Visiting Critic: Tina Teufel

Tina Teufel is an art historian and curator. She has studied art history, history and Italian in Salzburg, Austria, and Perugia as well as Venice, Italy. After working in different institutions such as the International Summer Academy Salzburg and Dia Art Foundation in New York, she has joined the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2003. As a curator she has been working on exhibitions with artists like Etel Adnan, Stephan Balkenhol, Tanja Boukal, Rudy Burckhardt, Andrea Fraser, Alexander Hahn, Rebecca Horn, Carolee Schneemann, and Nancy Spero since 2006. Together with Wulf Herzogenrath and Toni Stooss she curated the museum’s centennial exhibition John Cage and … Visual Artist- Influences, Impulses presented in 2012, to point out one of the most important group exhibitions she co-curated. Parallel she curated exhibitions in numerous galleries and independent art spaces. She has been in juries of the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and the County of Salzburg and is a member of the consulting committee for the visual arts of the County of Salzburg. Tina currently lives in Salzburg, Austria.

Chris Bors: KILL YOUR IDOLS

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Kill your Idols”, a solo exhibition of works by Chris Bors, currently an Artist in Residence, on view March 4 through April 2, 2016. Chris Bors’s solo exhibition of new paintings includes his series using logos from hardcore punk bands with a diverse range of imagery in which any visuals are fair game for repurposing, as well as several relying on text only. Titled after the name of the New York City­based hardcore punk band Kill Your Idols, some of the figures represented include rapper Easy­E, Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, and Saddam Hussein, the latter taken from a drawing by the D.C. sniper John Lee Malvo. Influenced by underground comics, punk and metal music, fanzines and graphic design, Bors’s work is a post­pop amalgamation of politics, cultural references and appropriated and drawn visuals. Bors coined the term "virtual dumpster diving" to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web.

Bors was born in Ithaca, New York and received his MFA from School of Visual Arts. Solo shows include Randall Scott Projects in Washington, D.C. His art has also been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, Bahnwärterhaus in Esslingen, Germany and Bongoût in Berlin. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Rail and featured in Vogue Italia, K48 and Zing magazine. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog featuring an essay by photographer Carl Gunhouse.

"Uncatered" Joiri Minaya Exhibition

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Uncatered”, a solo exhibition of works by Joiri Minaya, currently an Artist in Residence, on view February 5 through March 1, 2016.

Minaya’s current work for “Uncatered” focuses on the construction of the female subject in relation to nature and landscape in a “tropical” context, shaped by a foreign “gaze” that demands leisure and pleasure. Like nature, femininity has been imagined and represented throughout history as idealized, tamed, conquered / colonized and exoticized. Minaya constantly revises existing cultural products that engage in this form of representation and incorporating them, critically, in her work. These new works include “Siboney" which explores stereotypical constructions of the Caribbean and the Caribbean women based on elaborate fantasies drafted from the position of the foreign other. The performance aims to reflect on the projection of these constructions and how they are later internalized and laboriously constructed by the subject in which they originate. In addition, “DOMINICAN WOMEN - GOOGLE SEARCH POSTCARDS” Uses the postcard format as a platform for images that were culled from a Google search of images for the term  "dominican women". The series consists of re-compositions of the bodies of the women represented in these images or to draw attention to their context. The series is subdivided in different groups that follow different logics to re-compose these bodies. Additional works such as “Container” are the first of a series of performative photographs that feature a woman in natural environments wearing bodysuits made out of fabric with designs that represent nature. “Container” oscillates between ideas of agency and impairment within the construction of the “tropical” as a fantasy of leisure, pleasure and exoticness, and the presence of the female body within this fantasy.The use and consistent presence of the body or figure plus the interest in creating distinct power positions with it seem often contradictory, but are operating simultaneously.

Throughout all her work, Minaya’s direct focus on otherness, self-consciousness and displacement is inspired not only by women in her family, but issues of labor, dislocation, psychology, myth, art history, magic realism and symbols. These works thoroughly question and examine historical hierarchies that inform and condition current identities; constructions and manifest through the body and the resulting they are receipt, internalization and then their subsequent regurgitation. Minaya accomplishes this through her varied in depth exploration throughout different media: painting or sculpture might be a departing point for video or performance, resulting in a merge or develop independently into several works making for a conceptually and visually rich body of works.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work deals with identity, otherness, self-consciousness and displacement.  Her work investigates the female body and experience within constructions of identity, social space and hierarchies. Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. Minaya graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales  (ENAV) in Santo Domingo, D. R. in 2009, the Altos de Chavón School of Design in La Romana, D.R. in 2011 and Parsons the New School for Design in 2013. Minaya lives and works in the US and Dominican Republic.

Exhibition: February 5 through March 1, 2016; Opening reception: February 5, 7-9pm, Artist talk 8pm. For more information please contact studio@guttenbergarts.org or 201-868-8585. Guttenberg Art Gallery is free and open to the public by appointment, www.guttenbergarts.org.

Sarah Nicholls: Reading Time

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Reading Time”, a solo exhibition of works by Sarah Nicholls, currently an Artist in Residence, on view January 7 through February 6, 2016.

Artist books and artist-driven publications have risen to a new level of prominence despite the ongoing digitization of culture and communication. Books are a technology that, among other things, can respond to and depict the passing of time. Reading is a time-based activity, one that can slow down and create interior lapses in time. Your interior “reading voice” helps to both reinforce the private nature of reading, and the one-on-one connection the act creates.Handmade books in particular ask the reader to pause and contemplate the physicality of the book, the particular hands that have produced the work, and the time it took them to do so.

Reading Time is a reading room installed in the gallery at Guttenberg Arts that invites visitors to engage with monologues, brochures, ephemera, manifestos, scientific matter, propaganda, and alternate histories in the form of printed language. Included are a range of publications and a selection of prints which collectively revolve around the authority of the printed word. 

Publishing creates community, though that community may only be temporary and hard to hold together. In a culture where visual noise is inescapable, printed matter creates an opportunity to pause, ruminate, speculate, and share.

Sarah Nicholls is a visual artist who makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words. She often uses found language and metal type, combining image, visual narrative, and time. She has written a collection of self-help aphorisms, she publishes a series of informational pamphlets, and recently completed a field guide to extinct birds. Her limited edition artist books are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. For twelve years, she ran the studio programs at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. Currently she teaches letterpress at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Visiting Critic: Jennie Lamensdorf

Is the Director and Curator of the Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings Program in New York, NY. Art-in-Buildings brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for the occupants, residents, and guests of Time Equities Inc. properties. Recent projects include exhibitions and installations by Grimanesa Amóros, Jesus Benavente, Brent Birnbaum, Kevin Cooley + Philip Andrew Lewis, Justin Cooper, Frances Goodman, Mary Mattingly, Really Large Numbers, Carolyn Salas, Jessica Segall, and Jay Shin, among many others. She is also the curator of the Francis J. Greenburger Collection.  She is a Board Member of Art Omi, the visual arts residency at Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY; a member of the NurtureArt Advisory Board in Brooklyn, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit International Advisory Committee. She received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.