The Chazan Family Gallery

RETICULUM
Rhode Island College Metalsmithing. Exhibition of alumni, graduate and senior students.
Julian DeLaGarza, Gabrielle Lopez, Avery Lucas, Jennifer Walstead, Catherine Rubery, Thoa DiChiara, Lauren DelBrocco, Greer Howard, mason Kelly.

CHAZAN FAMILY GALLERY, Rhode Island College
Opening reception Thursday April 4th, 5-8pm
Curator, Dianne Reilly

Mattia Casalegno: Reflections, Opening Reception and Art Talk
Guest Curator: Tansy Xiao
Hosted by Frank Yefeng Wang

Chazan Family Gallery
September 13 - October 12, 2018

Chazan Family Gallery is pleased to present Reflections, an exhibition of multimedia installations by Mattia Casalegno, a New York-based Italian visual artist working in a broad range of media. Influenced by both post-conceptualism and digital art, his works are known for their relational, immersive, and participatory nature, with an introspection on the contemporary human condition and our relationship with technology.

One of the most visually attractive pieces in the show is a 3D-printed bird twisted in front of a plexiglass board and two antennas wrapped in LED lights. The board and antennas represent a television in such a ridiculous way that it becomes a brilliant mockery of outdated technology—a fascinating analogy to how we treat and are treated by the mediated experiences from numerous screens in our life. The Internet never seems to be the liberation from the dictatorship of televisions, nor do interactive artworks let the viewers be in control. But the illusion that technology would rescue postmodern human life from the sufferings of technology per se are precisely addressed in this piece. Optimism and absurdity are present at the same time. With the help of 3D-printing a physical bird is present, but rather than a real bird, it is the reproduction of the living creature’s digital model.

The exhibition also features Casalegno’s 3D-printed reproductions of classical sculptures with the material of Soylent, which is also the name of a popular powder food that doesn’t require chewing but contains 20% of the nutritions required for an adult. Food/dining is in fact a recurring theme in his oeuvre. The relationship between dining and human bodies represents something human about his works in a classy and almost old-fashioned way that is rarely found in other new media artists’ work which are often odes to technology. The notion of body, as well the symbolistic and aesthetic criteria that come along have been redefining the identities of mankind over time, both culturally and physically. At the same time, the intuitive and the rational ways of thinking never stopped questioning each other. The exhibition gives a glimpse into Casalegno’s take on such philosophical subjects with a playful approach.

Casalegno has been featured in publications such as “A Touch of Code,” Gestalten Books, “New Media Design,” Sometti, and “Deleuze and Audiovisual Art,” Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as on media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Art Tribune, the Creators Projects, Hyperallergic, Digicult, and Art F City. He has received various grants and fellowships from the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, the Center for Cultural Innovation, Young Italian Artists Network, NYFA/NASCA, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, among others. Casalegno has exhibited internationally in various festivals and museums, such as Mutek Festival Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), MACRO (Italy), Nuit Blanche (Belgium), Optronica (UK), Le Cube - Contemporary Art Museum (France), OFFF (Spain), AVIT (Germany), and LACMA (US). Casalegno currently teaches at Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute.

"MELTDOWN" RIC Student exhibition
Every year, the metalsmithing students at Rhode Island College come together to organize a professional showcase of their work over the past academic year. The show will feature artists from a variety of ages and backgrounds that represents the work being made within the Small Metals area of the Art Department. It will take place May 19th, 2018 - opening 5-8pm, within the Chazan Family Gallery and Art Center lounge, on the campus of Rhode Island College.

// Lonely Avatars: Solo exhibition of Alex M. Lee, on view in Chazan Family Gallery at Rhode Island College from March 1st - 28th, 2018. Poster of // Lonely Avatars with a missing "s". - Hosted by Frank Yefeng Wang

RIC's Annual Art Auction Every year Rhode Island College's very own Art Club hosts an art auction featuring artworks from students, faculty, alumni and many other donors from the art community. Proceeds from the annual auction are then used to fund academic art trips and events.

Real-fake.org.2.0
Opening Receiption: Thursday, Oct 5th, 2017, 5 - 8pm

Real-fake.org.2.0 is an updated and expanded version of the real-fake.org, an exhibition organized by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart in 2011. 2.0 includes the work of 53 post-digital media artists curated by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart now joined by Patrick Reynolds. This exhibition in Chazan Family Gallery at Rhode Island College is facilitated by Digital Media Art faculty member, Frank Yefeng Wang.

The original touring exhibition that took place in 2011 premiered at California State University Sacramento Gallery, and was accompanied by a website that defined a new and unusual medium at that time, even for the digital arts. It toured the southern US and East Coast and showed the work of 20 artists that used an array of simulation technologies in the context of contemporary art, exploring for instance artificial “xyz” space, the non-referenced, non-indexical synthetic image/object, or the specific qualities of the virtual camera that records it. The exhibition showcased regional, national and international artists working specifically with digital softwares that simulate natural processes - from physics and biology to analog cinema and photography.

In 2016 Clarke, Hart and Reynolds refined the original concept for a new exhibition, originally at the Bronx Art Space. Like the 2011 artists, those in the 2016 group produce still images, animation, interactivity, sculpture and installation, using 3D animation as their significant media. Like their predecessors - the video artists who adapted TV technologies for artistic uses - these artists have appropriated the technology employed in the production of 3D shooter games and feature-length Hollywood animation blockbusters, rejecting or adapting entertainment industry esthetics and content, and instead applying the medium to the trajectory of art history.

Since the first exhibition, artists who work with simulations have driven a wedge into contemporary media practice. The 2016 update, real-fake.org.2.0, features the works of 53 contemporary media artists - a list that is by no means inclusive. These artists consciously isolate and define a formal language native to the simulations of the real, a sub-terrain within an expanding contemporary digital culture, and integrate those elements into a variety of contemporary artistic strategies that emerge from the discourses of media and representation, as they have impacted on photography, experimental film, and installation-based works.

In 2011 it was rare to find artists involved in contemporary practice that were deeply invested in exploring the computer graphics of simulations. Since then, the practice has expanded and grown into a more broad, contemporary art culture. The languages of these 53 artists emerge from areas like figurative painting or abstraction, and from artistic movements ranging from Surrealism, Constructivism and Pop Art, as well as
avant-garde cinema and experimental animation. Since 2011, “real-fake” computer graphics have finally erased the possibility of considering photography and film as a mirror of reality, as special effects have become pervasive in advertising and Hollywood film. The future of journalism as objective reportage has been threatened by “reality” television and Fox television, at the forefront in the branding of pseudo-news-as-entertainment. We also currently live in a culture of bioengineering where a prosthetic view of the human body converges the potential of cosmetic surgery with the technological reality of a science-fiction world in which the artificial has uneasily crossed a boundary into the real. The boundaries we once perceived
between the physical and the virtual are breaking down as our exposure to simulation technologies becomes more ubiquitous.

In the face of this paradigm shift, artists respond with an esthetic of the fake. This is art that crosses the Freudian uncanny divide, at first creating a sense of disorientation and
questioning. Can we trust anything anymore? We have entered a space of madness, a psychotic space articulated by a culture that no longer embraces the difference between a representation and reality. The subjective reality and the objective merge. Fantasy rules.

Artists in the Exhibition
The real-fake.org.2.0 is an archive as an exhibition. The works of 51 artists have been collected on a series of reels. The real-fake.org website has also been expanded and updated. In addition to the original essays defining real-fake practice written by Claudia Hart and Rachel Clarke, are new essays by Rachel Clarke, Patrick Lichty and Patrick Reynolds expanding the language used to talk about simulations art with technologies that have exploded since the original exhibition, including printed sculpture and augmented and virtual realities.
-Text by Claudia Hart and Rachel Clarke, 2011-2016

List of Participating Artists:

AES+F, Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Gregory Bennett
, Tim Berresheim, Sean Capone, Jose Carlos Casado, Rachel Clarke, Shamus Clisset, Birch Cooper, Gero Doll, Mark Dorf, Carolyn Frischling, Joe Hamilton, Claudia Hart, Kurt Hentschlager, Adam Hurwitz, Kim Joon, Sophie Kahn (in collaboration with Lisa Parra), Everett Kane, Mark Klink, Alex Lee, Patrick Lichty, Locurto-Outcault, Kristin Lucas, Sara Ludy, Gerhard Mantz, Chris Manzione,
Claudia Mate, Alex McLeod, Shane Mecklenburger, Rosa Menkman, Jonathan Monaghan, Brenna Murphy, Eva Papamargariti
Will Pappenheimer, Sabrina Ratte, Michael Rees, Pat Reynolds, Benjamin Rosenthal, Nicole Ruggiero, William Robertson + Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Martin Sampedro, Ellen Sandor, Rick Silva, Keith Tolch, Katie Torn, Matthew Weinstein, Ryan Whittier-Hale, Frank Yefeng Wang, Snow Yunxue Fu, Giselle Zatonyl, Zeitguised

On the same day, we also have Forever Fornever, curated by Chris Romero in Bannister gallery!

Participating artists of Forever Fornever:
Morehshin Allahyari, Jacob Ciocci, Kenta Cobayashi, Terrell Davis,
exonemo, Miao Ying, Akihiko Taniguchi, Lu Yang

- Forever Fornever: Online
Ololade Adeniyi, Miyu Hosoi, Mushbuh, Rei Nakanishi,
Mani Nilchiani, Sarah Rothberg, Nozomi Teranishi, Yaloopop, Wang Yefeng

Ross Normandin: Under Sun, Over Time installation shots
Nov 10th - Nov 30th, 2016

Tomorrow!!! Chazan Family Gallery, see and smell the latest projects by Ross Normandin!

We are excited to announce the solo show of Joseph Morris at The Chazan Family Gallery at Rhode Island College (RIC) this fall. The exhibition opens Thursday October 13 with a reception from 6 to 8 pm with a series of time based work, including 2D algorithmic animation, and physical 3D pieces.

Joseph Morris’s solo exhibition, Infinite Resonance, includes a series of time based 2D algorithmic animation and physical 3D pieces that integrate digital technology into physical work. The pieces, his “emotive machines,” move in real time, and are either programmed to repeat a simple gesture, the act of breathing, or respond to ordinary occurrences, the trillions of particles passing through the spaces of your body every second. The animations use algorithms to infinitely draw lissajou curve patterns based on out of phase circle geometry.

The show contains large-scale sculptures that are intimate and subtle. They rhythmically expand and contract, and seem to move endlessly. The circle-based animations echo this endless quality. They are created with custom software code to draw complex harmonic motion patterns that never fully describe the same repeating image. The final set of work in Infinite Resonance contain pieces that describe and translate invisible spaces. The first uses a series of hand blown glass bells that are activated when solar wind particle data passes through a satellite in space, while the second turns a light on and off through a particle detector in the gallery.

Joseph Morris is a transdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. In 2015 he was a Harvestworks New Works Resident, and recipient of Pratt Institute’s Faculty Development Grant. Morris holds an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and BFA from SUNY Purchase College. He is currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, Industrial Design, teaching classes in physical computing, prototyping, rapid prototyping processes (laser cutting, 3D printing, and CNC milling), and assists students in the deployment of technology in their work. He is an expert craftsman and coder who believes in the possibilities enabled through the integration of technology in the arts.

The exhibition is curated by Frank Yefeng Wang.

Curator: Juanjo Barboza-Gubo
Installation Design: Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo

Andree Leduc
Curator: Juanjo Barboza-Gubo
Installation Design: Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo