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A Two Person Exhibition
March 5th through May 14th, 2016
Slemenda will be exhibiting a site-specific installation entitled, Blood of the Air. It draws from the Sufi allegory of an island. The Sufi use the imagery of an isolated, island-bound culture to illustrate humanity's limited understanding of the world. Thus, Blood of the Air becomes an environment to dramatize perception, itself. At its base, a pink mirror supported by sandbags is a makeshift landform, both containing us and transporting us, like a body. Above, air - given form as a large weather balloon - hovers overhead. The weather balloon is transcendence, alluding to Jean Piccard's 1930's high-altitude experiments with large plastic balloons and the infamous Roswell scapegoat.
Andy Slemenda was born in Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania. He lives and works in New York, NY, and he received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University Steinhardt. He has exhibited in Germany, France, Turkey, Canada and the United States. In 2011, he was awarded a fellowship by the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation. In conjunction with the 13th Istanbul Biennial, he contributed to the traveling project, The Story of Hayy. Through ready-made and organic materials, he reinterprets the body and overarching systems of knowledge to map new states of being.
Katie Vida
For this exhibition, Vida has created visual, textual, and sound collages composed on-site in Galveston and influenced by her time here. Within the sound work, a deconstructed radio drama is juxtaposed with recorded conversations, pop cultural detritus, as well as ambient field recordings from different locations throughout the island. The work intends to interrupt and deflect its own logic to be set free from narrative resolve.
Katie Vida (Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist. Vida is the recipient of fellowships at The Shandaken Project, VCUQatar and Fanoon: Center for Print Media Research (Doha, Qatar), The Corporation of Yaddo, Millay Colony, Budapest Puppet Theater (Budapest, Hungary), Vermont Studio Center, and Yale Norfolk, She has presented work at venues including: ALLGOLD MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY); Creative Time (New York); Torrance Shipman (Brooklyn, NY); For Your Art (Los Angeles); Primetime (Brooklyn, NY); MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and The Luggage Store (San Francisco, CA). She has served as visiting artist at institutions including University of Hawaii-West O'ahu (Honolulu) and VCUQatar (Doha, Qatar). Vida holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.