"Channel Flip, Meet Me at the Edge of the Sun" at Los Angeles Nomadic Division, USA

LAND (LOS ANGELES NOMADIC DIVISION), Los Angeles, California, USA
June 21, 2020 – July 5, 2020

https://vimeo.com/429423547

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) presents Channel Flip, Meet Me at the Edge of the Sun, a new commission created by Guadalupe Rosales. In the artist’s words: “I am interested in how violence and micro-politics are embedded in our bodies in contemporary society and how artists channel this social energy in their artwork. How do we release the violence we are exposed to every day? There are nuances within this question that I continue to wrestle with. Our bodies collect memory, positive and negative, and, increasingly so, due to common social and political conditions.” Rosales engaged artists MPA, Zackary Drucker, Nao Bustamante and rafa esparza—friends from different chapters of Rosales’ life—to activate these nuances and to experiment on the notion of bodies as archives. Viewers are invited to think alongside the artists about the power of our voices, our bodies, and breaking through our common boundaries: in sweat, blood, tears, rage, grief and releasing any embodied violence and emotions.

The premier broadcast also coincided with a solar eclipse and summer solstice, as a meditation on returning health and revolution.

This program is curated by Matthew Schum, Independent Curator.

LAND’s programming series, Nomadic Nights, is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Artists

Los Angeles-based Guadalupe Rosales received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and was the 2019 recipient of Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship and 2020 USA Artist Award Fellow. She is the founder and operator of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz, two digital archives accessible through Instagram with over 250k subscribers. The archive is built on an archive of vernacular photographs, objects and ephemera connected to Latinx youth culture in Los Angeles. Guided by an instinct to create counter-narratives, Rosales tells the stories of communities often underrepresented in public record and official memory. By preserving artifacts and memorabilia, Rosales’ reframes marginalized histories, offering platforms of self-representation. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Aperture Foundation, The Vincent Price Art Museum, Commonwealth and Council, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Spazio Maiocchi, the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami, and others. She has lectured at numerous museums and art institutions, including UCLA, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, the Getty Museum, the New Museum, NYU, and Yale.

Nao Bustamante’s performance art encompasses video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing to and explore issues of ethnicity, class, gender, and the body. Bustamante has exhibited, among others, at the Vincent Price Art Museum, ICA London, MoMA, The San Francisco MoMA, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio, the Kiasma Museum. In 2014-15 Bustamante was the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside. In 2015 she was a UC MEXUS Scholar in Residence. Bustamante is a Professor and Director of the MFA Program at the USC Roski School of Art.

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning Transparent.

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist whose work uses live performance as inquiry into specific sites, materials, and memory. What he calls (non)documentation investigates ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity. Recent projects are grounded labor, land and adobe-making specifically, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. rafa esparza is a Rema Hort Mann Foundation, California Community Foundation, and Art Matters Foundation grants recipient. Solo exhibitions include MASS MoCA, ArtPace, Ballroom Marfa, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2013); group shows and performances include the Institute of Contemporary Art LA, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, GAMMA Galeria, Bemis Art Center, LA><ART, the Armory Center, and Human Resources.

MPA has explored a range of meditative, durational, theatrical, and actionist modes of performance to engage “the energetic” as a potential material in live work. Enriched with ritual, her performances and installations critically examine behaviors of power. She has proposed questions on the global arms race, patriarchy as governance, and the dysfunctional union of art with capitalist commodity. MPA’s work has been widely exhibited, including the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, MassMOCA, Stedelijk Museum, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca. A frequent collaborator, MPA is a visible muse for many contemporary photographers, painters, and filmmakers. After receiving a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in 2013, MPA relocated from New York City to the Mojave Desert to continue her research of somatic practices. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, and since 2013 has been a visiting professor in The New Genres Art Department at UCLA.

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LAND (LOS ANGELES NOMADIC DIVISION) is a nonprofit public art organization that commissions site-specific projects with contemporary artists in LA and beyond. LAND was founded in 2009 by curators Shamim M. Momin and Christine Y. Kim and since 2019 has been helmed by Laura Hyatt, Executive Director.

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The film is available for streaming through July 5, 2020 at: https://nomadicdivision.org/exhibition/nomadic-nights-guadalupe-rosales/