Incidental Gestures
Maria Antelman & Jules Gimbrone
October 6 - November 2, 2019
@
Melanie Flood Projects
420 SW WASHINGTON STREET, #301
PORTLAND, OR 97204
Incidental Gestures is an exhibition about the ways bodies, identities, technologies and nature interlace and interface. Both Antelman and Gimbrone’s works are rooted in interrogating sensory perception and in drawing on productive unease, and even discomfort.
Jules Gimbrone’s photographs depict the corporeal resonating sculpture, Perpetual Motion. Standing on the shore of the Long Island Sound, vessels filled with brackish water reflect their own image and the natural environment. The glass, studded with sonic transducers, imply an imagined sound, or voice, speaking back to the waves. Gimbrone carves out a queer space, one contingent on a sounding subject’s illegible and instable identity–a flux caught within the frozen slice of a photograph. Here the flexible body, the imagined body and the listening body is able to perceive information beyond a quick binary-based flattening.*
“What I call Trans-Sensing Modalities are methods that trans people— specifically those who identify as transgender, but also people whose subjectivity is unmoored from the dominant culture—intuitively cultivate to navigate the world. An emphasis on sensory presence and integration, such as trans, is a reprioritization of the nuanced body, the flexible body, the imagined body, and the listening body, one that is able to perceive information beyond a quick binary-based flattening.”
Maria Antelman’s Sentimental Conversations is a sculptural installation with two video monitors on stands. These depict animated body parts, a young male chest with moving eyes looking at a senior female chest with moving lips. This soundless, internal trans-generational exchange transmits life experiences as information data. Another piece is Disassembler, a video projection with sound, which raises questions about the physical and psychological impact that the automated industry exerts on workers bodies. It confronts a post-automated experience, where bodies and gestures return to an organic, experiential world.
“I am thinking more and more about bodies in relation to technology and how we are becoming informational objects, as our biological, physical and emotional information becomes part of the data economy. At the same time, there is a new, autonomous, artificial consciousness starting to embody our surrounding things. This is designed by replicating human behaviors, and I am wondering how instinctively our coping mechanisms are mimicking this new artificial awareness, which is a simplistic copy of ourselves.”*
Incidental Gestures investigates different kinds of disembodying in order to investigate what a body may be. They both ask, what happens and what kind of meaning is made when two things that shouldn’t go together, do.
Maria Antelman received her MFA from Columbia University. Recent shows include Mechanisms of Affection (solo) at the Visual Art Center, UT Austin; Glass Age at Helena Anrather Gallery, NY (2019); Disassembler (solo) at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2018); New Acquisitions at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2018); photo-graphe at Benaki Museum, Athens (2018); Without God or Governance at Marinaro Gallery, NY (2018). She has been awarded production grants from the Onassis Foundation USA, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and J.F. Costopoulos Foundation. She has held residencies at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn and International Studio and Curatorial Program, NY.
Jules Gimbrone (b. 1982 Pittsburgh; lives and works in NYC) Gimbrone’s works have appeared at such venues as Stellar Projects, SculptureCenter, ISSUE Project Room, The Rubin Museum, MOMA PS1, REDCAT, Human Resources LA, Park View Gallery, Vox Populi, and Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva, Switzerland. Gimbrone received an MFA in Music Composition and Integrated Media from CalARTS in 2014. In 2018 Gimbrone received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and was accepted to In Practice at Sculpture Center.
WORKS ON VIEW
Maria Antelman
Sentimental Conversations, 2019 2 Channel SD Video
5 min loop
Disassembler, 2018
Vertical HD Video with Sound, 4:30 min
Commissioned by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn and co-produced by The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece
Jules Gimbrone
Perpetual Motion 1, 2, 3, 4
All works 2019
Archival Pigment Print Edition of 10 + 1 AP