Artist Talk: with Ashley Hunt, taisha paggett and Kim Zumpfe, moderated by curator, Robert Crouch
Join School for the Movement of the Technicolor People curator Robert Crouch and artists Ashley Hunt, taisha paggett and Kim Zumpfe in conversation at LACE.
The discussion will focus on the current installation on view at LACE, and the artists’ collaborative process.
School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a large-scale installation and performance platform by Los Angeles based artist taisha paggett. This project, which takes the form of a dance school, is shaped by the question, “what is a Black dance curriculum today?” The installation itself, developed in collaboration with artists Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe, serves as a temporary dance school, performance space and home for dance company, WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees). Read more about the project here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
taisha paggett makes things and is interested in what bodies do. she believes language is tricky, thoughts are powerful, and that people are most beautiful when looking up. her work for the stage, gallery and public sphere include individual and collaborative investigations into questions of the body, agency and the phenomenology of race, and has been presented locally, nationally and internationally. she’s been a Guest Lecturer at the Dance Center of Columbia College in Chicago since 2010. in addition to her group choreography and solo durational works, she has worked collaboratively, toured with and made significant creative contributions to the projects of Meg Wolfe, Victoria Marks, David Roussève, Cid Pearlman, Cheng-Chieh Yu, Baker-Tarpaga Projects, Kelly Nipper and Rebecca Alson-Milkman. Paggett is a former member of Ultra-red and maintains an ongoing collaborative project with visual artist Ashley Hunt, “On movement, thought and politics,” which has taken form as workshop, performance, video and mixed media installation. she holds an MFA from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and is a co-instigator of itch dance journal.
Ashley Hunt is a visual artist, writer and teacher who has dedicated the bulk of his professional career to documenting the expansion of the U.S. prison system and its effects on communities, alongside other projects that engage social movements, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate our art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. Hunt’s works have been exhibited in venues ranging from the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern to grassroots community centers and alongside activist campaigns. . Recent exhibitions and performances include Cue Art Foundation, Threewalls Gallery in Chicago, The Kitchen in New York, the 2012 Made in L.A. Biennial of the Hammer Museum, Sinopale 4 biennale in Sinop, Turkey, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and Woodbourne State Correctional Institute in upstate New York. Recent writing has appeared in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly (2014), Native Strategies issue 4 (2014), Shifter Magazine #20 (2013). Ashley is co-director of the Program in Photography and Media at CalArts.
http://ashleyhunt.info | http://correctionsproject.com
Kim Zumpfe is an artist and educator who lives and works in California. She works with images, objects, text, installation, collaborative structures, and exhibitions. In these various media, she is engaged with relationships between the ideological body and subjectivity in locations where multiple bodies develop, displace, produce, and forget to maintain boundaries and relations. Through modes of transformation, she investigates where borders within form disperse – in the body, subjectivity, and politicized space, as a way to interrogate encounters where collapse of identity, intimacy, and power structures overlap. Her work has been exhibited at Culver Center for the Arts Riverside, Visual Arts Center Fullerton, University Art Gallery Irvine, University Art Museum Long Beach, and several public and online sites. She is a member of Emily O, a free-floating artist collective that questions the relationship between individual and collective processes and identity through organizing exhibitions.
Robert Crouch is a Los Angeles based artist and curator who works across a wide range of media including photography, sound, installation, video, and sculpture. He has exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London, and performed at venues including the Art Center College of Design, Human Resources, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Stone.
He is the co-founding Director of VOLUME, a curatorial project that functions as a catalyst for interdisciplinary new media work through exhibitions, performances, events, lectures, and publications, and has worked with a wide range of artists including William Basinski, Nate Boyce, Richard Chartier, Loren Chasse, Tim Hecker, France Jobin, Kadet Kuhne, Lucky Dragons, Carsten Nicolai, Yann Novak, Steve Roden, and Christopher Willits. VOLUME has presented projects at venues including the Hammer Museum, the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Art Institute, and SF Camerawork.
Crouch is the former Associate Director/Curator at LACE, where he organized Resonant Forms, an electronic music festival exploring the relationship between sound, installation, and video, and curated exhibitions with artists Karen Lofgren, Sean Sullivan, and Margo Victor. In 2012 he organized Steve Roden: Shells, Bells, Steps and Silencesand Group Dynamics and Improper Light, a new project with Los Angeles artist Gina Osterloh. He is currently curating a new project with artist Taisha Paggett and co-curating a survey of performance work of the late Chilean artist, Juan Downey as part of the Getty initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
He is currently the Director of Artist Programs at Pasadena Arts Council and the Curator for the AxS Festival.
Installation image (above): Christopher Wormald.
