Alexis Disselkoen
BETWEEN US
ENTRE NOS
March 2016 / La Casita
Alexis Disselkoen
BETWEEN US
ENTRE NOS
La Casita Cultural Center
March 4 - April 22, 2016
ABOUT THE ARTIST
ALEXIS DISSELKOEN is a Los Angeles-based artist of Mexican and Anglo descent, who uses performance and installation to explore identity and belonging.
Striving to work around constructions of power that inform art production, viewership and participation, she propels encounters that are directed by the people involved. Disselkoen is a UC Irvine MFA graduate. She has exhibited at LACE, the UCLA Wight Biennial, Human Resources, Las Cienegas Projects, Track 16 and Perform! Now!
BETWEEN US,
ENTRE NOS
is a three-part installation and performance by artist Alexis Disselkoen. A flower-covered wall looms over the room as coffee-soaked sheets of paper cover the floor, shifting as bodies move through the space. Guests leave a footprint, and may take home the gift of a friendship bracelet, in matching pair to be worn both by the artist and the viewer. Disselkoen has long been fascinated with the research of human DNA migration patterns from all over the world. Using flowers as stand-ins, she examines ancestry and how each of us journeyed to be where where we are. With paper, she creates a ground surface that moves, shifts, recedes from view. This simple act asks: What happens when borders shift and the ground beneath us is politicized to create otherness among those who stand on it? A gift rounds off the experience by the simple act of exchange. What is at stake in everyday trades of commercial and non commercial goods? All three elements work together in this installation to produce an experience that is directed by the spectator. What is the result when the audience can participate in the creation of a work? Using both the space and viewership generates a setting of artistic and interpersonal exchange where one’s single interpretation is not the precedent. It is about all the makers of meaning (the artist and the viewer) coming together to trade their experiences.
Text by Maura Brewer
THE GLENDORA BOUGAINVILLEA
ALEXIS DISSELKOEN
In 1768, the bougainvillea was discovered in Brazil by an explorer named Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to cross the Pacific. He brought the plant with him on his voyage home, and in Paris the bougainvillea survived as a “stove plant,” grown in pots and moved inside in cold weather. The Glendora Bougainvillea, growing for 600 feet along Minnesota Ave and Bennett, 23 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, is the largest growth of bougainvillea in the United States. Its parent stock traveled to California on a whaling ship in 1870. The bougainvillea is a flowering vine that grows up the trunks of palm trees, and reaches heights of forty feet. The Glendora Bougainvillea is central to Los Angeles’s conscious effort to bill itself as a paradise in the early part of the 20th century. In the 1930’s and 40’s the vines appeared in Hollywood films and promotional materials, cementing their image in the California landscape.
1. Dried flowers, pressed and tacked to the wall.
THE TULIPOMANIA
X MARKS THE SPOT
The tulipomania refers to the period from 1634-1637 during the Dutch Golden Age, when tulips were bought and sold rapidly and at exorbitant rates. Tulips were brought to Europe in the early 1600’s from the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople. A craze for the flowers set in among the Dutch upper class, who prized them for their bright, variegated colors.
The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores. It was about nine miles long and five across, shaped, you might say, like a fat dragon standing up, and had two fine land-locked harbours, and a hill in the centre part marked ‘The Spy-glass.’ There were several additions of a later date, but above all, three crosses of red ink—two on the north part of the island, one in the southwest—and beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the captain’s tottery characters, these words: ‘Bulk of treasure here.’
At the peak of the tulipomania, bulbs changed hands ten times a day. According to a famous account by Charles Mackay, “A trader at Harlaem was known to pay one-half of his fortune for a single root, not with the design of selling it again at a profit, but to keep in his own conservatory for the admiration of his acquaintance.” Stock exchanges were built for the sole purpose of buying and selling tulip futures. Then, in 1637, the market crashed and the tulip trade came to halt, possibly due to an outbreak of the bubonic plague. The tulipomania is considered by many to be the earliest example of a speculative bubble.
2. Paper, stained with coffee, covers the ground. 3. Friendship bracelets, distributed to strangers. Objects circulate between guests. On the floor, creased papers have been dyed brown like unmarked treasure maps. After the show is over, we take the papers, now marked by our own footprints. Adults receive friendship bracelets. Dried flowers are pinned to the walls, reminding us of other places and times. Things move between people, but no money changes hands. Like any market, the value of each object lies not in its intrinsic qualities but in its circulatory potential. Wealth is a collective hallucination. The only thing that counts is movement, between people, across oceans, through time and space. At the end of the night, the audience dismantles the show.
The map, stripped of its symbols, sits on the ground. The papers crinkle underfoot, like dry leaves, picking up footprints, dirt and snow from outside. The red X, the sign of the treasure (wealth, plenitude), is replaced by the fleeting impression of bodies in space.
ALEXIS DISSELKOEN COMMISSIONS 2015
Metro Through the Eyes of the Artist series
2014
Lotería for Park(ing) Day Los Angeles, Union Station, Los Angeles
2011
Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Explosions in the Sky for Taking Care: Six Visual Interpretations
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 2014
FYA / Stock & Exchange for The Seminary for Embodied and Civic Arts, For Your Art, Los Angeles
Amazon Solitaire, Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, Los Angeles
Gulp for Stupid Pills, Hyperion Tavern, Los Angeles
2013
Ear Meal for LA Art Stream, Los Angeles
2012
Perform Wow! for Perform Chinatown, with The Gentle Beings Benevolent Association, Los Angeles
2011
What Have I Done to Deserve This, WorkSpace, Los Angeles
Nothing Comes from Nothing, Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles
Changarrito for Máximo González’s Playful, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles Perform WOW for Perform!Now! Chinatown, Los Angeles UC Irvine MFA thesis Exhibition, UAG, Irvine
Signify, Sanctify, Believe, Public Fiction, Los Angeles Irrational Exhibits 8, Track 16, Santa Monica
Gathered in a Clearing, LEVEL, Brisbane, Australia
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello for Gutted 2011, LACE, Los Angeles My body lies over the Ocean. My body lies over the sea for Art, Los Angeles Contemporary, The Barker Hanger, Santa Monica
Collective Show Los Angeles for WorkSpace, Los Angeles
BETWEEN US, ENTRE NOS (2015) Dimensions: Variable Materials: Sea Foam, Statice, Eucalyptus, Sweet William, Matsumoto Aster, Palm Leaf, Gerbera, Daffodils, Iris, Tulip, Palm Bark, Sage, Coffee, Paper, Embroidery Floss, Beads, Jewelry boxes, Ribbon.
La Casita Cultural Center Tere Paniagua Executive Director Monica McLean Administrator Zulay Hodukavich Programming Coordinator Jun Xian Wu Event Management Marinique Mora Graphic Design Yikun Meng Public Relations Ana Arango Community Outreach
GALLERY HOURS Monday - Friday 12 p.m. - 5 p.m. or by appointment 109 Otisco Street, Syracuse, NY 13204 (315) 443-1879 lacasita@syr.edu http://lacasita.syr.edu/