Carolina González Valencia + Adela Goldbard + Veronica Mockler + Amanda Gutiérrez

PROGRAM :

In Search of The Best Cyclist in the World
Valencia | 2016 | colour | sound | HD video | 25:00 mins
In Search of the Best Cyclist in the World is a fragmented narrative where I explore my memories of immigrating to the USA as a teenager and my father’s experience as the only one in the family who never left the country. The film navigates the complexities of remembering and the need to understand the consequences of the past in the present. Animation, home movies, re-enactments, news archives, and a recent trip tell stories of a departure and the tales in between distance, time and years of absence. The collaboration with my father is an exploration of the act of remembering as a tool to create new ways to relate to the present. He insists on forgetting, I insist on remembering. Maybe he needs to forget to move forward, maybe I need to remember to move forward. How do you negotiate history within the ones who left and the ones who stay? Perhaps the film is a self portrait, a family portrait, a portrait of a story of migration, perhaps all of them. I aim to contribute, to complicate portraits and their representation, revealing its layers from the micro to the macro.

Les Interprètes
Mockler | 2018 | colour | sound | HD video | ~20:00 mins
The artist did a six-week residency in a Montreal high school in April 2018. During her time there, she created a series of video, sound and performative interventions with 16 teenagers who had just recently immigrated to Montreal, Québec, Canada. With the students, Mockler explored what it means to express oneself as a teenager and the control one has over self-representation at that age. Interested in their daily lives and preoccupations, the artist suggested different performative settings in which the teenagers could talk about themselves. The group and Mockler agreed that not expressing oneself at times is also a form of self-affirmation. Together they explored speculation, secrecy, interviewing, agreement, confession, homage, social media and even self-censorship as modes for representation. In Les Interprètes, the artist’s aim was to make her audience aware of the actual thoughts and discourses of young people who have immigrated. Mockler wanted to go against documentary tendencies that gratuitously victimize and exploit the narratives of individuals who have undergone migration. She sees Les Interprètes as an experimental moment in which she tried to give these teenagers control over their own depiction.Trailer, Les Interprètes: vimeo.com/366242491

Paraallegories (#1-4: Microbus, Casino Royale, ATM, Lobo)
Goldbard | 2013-2015 | colour | sound | HD video | 17:30 mins
Paraallegories (2013-2015) was inspired by a critical observation of Mexico’s press, with particular focus on its coverage of the Mexican Drug War and the complicated nature of political corruption. For this project I considered how the press is mediated, and what ideologies it promotes—especially during events in which violence, protest, dissidence, or repression make the news. I examine these flashpoints in Mexico’s recent history through reenactment, combining manual, handicraft work with high quality technical cinematography. The result is a conflation of fact and fiction that questions how reality is addressed, presented, and misconstrued. I borrow images from news events to construct full-scale models with reed, newspaper, and cardboard that are then destroyed with pyrotechnics in an intersection of allegory, black humor, and metaphor. This video series specifically references the Burning of Judas, a tradition of Catholic origin in which effigies of public figures, built after Judas Iscariot, are detonated in a ritual to allegorically get rid of the evil embodied by the traitor. Each effigy in this series is loaded with a specific symbolism: for example, the Lobo pickup truck stands as an icon of drug trafficking while Oxxo stores become symptoms of capitalism.Excerpts, Paraallegories: https://youtu.be/OTO5M6-wg5E

Flâneuse>La caminanta | Sometimes | Brooklyn League of Female Walkers | Waiting
Gutiérrez | colour | sound | HD video | 15:00 mins
This series of short videos centers on the artist’s walking practice in collaboration with female identified participants. The work departs from the creation of the Dérives, analyzing urban space through psychogeography and its relationship with gender, empowerment and placemaking.

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Carolina González Valencia’s practice lies at the intersection of personal, social, and political narratives. She weaves multiple media–animation, video, film, performance, writing, drawing, painting–to create documents that challenge social and historical representations of migration, otherness, diaspora, and labor. She has worked on projects in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Lebanon, and the United States. Carolina’s work has been shown internationally at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Quito, Ecuador; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME); GAZE (San Francisco); International short films showcase (Jakarta, Indonesia); Full Frame Theater/International short films and videos (Durham, NC); Broward College (Davie, FL); Contra el Silencio Todas Las Voces (Mexico City); Cinemateca Distrital (Bogotá, Colombia); Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Her films have been screened on public access TV on such sites as Can TV (Chicago) and Videonautas (Colombia). She is the recipient of the Lyn Blumenthal Scholarship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), the Gelman Travel Fellowship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); and the Programa Nacional de Estímulos (Colombian Ministry of Culture). She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation). Carolina is now an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. carolinagonzalezvalencia.com

Veronica Mockler was born in Quebec City in 1991. She graduated with Distinction from Concordia University (BFA Studio Arts) in 2015 after studying abroad in the Republic of Ireland to complete her degree. Mockler has since been based in Montreal where she lives and works as a professional artist making social and relational art. Her pieces have been featured in numerous exhibitions and festivals, namely: Women Cinema Makers (Berlin, Germany), Intersections Biennial of Art and Technology (New London, CT, U.S.A.), Gstaad International Art Film Festival (Montevideo, Uruguay), Redding Flagg Gallery (Toronto, ON, Canada), La Biennale Manif. d’Art Internationale (Québec, QC, Canada), ATSA at Place des Arts, Cinéma Sous les Étoiles, Dazibao, Eastern Bloc, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Vidéographe (Montreal, QC, Canada), and more. Supported by the Acts of Listening Lab in Concordia University, her new graduate research-project explores the Creation of Applied Performance Art for Citizen Self-Representation. The artist is the co-founder of Visible, a Montreal art collective that highlights the power of citizen expression through performative, digital and diversified gatherings. The artist has been the recipient of awards and grants for her work, both in Canada and abroad, from various entities including the First Prize from the Montreal Arts Council’s Patrons of the Arts (2019). In her practice, Veronica Mockler tackles a wide range of social issues by presenting the experiences of people living these realities. She brings beautifully real individuals to share their stories in live performances, videos and media installations. Her pieces have been described as a « call to action » « blending [of] humour with sobering realism » (The Link, 2019), as well as sometimes « leaving you with a haunting question » (La Presse, 2019). This interdisciplinary artist draws from many fields, methods and mediums, such as oral history, documentary, community development, new media, performance, relational and conceptual art as well as art pedagogy. Mockler has stated that her goal is to create art that strengthens the agency of the people she works with. Bringing folks to represent themselves in the public arena is an ethically complex art practice. This complexity is what drives Mockler in her art making and research. veronicamockler.com

Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who believes in the potential of art to generate critical thinking and social transformation. Her work focuses on the politics of memory, questioning the power relations and social constructs behind official narratives, archeological preservation, patriotism, state-sanctioned celebrations, and mass media. She is especially interested in how destruction becomes a ritual, a statement, a metaphor, a way of remembering and a form of disobedience. She dissents by re-enacting and making visible events that have been forgotten or erased, by collectively building, staging and, importantly, destroying—always with subtle parody and dark humor. Her work melds video, sculpture, photography, text, pyrotechnic performances and immersive installations. Goldbard holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of Mexico. Goldbard is the 2017 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize and she was recently granted the prestigious Joyce Award 2019. From 2015 to 2018 she was a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of Mexico (Mexico’s Endowment for Culture and the Arts). Goldbard is Assistant Professor at the Division of Experimental and Foundation Studies at Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from Mexico City, she lives and works in the United States and Mexico. She is currently working on “The Last Judgement”, a new co-created, participatory artwork to be presented in Chicago in an exhibition and public performance in fall 2019. adelagoldbard.com

Amanda Gutiérrez (b. 1978, Mexico City). Trained and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater, Gutiérrez uses a range of media such as film and performance art to investigate how these conditions of everyday life set the stage for our experiences and in doing so shape our individual and collective identities. Approaching these questions from immigrants’ perspectives continues to be of special interest to Gutiérrez, who completed her MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently elaborating on the academic dimension of her work. Gutiérrez has held numerous art residencies at FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, Bolit Art Center in Spain, and her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. A recipient of a grant from the National System of Art Creators, in Mexico, Gutiérrez recently was the recipient of residencies at the New York Camera Club, Harvestworks, and MISE-EN_PLACE Bushwick. http://www.amandagutierrez.net/ https://vrwalkers.org/