For the remainder of 2020, we decided to hand the curatorial duties to a handful of friends we’ve worked with previously. These programs will highlight the people working in the time-based arts in their community. This is an idea we’ve been kicking around for a long time with it initially being a fest that would explore different regions of the US and now felt like a good moment to explore it further. If 2020 has shown us anything it’s that our community is the only thing we can actually rely on.
8PM September 25th, 2020
Friends of Friends Community Series:
A Stones Throw: curated by Jared Steffensen
Jared Steffensen is an artist and Curator of Exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, UT. He earned a BFA in Intermedia Sculpture from the University of Utah in 2002 and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. He was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2006. His curatorial work is largely focused on local and regional issues of the Intermountain West, including Cities of Conviction (Contemporary Artists from Saudi Arabia), Desire Lines, Working Hard to Be Useless, and Shady Acres.
Statement on the program:
A Stones Throw
Utah and Colorado are neighbors. They share similar landscapes, peoples, and a border established by an occupying government. However, they are viewed by many as vastly different places due to a predominant religion’s influence in Utah. This influence informs generalizations about the overall population, its culture, and perceived collective conservative beliefs.
A Stones Throw provides viewers outside Utah an opportunity to see how those beliefs are met with opposition by the artists and activists who call it home. Themes of family, identity, religion, and environment are explored, challenged, and countered through unique insider perspectives. When seen together, these videos provide a snapshot of the engaged groups of people in Utah pushing against established national and local power structures.
Steven Stallings Cardenas, Anoche, is an ode to his relationship with his abuelito.
Jorge Rojas, Lizzy Fernandez, and Jaclyn Wright examine identity through the lenses of language, memory, and oppressive systems of power.
Amy Jorgensen, Levi Jackson, and Cara Despain look to upend religious patriarchy with critiques of biblical myths tied gender inequities, manifest destiny, and a lack of environmental stewardship.
Tiana Birrell, Jared Steffensen, and Zachary Norman scrutinize land/ resource use and who benefits from its consumption.
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Artist: Levi Jackson
Title: Coming 'Round the Mountain
Statement: Coming ‘Round the Mountain is about the connection between the idealized and the realized. I wanted to make a work that encapsulated the Western American idyllic man— the cowboy— with the disembodied idyllic man, Jesus. In a way, it shows the humanity and inhumanity often overlooked or passed by in the act of searching for glory. The song, she’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes, is derived from religious/protestant roots and thought to have connections to the underground railroad, rail workers, rapture, and as a children’s folk tune. It is a messy song.
At some level the video is imitating folk art, imitating nostalgia. Or at least the nostalgic mirage and myth of the sublime. The video has a false linear timeline where we and the driver are together, time is passing, we are moving, and nothing is happening. I really liked the idea that the second coming is actually a slow burn. Jesus has to drive a truck, his chariot, because the west is so vast, rugged and unforgiving. He just floats on forever. The itchy reality of perpetually moving ‘westward’ in an attempt to find something, anything. Westward ho! All in the name of whatever power we adorn in order to realize our visions.
And yet, all of this driving and following is mesmerizing. It feels magical and soft. I like that illusion for exactly what it is, an illusion. But it feels real and trustworthy. And at some level, it is. That mixing is sadness. A longing. Cowboy Jesus is a sad cowboy. Bored and always moving.
Origin: USA
Year: 2018
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Artist: Zachary Norman
Title: Stim & Dross, Preface: the brinkmanship of annihilation
Statement: The Utah Inland Port is a proposed dry port in what developers refer to as the "Northwest Quadrant" of Salt Lake City, Utah. The term "Northwest Quadrant" being a euphemism for 28,000 acres or 43 square miles of Great Salt Lake ecosystem and vital habitat for numerous species of wildlife, some of which are endangered.
Inland ports are large swaths of land in areas with "lower land acquisition costs" than areas surrounding traditional seaports, as these are located near major coastal metropolitan areas. Inland ports serve as intermodal logistics hubs that increase the efficiency of the transshipment of shipping containers from boat to train to truck. They are designed to minimize the amount of time spent transferring and organizing containers at major seaports to reduce costs, traffic congestion, and pollution in these areas. However, these problems do not just magically disappear by creating an inland port; they are instead transferred from the seaport to the dry port. Costs are transferred by taking advantage of lower land acquisition costs and property taxes inland, and by hiring workers in smaller metropolitan areas where wages are lower and organized labor unions are not as strong. Traffic congestion and pollution is reduced by minimizing the amount of time trucks and trains spend at the seaport, but this time is simply spent at the dry port, many of which are in areas of high environmental sensitivity, such as the wetlands and floodplains of the Great Salt Lake, or areas with more lax environmental regulation.
In its current state, the port is still just an abstraction — an idea borne out of the neoliberal tendency to conflate development with progress and acceptance of progress as a kind of telos despite the obvious incompatibility of the two concepts. Telos being an ultimate goal or destination and progress being the movement towards a goal.
Origin: USA
Year: 2020
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Artists: Tiana Birrell and the world wide web
Title: C of Information_c is for sea
Statement: My current research project seeks to emphasize the materiality of the digital realm and accentuate its agency within the landscape and within local economies. I look towards data servers, a 21st century digital archive and storage infrastructure used to house all online interactions, and the copious amount of water and energy they consume to dispel the perception that the internet lives in a place-less realm. By using the massive water consumption habits of the National Security Agency data centers located in Bluffdale, Utah as a case study, this project accentuates the place-full-ness of information as well as situates this water-sucking panopticon into our local landscape of the mountain west. How can looking at water usage shed light on one’s relationship to information consumption? To place? To the politics of access? What happens when these networked and linked entities are seen as disconnected, islands of isolated agents? I use the desktop as a way to contemplate digital place, a complicated web-of-sites, and as a way to sit in discomfort with these inquiries.
Origin: USA
Year: 2017
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Artist: Jared Steffensen
Title: F U Tree
Statement: If the world had hands and knew how to speak our language, maybe more would understand what it’s trying to tell us.
Origin: USA
Year: 2006
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Artist: Jaclyn Wright
Title: Opaque Bodies
Statement: Opaque Bodies is part of the series, Marked, which refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck that has drawn verbal and physical abuse from strangers. Reproductions of the birthmark’s shape and color appear throughout the work. Birthmarks are like political boundaries on a map, expressing the concomitant desire to include and exclude, to mark belonging through exclusion and differentiation. The work explores the parallels between human attempts to control, shape, and extract from the land and the body. Opaque Bodies, made on public lands in Utah, is a performance that takes place at sites used for target practice that bear the marks of gun use — bullet holes in rock formations, littered assault rifle casings, and shredded objects. The disregard with which these marks are inscribed upon the landscape parallels the disregard with which patriarchal and capitalist institutions view the gendered body. The desert landscape is used as a site of symbolic violence that works to camouflage the body. Oscillating between visibility and invisibility, the work seeks to address how white gendered bodies can be both marked and weaponized to maintain power and privilege.
Origin: USA
Year: 2019
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Artist: Jorge Rojas
Title: Cherry Picker
Statement: "Cherry Picker" is a racial slur that was used against my family and I when we migrated to Utah from Mexico. Latin@s in the U.S. are often limited to low paying jobs, such as picking fruit, which includes but is not limited to cherries. This selfie performance is meant to provoke thought about where our food comes from, who's doing the labor, and how unjust immigration laws create inequality. These questions take on new meaning in the age of Covid-19 as we consider who are essential workers. In Cherry Picker, I flip the title's racist slur into a position of power, as if to say, "It's not enough to call us cherry pickers, we pick all your food!" This piece was performed in honor of Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers Union, and all the immigrants that do the work.
Origin: USA
Year: 2019
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Artist: Izzy Fernandez
Title: Garden
Statement: I am an interdisciplinary artist who makes work about the fragmented and artificial nature of memory and identity. For “Garden,” I wanted to create a virtual reality populated by videos, paintings and photographs from my time growing up in Hawaii. In the process of trying to gather this content, I found out that most of it had been deleted or thrown away. This complicated my project, but led to an endeavor in which I had to attempt to construct the images from my childhood, not as I saw them in front of me, but as I remembered them.
My interest in fabricated images stems from a place of love and sadness at the thought of forgetting. The marks I make are those of an individual who is desperate to jot down every memory before/as they forget it and the result is often messy and discombobulated. To fill in the cracks where memory fails me, I utilize fantasy.
Through my attempts to visually recreate memories, I’ve found that remembering the past is an exercise in imagination more than anything having to do with reality. That being said, memory and nostalgia are not futile devices, but rather, infinite exercises in world-building. Ultimately, “Garden” seeks to communicate what my early memories would look like as they are felt, remembered, and created.
Origin: USA
Year: 2018
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Artists: Written and Directed by Steven Stallings Cardenas; Music by Jonny Stallings; Cinematography by Bentley Rawle; Produced by Jed Thunell
Title: Anoche
Statement: My relationship with my abuelito is very different from that of my mother or her siblings. I grew up thinking of him as a joyful, cheerful person with a laugh contagious to everyone around him. I made Anoche to show what I see in my abuelo: a person who dreams, who works, and who awaits death like the rest of us.
Origin: USA
Year: 2019
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Artist: Amy Jorgensen
Title: Red Delicious
Statement: A video performance work exploring ideas of the body, narrative, and desire through the symbolic re-telling of Eve’s classic narrative. Staged theatrically in one long continuous shot, a luscious red apple, suspended from a string, swings back and forth like a pendulum. The artist stands below, very focused, watching the apple as it moves from side to side, just out of reach. This work navigates the cultural landscape of longing and desire through the lens of the camera as the relationships between performer, documenter, and audience are blurred. Traditional boundaries of gaze and power become ambiguous as the hypnotic narrative unfolds.
Origin:USA
Year: 2013
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Artist: Cara Despain
Title: Church Rock (Second Coming ad)
Statement: This crass advertisement for the Second Coming event exploits the language and context for apocalypse and conflates belief and the climate crisis.
Origin: USA
Year: 2018
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