SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Artpace San Antonio announced the opening of their Summer 2022 International Artists-in-Residence exhibitions. On July 21, from 6-9pm, Hellen Ascoli (Guatemala City, Guatemala / Baltimore, Maryland), Jonesy (Los Angeles, California), and Betelhem Makonnen (Addis Abeba, Ethiopia / Austin, Texas) revealed work created during their Artpace residencies. The three artists were selected by Andy Campbell, Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design.
Hellen Ascoli’s Artpace project, (she re-members) siendo somos, takes inspiration from the artist’s forthcoming book “En los hilos encontré,” a pedagogical resource to support learning and teaching the embedded knowledge of the back-strap loom. Ascoli began working on the book six years ago after working as an educator at a textile museum in Guatemala. Throughout her time there, the artist noticed young visitors exploring the museum and saw an opening to how intergenerational knowledge could be reflected and transmitted. In the En los hilos encontré (Threads I Found), written in Spanish and Kaqchikel, and co-authored with Negma Coy, is being digitally displayed in the exhibition through an interactive setting. The installation also includes Ascoli’s explorations of the back-strap loom through poetry, photography, textiles, and more. The multifaceted installation is an extension of her previous work and encourages viewers to position themselves within what the artist calls ‘Weaving Worlds.’
For Jonesy’s Artpace project, JONESY PRESENTS HOT ACTION AT ARTPACE, the artist has constructed a room inspired by men’s intimate spaces, such as gay bars, sex clubs, bathhouses, and so forth. At the core of the project is an in-progress film made in collaboration with artist and choreographer Lindsey Taylor and a team of other performers. The film features predominantly women performers to subvert the stereotypical expectations of men’s intimate spaces by focusing on women’s desires and experiences. Utilizing a queer, historical perspective, the performers are sharing their own ideas of what these spaces could be if they were more available to others. Alongside the single-channel video, the gallery space includes objects from the set of the film, a print, and an audio piece by duo Toxic Water playing throughout the gallery.
Betelhem Makonnen’s residency offering, unsettling narratives, is a meditation that considers presence and place in relation to memory and history within non-linear time. The works, made up of still and moving images, text, and installation, emphasize perception and seeing as a sensing that we do with the body and through the body across time. Throughout the gallery, we see repeating yet different signs of nature emergent from the source photograph and experience its foregrounding across different times and locations (from Southern California to Rio De Janeiro to the Texas Coast), reinforcing the artist’s conceptual foundation that accepts the future and the past as forms of the present, present in the present. unsettling narratives is an invitation to break with flat linear logic and to connect through a moving focus that opens and rearranges perception across time and space.
