signs and symbols

signs and symbols: artists & allies IV

August 1 - September 30, 2021

Opening Online: Sunday, August 1, 6:00pm
Closing: Thursday, September 30, 6:00pm

signs and symbols is delighted to present artists & allies, the fourth edition of our annual summer program — a dynamic exhibition of time-based media — featuring video works, video documentation of performances and live streamed-performances.

Conceived as an experimental glimpse into our program and upcoming season, our annual summer exhibition celebrates the spirit of collaboration and experimentation, and the importance of community — #signsandsymbolscollective. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of works by artists of the gallery, along with “ally” artists who collaborate with our artists or inspire us and contribute to our mission and discourse. Online for the second year, this year's iteration consists of works that best lend themselves to virtual viewing. The selection of works are both new and old — new works along with timely historic works and projects we find ourselves revisiting anew.

After a year of isolation, we can finally touch again. We crave sensuality — hands caressing, mouths softly sucking on toes, strangers dating, fingers extracting pearls. A woman laments the criminalization of sex work. A mother makes sense of her experiences. We crave freedom and release, too — smashing through walls, through music, through tennis with witches. Caught between the throes of the pandemic and a promised recovery of normality, between nihilism and desire, we drift in liminal spaces. A new reality is sculpted. We are haunted by the memory of the insurgence, by incalculable loss, by our own ambitions, by past lives. In our search for connections and answers, we walk on the beach at night, exchange messages with friends across the world and wander through an empty home in Korea in search of roots. We relearn who we are. We thank those who came before us. But as we emerge, what lies ahead? Impressions of digital and analog technologies, artificial intelligence, the trustworthiness of images, a 3D printing of a fist — the future remains uncertain. Or, as Batman delivers in a message: "The future is shit." Only time will tell.

Devised with the intent for dialogue and exchange, artists & allies is not a singular position, but presents a diverse assemblage of style and substance from artists with unique sensibilities, and doubles as a snapshot and overview of our program and entry point to many of its strongest voices. Enjoy! xx

participating artists include:

annabel daou | rachel libeskind | tony orrico | ornella fieres | pola sieverding
jen denike | joan jonas | michelle handelman | carol szymanski | jaša | jamie diamond
sharon louden | brian clyne | the bad reviews | rania jaber | philip rabalais | david hurlin
adam broomberg | katy schimert | inner course | fawn rogers | ann weathersby | jill casid
barbara gundlach | steven steve paul | shelley marlow | melinda jean myers | eileen cowin
itziar barrio | jeewi lee | aja jacques | segolene hutter | isaac schaal | hrag vartanian

performance and happening dates:

Sunday, August 8 | Tony Orrico, David Hurlin & Philip Rabalais | performance documentation | 6pm | released online signsandsymbols.art

Sunday, August 29 | Shelley Marlow | performance | 2pm | Instagram Live @signssymbols

JEN DENIKE
Girls Like Me, 2006

"Girls Like Me is inspired by every scene in every film embedded in your psychic memory of the girl ritual, the cult of girls to women filmic moments, that unfettered felt freedom of female to femaleness, the muse as familiar, an innocence verging on eroticism. A few of my favorites include Persona (1966), I am Curious Yellow (1967), The Conformist (1970), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Suspiria (1977), Valley Girls (1983), Clueless (1995) and The Virgin Suicides (2000).

"Girls Like Me employs a playful yet rigorous cannon of repetition, the girls remain focused at task, while I move slowly over their bodies, my camera caressing their writhing renaissance triangulation, a prolific composition of three women sucking each other's toes. The bed as proscenium anchors their feminine cinematic arch towards a desire to desire, a decadent yet stoic performance, an encapsulation of exposed sensuality and the unspoken intimacy of shared femaleness."

They've got a name, but they don't wanna use it.
It's all the same to girls like me. It's all or nothing to girls like me.
I said yeah yeah yeah yeah, Girls Like me.
(excerpt from lyrics by Bonnie Hayes, 1982)

JAMIE DIAMOND
Portraits of Craigslist Strangers, 2010

"In this series, I invite strangers to perform intimate actions on my instruction. The subjects are not in fact lovers, they’ve answered an ad I posted on Craigslist and met for the first time in the studio. They have agreed to pose for a still image, and don’t know that the camera is shooting video. What is captured are hands moving awkwardly over shoulders, fingers tentatively interlacing, smiles being fixed on unchanging expressions. The act of posing, of constituting themselves, is now the end product."

ANN WEATHERSBY
Hermit Lane (Had she a room to herself), 2004

"In Hermit Lane (Had she a room to herself), I tunnel through an empty house with a sledgehammer and axe, rupturing surfaces, and creating crawlspaces from room to room. Engaging with the aesthetics of video, performance, and sculpture, I reconsider perceptions of female subjectivity, the limits of domestic confines, the repression and release of emotional and psychological events, and the intersection of pleasure and pain via extreme physicality – a rebellion against cultural and social binaries and expected codes of feminine behavior."

AJA JACQUES WITH ADAM BROOMBERG, SEGOLENE HUTTER & ISAAC SCHAAL
Sex Work, 2021

"We live in a society where services are bought and sold. My work, sex work (both on and offline) is one of these services. Providing sexual services should not be criminalised. We condemn the hypocrisy within our societies where our services are used but our profession or businesses are made illegal. This legislation results in abuse and lack of control over our work and lives. Sex workers should not be perceived purely as victims to be assisted, criminals to be arrested or targets for public health interventions – we are part of society, with needs and aspirations, who have the potential to make a real and valuable contribution to our communities. We oppose the criminalisation of sex workers, their partners, clients, managers, and everyone else working in sex work. Such criminalisation denies sex workers of equal protection of the law. This includes the right to form and join professional associations and unions that protect us both on and offline. The right to work, to choose one’s work, and to fair and safe working conditions are fundamental human rights."

FAWN ROGERS
The World is Your Oyster, 2020

"'The world is your oyster' was often said to young people with life ahead of them. Originating from Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, it exists as a phrase of passionate violence directed toward the pursuit of one’s desire.

"In 1918, as the Spanish flu ravaged the world, oyster beds were pillaged as they were seen to be remedies for the deadly disease. In 2020, when the COVID-19 epidemic hit us, I wanted to work with pleasure and pain, nature and industry, fragility and the future. The World is Your Oyster pays homage to these idiosyncratic and complex forms, inviting viewers to consider life, sex and death simultaneously. While oysters are commonly considered luxurious rarities forged by nature, like many things, human intervention has subverted the organic process of their creation. The oysters are harvested and pearls cultivated. An excision made to the oyster’s flesh assaults the viewers’ senses; ultimately this work is both violent and sensual, and at the center of these contradictions, the oyster is a symbol of lust, pleasure, opulence and indulgence, all-consuming and offered up for consumption, a literal embodiment of the anthropocentric."

JOAN JONAS
Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, 2021

This video is part of a large drawing installation exhibited at the 13th Shanghai Biennale, the subject being underwater rivers that carve channels on the ocean floor. The work was developed from sonar representations of these underground canyons made by scientists. Jeffrey Peakall, a sedimentologist, provided images, including the simulation of water flowing in the video.

ANNABEL DAOU & RANIA JABER
min sama la sama (from one sky to another), 2021

"min sama la sama (from one sky to another) is an exchange across place and time, between New York, Beirut and Aley, a town in the mountains of Lebanon. It documents a summer day and the fragments of conversation transmitted through virtual space. Images of the sky are shared often on social media, an ordinary way to express what’s above and beyond us. What does the sky hold? How do we frame where we are as we speak/write to someone on the other side of the world? Which sky belongs to whom? How do we make sense of places that are dominated by the powerful where power lines hold no power? The words hover and the skies overlap for a moment as we try to say something to each other."

TONY ORRICO, DAVID HURLIN & PHILIP RABALAIS
CROSSWAKE, 2021
Video forthcoming on Sunday, August 8

Documentation of a 4-hour performance in which Orrico and Hurlin integrate sonic and movement practices that test physical limits and sustain a co-authored presence. Rabalais navigates their improvisational terrain from behind the lens, amplifying aspects of the soundscape while formalizing one mobile vantage point. Orrico’s sound is a consequence of physical parameters that respond to Hurlin's interpretative play. Their sensing is circuit-like; reflexive sound and action that seems to evade absolute silence or physical release.

SHARON LOUDEN & BRIAN CLYNE
Seen and Heard: Amplifying Gratitude, 2020

In September 2020, Sharon Louden collaborated with a group of six women undergraduate students from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) to create a temporary outdoor sculptural installation that celebrated the 100th anniversary of Women's Suffrage, entitled, Suffrage Rugs: Amplifying Voices of Unheard Women. As part of the commission, Louden also collaborated with Brian Clyne to create an animation which was screened outdoors on campus during the opening reception. Seen and Unheard: Amplifying Gratitude continues Louden’s series of abstract animations begun in 2006 that imply figuration as shapes and colors morph and blend into clearly choreographed episodes. This version is her first to use visual statements that pay homage to all the women of the Suffrage movement, without whom the passage of the 19th Amendment would not have been possible, such as Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Angelina Weld Grimké, Marsha P. Thompson and Sarah Parker Remond, to name only a few.

ORNELLA FIERES
A black dog is looking at himself in the mirror, 2021

In Fieres’ video work A black dog is looking at himself in the mirror, we watch technology observing itself. Almost indiscernible scenes in slow motion are hidden behind what seem to be descriptions of images. It could be that the two, the out of focus footage and the phrases in bold letters, refer to one another, but there is an obvious or at least felt discrepancy which might stem on our collective memory: For the piece, the artist presented Sci-Fi movie sequences from the 1960s to 1970s to a neural network trained to analyze images, which then captioned the short scenes. Fieres blurred the footage, so in the end we can only assume that the artificial intelligence failed to recognize the fake technology that was once imagined to become our future.

MICHELLE HANDELMAN
Claiming the Liminal Space, 2021

May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in. –Jill H. Casid, critical theorist

"Claiming the Liminal Space takes inspiration from Jill H. Casid’s above quote in a continuation The Pandemic Series project which recontextualizes characters from my previous works into hypnotic visual essays about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. The first piece in the series These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves (2020) reflected on the feelings of isolation, and fear of the unknown experienced during the first lockdown. The second piece Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) was created in response to the political uprising summer 2020, marking what’s lost and gained in the struggle for justice and equality. This latest piece Claiming the Liminal Space (2021) looks at the insurgency of January 6, 2021, and how fears and lies built over the course of the pandemic gives way to rage on all fronts, exposing the effects of QAnon doomscrolling, and despicable wanna-be despots. It’s crucial to read this moment from a perspective of racial inequality and capitalist fascist oppression. Claiming the Liminal Space speaks to the discomfort of self-reckoning, and the complicated relationship between social and political inertia.”

THE BAD REVIEWS (ZANDER BLOM & SEAN O'TOOLE)
The Future is Shit, 2018

"Funny, I’ll live to regret that made-up song. How about this as a description: The Future is Shit was made during an intense bout of studio recordings. The unscripted studio experiment has its origin in a book of artist manifestos sitting at the top of a pile in Blom’s primitive recording studio in Cape Town. Two US businessmen, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, were much in the headlines. English music producer Oscar Powell was still a fixture of digital radio NTS. Dubai was still a popular midpoint for the flying class. Most of the video was made on a Friday night. The cheap Batman outfit was ordered from Takealot, South Africa’s homegrown answer to Amazon." —Sean O'Toole

RACHEL LIBESKIND
Spirit of Technology, 2011

"I made Spirit of Technology as a part of my senior thesis in Visual Studies at Harvard University. It was a meditation on the ways analogue technology still remediates the stressors of digital technology. Using really simple printed out color photos (no bigger than A4) as my collage materials, and toothpaste in place of paint on a cheap scanner bed — I tried to make as many painterly compositions as I could forge with my limited materials. I then tried to arrange these newly digital (albeit ephemeral) 'Paintings' into an animation program to create a fluid story of this creation and of my process.”

JILL CASID
Untitled (Melancholy as Medium), 2021

What to do with the ways we’re being undone? Casid's short film, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) calls up an activist wake that refuses to move on. Unfolding a ritual of mediumship, the film conduces our outraged grief as catalytic for the uprising and care work of living with more than one virus, amidst more than one pandemic, carrying our as yet unaddressed losses into the battles we’re still waging in the name of supports for the thriving of Black, Brown, Indigenous, crip, queer and trans vitalities. Centered on a set of fragile Polaroids, the film conjures with the material fragility of analogue photography to commune with the incalculable but still powerful presence of unredressed loss. In reversing the primacy of showing over telling, the film incorporates disability access as aesthetic gain by making closed captioning integral and image description its primary vehicle.

HRAG VARTANIAN
Flowers for Mr. Van Lare, 2021

EILEEN COWIN
A Sudden Sense of Dislocation, 2019

"Every morning, I open the NYTimes and I am outraged — every single day. I bring that feeling into the studio. After the 2016 election, for the first time, I was paralyzed. I looked to other artists for help. I read the work of poets like Evie Shockley, Claudia Rankine and Terrance Hayes. I put this Philip Guston quote on my wall: 'So when the 1960's came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.'

"A Sudden Sense of Dislocation came out of a collision of events/interests/obsessions: hiding, fear, separation and most of all — uncertainty. It is about unseen events and the uncertain future. For years my work has been about trying to come to terms with a political and cultural climate where you have to be constantly looking over your shoulder. There is a fine line to tread if we don’t want our work to look like paid political announcements. I want to make images that slide under the skin rather than smash you in the face. I imagine myself walking down a long hallway with many doors, there is the immigration door, the climate change door, the #metoo door, the gun control door, the racism door and so on as I frantically race from door to door wondering which one to open."

JEEWI LEE & STEVEN STEVE PAUL
vor•wurf, 2021

For the short film vor•wurf (literally: forward•throw // meaning: reproach), Lee traveled to South Korea to the village of Ha-Dong, where her grandfather's house stands. To some he was regarded as a brave personality, to others as a violent family tyrant. Perhaps he himself was just a victim of the Korean War, in which he fought as a teenage soldier and from which he returned injured. He died shortly before the artist was born, so she never met her grandfather in person. It is only by visiting his house, even more intimately through his room, that she meets her grandfather.

She seeks out the traces in the house and exposes herself to this past. The grandfather had lived in the house for decades. His traces were inscribed on the walls, sometimes literally speaking. When Lee peeled off the wallpaper, she discovered some paper notes pinned to the wall underneath different layers: words of wisdom, resolutions and amulets printed on paper. For Lee, the wall of the unfolded room is like a second skin onto which the personal story of her grandfather is inscribed.

KATY SCHIMERT
Icarus and the World Trade Center, 1998

"In the '90s, I had a studio on John Street near the World Trade Center. The towers were an ever-present male icon of power. But in the evening, as the sun would descend and creep between the two towers, a visual sunburn would appear, dissolving towers' edge, transforming the masculine structure into an illusive female form. Meditating upon the transformation, the jubilation of the rising market and the haunting presence of traders, I came to think of the Icarus Myth — the image of out-of-control ambition, of flying and falling figures. Icarus’s father, Daedalus, was an architect who built a labyrinth that eventually imprisoned both father and son, leading to the fashioning of wax wings and their escape. For me, the trading floor and the complexity of world markets became a contemporary, psychological labyrinth and a prison for an ambitious soul."

JAŠA
The Monuments, 2021

"When Gerhard Richter was asked what he thinks about when he paints, his answer could not have been straighter nor truer to fact. 'I do not think, I paint,' he replied.

"With this video, I do exactly that. It portrays the relations between various media I tend to use when thinking and relating to space and time. The contrast between the material and the ephemeral, how an intention, a gesture and an attitude within and towards the space is a work of art that does not merely reflect but generates reality."

MELINDA JEAN MYERS
the bough breaks, 2021

the bough breaks is a choreographic work of autofiction, created and performed by Melinda Jean Myers. The show focuses on her personal experience of early motherhood by exploring the movement vocabularies, rules created, stories told and songs sung to raise, teach and endure a growing child. With the child absent from the frame, the performance emphasizes the lived, the real-time, and the exaggerated flow of a mother in process; she is simultaneously always and never alone.

CAROL SZYMANSKI
Prologomenon to the go-between, 2021

"Prologomenon to the go-between serves as a video abstract for an ongoing performance work I began in December 2020. In this work, the go-between, I play the role of artist-as-matchmaker. The performance might be thought of as a sort of social sculpture, or perhaps a collaging of people.

"My pool of potential matches come by word of mouth from friends and friends of friends. The participants fill out a questionnaire and have an introductory meeting with me before meeting each other. The basis of trust stems from my good will, discerning eye, and innate desire to bring people together for the sake of happiness. As of today, I have conducted 29 'go-arounds' in which I introduce couples with me in my studio or occasionally on Zoom. We play a few rounds of poker for warm-up.

"Prologomenon to the go-between uses footage from the first go-around I conducted, when I introduced one man to two women at separate times in one day. As all my participants are to remain anonymous, I document the meetings by close-up video images of the participants' hand gestures which I see as a form of language."

BARBARA GUNDLACH
Memory of a Coma, 2020

"As a coma survivor, I had to go through a long process of regaining my memory and physical senses, as well as trying to balance my shattered sense of time. The work is informed by my engagement with neurological sciences and psychology, as well as the personal experience of struggling to regain memory.

"Memory of a Coma is a video performance which engages with the liminal space between the unconscious and the present, the familiar and the unknown. Striving to tap into this intricate duality of absence and presence in the human experience, the work is separated in two chapters on the notions of dying and coming back. I am interested in creating a sense of familiarity by the deliberate choice of an everyday setting as a backdrop, which then is challenged and disrupted. By exploring the shifting associations that happen when changing the vantage point of the banal, my work engages in the phenomena that occurs when a scene at hand is only what we read into it through memory-based and therefore personal associations. Memory of a Coma aims to draw the emotional and neurological link between the fear of forgetting, and poetry of death.”

ITZIAR BARRIO
The History of the Fist, 2014

"The fist is a ubiquitous symbol, which has amassed myriad significance throughout the epochs of recorded time. Following its trajectory through historical and fictional narratives, the fist is the central character in the work. Barrio inspects this history with a rhizomatic approach, encompassing the multiplicity of meanings housed within this simple but loaded icon. The settings of a strip club, a cave and a lab become stages, which act as portals through which we travel through time and space, conflating different iterations of our central character.

"The video includes text by writer Dia Felix, whose narrative fiction reinforces the larger mythology, and commentary by historian Lincoln Cushing, grounding the work in nonfictional details from his studies of the fist in a political art context. The History of the Fist also references the recent archaeological discovery that most early cave paintings were likely made by women, highlighting the potential of what is missing from the recorded history of human experience. Swiftly transitioning from this deep reaching human narrative, Barrio also hints at the sensual promises of future-gazing cyborg cultures, through digital fabrication of this archetypal body part. We are left to wonder what is it that we produce now that will be remembered, which symbols will survive us, and how they will be interpreted by generations into the future." —Rachel Vera Steinberg

POLA SIEVERDING
Blurry Picture (a fragmentary note), 2011

"How are we conditioned to see? Blurry Picture is an audiovisual fragment, a recording I made in 2011 after repeatedly visiting Palestine and teaching in Ramallah that year, to process some of the thoughts and questions I encountered. It contemplates the iconic, the natural, the political, and the touristic image and the gaze through which they are produced. Ten years later, this is the first time I share this unfinished piece with a wider audience. The questions remain as relevant as when I first experienced them, and what is visible is still and always has been dependent on the way and interest with which we look and listen."

INNER COURSE (RYA KLEINPETER & TORA LOPEZ)
INNER COURSE vs THE WOMBAT WITCHES, 2021

INNER COURSE vs THE WOMBAT WITCHES was performed live during the intermission of the final doubles match at the 2014 Women’s International tennis tournament in Hobart, Australia.