Collaborations within a Collaboration at SCOPE Miami 2011

ap-art-ment contributes three projects to the 2011 Skowhegan alumni project: Strength In Numbers at SCOPE Miami 2011

Strength In Numbers:
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS is an event, a sculpture, an installation, and a group of individual artists with extremely diverse practices laminated by a shared experience at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, where they met and started working together during this past summer’s session. In proposing a project for SCOPE, this was their point of departure: what is an individual within the context of an organization? Using these constraints as a catalyst, the project has evolved into a collaborative effort to bridge the physical distance between each of them, and manage a condensed time of production and display. Featured in the Outside Lounge at SCOPE, the 2011 Skowhegan residents will reassemble, build, project, stage, and perform a space for collaboration, ambiguity, and flexibility. They will work on their monument “the group” during the course of the fair; side by side, but not necessarily together, like a ship’s crew trying to stay afloat. Their materials will consist primarily of the detritus of other participants at SCOPE and the contents of two crates, arriving from New York and London, respectively. The items inside the crates will be incorporated based on written instructions, telephone conversations, email correspondence, and hands on assistance from the artists. Ultimately and throughout, we will be arriving at a structure that is zoned for productivity and a vibe that overcomes the aspirations of any of us individually. During the week-long event and on a daily basis, the monument will evolve, grow, discharge, dissolve, take U-turns, make upgrades, flex and flux, purge and merge, expand and even collapse in a constantly-morphing building performance.

ap-art-ment at SCOPE Miami, 2011

This piece by ap-art-ment will accompany the Skowhegan assemblage at SCOPE Miami this November-December.






Shaved
by ap-art-ment
2011
materials: carpet

About the Thing and the Thing Itself, closing reception

About the Thing and the Thing Itself
Works by ap-art-ment, and solo works by both its progenitors, Laura Boles Faw and Cathy Fairbanks

closing reception: November 12, 2011 12-2pm
Pop Up Art House
730 W. Sunset, Henderson, NV 89011

A recent review of the show can be found here:
http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2011/nov/09/sensuous-now/
or here:

There’s a variety of everyday magic that draws the senses into focus—a sound or maybe an action that aligns the body and mind into full and complete attentiveness. Worries about tomorrow or regretful yesterdays fall away, and for an instant we are utterly present in time. The sound of a zipping jacket. The act of washing dishes. The touch of a dog’s cold wet nose. It can be a quick snap-to or a slow slip out of oblivion and into a sensuous now.

A preoccupation with this kind of “there-ness” permeates Pop Up Art House’s About the Thing and the Thing Itself, an installation by Californians Cathy Fairbanks and Laura Boles Faw, under the collaborative name ap-art-ment.

The pair primarily investigates the very nature of collaboration. A quick and dirty read of the installation almost theatrically illustrates this creative conversation, symbolically played out in a series of pairings that crescendo in Fairbanks’ “Sleeping Bags.” The sculpture presents two sleeping bags lovingly stitched in swirling methodical zigzags that pucker and manipulate the sacks in such a way as to subtly suggest the curve of a recently vacated body. The bags are inverted and upright, resting atop two mannequins, facing one another in stilted exchange. The collusion is echoed by the proximity of Faw’s haunting “Part 1,” two prints of two drawings of crumpled blank paper, specimens of (or placeholders for) exchange between the artists themselves.

Don’t let the veneer of duality fool you: The heart of About the Thing is its vigorous simultaneity. Faw and Fairbanks function alongside one another, two coins spinning rather than two sides of the same coin.

In this interrogative dialogue, moments of precision seem to pinpoint instances of connectivity, but oddly those seem to happen most successfully independent of one another. An exhilarating “there-ness” is present in Fairbanks’ “The Drawing of Force,” purses made of deployed vehicle airbags, and the gorgeous fetish-finish infinity of dog snouts in Faw’s “Smelt Out” would give a Zen Buddhist a run for her money in its sensorial celebration of the Now. While interesting, collaborative pieces like the drawings in “Myth” footnote the mysterious alchemy of the solo work of these two artists viewed in proximity, a more fascinating chess game. As articulated in About the Thing, one artist is always a ghostly presence in the best of the other’s work.

Faw’s “Props” beautifully sums up the open-ended precision of About the Thing. Two unidentifiable, vaguely nonfunctional pink tools lean against mirrors, pinning them to the wall. The point of touch is also a point of departure, an ending and a beginning: acute, precarious and sure. Ap-art-ment’s most lucid instances of collaboration emerge in the present tense, a space-gap of pure potential.

About the Thing and the Thing Itself at Pop Up Art House

About The Thing and The Thing Itself A Collaborative Installation by Cathy Fairbanks and Laura Boles Faw ap-art-ment curated by Matthew Marchand Opening Reception: Saturday, October 8, 6 - 8 pm Exhibition Dates: October 8 - November 12, 2011

Pop Up Art House is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of the Los Angeles/San Francisco based collaboration ap-art-ment, About the Thing and The Thing Itself. This exhibition explores ideas of relationality and proximity to objects and others. For the progenitors of ap-art-ment, Cathy Fairbanks and Laura Boles Faw, collaboration is an ongoing conversation concerning the possibilities and potential of collaboration. This has become a more open dialogue as Fairbanks and Boles Faw now work in different cities. For About the Thing and the Thing Itself, ap-art-ment has created sets of material proxies that reference surrogacy. These proxies are manifest through various forms including sculpture, videos, photographs, and drawings. Since its inception in 2009, ap-art-ment has explored means of production and shared authorship that are charged. Through ideas of "thereness," boundaries and radical empathy, their newly imposed geographic distance has become a fertile space of inquiry. About the Thing and the Thing Itself will pair work made collaboratively with relevant works from their solo practices, all of which examine where collaborative boundaries lie. It is apropos that the Pop Up Art House exhibits the latest phase of ap-art-ment's collaboration. The cultural space that Cathy Fairbanks and Laura Boles Faw investigate resonates with a Las Vegas that stands astride a seam in American culture: proposing the familiar while maintaining a position in the fantastical. For ap-art-ment the Pop Up Art House becomes a boundary where two bodies of work, twice removed from the familiar and made in collaboration but at a distance, meet. Laura Boles Faw and Cathy Fairbanks of ap-art-ment hold MFA degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute. Boles Faw's work focuses on the re-stylization and thus re-definition of visual signifiers. Selected group exhibitions include Adobe Books Parlor, Mission 17, Royal Nonesuch, and Clara Street Projects. Recent solo exhibitions include Propped-Up: A Tale of No(Non)Sense at Ever Gold Gallery and A Love Story for The One. In August of 2011, Boles Faw co-curated the exhibit Over My Dead Body: A Collaborative Installation about Artistic Survival at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco. Fairbanks' work, which often communicates a sense of frustrated desires, has been exhibited across the western states. Her work has been seen at Bay Area venues such as Queen's Nails Annex, The Adobe Books Parlor, and Pueblo Nuevo Gallery. Her first solo exhibit, To Form, traveled to Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, fall of 2010. She recently completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, summer of 2011.

http://ap-art-ment.blogspot.com

About The Pop UP Art House: The Pop Up Art House is a temporary, contemporary gallery in one of the many vacant storefronts in the Las Vegas Valley. PUAH is in an industrial area within the City of Henderson's Redevelopment zone, an area originally intended to rival Hollywood as the location of Jerry Lewis' Rainbow Studios. PUAH hopes to facilitate true revitalization that springs from vibrant and creative collaboration between local government, the community and artists bringing culture and diversity to previously derelict spaces. PUAH Gallery aims to take advantage of this economic downturn by offering a large exhibition space and bringing regional and national artistic voices into the local community with a challenging art program featuring emerging artists. Scott Dickensheets, Las Vegas City Life writes, "it does have a few things going for it: The location, on a declasse stretch of Sunset Road instead of downtown, is just off the freeway, and -- in contrast to the Main Street feel they're foisting onto Water Street -- PUAH's nabe is industrial, gritty, anti-suburban; and owner Shannon Mc Mackin seems committed to it. ....it's probably a good sign that this fledgling gallery in a Henderson backwater puts on airs -- -- as good as any high-falutin' gallery in town. Worth a drive down the 95." Vegas Seven calls it "one of the coolest projects to land in the Las Vegas Valley."

General Information: PUAH is located on 730 W. Sunset, Henderson, NV 89011. For information on PUAH please vist our websitewww.thepopuparthouse.com or contact Sam McMackin via telephone at 323-240-2888 or via email atsam@thepopuparthouse.com Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 2pm and by appointment

The Gate and The Farallons