4 - Vox Populi - Mike Calway-Fagen, Hell and High Water

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Andrew Suggs

215-238-1236

High resolution images are available upon request.

EXHIBITION DATES: February 4-27, 2011
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, February 4 from 6 - 11 pm
GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm
GALLERY TALK: TBA

Philadelphia, PA - Vox Populi is pleased to announce February's exhibitions.

Mike Calway-Fagen, Hell and High Water

We live in a state of fear. We are scared of ourselves and each other; the good intentions of passersby; unexpected occurrences, both natural and man-made; killer bees and shark attacks; hope and defiance; the future and the past. Granted (or wrested) dominion over the earth, the sea, the sky and their inhabitants, we have been at best errant and inattentive, at worst downright dangerous. We worry we will have to pay for our negligence and our hubris, one way or another. We wonder when our debt will be due, and how much we will owe.

It is in this context that Mike Calway-Fag en works. Simultaneously deeply critical and heartbreakingly hopeful, he asks us to connect: to each other, to our surroundings, to our actions, to him. Perhaps greater connection will allay our fears and atone for our transgressions; if not, we need not be so completely alienated. Though aware that humanity has likely consigned itself and its environment to an inevitable unravelling and final dissolution, Calway-Fagen is neither cynical nor pessimistic. Often, his work is hopeful and idealistic in its criticism: we are complacent, scared and blind, but we can be better. It hinges on the overlaps and (dis)continuities between various realms of existence– animal and human, natural and artificial, permanent and ephemeral, sacred and profane– showing their mutability and lack of fixity.

In Hell and High Water Calway-Fagen brings together a body of work created over the past few years in locations across the United States. Ranging from large-scale sculpture to documentation of a Southern countryside intervention, intimate installation and suites of objects, his work draws o n the forgotten and pushed aside. Utilizing found and recycled materials such as walking sticks, blankets and fabric, roof shingles, and an unclaimed taxidermied german shepherd, his is a decidedly recombinant, low-tech, and do-it-yourself aesthetic. In tandem with a conceptual and intellectual rigor, Calway-Fagen produces work that is unabashedly both harsh and tender. Unbowed by either the plenitude or the injustice of existence, he brings forth both, asking us to see it all with clear eyes and soft hearts, and without fear.

Calway-Fagen holds a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Tennessee and has shown widely, including solo exhibitions at Possible Projects (Brooklyn, NY), The Carnegie (Cincinnati, OH), and Good Citizen (St. Louis, MO). [website]

Slinko, Naked Thing

Exploring the relationship between basic needs and excess, Naked Thing examines cultural production and sculpture in the current economic environment. Topics as diverse as Greek philosophy, Dixie cups, and flattened road kill all converge in this new body of work by Slinko. Featuring found objects, sculptures and prints, Naked Thing poses questions of radical equality between things and matter, form and content, cultural value and artistic investment.

Trained as a painter and designer Slinko spent the last years concentrating in sculpture. She has received residencies from VCU Sculpture and Extended Media, Sculpture Space, Center for Emerging Visual Artists, and Henry Street Settlement. Slinko is a graduate of VCU Sculpture and Extended Media program, and a Jacob. K. Javits Fellow.

Alyssa Taylor Wendt, TRIFECTA

Alyssa Taylor Wendt’s installation TRIFECTA combines the artist’s unique sense of fabulism and symbology to create a meditation on direction, existence and process. She chooses elements from both hereditary and present fragments of her life and folkloric detritus to create unresolved narratives that call for elements of the viewer’s personal experience to complete. The installation builds on footage that she filmed in Iceland and consists of sculpture, large format photographs, interactive segments and video The show will be presented for the first time in its entirety at Vox Populi Gallery.

Wendt lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. [website]

Letha Wilson, Punch the Sky

For the exhibition Punch the Sky, Letha Wilson presents recent work that takes landscape photography as the starting point for sculptural construction and interruption. In her work the ability for a photograph to transport the viewer is both called upon and questioned; sculptural intervention attempts to compensate for the photograph's failure to encompass the physical site it represents. Wilson shoots and prints her own color photographs, often taken in the Western United States, and her work approaches the genre of Landscape Photography with equal parts reverence and skepticism.

Wilson was raised in Colorado and received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, and her BFA from Syracuse University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and her artwork has been shown at many venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, BravinLee Programs, Nudashank, PARTICIPANT Inc, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. This year Wilson will be an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. [website]

AT FOURTH WALL

Michelle Dizon, Empire (ABS-CBN)

Curated by Jesse Aron Green

Empire (ABS-CBN) comes from Dizon's on-going cycle of works, Empire, in Fragments, which deal with the Philippines' colonial and neo-colonial history in an era of globalization. The videos that comprise the installation include shots of the movie theater at the former US military bases, shots of the walls that enclose the former seat of Spanish colonial power, shots of recently built infrastructure by the US on the southern war-torn island of Mindanao, and shots of the medi a conglomerate ABS-CBN's broadcast tower during a new year's celebration. All of these fragments weave together a spatial and temporal experience of the question of empire as it continues in the global south in general and in the Philippines in particular. Empire (ABS-CBN) documents the Philippine medi a conglomerate ABS-CBN's broadcast tower during a New Year's celebration in 2009. The work recalls Warhol's Empire in which Warhol filmed the Empire State building and slowed the film to a duration of eight hours. What is different in Dizon's work is that the "empire" is not the name of the buildi ng, but rather, a political history in the context of the Philippine nation state and its colonial and neo-colonial history.

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, and scholar. Her work focuses on questions of postcoloniality, globalization, migration, social movements, human rights, and historical memory. She works between Los Angeles and Manila. Dizon has had solo exhibitions at the CUE Art Foundation in New York City, the Art Gallery at the University of Texas, Arlington, and the Vargas Museum in Manila, Philippines. Her work has been exhibited in group shows internationally including the Redcat Gallery (LA, CA), Galleryloop (Seoul, Korea), Kor-i-noor (Copenhagen, Denmark), Tate Modern (London, England), Para/site Art Space (Hong Kong, China), Luckman Gallery (LA, CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF, CA) , Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LA, CA), and the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA). She has taught in the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts and she is currently on the faculty of the V ermont College of Fine Arts. Dizon holds a BA in English and History of Art from the University of California Berkeley and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is completing a Ph.D. in the Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley.

Founded in 1988, Vox Populi is a nonprofit artist collective that supports the work of under-represented artists with exhibitions, gallery talks, performances, and lectures.

Vox Populi's programs are possible through the generous support of individual contributors, our audience and Board of Directors, as well as the following funders: The William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, Samuel P. Mandell Foundation, Samuel S. Fels Fund, Dolfinger McMahon Foundation, The Barra Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Scion, and Google.

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Andrew Suggs
Executive Director
Vox Populi
319 North 11th Street
3rd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215.238.1236
www.voxpopuligallery.org