José Carlos Teixeira | Sarah FitzSimons
José Carlos Teixeira | Sarah FitzSimons
Recent Works
Arte Institute presents a screening and discussion of recent works by José Carlos Teixeira (Video Art Project series), followed by an artist talk by Sarah FitzSimons.
RU, Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY
February 15, 2013 / 6.30 pm
This event is organized by Arte Institute and hosted by Residency Unlimited (RU) within the framework of the partnership established in 2012 (http://www.residencyunlimited.org/partnerships/arte-institute/)
Description | Artist Statements
José Carlos Teixeira is an artist whose research-based work involves primarily video-essay, installation, and related photography. Three main axes shape his overall interdisciplinary practice: art and politics; art and community; art and technology. Is this a collision or a productive encounter?
Notions of identity, otherness, language, boundary, exile and displacement, are recurrent themes in his creative and theoretical investigation. Using strategies of individual and group performance, his pieces address specific issues related to locational identity (or identity as an ongoing process of transformation), global diaspora, the limits (or overlapping) of personal and social territories, and the definition of physical and psychological spaces. They attempt to generate not a set of conclusions, but a continuous process of questioning. Usually coming from a subjective, discursive and contextual approach, Teixeira focuses on collaboration, participation, and dialogue, therefore incorporating multiple voices and subjects into the audiovisual projects. The relationship with, and the representation of Otherness (both in its external and internal dimensions) occupy a central role in his aesthetic and ethic materializations.
Frontiers between video art and cinema, fiction and documentary, are purposely left open and undefined, following the belief that the most challenging and substantial artwork derives from in-between places, from areas resisting conventional categorizations.
Sarah FitzSimons is a visual artist whose project-based work typically involves a sculpture, installed outdoors or indoors, which interacts with and derives meaning from its surroundings. She interprets and reframes this process through photography, video, and storytelling, sometimes representing the images, video loops, and text as separate pieces. Much of the work seeks to connect our constructed culture and daily lives with the wider patterns of nature. FitzSimons works first and foremost in and with three-dimensional space, and a core question that drives her research is: how can an object affect the space around it? Just as the form and bulk of a mountain range creates its own weather, (rain forests and rain shadow deserts), how can and does art alter the space around it? (physical space, emotional space, aesthetic space, social space, metaphoric space, etc.) The sculptural objects she makes are rarely self-contained, meaning that they need context to be complete. When listing materials for works, she often include things like the Pacific Ocean, a small town in Vermont, a bedroom, and the Joshua Tree Desert, in addition to more typical materials of wood and steel. Both categories of ‘material’ (physical and site) are equally important in building the pieces.
Over the past decade and into the foreseeable future, her practice continues to explore the physical presence and power of mountains, rivers, deserts, and oceans, and their counterparts (just as massive) in the individual human psyche and collective unconscious.
Bios
José Carlos Teixeira was born in Porto, Portugal in 1977. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), with a BFA from the School of Fine Arts at University of Porto. Teixeira has participated in exhibitions and screenings around the world, and his work has been shown in venues such as the Hammer Museum, LACE (Los Angeles), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Art Interactive (Boston), Museum of the City of New York (New York), Le Grand Halle de La Villete (Paris), Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), Rosalux, Berlinerpool (Berlin), National Center for Contemporary Arts (Moscow), M. K. Ciurlionis National Museum (Kaunas), Hélio Oiticica Art Center (Rio de Janeiro), São Paulo Cultural Center (S. Paulo), Museu da Cidade, Fundação EDP, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Goethe-Institut, and Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa (Lisbon), to name a few. He has also been the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Fulbright/Carmona e Costa Foundation Grant, FLAD Grant, Gulbenkian Foundation Artistic Grant, UCLA Fellowships, Samuel Booth Award, D’Arcy Hayman Award, Fuso Video Festival Jury Prize 2011, and the 2005 EDP New Artists Prize nomination. Teixeira was until recently Assistant Professor at ESAD.CR (Portugal), and he currently is Adjunct Faculty at UW-Madison. In 2008-09, he was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and in 2013 he will be in residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony. www.josecarlosteixeira.com
Sarah FitzSimons was born in Euclid, Ohio in 1977. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California Los Angeles, with a BA and BFA from Ohio University. FitzSimons has exhibited her work internationally and in cities across the United States. Recent exhibitions and commissioned works include International Forest Art Path (Darmstadt, Germany); Ponto e Coordenada (Monsaraz, Portugal); The Hairy Blob (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago); Compendium (Chazen Museum of Art, Madison WI); Any Questions? (Vadehavsfestival, Mando, Denmark); Between Document and Fiction (Porto, Portugal); Environmental Art Biennale (I-Park, East Haddam, CT); Fusion Culture (SoFA Gallery, Bloomington IN); Compasses (Spaces Gallery, Cleveland OH); Who Killed Bambi? (Cypress College Gallery, Cypress, CA); Orogeny (EnView Gallery, Long Beach, CA); and Squatting at Langton (New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA). FitzSimons has received grants and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, University of California Los Angeles, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vermont Studio Center, I-Park Residency, and the MacDowell Colony, among other institutions. She currently teaches as Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.