Recent pasts
A two-part project presented online and at ArtCenter DTLA
Recent Pasts is an exhibition in two parts: Part 1, Recent Pasts, Tomorrow’s Archives, launches online with programming from the Southland Institute in Fall/Winter 2020, and Part 2, Recent Pasts, Revisited, continues offline with a group exhibition of works at ArtCenter DTLA in Fall 2021.
Recent Pasts considers the changes and perpetual recalibration in arts education and institutions over the recent past of 2005–2020, and into 2021, and in the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts they are situated within. Extending over a year, the exhibition looks to these recent pasts and reflects on where we have come, while questioning and offering possibilities of moving forward. Recent Pasts is also an attempt at reconsidering how we produce and present exhibitions—a process rooted in planning—in a future that is increasingly difficult to predict.
Recent Pasts is organized by Aurora Tang, independent curator in collaboration with Love’s Remedies (ArtCenter DTLA Residency Project 2020), the Southland Institute, and ArtCenter DTLA.
Organized by the Southland Institute
November 2020 - January 2021
The Tomorrow’s Archives workshop series was conceived collectively in an ad hoc Southland Institute course — “what is programming?”— formed in the wake of Covid-19, and in response to an invitation to contribute programming to the Recent Pasts exhibition. Participants included Kate Brown, Adam Feldmeth, Chloe Ginnegar, Christina Niazian, and Joe Potts.
Tomorrow’s Archives is a series of free, public online workshops organized by the Southland Institute, and led by Shannon Finnegan, Chang Yuchen, Maternal Fantasies (Isabell Spengler and Maicyra Leão), Hagar Cygler, and Taeyoon Choi.
Workshop Schedule
“Artists for Alt-Text” image courtesy Shannon Finnegan
Friday, Nov. 13, 3-5pm (PST)
Alt-text as Poetry
with Shannon Finnegan
An essential part of web accessibility for people who are blind, low vision, or have certain cognitive disabilities, alt-text is often overlooked altogether, or understood solely through the lens of compliance. This workshop centers alt-text as a writing practice to be approached and embraced with creativity and care.
Register here
Friday, December 4, 2020, 3-4pm (PST)
A Book Is a Flat File Is a Butterfly
with Chang Yuchen
Combining conversation and hands-on exercises, this lecture-workshop will address the heavy aspects of artist books: the archive, the administration, the inventory, as well as the light aspects such as dream, memory and imagination.
Register here
Sunday, December 6, 11am-1pm (PST)
Collage Thinking, Collage Doing
with Maternal Fantasies // Isabell Spengler and Maicyra Leão
Based on creative methods used by the art collective Maternal Fantasies, the workshop proposes a broader sense of translation between thinking/discourse and practice/performative visibility, looking at ways collage can be performed collectively.
Register here
Friday January, 8, 2021, 11am-12pm (PST)
Faded but Not Forgotten
with Hagar Cygler
An extension of Cygler’s project Faded but Not Forgotten, this workshop in collaboration with Christina Niazian is an invitation to engage book making as a life practice with an emphasis on the process of exploring the common variables one faces when assembling a book: instinct, archives, decisions, sequence, and binding.
Register here
Saturday, January 16, 3:30-6pm (PST)
Distributed Web of Care
with Taeyoon Choi
Choi is a co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation whose initiative, Distributed Web of Care presents a critical perspective on technology, ethics and justice through lecture and interactive performances. In this workshop participants will learn about alternative social networks that are open source, free, and non-oppressive. For beginners without prior experience of coding.
Register here
For more information about workshops and facilitators, please visit the Recent Pasts, Tomorrow’s Archive site.
REcent pasts:
Revisited
September 20 - October 23, 2021
ArtCenter DTLA
Main Gallery
curated by Aurora Tang
Dorit Cypis, The Sighted See the Surface. Image courtesy Dorit Cypis
Recent Pasts, Revisited is part 2 of the project and will be presented at ArtCenter DTLA in Fall 2021. Originally conceived as an exhibition examining the structures, conditions, and concerns of arts education and institutions in Southern California over the last 15 years, Recent Pasts was scheduled to be on view at ArtCenter DTLA Fall 2020. Due to Covid-19, the exhibition was rescheduled for Fall 2021.
The project’s title comes from the 2004–5 symposium and publication by the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS), that brought together graduate art programs across Southern California1. In educator and critic Norman Klein’s 2004 SoCCAS catalogue essay, Klein suggests cross-institutional initiatives such as SoCCAS can offer a step towards making a restructuring possible: “New forms require new systems of production and cultural theory. I leave it to readers to locate their own possibilities in what follows.”2
Informed by Klein’s prompt, Recent Pasts is an exhibition presented in partnership with ArtCenter DTLA (est. 2019), Love’s Remedies (est. 2018), and the Southland Institute (est. 2016) that considers the changes in arts education and institutions, and in the socio-political, economic, and cultural sectors they are situated in, over the recent past of 2005–2020, and into 2021, as our understanding of the recent past continues to re-calibrate each day. Extending over a year, the exhibition looks to these recent pasts and reflects on where we have come, while questioning and offering new possibilities of moving forward. Recent Pasts is also an attempt at reconsidering how we produce and present exhibitions—a process rooted in planning—in a future that is increasingly difficult to predict, amidst overwhelming and overlapping rates of change.
Recent Pasts, Revisited will feature a group exhibition of works by artists with a connection to Los Angeles and an interest in making invisible institutional structures viscerally visible with care and criticality.
Artists:
Nick Angelo Janna Ireland
Neha Choksi Ruben Ochoa
Dorit Cypis noé olivas
Katie Herzog
Visit the Recent Pasts online flat-file of working documents for both Part 1 and Part 2 of the exhibition.
Artist bios
Nick Angelo (b. 1990, Los Angeles, California) is a Los Angeles-based artist. He holds a BA in Urban Studies from The Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at the New School in New York City, and an MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has been included in recent exhibitions at Chateau Shatto and Human Resources in Los Angeles, and he has a forthcoming solo exhibition at F, Houston, in December 2020.
Angelo’s work stretches across multiple mediums, and uses maps, topographies, and diagrams as methods of criticality towards American cultural and institutional power structures, constantly hinting at an “end times” enigma which seems omnipresent in a contemporary environment plagued by disinformation and dissent. He often references his experience as a “first wave opioid epidemic baby” as a lens and foundation to open up a larger conversation regarding mental health, addiction, “insanity,” power relations, and institutional critique, with the pharmaceutical industrial complex acting as a starting point. www.nickrangelo.com
Neha Choksi embraces a confluence of disciplines, including performance, video, installation, and sculpture. She disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in everyday life—from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Her process often involves collaborative and lived performances that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings.
Her most recent work-in-progress, Elementary, is a long-term, multi-format project that stems from a lived performance wherein she attends for an entire academic year (2018-2019) at a Los Angeles public elementary school as a kindergarten student. Work from another multi-part project, started in 2016, which explores human and artistic relationships with rocks and raw earth, will be presented offsite by the Kleefeld Contemporary (previously known as University Art Museum), California State University, Long Beach in 2021.
Recent honors include the 2019 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the designation of Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for 2017-2018 and 2019-2020, and the India Today Best New Media Artist of the Year Award for 2017. She serves on the editorial board of the Los Angeles-based arts journal, X-TRA. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay. www.nehachoksi.com
Dorit Cypis has explored history, identity, and social relations since the 1980s. At the core of her work is exploration of the artist’s role as creator, educator, mediator, and community-builder, with a guiding question, “Who are we to one other?"
Cypis’ career covers: performance, photography, and immersive media installation; curriculum development at colleges and universities; civic programs on generative relations across conflict and differences; and publication on identity and social relations. Dorit has exhibited internationally including: Whitney Museum, Musee des Beaux Art/Bruxelles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Musee D’Art Contemporaire/ Montréal, Walker Art Center, Orange County Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Open City Festival/Lublin, Poland, Kestner Gesellschaft and at galleries and community centers.
Dorit has worked with and founded civic organizations: PeoplesLab, transforming conflict into possibility for communities in conflict; Mediators Beyond Borders, building local and global capacity for conflict engagement; and Kulture Klub Collaborative, artists and home-less youth bridging survival and inspiration to build social engagement.
Among many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, 2014. Cypis earned a Master of Fine Arts, California Institute for the Arts, and a Masters of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and raised in Montreal, she currently lives in Los Angeles. www.doritcypis.com
Katie Herzog (b. 1979, Palo Alto, California) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2005. Recent exhibitions include Yankee Candle at Klowden Mann in Culver City, California (2020), Mom’s Historical Record at Sol Treasures in King City, California (2019), and Terms of Use at UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of Arts in Irvine, California (2019). She has participated in a number of artist residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Banff Centre, Bblackboxx, Ox-Bow, Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations in Berlin, and the Soulangh Artist Village in Tainan City, Taiwan. Her work has been written about in publications including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Hyperallergic, Art and Cake, the Huffington Post, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Artforum. She currently works for Monterey County Free Libraries and lives in Parkfield, California. www.katieherzog.net
Janna Ireland was born in Philadelphia, but has chosen Los Angeles as her home. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago, and in group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. She has been published in Aperture, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Art Papers, Vice, and The Los Angeles Times. Her first monograph, Regarding Paul R. Williams, was published by Angel City Press in 2020. www.jannaireland.com
Ruben Ochoa is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice engages space as both a concept and form. Sourcing from construction materials associated with inherent histories, Ochoa’s works expose the ideological and broader socio-political and economic relationships that facilitate how the spaces we inhabit and move through are assembled.
While sculpture continues to be at the center of Ruben’s practice, in recent years he has been increasingly interested in how his signature use of everyday materials can be used in two-dimensional works. In his “rust paintings,” Ochoa approaches rust as a pigment and his compositions take full advantage of the unpredictable nature of the medium. Iron oxide, that striking russet color, is the bane of iron and steel. Its effect on the canvas call to mind the visible deterioration and class boundaries of a city. The end effect is trademark Ochoa–striking at the outset, and after close inspection, seething with undercurrents of biting commentary of today’s class and racial divisions.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford; and SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe; and numerous group exhibitions, including at the 54th Venice Biennale Collateral Event (The Future Generation Art Prize Exhibition); Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas; and 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York. His work is in many public collections including, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2019, Ochoa completed Mis Marcadores, his first public art commission located at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry for the GSA Art in Architecture program. He has been the recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant, California Community Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. www.vielmetter.com/artists/ruben-ochoa
noé olivas is a Southern California-based artist. Through printmaking, sculpture, and performance, he investigates the poetics of labour. He considers the relationship between labour as it fits into the conceptions of femininity and masculinity in order to play with and reshape cultural references, narratives, myths, traditions, and objects, ultimately employing a new meaning.
olivas is an artist-gallerist-organizer and co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart and inaugural professor for the Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA at Prescott College, where he is teaching a course on art and healing. olivas received his BA in Visual Arts from the University of San Diego and his MFA in Art from the University of Southern California. He lives and works in South Central, Los Angeles, California. www.noeolivas.com
About the Curator
Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. Since 2009 she has been a program manager at The Center for Land Use Interpretation. From 2011–2015 she was managing director of High Desert Test Sites. She has taught at Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California, and is on the board of directors of Common Field. www.auroratang.net
1This inaugural SoCCAS symposium was organized in conjunction with Supersonic: 1 Wind Tunnel, 8 Schools, 120 Artists, a group exhibition of graduating artists from the MFA programs at SoCCAS schools: ArtCenter, Cal Arts, Claremont, Otis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego, and USC. This was the first major exhibition to be held in ArtCenter’s “Wind Tunnel” space.
2Norman M. Klein, “The Boost: Cultural Meteorology in Southern California.” In Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2005), 30.
