SAN JOSE, CA.- The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art announced the selection of three artists for the next round of ICA Sandbox Projects—ongoing site-specific installations in the ICA’s gallery. After a call for proposals from artists throughout the west coast, the ICA curatorial team selected artists Kathy Aoki, Sofie Ramos, and Tracey Snelling to each design and create a site-specific installation project.

Kathy Aoki
Kathy Aoki addresses gender and pop-culture issues through approachable visual formats with a twist of humor. Installations of her current body of work, collectively entitled "The Museum of Historical Makeovers," are presented in the context of an ersatz beauty history museum.

Aoki’s work can be found in major collections across the U.S. including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Harvard University Art Museums, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Awards include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (NH), the Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), and the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium). Aoki lives and works in the Silicon Valley where she is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Santa Clara University.

For her ICA installation, Hello Kitty Monument Diorama, Aoki will create a room-sized diorama, in the vein of an exhibit at a Natural History Museum. Complete with a viewing bridge, the monument will be promoted as the perfect photo-op for selfies. Modular sculpting of the Hello Kitty facade will allow for alternating “monument-worthy” celebrities-of-the moment every few weeks during the exhibition. Social media will play an integral part in the installation, commenting on the phenomenon of selfies in museums, while also providing a way for the viewer to interact with the installation. Viewers will be prompted on Instagram and Snapchat to “filter” their selfies using a custom filter that will locate them in Aoki’s fictitious place. By using the filter, visitors to the exhibition will contribute to an online archive.

Sofie Ramos
Sofie Ramos was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and is currently based in the Bay Area. Since her recent escape from academia, she has had exhibitions at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York, Incline Gallery in San Francisco, and Johansson Projects in Oakland. She has also completed the Artist in Residence program at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.

Ramos is inspired by everyday material culture; she curates found objects, patterns, and materials and makes the familiar strange through hyperboles of form and color, as well as unexpected juxtaposition and whimsical attention to detail.

Ramos will create a site-specific immersive installation that aims to conflate the three-dimensional arrangement of objects in a space with the two-dimensional composition of a painting. By incorporating the architecture of the existing space of the ICA as well as sculptural constructions and found objects into one composition, her work will consider where one-piece ends and another piece or the containing space begins. The intended effect is the experience of walking into a painting and being completely immersed. Ramos’s practice involves an improvisational approach – accumulating, arranging, reusing and reworking layers of visual material. The continuous recycling of materials from past installations imbues them with new life as they evolve and combine in fresh iterations.

Tracey Snelling
Tracey Snelling is an internationally recognized artist who is based in the Bay Area and Europe. Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and installation, she creates an impression of place, people and experience. Snelling has shown work in museums including Gerneentemusuem Helmond, the Netherlands; Shanghai Zendai MOMA, China; The Museum of Art and Design, New York; and Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany.

She has had solo exhibitions throughout the US as well as in China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and London, and has been awarded residencies in Beijing and Shanghai. She also received a 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. She has an upcoming sculptural commission and exhibition at the Historical Museum of Frankfurt in October 2017, and a residency and exhibition at the esteemed Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Snelling’s Clusterfuck installations are a combination of sculptures, video projections, lights, rugs, kitsch, images, and odd accessories. The installations are immersive experiences that place the viewer at the simultaneous conjunction of a multitude of different, sometimes opposing, cultures. Snelling proposes to create her largest Clusterfuck installation to date for the ICA’s Sandbox Project. The installation will consist of walls covered with posters, magazine pages, carpets, and fabric. Large projections will also fill parts of the walls. Her sculptures will be jumbled throughout the gallery along with kitsch and various found objects. Included will be a living room area and within that a stage for a performance during the opening.

Sandbox Projects
In Silicon Valley, technologists use the term “sandbox” as a figurative place to experiment with new code or ideas. In a similar spirit, the ICA’s Sandbox Projects is a space that supports emerging and mid-career artists to experiment, take risks and develop works that would not otherwise be realized. Not limited to media, the program encourages site responsive, ambitious, architectural and large-scale works.

Previous Sandbox Projects include: Val Britton: Intimate Immensity; Mike Rathbun: Urgency; Chris Dorosz: Painted Room; Christel Dillbohner: Ice Floe; Ligorano / Reese: Crater Bay Area.

Sandbox Project recipients (artist/artist team) will receive an honorarium (ranging from $1,500- $5,000) to design, create and complete an installation project. The honorarium can be used towards project expenses including materials, supplies, transit of artwork, travel, per diem, and artist fee. The ICA will additionally support the project with access to a team of professional preparators during install and de-install, provide marketing for the project and host an exhibition opening.

The ICA established a call for Sandbox Project proposals in April 2017, posting the opportunity across our social media platforms and alumni programs in the Bay Area, and distributing it to more than 4,000+ email recipients. From this, the ICA received 132 eligible applications from artist throughout the west coast.