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home away from
LACE Summer Residency with Jimena Sarno
Preview Reception: June 28, 2017 8-10PM
Exhibition Dates: July 1 – August 13, 2017
Curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar
home away from addresses experiences of borders, displacement, and immigration procedures as they manifest in the everyday lives of immigrants, through an immersive installation in the main gallery at LACE.
Jimena Sarno has created, designed, and built home away from during her summer residency. The installation occupies the entire main gallery as a permeable wooden structure — with a single entrance, and is circumventable from the outside — which filters light through its gaps and produces oscillating shadows. Two video projections depicting details of self-portraits by immigrant youth shelter the central structure.
Sarno’s project is inspired by Hollywood flats, used as backdrops in film and scenic design, laths, wooden strips that were traditionally used to construct interior walls in domestic architecture, and border holding areas, where people are enclosed while being processed to access another country. The video is composed of remnants of self-ideal portraits of the artist’s middle school students. The outline of these figures are used to create maps, revealing specific features through the rhythm of a white, linear light accompanied by the digitally processed sound of a scanner and healing frequencies.
The sequence of the words “home away from home away from home away from” spins around the impossibilities of establishing a new space for living, or even returning to an origin as the individual is constantly disciplined, banned, and interrupted in their desires and their pursuits.
The space will be activated throughout the exhibition with a series of artists’ collaborations: performances, interventions, and workshops, as a call for self-determination to challenge and disrupt the structures that define our paths.
Collaborations
Throughout the duration of the exhibition:
Video
Arts integration program and Students from Belvedere middle school-East LA. 2017 Class of Ms. Escalante, Ms. Adewale, Ms. Macías, Mr. Acosta, Mr. Conde and Ms. Flores (ESL and 6 to 8 Grades).
The scent H.O.M.E.
Jenny Qaqundah, Palestinian herbalist, has prepared a grounding scent with hints of citrus to uplift the spirit. The plants that she gathered for this therapeutic formula are vetiver, dalmatian, sage, dark patchouli, rosemary, cedar, nutmeg, bergamot and lemon. The blend has hints of her Arab home.
Programming:
June 28 8:30PM: C3LA Choir – LA-based choral collective performance
July 12 Sculptural intervention by Niloufar Emamifar
July 12, 7PM: Performance and sculptural intervention by Nooshin Rostami
July (Date TBD): Afternoon immigrant youth writing workshop facilitated by writer Sarah Rafael García
July (Date TBD): “Se habla español” event, walkthrough with artists and curators in a bilingual space Spanish/English
August 13 6PM: Closing event - Listening party with live sound by Jimena Sarno and artists, Cay Castagnetto and Arshia Haq, in collaboration with VOLUME. Launch of home away from publication printed by Tiny Splendor with an essay by Manuel Shvartzberg, and other writings and images by invited artists and writing workshop participants.
Support for home away from is provided by the California Arts Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Visual Artists Network, a program of the National Performance Network.
Jimena Sarno is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer. She works across a range of media including installation, sound, video, text and sculpture. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and currently living in Los Angeles, her experience as a South American immigrant informs her practice. She is the organizer of analog dissident, a monthly discussion gathering that features two invited artists and encourages intersectional approaches and critical engagement outside of traditional art institutions. Her work has been exhibited at LACE, PØST, Human Resources, UCI Contemporary Art Center, Control Room, Fellows of Contemporary Art and Grand Central Art Center among others. She is the recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists.
Always stemming from personal experience, her work takes shape as installations where she builds, rearranges and re-contextualizes objects, images, sound and found text into constellations of new relationships. Through the material process of building objects and environments, she retraces the practical and aesthetic considerations of systems of control—from the increasing abstraction of preemptive warfare, mainstream media distortion and every day corporate and government tracking to the idea of the good citizen and the criminalization of dissent.
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)