Knew Members Show gives voice to the seven artists and strangers whose paths have converged at Vox Populi as new members who joined the organization in 2018. Occupying Vox Populi’s Lobby, Gallery 1, Gallery 3, and 4th Wall in Black Box, this group exhibition features Marion Horowitz, Natalie Kuenzi, Kris Rumman, Makeba Rainey, Aaron Terry, Loraine Wible and Luxin Zhang. By placing their work in conversation, these artists invite their audience on an exploration that exceeds the sum of its parts.
Read Vox member Lane Speidel‘s response to two performances, by Marion Horowitz and Luxin Zhang, presented in conjunction with this exhibition!
– Appeal and Applause, Becoming and Being, Commanding and Communion: 2 Performances on December 7th, Lane Speidel, Published to the Vox Populi Website: 12/19/18.
The Lobby
Featuring Marion Horowitz, Aaron Terry and Loraine Wible
Grouped together for their mutual interests in humor, performance and interactivity, The Lobby features new artworks and installations by Marion Horowitz, Aaron Terry and Loraine Wible.
In an historical, groundbreaking and reality-bending attempt at real magic, artist Marion Horowitz will construct and animate a golem at Vox Populi within their installation and performance environment welcome: a golem for us. Please bring spiritual and material offerings to please the monster, our bundle of joy.
Throughout his work, Aaron Terry questions the existence of a singular truth and who determines it. Sourcing information from news media, album covers, and sound bites, Terry pulls elements that he uses repetitively aiding in the construction of new conversations to age-old questions about truth, human atrocities, and the potential for a better future.
Loraine Wible’s interactive installation Our Pillars (image above) playfully questions the codes of museums and their rooting in a white patriarchal value system. In this work, humor is the language that allows to joyfully critique our Western fantasies.
Gallery 1
Featuring Natalie Kuenzi and Kris Rumman
Gallery 1 features Natalie Kuenzi and Kris Rumman’s respective interventions into craft and design practices that reference the domestic and interior.
Working with high and low art materials, Natalie Kuenzi (image left) reinvents materials and processes in order to dismantle and repurpose fine art and craft tradition. Her recent work with crocheted, reclaimed plastic seeks to disrupt habits of taking-and-wasting that permeate Western culture. In one work, We the Flower Field, Kuenzi intertwines craft and fine art processes with upcycling and personal narrative. The work contains hundreds of flower forms made of hand-built porcelain roses, as well as crocheted plastic that was collected along the streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Kris Rumman’s progressive installation Local (image right) will be built and transformed over the duration of the exhibition. Composed from sumac, cumin, turmeric and fennel, along with sand and other vertical elements, Rumman’s installation references patterns from tiles in Palestinian homes. The spices, potent and unapologetic, claim invisible, olfactory territory both throughout the physical space and also in the viewers’ memory. Over time, the pattern is marked by the viewers passing, and the ground acts as a visible record of their presence and absence. Slowly, the granules mix and the pattern transforms into a homogenous blend.
Gallery 3
Makeba Rainey: Black Auntie
Black Auntie is an experimental, work-in-progress installation by Makeba Rainey resembling a fully-decorated living room filled with artifacts collected by Ms. Kymberlee Johnson-Norfleet (aka Ms. Kym), an oral historian and poet from North Philly by way of Hollywood.
Complete with a sofa, coffee table and television, the installation features a video of Ms. Kym in the very same space talking to a group of young Black people gathered at her feet about the very same artifacts in the room.
The installation presents an intergenerational conversation between Black queer folks; a visualization of how revolutionary and healing Black love between blood relatives can be. It is an experiment in healing generational trauma through story-telling and emotional skill-sharing/building.
4th Wall (Black Box)
Luxin Zhang: One Billion Applause / One Voice, Yi Sheng Yi Sheng
One Billion Applause / One Voice, Yi Sheng Yi Sheng is a two-channel video installation and environment for performance by Luxin Zhang.
The title (Yi Sheng) riffs on the different meanings of characters with similar pronunciation in Chinese: Yi Sheng means “one voice” and doubles as “one billion applause.” Zhang’s video features applause sourced from Chunwan, China Central Television’s annual Spring Festival Gala, which has the largest audience of any entertainment show in the world.
The interrelation between performer and audience is explored, and Zhang performs both roles in pursuit of the notion of “Harmony.” The sonic environment, created by both performer and audience, is where the communication starts.
Artist Bios
Marion Horowitz is an artist based in Philadelphia. Following various cycles as a midwest zinester, traveling folk-punk musician and drag queen, she has formed a practice as a student of Pochinko clowning and multidisciplinary performance. They aspire to create eclectic and unique performances that investigate themes of identity, anti-futurity and apocalypse, while upholding the #1 values of JOY and FUN. Recently, Marion debuted her original one-clown show Minnow Future: the Opera at Washington Project for the Arts in Washington DC. They also appeared in Feast of Fools, a Halloween clown extravaganza at the Open Kitchen Sculpture Garden. Marion studied Directing at Oberlin College, from which she holds a BA in Russian Language and Literature.
Natalie Kuenzi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Philadelphia, PA. She holds a BFA in Ceramics and a BA in Art History and Theory from Western Colorado University and a MFA from Tyler School of Art of Temple University. Natalie’s work is a hybrid of craft and art making processes that incorporate elements of ceramics, fiber, painting, and sculpture. With her work, Natalie hopes to create a space for creative wonder and radical joy. Her work has been exhibited in Philadelphia, PA, New York, NY, Washington, D.C., New Haven, CT, Detroit, MI, and beyond. Additionally, Natalie is an adjunct professor and studio technician at Tyler School of Art as well as an instructor for The Clay Studio and The Claymobile of Philadelphia.
Makeba Rainey’s creative practice focuses on building community and what that looks like. For her, community is an extension of family. By centering her work around social justice, specifically in regard to Black Americans, community becomes the key to liberation. Her artwork taps into aspects of the Black community, merging the old with the new by re-envisioning ancestors through new media and creating space for young creatives to build and sustain themselves. Although a lot of her work is local to Harlem, she creates bonds with the larger Black community through her web-based artist collective incorporating the themes of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter. Originally from Harlem, NY, Makeba is a self-taught artist best known for her digital collage portraits of contemporary and historical Black icons. Makeba is an internationally-exhibited artist, a 2017 Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project, a 2018 member of Vox Populi gallery in Philadelphia, a 2018 CFEVA Fellow, a 2018 Season III NARS resident Artist, and an Absolut Art artist.
Kris Rumman is an interdisciplinary artist whose work contends with the myths and realities of identity through the examination of storytelling and historical knowledge. Growing up in Toledo, Ohio to parents with roots in the Middle East, Rumman began her practice at the Toledo Museum of Art, where she began her nearly two-decade-long relationship with glass. She graduated with a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2008 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2018. Rumman has received many honors including the Laurie Wegmen Prize in Glass, recognition of excellence from the Glass Art Society, and is a recipient of the 2018 Tyler School of Art Dean’s Grant. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with a special honor of a permanent work in the City of Toledo’s Art in Public Places Collection. Kristine Rumman is presently based in Philadelphia where she is an Instructor at Tyler School of Art and a new member at Vox Populi.
Aaron Terry grew up as a kid with no electricity or running water in the woods of Upstate New York until fate brought his family to Philadelphia, where he grew into the city as a young adult. His biggest fear as a child was nuclear war or a bear attack. Terry’s work has been shown in Argentina, Chile, Moscow, Berlin, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon and the San Francisco Bay Area. Terry has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, but recently returned to Philadelphia. He works in traditional and non-traditional printmaking, sculpture and sound pieces. Terry is a DJ and musician in the band Gold Wood and he organizes art and music related events throughout Latin America aimed at fostering a more creative dialogue between artists and musicians (and the people that enjoy visual and sonic arts). Terry holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Delaware.
Loraine Wible is a French expatriate and the daughter of a filmmaker and printmaker. As a Pataphysics enthusiast, Wible works with digital material to bring to this world joyfully surrealist, absurdly political, and radically futuristic postcards from her intellectual and emotional voyages. She has spent the last decade in Cincinnati where she ran art museum parodies, curated literally elevated art shows, opened fictitious art galleries, sang songs devoted to lasers, bitched about the future, and made a never-ending stream of non-existing images. She recently joined the faculty at The Art Academy of Cincinnati as an Assistant Professor of Video Art/Motion Graphics.
Luxin Zhang is an interdisciplinary artist who works in Philadelphia, PA. She holds a B.S from Far Eastern University and received her MFA from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work often takes the form of performance, video, sound and photography. As a classically trained vocalist, she creates video and performance that plays with audience expectation. Luxin has exhibited and performed internationally in galleries, museums and concert halls, including Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse; David Geffen Hall, and Lincoln Center in New York. Her work was also shown at Light Work in Syracuse, N.Y. She recently joined Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, PA as an artist collective member.