Me Gusta El Sonido
Curated by Sarah Fritchey
May 13—July 1, 2016
Bianca Boragi, Oi Fortin, Mohamad Hafez, Insook Hwang, Aude Jomini, Adam Niklewicz, Jason Noushin, Chen Reichert, Rashmi Talpade, Miguel Trelles , Mariya Vlasova, Tanya Wolski, and Guimi You.
Bianca Boragi, Web of Lies (Tissu de Mensonges), 2013. 8″ × 10″.
Spanish for “I Like the Sound of That”, Me Gusta El Sonido commissions a group of Connecticut-based artists who were raised in bilingual family households to write Artist Statements of 100-200 words. The Statements will identify one key term, phrase, or idea that is key to their practice, but is untranslatable into English from their respective ancestral tongues. The show revels in the inadequacy of language to fully account for our ideas– creative and so forth.
The show asks: what is at risk when we have no chance of being fully understood in the first place? How does the image maintain command over its accompanying text? How might an artist imagine new language as readable imagery within the grounds of his or her practice?
Bianca Boragi (French), Joe Bun Keo (Thai/Khmer), Oi Fortin (Thai), Mohamad Hafez (Syrian), Insook Hwang (Korean), Aude Jomini (Swiss/French), Adam Niklewicz (Polish), Jason Noushin (Farsi), Chen Reichart (Israeli), Rashmi Talpade (Hindi), Miguel Trelles (Puerto Rican), Mariya Vlasova (Russian), Tanya Wolski (Polish), and Guimi You (Korean).
For 30 years, Artspace has championed the ideas and artistic concerns of local artists and created space for exhibitions on the most urgent issues of our time. These topics have spanned the AIDS Crisis (Interrupted Lives, in 1991), Immigration (Mythical Nation, 2003), Globalization (Factory Direct, 2005), Climate Change (Futurecast, 2012), and in 2015, racial bias in the Justice system (Arresting Patterns). Over this period, Artspace has been at the forefront of New Haven’s arts scene, taking risks on behalf of local artists to advance their careers.
From 2016 to 2017, Artspace will present a series of exhibitions and anniversary events under the banner Three Decades of Change that celebrate the artists and exhibitions that shaped our organization in its pivotal moments. The installation of the Artist Statements onto the storefront windows of Artspace will reference the first exhibition that took place at Artspace, when we moved to Orange Street in 1999. This second iteration will challenge the sense that an artist might easily communication to his or her audience, and explore the tensions produced by cultural gaps made visible.