FRAMEWORK PANEL #27

CHALLENGING COLONIALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Wednesday, April 4th, 2018
6:30 – 8:00 pm

The Mexican Cultural Institute
2829 16th St NW
Washington, DC 20009

Attendance is FREE.

MEDIA

• Press Release

Transformer continues our ongoing FRAMEWORK Panel Series with FRAMEWORK Panel #27: Challenging Colonialism in Contemporary Art. This panel will highlight emerging artists challenging commonly held notions of how their identities have been defined through colonialism, history, and popular culture.  Panelists include. Ash Arder, Adrienne Elise Tarver, Dulcina Abreu, and Hoesy Corona. The panel is moderated by Edgar Endress.

This panel is presented in conjunction with Transformer’s spring exhibition, Queer Tropics, a group exhibition that considers the abstract idea of the tropics and how that vision has been variously created, reinforced, and confronted. Originally presented at Pelican Bomb Gallery X in New Orleans, November 2017, Queer Tropics features artworks that examine the visual and cultural systems through which one imagines the landscape of the tropics as a site of leisure, sensuality, and play.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Ash Arder is a trans-disciplinary artist who creates idea and object-based systems for interpreting and re-imagining interspecies relations (i.e. relations between humans and plants). Her highly flexible, research-based approach examines these relationships primarily through pop culture and historic (both personal and shared) lenses. She is a 2018 MFA candidate in the fiber department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 

Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Victori+Mo and BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn, NY, A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and Art Matrix Gallery in Chicago, IL and an upcoming solo show at Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY. Recent group exhibitions include shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Pelican Bomb in New Orleans, Transformer Gallery in Washington DC, and Freight + Volume in New York among others. She was selected by ArtNet as one of “14 Emerging Female Artists to watch in 2017” and has been featured in online and print publications like Brooklyn Magazine, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, Ingenue Magazine, Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University. 

Dulcina Abreu was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Abreu's artwork is primarily focused on dance as medium, creating spaces to talk about resistance and identity through performance art, installation, poetry and sculpture. With pieces as "Lady Walk" or "Cartografia" Abreu plays in between representation and translation of the aesthetics of Dominican labor in NY, each one piece inspired by transcultural phenomenon around construction craftsmanship or basic assembling line performance. Zie projects have been presented with art institutions as New Museum, Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery, Sheila C Johnson Design Center and Studio 301.

Hoesy Corona is a multidisciplinary artist and the founding co-director of Labbodies, a visual arts organization that creates opportunities for artists working in the arena of performance art. Corona’s unapologetically colorful, sculptural and performance-based works have appeared at The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, The Queens Museum, Visarts, Transformer DC, Glass House Project, Kern Gallery, Haggerty Museum, The Peale Museum, Panoply Performance Laboratory and The Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, among others. Corona is the recipient of a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant administered by The Contemporary.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR:

Edgar Endress is a Chilean artist who works within the limits of social-practice and sculpture, interactive media, collaboration and public engagement. Most of Endress' work involves working with communities with an emphasis on popular culture. His works of video art and documentaries reveal a very personal style of camera and editing, with a constant interest in the relationship between the natural landscape and the built one, as well as in the human presence and the personal stories that are held in these spaces. He is also the founder of the Floating Collective Laboratory, a mobile museum that aims to bring art closer to the daily life of the public and stimulate participation in contemporary and social art. He also directs an experimental laboratory of arts and technologies at George Mason University.

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The Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington, D.C. is committed to enriching the relationship between Mexico and the United States by sharing Mexico's vibrant cultural past and present with the local community. Since its establishment in 1990, the Institute has succeeded in presenting diverse, ongoing cultural programs and has become a thriving artistic center in the heart of Washington. Over the past two decades, the Institute has developed cultural programming in partnership with many institutions in the nation's capital including the Smithsonian Institution, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, among others. www.instituteofmexicodc.org