|
For These Times presents a wide-ranging group of artists inspired by the Vision Festival's commitment to free artistic expression and to working towards a just future. Pointedly speaking to the socio-political storm America is weathering, the art never divorces from its proximity to the stage engaging in the conversation vocalized by these performed arts.
The exhibition includes drawings from Tim Clifford’s “Bloodletting” series, the video projections of Kit Fitzgerald and Bill Mazza, InnerCity Projects' large-scale amber-glass pendulum, Maya Misra’s stamp and flag works that challenge the meaning of national borders, Ted Riederer’s blacked-out album cover poems. |
BILL MAZZA Bill Mazza is a visual artist and activist based in Brooklyn. His work traces spatial and temporal relationships of individuals within mediated environments. An additional part of of his practice is ‘art in the service of community,' most frequently taking the form of volunteer design for arts and activist organizations. He has been honored and inspired to be involved with Arts for Art since 2005. 
TED RIEDERER Ted Riederer’s record collages This Is A Declaration and Without This Desolate Madness are transcendental poems made by blacking out found vinyl record sleeves. They reflect Riederer’s lifelong investigation into the redemptive power of visual art, performance, and music. Since 2010, he has traveled the world with his conceptual art project Never Records. The project continues to grow while remaining faithful to its original objective: to create community across social, political, and religious division. |
KIT FITZGERALD On June 1, video artist Kit Fitzgerald will be creating live video paintings and projections. She creates video images live, in real-time, bringing to video the same type of immediacy and body connection as found in music and performing arts. Since 1985, she has applied this technique of improvisational "video painting" to live music/video performances with musicians, including Peter Gordon, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Max Roach. 
INNERCITY PROJECTS
(Jo Wood-Brown / Miriam Parker) The collaborative team of Jo Wood-Brown and Miriam Parker's InnerCity projects grew out of the environment of the vision festival with its embrace of music, dance, visual art and spoken word. Through works that stage paintings, video, installation and choreographies of presence, InnerCity explores the state of being in-between destinations and how our body can be present in two different places at the same time. |
MAYA MISRA Employing a variety of media including photography, painting, and sculpture, Maya Grace Misra creates art that addresses the use of symbols in creating identities, whether personal or public. Using flags and stamps, which reinforce specific historical narratives through exclusionary imagery and distribution, her work calls for a major culture shift by reflecting on how we consume and interpret national symbols, and most importantly, by changing these symbols to better represent the people. 
TIM CLIFFORD Tim Clifford's recent work investigates the intersection between aesthetics and violence and more broadly how objects and images absorb meaning and become embedded with history. The work asserts, in the words of the poet George Oppen, that: “There are things we live among / and ‘to see them / Is to know ourselves." |