Mondays

Monday Night – LMCC Quartet – Cecilia – Dario – Catarina + A.J.-- 09.22.03

Monday Night – LMCC Quartet
Cecilia Galiena - Dario Solman – Catarina Leitao and A.J. Bocchino -- 09.22.03

(((takes place at woolworth building! Not as usual in 16 Beaver Street!)))

Contents:

0.0 About this Monday (not at 16 beaver! See below for more details)
0.1 how to get to the woolworth building? RSVP!!!

1. About Cecilia Galiena
2. about Dario Solman
3. about Catarina Leitao
4. about A.J. Bocchino

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0.0 About this Monday (not at 16 beaver! See below for more details)

we are happy to invite four of the LMCC residents at woolworth building to present at their own studios, a combination experiment of studio visit + artist presentation.

We will discuss after a short presentation of the four artists, their own work, as well as the relation of the artist’s work to each other (if any), through the fact of their sharing spaces at the Woolworth building and other aspects.

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0.1 how to get to the woolworth building? RSVP!!!

What time?
7:00 pm

What do you need to do?
You need to write to cecilia , because she will put your name downstairs.
cgaliena@earthlink.net
please do this as soon as you know. Even if you are not sure, better to give the name. Then decide. ..By Monday early afternoon? By 2:00 pm?

Where exactly?
Woolworth Building
233 Broadway
New York, NY
between Park Place and Barclay Street, 33rd Floor

Subway and Bus Directions:
N/R to City Hall
2/3 to Park Place
A/C to Chambers
M1 and M6 to Broadway and City Hall

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1. about Cecilia Galiena

Cecilia Galiena has an MA in analytical psychology from Rome, an MFA from Hunter College and is the co-founder of Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an international artist residency program in Umbria, Italy. She has exhibited widely, most recently at Art in General, JCAL in Queens, Pier-2 in Kaoshiung, Taiwan, the Drawing Center and Care Of in Milan.

Matt Freedman about the work of Cecilia Galiena:

In Art in General's street window Cecilia Galiena has orchestrated a small linguistic black hole. Front and center repose a covey of little paintings of gesturing newsmakers lifted from photographs, the spaces between their signifying hands enigmatically filled with geometric solids. The paintings loiter about in front of a chatty white wall on which appear two corresponding texts and drawings. On the left the word "Calm" is scrawled beneath a crude three-dimensional half erased segmented torus like shape, and to its right the phrase "National Safety Standards" appears below an awkward shoe boxy shape. This central panel has interrupted a single white on black mural. On the left wall of the installation the words "Very Precise Language" sit beneath a rectangle with four odd serrations running along one side, while the right wall holds the words "Final Touches" underneath five cubic shapes which appear to be lining up with the notched rectangle to play a game of musical chairs. The paintings initiate an irresistible urge to formulate a narrative. Condoleezza Rice, FDR, Putin et al. seem to be skulking off with chunks of frozen words lifted from the walls around them.
Galiena's annotated and displaced solids concretize the symbolic ephemera of words and gestures and miraculously drag them into the touchable, visible, visceral Here and Now. The prerequisite skill for accomplishing this feat is to master the rhetoric of linguistics, and Galiena is certainly adept - she wittily slices the signified from the referent and unpacks the signifier-but these games just get her started. She uses her mind like a starter's pistol; theory instantly generates action without artifice. It is no accident she executes the murals with her left, untrained hand. She is after complete transparency. Her strategies and tools are as simple as possible so as to generate the simplest unanswerable questions.
Where does the body end and the mind begin? Where does the mind end and the art begin? When we look at a thing and think of the word for it, does the word matter? When we think of a thing but there is no thing there, does the thing matter? When we draw a thing and give it a name are we lying? The lumpy text drawings give crazy weight and presence to our instinctive urge to communicate, but more intriguingly, they address our even more primitive and urgent impulse to force ourselves upon the world, to have some attention paid. Words focus us, but if we insist on their meaning something, they lay a trail of bread crumbs which lead to a tough paradox; this universe we love to discourse upon is wordless and chaotic; beyond syntax. The more we talk, the further we get from what we talk about.
What to do? We are told language is wired into us, and the thought makes us itchy. If all this talk is as instinctive as breathing, than we don't have to apologize for being so noisy, but really, don't we think more of our wonderful words than that?
Galiena pushes us off balance and we are slow to respond. We can't think about these heavy things for very long, they are so much trouble. Which is fine, for heavy thinking won't get us out of this one. Brains are only half the story. Songs of signs and signifiers are all right, but those dreamy half besotted questions the works inspire after we are done thinking the heavy simple questions-How do you read a face? What does John Wayne mean? Could you talk to someone backwards or inside out?-those questions agitate the entire spirit as only art can.

Matt Freedman
New York, November 2002

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2. about Dario Solman

> > 1. a short bio (one paragraph)
from LMCC pamflet:
Dario Solman studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia and
received his MFA from Ohio State University. He participated in the P.S. 1
International Studio Program, the Cimelice Castle residency program in the
Czech Republic and has taken part in group shows in Alexandria Bienalle,
Egypt; Melbourne, Australia; Zagreb, Croatia; as well as at various venues
in New York and elsewhere in the U.S.

> > 2. some links that are relevant to your work.
> > 3. any text you've written or someone else wrote.
> > 4. anything of relevance to your work

I have couple of links with my work, online projects and texts:

http://66.150.145.166/filmlog/ - current project - related to the work at
the Woolworth
http://66.150.145.166/ds/ - portfolio
http://66.150.145.166/airfiles/ - project from 2001
http://66.150.145.166/cabinfever/ - 2000 project

description of a recent project:

The Heart of Perspective is an ongoing project and engages various mediums:
drawing, animation, video, digital art, text etc.
The Heart of Perspective explores perspective with all of its meanings: the
visual art tool to represent 3D space, a view, point of view, a way to
perceive and understand, a particular idea, opinion, philosophy or ideology.
The project is developed as a "film in progress": a film-like work made by a
non-filmmaker [a film without film]. It contains various elements:
animations, storyboards, drawings, texts, soundtrack and Filmlog [film web
log]. These elements refer to each other, but never reach the full synthesis
as a regular narrative film.

More information is available at: http://66.150.145.166/filmlog/

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3. about Catarina Leitao

Catarina Leitao received her undergraduate degree in fine arts from the University of Lisbon and completed her MFA at Hunter College. She has exhibited at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Star67 in Brooklyn, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum of Modern Art in Lisbon, and the Sintra Museum of Modern Art in Portugal. She received grants from Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Fundacao Gulbenkian and the Fundacao Luso-Americana. She is currently an artist in resisdence Lower Manhattan Cultural Council©ˆs residency at The Woolworth Building.

http://www.catarinaleitao.net

You may find texts in bio > exhibitions/Press/reviews > Catalogue essays.
Just in case, I send links to the texts alone:

http://www.catarinaleitao.net/tn.html
http://www.catarinaleitao.net/denatura.html

Statement:
I create sculptures that combine natural settings with articles of furniture made from fabric, carpeting and felt. My work addresses the idea that nature, in urban settings, is an artificial and consumable item. Because we have been alienated from the wilderness, we rely not only on the appropiriate gear but the act of consumption to calm our fears of the unknown. Currently, I am developing a series of large-scale drawings - a fictional catalog of conceptual products for outdoor activities that respond to one©ˆs desire to be close to nature. These products combine the urban dweller©ˆs need for comfort and safety by providing packaged versions of the wilderness.

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4. about A.J. Bocchino

A.J. Bocchino received a BFA from Tulane University in New Orleans and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has had solo exhibitions at White Columns and at Urban Glass Gallery in Brooklyn where he was resident artist. He has also exhibited at International Print Center and Artist’s Space in New York City. Bocchino was a recipient of an American Craft Council Emerging Artist Grant.

Links

www.whitecolumns.org/wr.bocchino/gallery.html

www.artistsspace.org/webspace/2002/july-aug02/

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s residency at the Woolworth Building
September 2003

My current project uses headlines from the NY Times as data for systems that generate complex networks and forms. I use headlines from 1988 to 2003. The headlines are organized chronologically and color-coded according to subject. Out of this organizational system intricate color patterns emerge from the daily events recorded by the newspaper.

The economics and politics associated with global and national events generate a continuous stream of news from which definitive forms emerge. The actions of George Bush, Bill Clinton, the United Nations, Israel, Palestine, and North Korea all influence the structure of my project. These actions are the raw material which create a distinctive structure out of the myriad events which occur everyday.

I am interested in decentralized systems that spontaneously generate structure as they increase in size. Internet maps, termite colonies, and cities are all examples of these self-organizing structures. They are generated as a result of thousands of local interactions between individual agents. These interactions are unintentional events which accidentally create a higher level order. There is no hierarchy or command system that determines the shape of a termite mound or an urban city. Just as the termites organize into colonies, people into neighborhoods and cities, and web sites into maps of the Internet; the NY Times color-coded headlines self-organize into complex forms dictated by the content of the news and the frequency in which each subject is repeated in the newspaper. Unexpected patterns emerge from the accumulated headlines revealing new contexts, truths, and ironies.