderno de República Dominicana and E-Flux in New York. She was featured at the Louvre Auditorium and in PR04 [Tribute to the messenger], a biennial art event in San Juan, and completed a residency at Gasworks in London. She organizes an itinerant alternative and experimental film and video series in Puerto Rico, alternatively titled Proyector and 1/15. She was a guest curator of the 2da Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe in 2009.

FOURTH WALL CURATORIAL GROUP

Cecilia Dougherty is an artist and writer who works in video, photography, and web applications.

Areas of interest include women's rights, feminist theory, woman's place in the new global (dis)order, queer identities and queer, psychology and sexualities, everyday life, and new media. She has had numerous shows, screenings and retrospectives. Work has been written about and cited in books including Lesbian Art in America by Harmony Hammond, Chick Flicks by B. Ruby Rich, and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, and Queer Histories by Elizabeth Freeman (forthcoming 2010). She has published essays, reviews, artist's pages, poetry and fiction in anthologies and journals including A History of the Avant Garde Moving Image in the San Francisco Bay Area (forthcoming 2010), [From Site to Vision] the Woman's Building in Contemporary Culture The [e]Book, Felix XXX, Nest, Millienium Film Journal, Afterimage, Swingset, Film Comment, Artbyte, New Art Examiner, Blocnotes, and Framework. She is currently Core Faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Film/Video Co-Chair, 2000 to 2004; an Artist-Teacher at the Vermont College of Fine Arts; Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union, New York; and faculty at the International Center of Photography, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Jesse Aron Green was born in 1979 in Boston, MA. He received his MFA from UCLA and his BA from Harvard University. His recent exhibitions include a project in the Oil Tanks at Tate Modern and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. He is the Arthur Leavitt Fellow at Williams College for 2010/2011.

Kevin McGarry is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. His journalism has recently appeared on Rhizome, T Magazine Blog and the online editions of Art in America, Artforum and Interview. He is a director and programmer of Migrating Forms, a festival of new experimental film and video held at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Elisabeth Subrin's conceptual films and videos explore relationships between history and subjectivity, and the nature of evidence. Working across narrative, documentary and conceptual art practices, she also explores questions about the nature and meaning of mental illness, the legacy of feminism and the impact of recent social history.Subrin's award-winning work has screened widely in the US and abroad, including solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art, Thread Waxing Space, The Vienna International Film Festival, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Harvard Film Archives, The San Francisco Cinematheque, Sue Scott Gallery, and in group shows, festivals and museums internationally, including The Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The New York Film Festival, and The Rotterdam International Film Festival. She has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Annenberg, and The Creative Capital Foundations, and participated in the Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directing Fellowships with her first feature-length narrative film, in development with Forensic Films in New York. She has received film commissions from The MacDowell Colony and The Danish Arts Council for recent projects, The Caretakers and Sweet Ruin. A solo exhibition curated by Lia Gangitano will take place at PARTICIPANT, INC. in New York in 2011. Subrin was born in Boston and received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1990. She received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute in 1995. She has taught extensively, including at Amherst College, Cooper Union, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University, and The Yale University School of Art. She is currently Assistant Professor of Film and Media Art at Temple University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.