AFTER LIFE (what remains)
JUNE 16 — JULY 21, 2018
AFTER LIFE (what remains) is a multi-genre visual art and performance exhibition that stages a conversation between Asian Pacific American and Indigenous artists around the questions: what new strategies are needed to survive after environmental catastrophe and military intervention, by communities facing displacement and dispossession? How can speculation, humor, and fantasy fuel larger movements for social change around the Pacific Rim—from the Pacific Northwest, to California, to Southeast and East Asia—and in the heartland of the USA?
Featuring Alejandro T. Acierto, Michael Arcega, Leeroy New, Super Futures Haunt Qollective & Rea Tajiri
Curated by Thea Quiray Tagle
PUBLIC PROGRAMS:
Opening reception, featuring a visitation by Super Futures Haunt Qollective
Saturday, June 16, 5 — 8 PM
LORDVILLE screening and discussion with filmmaker Rea Tajiri and Angie Morrill of Super Futures Haunt Qollective
Friday, July 13, 6:30 — 8:30 PM
Closing reception with readings by local writers Woogae Bae, Sarah Dowling, Nejat Kedir & Marites Mendoza
Saturday, July 21, 6 — 8 PM
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Salisbury University, SOMArts and presented performance works at Rapid Pulse, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Center for Performance Research, and Center for New Music and Technology. Noted for his “insatiable” performance by the New York Times, Acierto has performed extensively throughout the US and abroad and can be heard on Carrier, Albany, New Focus, Parlour Tapes+, and Avant Media Records and has issued a solo record on Prom Night Records. He is a 3Arts awardee and a recipient of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Darmstadt Festival for New Music with Ensemble Dal Niente, with whom he is a founding member.
Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. His research-based work revolves largely around language and sociopolitical dynamics. Directly informed by Historic narratives, material significance, and geography, his subject matter deals with circumstances where power relations are unbalanced. Michael has a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Asian Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Asia Society in NY. He was awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, California where he is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.
Leeroy New (b. 1986, General Santos City, Philippines) is an artist-designer whose practice overlaps and intersects with film, theater, product design, and fashion. Originally trained as a sculptor, he tried everything from production design for film, to working with fashion designers, to creating 3D mock ups for commercial purposes. He was able to integrate this inclination to move from one mode of creative production to another as the spine of his creative practice. As a response to the issue of art and art practitioners’ (in)visibility in the Philippines, New decided early on that cultivating a language for large scale public art was the challenge he had to take on. Through his persistence, despite the initially limited support and resources, what resulted were immersive installations that use a variety of found objects directly sourced from the immediate material culture of his current environment.
Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ) is an art and research based collaboration between three avatars: SFAOW (Specularity: Fugitive-Alterity Or Whatever), Agent O, and Lady HOW (Haunting or Whatever). They are also sometimes known as the science fiction pop stars F. Sam Jung, C. Ree, and Angie Morrill. In their terrestrial forms, F. Sam Jung (MCP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a sky person and urban planner in New York, and C. Ree (MFA University of California, Irvine) is an artist and film programmer based in California, and Associate Faculty in Art at MiraCosta College. Angie Morrill (Klamath Tribes) holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego and is the director of the Indian Education Program for the Portland School District. SFHQ shares a theoretical and visceral relationship to haunting as a decolonial and inevitable response to the violence of colonialism. SFHQ also shares an affective, life-generating bond rooted in love that affirms our own existence and those of all people that impels us to look for, create, and demand (with critical hope) more ethical futures not-yet-here. @hauntqollective
Rea Tajiri is a filmmaker and visual artist who earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. In 2015, Tajiri was awarded the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for her filmmaking. Tajiri’s latest feature- length documentary Wisdom Gone Wild was recently awarded an ITVS Diversity Development Fund Grant and the Center for Asian American Media’s Documentary Fund Award. Her personal essay film History and Memory premiered at the 1991 Whitney Biennial and won several awards including the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, and a Special Jury Award; New Genres from the San Francisco International Film Festival. Tajiri is a two-time recipient of the Rockefeller Media Fellowship, and two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships. She is a Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University where she teaches classes in Documentary filmmaking.
Header Image: Super Futures Haunt Qollective
Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Salisbury University, SOMArts and presented performance works at Rapid Pulse, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Center for Performance Research, and Center for New Music and Technology. Noted for his “insatiable” performance by the New York Times, Acierto has performed extensively throughout the US and abroad and can be heard on Carrier, Albany, New Focus, Parlour Tapes+, and Avant Media Records and has issued a solo record on Prom Night Records. He is a 3Arts awardee and a recipient of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Darmstadt Festival for New Music with Ensemble Dal Niente, with whom he is a founding member.
Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. His research-based work revolves largely around language and sociopolitical dynamics. Directly informed by Historic narratives, material significance, and geography, his subject matter deals with circumstances where power relations are unbalanced. Michael has a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Asian Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Asia Society in NY. He was awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, California where he is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.
Leeroy New (b. 1986, General Santos City, Philippines) is an artist-designer whose practice overlaps and intersects with film, theater, product design, and fashion. Originally trained as a sculptor, he tried everything from production design for film, to working with fashion designers, to creating 3D mock ups for commercial purposes. He was able to integrate this inclination to move from one mode of creative production to another as the spine of his creative practice. As a response to the issue of art and art practitioners’ (in)visibility in the Philippines, New decided early on that cultivating a language for large scale public art was the challenge he had to take on. Through his persistence, despite the initially limited support and resources, what resulted were immersive installations that use a variety of found objects directly sourced from the immediate material culture of his current environment.
Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ) is an art and research based collaboration between three avatars: SFAOW (Specularity: Fugitive-Alterity Or Whatever), Agent O, and Lady HOW (Haunting or Whatever). They are also sometimes known as the science fiction pop stars F. Sam Jung, C. Ree, and Angie Morrill. In their terrestrial forms, F. Sam Jung (MCP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a sky person and urban planner in New York, and C. Ree (MFA University of California, Irvine) is an artist and film programmer based in California, and Associate Faculty in Art at MiraCosta College. Angie Morrill (Klamath Tribes) holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego and is the director of the Indian Education Program for the Portland School District. SFHQ shares a theoretical and visceral relationship to haunting as a decolonial and inevitable response to the violence of colonialism. SFHQ also shares an affective, life-generating bond rooted in love that affirms our own existence and those of all people that impels us to look for, create, and demand (with critical hope) more ethical futures not-yet-here. @hauntqollective
Rea Tajiri is a filmmaker and visual artist who earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. In 2015, Tajiri was awarded the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for her filmmaking. Tajiri’s latest feature- length documentary Wisdom Gone Wild was recently awarded an ITVS Diversity Development Fund Grant and the Center for Asian American Media’s Documentary Fund Award. Her personal essay film History and Memory premiered at the 1991 Whitney Biennial and won several awards including the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, and a Special Jury Award; New Genres from the San Francisco International Film Festival. Tajiri is a two-time recipient of the Rockefeller Media Fellowship, and two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships. She is a Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University where she teaches classes in Documentary filmmaking.
Header Image: Super Futures Haunt Qollective