The First Horizons of Juno

Christina Coleman, Jane Hugentober, Candice Lin, Karen Lofgren, Christine Rebet, Alice Wang and Chantal Wnuk

09/16/2016 - 10/22/2016

MASS is pleased to announce The First Horizons of Juno, a thought-experiment in aesthetics without patriarchy. An homage to the histories of women’s material culture and feminist science fiction, the exhibition begins in an imaginary future …

FOR ALWAYS-ALREADY RELEASE

Some time from now, another people arrives (after ours). They will not know hierarchies, whatever those are. They will not divide between genders, sexualities, nor skins and hairs, whatever those are. Natives to their own landscape, theirs will be another horizon.

These people (let’s call them Juno, though we don’t know what they call themselves, if anything) looked at their beginnings. They looked for clues to their origin and they found things made by their ancestors, who created but never distinguished values between earth and body, between stone, metal, or fossil, between peoples.

They will choose to share these objects with each other in what you may call an exhibition. (Though our language does not suit theirs.) Things of Juno move pasts and futures. Maybe you see the past as behind and the future ahead. But there’s no need to.

The First Horizons of Juno is curated by Ariel Evans and C.C. Marsh. Its artists are: Christina Coleman (Austin, TX), Jane Hugentober (Los Angeles, CA), Candice Lin (Los Angeles, CA), Karen Lofgren (Los Angeles, CA), Christine Rebet (New York, NY and Paris, FR), Alice Wang (Los Angeles, CA), and Chantal Wnuk (San Diego, CA). Set textiles created by Veronica Giavedoni (Austin, TX).

THE ARTISTS

Christina Coleman is a visual artist working in sculpture, drawing, and installation. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles (BA, 2006) and the University of Texas at Austin (MFA, 2012). Utilizing various materials, ranging from commercial hair products to traditional fine art tools, Coleman works through subjects including the body, space, identity, and abstraction. Her work has been shown in Austin, TX at the Isese Gallery of The University Of Texas at Austin’s John L. Warfield Center, grayDUCK Gallery, and the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center. She was an artist in residence at the Contemporary Artist Center at Woodside in Troy, NY. Most recently she exhibited in Laredo, TX at Texas A&M International University and in Austin at de stijl | PODIUM FOR ART.

Jane Hugentober lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from University of California, Los Angeles in 2014. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Gallery Fu, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa, Japan; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA; and Dacia Gallery, New York, NY, amongst others. She is the recipient of the M.M. Denny Award (2013-2014), Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg Feitelson Arts Foundation (2011-2014); The Resnick Scholarship (2013-2014); as well as the Elaine Krown Klein Scholarship (2012-2013).

Candice Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University. Lin’s work engages notions of gender, race, and sexuality through examining discrepant bodies, vibrant material, and disobedience drawing from scientific theories, anthropology, and queer theory. Lin’s work has been recently exhibited at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, the Delfina Foundation in London, La Maison Populaire in Paris, and Akuna Zentroa/Alhondiga Bilbao, Spain with recent solo exhibitions at Francois Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles) and CAAA (Guimaraes, Portugal). Lin has been awarded several residencies and grants including the Headlands Art Center AIR, Artist Lab Residency at 18th Street, the 2014 California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center Residency, the Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Borse Residency, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She is represented by Quadrado Azul Gallery in Porto and Francois Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles.

Karen Lofgren was born in Toronto in 1976, and received her MFA from CalArts. Recent solo exhibitions include Other Relevant Experience at Royale Projects Contemporary Art; On the River at VOLUME; and Trajectory Object c. 2000-2050 with High Desert Test Sites. Group exhibitions include Commonwealth & Council; LACMA; and Human Resources. Her projects have received support from the Mike Kelley Foundation; the Canada Council for the Arts; Durfee Foundation; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Ranch Projects; and West of Rome Public Art.

Christine Rebet received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London. Her work is based on drawing and develops into forms ranging from animation to the environment, installations, and performance art. At the heart of her work is the elaboration of historical traumas in the context of a personal reinterpretation and a consequent reanimation. Rebet has previously exhibited and held performances in various international contexts including: Bureau, New York; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Grieder Contemporary, Zurich; AlbumArte, Rome; Invaliden1 Galerie, Berlin; Marvelli Gallery Project Room, New York; Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo; Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore; the Cartier Foundation, Paris; the Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, New York; and Le Magasin, Grenoble, France. Rebet’s work appears in the public collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France and the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, France.

Alice Wang makes sculptures, drawings, videos, prints, and experimental films. She is a member of nonsensical, a publication and curatorial collective. Alice received her BS from the University of Toronto, BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and MFA from New York University. She was a fellow of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a Villa Aurora fellow in Berlin. Alice has presented work at Arturo Bandini (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), LACA (Los Angeles), 18th Street Arts Center (Santa Monica), Immanence (Paris), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), 80WSE (New York), the Art Gallery of Mississauga (Canada), and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, among others. Her work will be included in an upcoming exhibition at the LACE Project Room, and she will be presenting a solo exhibition at ltd los angeles in 2017. Alice teaches Sculpture at the University of California, Riverside.

Chantal Wnuk is a painter and sculptor currently living and working in San Diego, CA. She was born in Houston, TX and received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Using found materials and imagery, she focuses on the vulnerability of being alone versus that of being bound to another human or object. In 2012, she received the Undergraduate Professional Development Travel Grant, resulting in Girls Gone West at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, TX in 2014. More recent exhibitions include Wouldn’t It Be Nice at Eastfield College in Mesquite, TX, Having a Coke with You at Helmuth Projects, and Not Quite Nothing at SDAI in San Diego.

THE CURATORS

Ariel Evans is a writer, curator, and editor as well as a PhD candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in the history of photography, feminist thought, and post-war American art. She is currently a Graduate Research Associate at the Harry Ransom Center; she is also the founder of Pastelegram magazine and the editor of Coronagraph. From 2012 – 2013 she worked at the University of Texas’ Visual Arts Center where she was the 2012-2013 Curatorial Fellow. Previously she was the Assistant Editor for Art Lies magazine. Her criticism has appeared in Art in America, Modern Painters, Art Lies, Mimeo Mimeo and … might be good.

C.C. Marsh is an art historian and independent curator living in Los Angeles. She received a BA in Fine Arts from New York University, an MA in Art History from Hunter College in New York, and is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. C.C. has worked at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has curated exhibitions of contemporary art at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas. Her dissertation project examines UNESCO’s use of photography as a tool of pedagogy and propaganda from 1946 to 1956.