Please join us on Feb. 2, 2017 for a provocative discussion X-Medium with a panel of artists, writers and thinkers. This event is free and open to the public.
Panelists:
RYAN McCARTNEY, Icebox Project Space
GEE WESLEY, Ulises
RICKY YANAS. Ulises
Moderated by:
MINA ZARFSAZ, Vox Populi
——————
Marshall McLuhan says “[…] all media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social or cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”
The current model of understanding in visual arts put vision in the center of art, but keep a gap between the object and the eye. Since Descartes, we have been operating in models that separate form and content. These models negate that we are connected to the reality, and only through a re-presentation of the reality we have a grasp of it. The procedural strategies and conditions within any given media offer us ways to re-organize our everyday realities: how we walk, how we eat, how we enter or move within a space, and in large how we identify as a person in the world. In other words, the media alienate us from the known, but give us tools to constantly reorganize a new reality. *
* Zarfsaz has been working on a book on Enactive Perception, (X-SMALL, X-MEDIUM, X-LARGE) and this talk is an effort in discussing some of the issues she is addressing in her book.
——————
Speaker bios:
Ryan McCartney is an artist, curator, writer and director at the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, PA. He is currently pursuing perception as a means of interpretation, both in his artistic and curatorial practices. Recent projects include Unlisted, a multi-faceted art fair hybrid, Live/Work, and You Can Curate! Ryan has most recently exhibited his own work in Other Selections at the Center for Art in Wood and dog and wolf at Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art. He has taught at various institutions since 2008, and most recently contributed writing to Title Magazine. Ryan received his BFA from the Cooper Union, and his MFA from Tyler School of Art.
Gee Wesley is an artist and organizer born in Monrovia, Liberia. Wesley is the current Spiegel Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
Ricky Yanas is a Texas born artist, curator, service worker, and educator based in Philadelphia, PA. He received his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. He is currently a member of the artist-run gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia and teaches video at Moore College of Art and Design.
Ulises is a bookshop and curatorial platform dedicated to artists’ books and independent art publications. Performing the model of a quarterly periodical, each season of Ulises invites contributors to present publications, workshops, lectures, artworks or collaborations in response to a theme.
Moderator Mina Zarfsaz is an internationally known designer, interdisciplinary artist, and system thinker who works across the fields of art, philosophy, architecture, and design. Her work seeks to invert common tools and social control to create dialogue, exchange critical perspective, generate questions and ideally inspire a better understanding of what we perceive as reality and its representations. Her videos and sculptures explore the nature of perception and the organization of the everyday in the world around us.
Zarfsaz has attended the MFA Communication Design program at Pratt Institute and received her MFA from Montclair State University in Studio Arts. She holds a BFA from State University of New York, a BA in Business Administration from University of Alzahra and an Interior Design Certificate from Tehran University. Zarfsaz currently lives and works in Montclair, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and holds teaching appointments at Montclair State University, and Temple University.
