Updates

Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters – July 22 – August 17, 2022

See our project Sin Sol in this exhibition!

Featuring:
Farah Al Qasimi    Beatriz Cortez    micha cárdenas    Tessa Grundon Joiri Minaya    Ada M. Patterson    Himali Singh Soin Himali Singh Soin and Alexis Rider 

Historically, colonial enterprises have violently linked land- and water-scapes with the bodies of women and femmes, queer people, and people of color in order to dehumanize them. By becoming dirt and water, such bodies have been equated with “natural” resources, made vulnerable to exploitation, extraction, and land theft justified along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet such linkages, particularly in recent years, have been meaningfully appropriated by artists as acts of resistance that articulate new futures and magnify marginalized histories. Presenting the work of Farah Al Qasimi, Beatriz Cortez, micha cárdenas, Tessa Grundon, Joiri Minaya, Ada M. Patterson, Himali Singh Soin, and Alexis Rider, Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters engages with complex questions around impermanence, belonging, transformation, and erasure as they relate to human (and non-human) lives and the earth itself.

Read the complete Curatorial Statement here.

Visiting the Show

The Gallatin Galleries are open Monday through Friday from 9am to 6pm to the NYU Community. You must be cleared to be in the NYU building with the Daily Screener to enter the Gallery.

All non-NYU community members (including recent alumni who no longer have the Daily Screener) can view the exhibit by appointment, by emailing GallatinEvents@nyu.edu at least 1 business day in advance.  The exhibit is closed on weekends. If you wish to make an appointment for Monday please let us know by noon the Friday before.

NYU is a vaccinated community.  All members of the NYU community are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and receive a COVID-19 booster shot (if eligible for the booster based on CDC criteria). You must be able to show the green screen on the NYU Daily Screener to enter the building.

All visitors/guests to The Gallatin Galleries must be vaccinated and boosted and be cleared to be in the NYU Buildings. All non-NYU persons are required to bring proof of vaccination and ID so we can check it at the door. If you do not bring proper documentation, you will be turned away at the door.

All non-NYU visitors must make an appointment to attend.

 

CYCLES of the longed for and the grasped: ILGBTAR Retrospective (2013-2021)

See our work in Toronto this summer!

Cycles Exhibition at Tangled, colorful, lit up balls hang from the ceiling against a black background

Date

June 6, 2022 – July 22, 2022

Location

Tangled Art + Disability

About the Exhibition

Curated by: Tobaron Waxman

THE INTERGENERATIONAL LGBT ARTIST RESIDENCY is a vision and experience of sustainability via 2SLGBTQ+ visual art and political histories in the diverse and contested territory known as Canada. ILGBTAR was invited by Tangled to design an exhibition that would poke holes in conventional notions of ‘access’. The exhibition includes seven ILGBTAR participants and alumnx from 2013-2021, each with unique critiques of ‘access’ (or conveniently misconstrued, neoliberal notions of ‘access’) and how crip materiality informs their work and life. The works, some created specifically for CYCLES of the longed for and the grasped, are surprising in scale and immediacy, directly addressing gallery visitors in embodied ways. ILGBTAR, which critiques institutional architectures and the barriers they reproduce and represent, sought out those alumnx whose inter-arts practices are often deemed ill-fitting to rooms and opportunities, because these artists generate art forms and activities which when brought together confound standard categories or conventional exhibition practices. All of these works invite physical contact or memories of it: THE GRASP, BOTH VIRTUAL AND EMBODIED; AND THE LONGED FOR, WHICH IS JUST BEYOND REACH. Several works challenge expectations of the cyclic, the spherical, and the personal orbit, offering complex structures of interdependence. The first program of its kind, ILGBTAR is committed to directly supporting queer artists and art production, in the form of funded artist residencies, studio visits, exhibitions, projects and consultation with decolonial critique. ILGBTAR facilitates resource sharing, shared practice, art career management training, and community building, in endeavoring to foster communication across generational lines.

CYCLES of the longed for and the grasped: ILGBTAR Retrospective (2013-2021) proposes an accessible wayfinding into these works, including The ILGBTAR Reading Room. In the ILGBTAR tradition of sacred hospitality, gallery visitors are welcome to think with the artists and access the work via an energy and pace of a different kind of encounter. Please feel free to relax in the Reading Room, enjoy a light refreshment and peruse bibliographic materials loaned by the artists for this exhibition. In solidarity and friendship, Tobaron

2022 Updates!

Friday, June 3rd, come to the Digital Arts Research Center at UCSC from 12-4pm for our DANM open studios event! Angie Fan and Nicki Duval of the CRS will be showing new work involving mocap, movement and interactive projections!

People in the critical realities studio at Fall Open studios watching a film

Here is a photo of our Fall 2021 open studios event where Film & Digital Media Student Darren Wallace was screening films in our studio.

Also, if you’re in Toronto, come to our screening of “Oceanic: Queering the Ocean” at the event Infinite Points on a Circle at the Toronto International Film Festival Lightbox on June 5th and 25th, 2022! Curated by Syrus Marcus Ware!

Mossy rock on the beach with water streaming through it, two 3D scans of dancers to the left and right of the water
Still from “Oceanic: Queering the Ocean” film by micha cárdenas, Gerald Casel, Cynthia Ling Lee, Susana Ruiz, Huy Truong and Anna Friz

Still from the film "Oceanic: Queering the Ocean" with natural bridge at natural bridges state beach and 3d scan of micha cardenas dancing

Still from “Oceanic: Queering the Ocean” film by micha cárdenas, Gerald Casel, Cynthia Ling Lee, Susana Ruiz, Huy Truong and Anna Friz

New Undergraduate Researcher joining the Studio to work on Oceanic

We are happy to announce that Gabrielle Serna has been chosen for a fellowship, and will be working with us this quarter on our AR project, Oceanic. Gabrielle is a Mexican, lesbian artist and game designer who creates nostalgic and introspective games about identity and inclusion, and works to center the experiences of queer and trans people of color through her work.

Gabrielle will be making the AR prototype that our project will exist within.  She will be utilizing the Unity AR project template to build the digital environment that will house our text, 3D lidar scans of Natural Bridges, volumetric video capture by Susana Ruiz, as well as our soundscape.

About Oceanic: Oceanic shifts attention from the damage climate change is causing to the life-worlds on land to the unfolding harm of the oceans. Oceanic will use Augmented Reality (AR) to visualize landscapes and aquatic species threatened by climate change, stitching the line from colonization to neoliberalism to racial capitalism through holographic dance performances captured with volumetric video.

Oceanic will present audiences with an experience of the coast of the Pacific Ocean at Natural Bridges State Beach, with an original soundtrack and a series of performances that tell the story of how climate change is a racial justice issue. The creation of this art game will include volumetric video of dance performances by Cynthia Ling Lee, Gerald Casel and micha cárdenas, in collaboration with Susana Ruiz.

Oceanic will present volumetric, or 3-D, video of movement performances, alongside 3-D LIDAR scans of ecotonal coastal environments. These scans include other species who live on the coast, including starfish and sea urchins. Oceanic will also present words from chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, who wrote about this beach to think through solidarity across identities in women of color feminism, such as the former exclusion of trans women, which she tried to undo.

AI, Aliens and Androids: Trans of Color Studies After the Human, Research in Progress Presentation at UCSC

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Critical Race & Ethnic Studies

Disability Resource Center 

Critical Realities Studio


Invite you to “AI, Aliens & Androids: Trans of Color Studies After The Human”—a CRES Work in Progress (WiP) event featuring work by micha cárdenas & Krizia Puig.

CRES Works in Progress events feature one graduate student with a designated emphasis in CRES and one CRES primary or affiliated faculty member, who present in-progress research to foster a robust intellectual community in our program and across campus. Professor cárdenas will be sharing some insights about her AR game “Sin Sol/No Sun,” and Krizia will be presenting excerpts from their experimental essay “The TransAlien Manifesto.”

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz & the founding director of the Critical Realities Studio. micha cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technology. Her book in progress, Poetic Operations, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics.

Krizia Puig is a Feminist Studies doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz, where they also work as the Program Coordinator at the Disability Resource Center, and as a researcher-artist for the Critical Realities Studio. Krizia’s work explores issues related to affective robotics and space exploration, focusing on the study of future Mars settlements through frameworks that include feminist & crip technoscience, critical race & ethnic studies, and astronomy & astrophysics.


WHEN: TODAY, NOV 20, 2019 2:00PM-4:30PM

WHERE: HUMANITIES 1 ROOM 210


QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, & ACCESSIBILITY

 kpuig@ucsc.edu | jkomori@ucsc.edu

 
Image description: Flyer of the event “AI, Aliens & Androids: Trans of Color Studies After The Human” sponsored by Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, The Disability Resource Center, and the Critical Realities Studio. Centered, a screenshot from Aura—the trans latinx AI hologram who is one of the main characters of Sin/Sol: an augmented reality game that allows users to experience the feelings of a climate change event, in order to deeply consider how climate change disproportionately affects immigrants, trans people and disabled people.

 

Sin Sol at the 7th Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece

Sin Sol, Prototype, one installation of the overall project Sin Sol, being created in the Critical Realities Studio, has been exhibited and performed at the 7th Thessaloniki Biennale in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Sin Sol / No Sun is an augmented reality game that allows users to experience the feelings a climate change event, in order to deeply consider how climate change disproportionately effects immigrants, trans people and disabled people. Players can find, see and hear a story told through poetry about living through climate change induced wildfires, from a trans latinx AI hologram, Aura. Set fifty years in the future, Aura tells the story of environmental collapse from the past, which is our present in 2018. Part environmental archiving project, the environments in the game include actual 3-D scans of present day forests from the Pacific Northwest. With the goal of multispecies survival and solidarity in mind, Aura’s dog, Roja, leads players on a journey to escape the wildfires and find oxygen capsules which contain poetry, telling more of the story as they progress through the game.

Game design, Writing and Direction by micha cárdenas
Environments, Writing and Installation Design by Abraham Avnisan
3-D modeling by Marcelo Viana Neto and Adrian Phillips
Soundtrack by Wynne Greenwood
Character Design by Morgan Thomas

The theme of the biennale is “Taking a Stance”. The curatorial statement asks: “Would it be possible for a biennale to become both a point of stasis, and the starting point for reflection on the crucial issues that contemporary societies are facing in the current conditions of acceleration and increasing inequality? To examine, from a critical distance, people’s standpoint towards the world and the planet? To bridge the gap between the viewer and contemporary art and to overcome curatorial and institutional complacency in order to get to the core of politics and daily life, also by reconsidering artistic practice as a condition of labor both within and outside institutions and norms?”

 

micha cardenas, dance perfornance at Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece, October 2019