Skype Walkthrough with Writer/Artist Jenny Donovan

Visit LACE on Friday, July 30th at 12:30 to see a public walk-through with writer/artist Jenny Donovan via Skype as she discusses her work with Gabriela Torres Olivares on Yo No Estoy Aqui as part of the Not Content portion of Les Figues‘ curation of Painted Over/Under.

To see more from Jenny and Gabriela, please visit their blog at yonoestoyaqu1.blogspot.com.

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
Where do we locate what is not physically present? Where are we when we speak into a telephone?  Where we are when we are inside of the border and cannot get out?  That is to say, where is that which is not physically here due to circumstance rather than conviction.  The question, philosophically, is perceptual.  A is (physically) here and therefore not (physically) there.  B is (physically) there and therefore not (physically) here.  This perception stirs up the disjunctive between the Shakespearean to be or not to be and the there of a dinosaur that alienates us through fear because it is always there and never here (although it always is) in Augusto Monterroso’s story. The answer is a minifiction, a phrase whose past and future are uncertain within the constant present of a line, a marrow whose subjective skeleton is yet to be discovered: a virtual realm.

Yo no estoy aquí = yo soy aquí (I am not here = my presence persists here) because one concept cannot exist without the other. This project explores the process of virtuality as the answer to “where are you when you are not here?” That absence is the presence of absence: the emptiness that gives form to a figurative presence.  Everything that is not, so that something can become everything that is not here.  The present is everything that is but also that which is not. As reader-spectators remove the post-its, they take with them the reason why a specific individual cannot be present. The moment a reader-spectator reads a text, a virtual dynamic is created, one in which everyone that is not here exists through the other.

ABOUT THE WRITERS/ARTISTS
JENNY DONOVAN is an artist, writer and translator, whose work has appeared in numerous journals, including Revista Espiral, Papeles de la Mancuspia, Encyclopedia Volume 2 F-K, Abrazo, and Bulbo Press. She has presented work in various independent spaces and museums in the US and Mexico, including: Museo Carrillo Gil (México City, D.F.), The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco), El Museo Nacional de La Ciudad de México, (Mexico City, D.F.) and El Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT). With Gaby Torres, Donovan co-directs La Derramadora Press, a binational and bilingual independent press that produces small editions of hand crafted books from recycled materials.

GABRIELA TORRES OLIVARES is the author of three collections of short stories, including Regiomonteses (enfermario) (ediciones La Derramadora press, 2008 and Tierra Adentro, 2010), Están Muertos, (Harakiri Plaquettes, 2004), and Incompletario (Ediciones Intempestivas, 2007). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including: Caja de Viento (Ediciones El Árbol) and La Difícil Brevedad (2006), as well as in numerous periodicals. Torres currently lives in Tijuana, B.C., where she is the co-director and chief editor of La Derramadora Press.

ABOUT NOT CONTENT
Not Content is a series of text projects curated by Les Figues Press as part of the year-long initiative PUBLIC INTEREST at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). Concentrated in the summer season (June 21-September 30), and extending, to a lesser degree, through the fall, winter and spring, NOT CONTENT brings together an international group of writers who will be “in-residence” at LACE. The writers will investigate the ways in which language functions within public and private spheres and within the tenuous space between these real and imagined realms.

For more, please visit http://lesfigues.blogspot.com.