Homework
curated by Fiona Yun-Jui Chang and Babsi Loisch
Fiona Yun-Jui Chang
Ching Ching Cheng
Gilda Davidian
Babsi Loisch
Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza
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Virtual Exhibition
The original object is needed elsewhere, Babsi Loisch, 2018
Homework, curated by Fiona Yun-Jui Chang and Babsi Loisch and featuring work by five artists, initiates a dialog on a practice of care that carries the weight of everyday life and holds us steadfastly from the inside. Fiona Yun-Jui Chang, Ching Ching Cheng, Gilda Davidian, Babsi Loisch and Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza engage in the conversation with their shared multi-cultural identity.
Drawing attention to the domestic space, Homework simultaneously forms a collective investigation into care-providing labor, adaptation, and home-building - activities crucial for humanity yet so often regarded as insignificant. Spanning a range of media, these artists probe into the economy centered around home and put pressure on how society measures the ephemeral values we live by (love, culture, support) with capitalist logic.
Fiona Yun-Jui Chang
Fiona Yun-Jui Chang is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States in 2008. She became a mother in 2015. Both the trans-cultural and motherhood experience lead her to re-examine the norms of everyday life. Using photography and workshops to deconstruct everyday language, Fiona immerses her art practice in ordinary places with everyday people to foster conversations on value making and the meaning of being. Her ongoing investigation is to question what an artist is and where art takes place today between local and global contexts. Prior to practicing art, she obtained a bachelor degree in Law from Chinese Culture University in Taiwan.
Foreigner (2020-ongoing)
inkjet photographs, ink, paper, time
The Moon (photograph - 11 ⅛” x 12 ⅜”)
Draft no.1, 2015 - 8 ¼” x 11”
Draft no.2, 2018 - 8 ¼” x 11”
Draft no.3, 2020 - 8 ¼” x 11”
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Foreigner is an installation of two main components – The Moon, a series of photographs of a pregnant body mimicking phases of the moon, and Draft, a writing practice revealing the artist’s ongoing introspection of her maternal bodies and art practice. Each time Fiona revisits the photographs she took during the last trimester of her pregnancy in 2015, she makes a new draft of the so called ‘artist statement’ to describe the physicality and articulate the meaning of the photographs. Through rewriting, Chang unfolds an ongoing monologue about her art practice and parental practice where uncertainty and vulnerability are deeply embedded.
Ching Ching Cheng
Ching Ching Cheng was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States in 2002. She received her BFA from Art Center College of Design. Ching had co-curated an exhibition “The Language of Perpetual Conditions” at California State University Los Angeles in 2016. Ching exhibited at LACMA Rental and Sales Gallery, Chinese American Museum, Craft and Folk Art Museum, 21c Museum, colleges, universities and art fairs throughout the United States, and also had solo exhibitions in Taiwan and China. She attended an artist-in-residency program at 943 Studio in Kunming, China in 2011. She has taught lectures and workshops at colleges, Universities, museums, non-profit organizations, and private art centers. She received grants in 2011 and in 2015 from the Art and Cultural Center in Taiwan, and in 2018 from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Ching currently lives and works in Altadena, California.
American Woman (2019)
single channel video
11 mins
When people migrate, they bring their cultures and identities with them. Sometimes the culture and identity that they bring with them changes and adapts to that new environment, and it changes to a modified new culture or a subculture, and a distinct identity. I am interested in the relationship between identities and space. The space is not only the physical environment and locations, but also the cultural, social, economical and political aspect of the space. How identities were defined through space, and the notion and ideology of what identities mean in the relation to its space. Adapting, resisting, transforming, and accepting are stages of in between, and this process of progression becomes the focus of my work. What we once were and what we have become is a cognitive representation of one’s own identity. As a first generation immigrant myself, and having two young mixed-race children, I always put myself in the situation to make the subject matter more personal to me. My work gives an intimate and personal account of my own experiences in transition stages of changes in my own identity, while opening and encouraging the viewers for further discussions about the connections and bridges of global society.
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Apron Series
Apron series 26 (2016)
repurposed apron, epoxy resin
15”x16”x4”
Apron series 32 (2016)
repurposed apron, epoxy resin
24”x20”x8”
Apron series 30 (2016)
repurposed apron, epoxy resin
24”x18”x15”
This is a series of works that explore identities found in everyday life from different perspectives. The works are a portrait of myself as an artist, wife and mother. These sculptures are inspired by the contrast between Taiwanese and American culture.
In the past, human beings built shelters for their families. Even in some cultures today, people still physically build shelters. As long as people have the ability to physically construct a home, or virtually build a home, we are always adapting and changing our environment. At the same time, our identities are also adapting and being changed by what surrounds us.
Gilda Davidian
Gilda Davidian is a photographer living in Los Angeles. Her practice asks questions about the relationship between photography and memory, and how we come to understand histories and locations through images. Davidian received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2014. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the MAK Center, the Korean Cultural Center, Monte Vista Projects, the Hessel Museum of Art, Human Resources, and Visitor Welcome Center.
Phases (2020)
Digital C-Print
3 prints, each 16”x20”
In her series Phases, Gilda Davidian explores the different stages of life through portraits of herself, her mother, and her daughter. Drawing on the phases of the moon as inspiration, Davidian reflects on the interconnections of matrilineal lineage using photography’s entwined relationship to time.
Babsi loisch
Babsi Loisch is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She was born in Vienna, Austria. She holds a MPhil in Social- and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, a BFA in Photography from the Glasgow School of Art and a MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts. In Los Angeles, Loisch’s work has been included in shows at The Box, and at non-profit spaces ‘Art in the Park’ and ‘Art Share LA’. In 2019 she was awarded a commission through CURRENT:LA FOOD, the second iteration of a public art initiative presented by the City of Los Angeles. Loisch carried out art projects at RedLine, Denver, CO, at The Armory Center, Pasadena, CA, at Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, NY and at Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL.
Burp cloth (2019)
textiles, yarn, time
124” x 114”
The burp cloth is fascinating in both its immediate intimacy and simultaneous universality. In all different shapes, forms and textures, new, old, used or stained, the burp cloth is one of the few items used by most caregivers of babies.
Breastfeeding, pumping, night feeds, bottle preparation, first foods - feeding infants takes various forms. Whatever the specifics, it always takes a village to make successful feeding possible because of its often complicated logistics, especially for working mothers. Feeding is communal work done by a unit that works together to provide for a being.
For Burp cloth, a project stretching over the course of 6 weeks, I collected donations of feeding related textiles (burp cloths, bibs, nursing bra pads, etc.) that I sew into a giant cloth - changing continuously with each piece that was given to me, unpredictable and awkwardly shaped like parenthood.
maryrose cobarrubias mendoza
Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza has crafted her own visual language of transformation, exalting the everyday in drawings, sculpture, and installation for nearly 30 years. Using memory, material significance, and personal narratives, her work expresses circumstances of cultural amnesia and post-assimilation through processes of the handmade.
Mendoza earned an MFA from the Claremont Graduate University after completing studies at Otis/Parsons and a BA at California State University, Los Angeles.
Mendoza’s work has exhibited at venues such as the Pacific Asia Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, PlugIn Gallery (Winnipeg), YYZ Artist Outlet (Toronto), Commonwealth and Council, SolwayJones, HudsonJones Gallery (Cincinnati), COOP, (Seoul) and others.
Mendoza has been honored with several awards and fellowships, including a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2012 C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, a Los Angeles Artists Fellowship, an Art Matters Fellowship, and honorariums from the YYZ Artists’ Outlet, PlugIn Gallery, the Pacific Asia Museum, and the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock.
Maid to Order (1998) - performance for Far Safari, Foundation Art Resources, Griffith Park Old Zoo, Los Angeles.
Business card, Philippine flag, shoes, suitcase, laundry detergent, sponge, sticker, airline ticket, name tag, ‘Philippine General Consulate Authentication’, wooden spoon, syringe. Script dialog based on various late 1990's domestic worker agency websites. Performance elements not included in installation in situ: broom, Auctioneer (originally played by Evelyn Co), music (‘In The Limelight’ as performed by David Lindup).
In 1998, Mendoza created an auction-style performance for Far Safari, an outdoor exhibition project at Griffith Park presented by Foundation Art Resources (FAR). The performance, titled Maid to Order, was the first and, to date, only performance art project of Mendoza’s to be shown publicly.
The piece addressed the marketing of domestic workers from countries such as the Philippines to affluent households around the world. Referencing books such as Nicole Constable's Maid to Order in Hong Kong, and The Philippine Women's League of Japan as well as various marketing websites, Mendoza's piece focused on the sacrifices women were willing to make as mothers, wives, and educated professionals in order to find employment abroad in order to support themselves and their families.
Wearing an iconic maid’s uniform sewn from a Philippine flag, Mendoza carried a suitcase of props—including a ‘barbell’ made of detergent boxes, her ‘Philippine General Consulate Certification’, a syringe, an airline ticket, and a broom—and displayed herself while being described by an Auctioneer. The Auctioneer, played by Mendoza's friend, Evelyn Co, listed Mendoza's physical and professional attributes while a nostalgic 1960s commercial jingle played in the background. Through her research, Mendoza found that websites marketing domestic workers listed personal information, including physical attributes and educational degrees, often revealing women with advanced degrees in various fields pursuing foreign domestic work.