"Exquisite Crisis & Encounters"

"Triptych" (Oona Paredes)

I.
helpless i watch
you said
as my country burns

i thought i was that country
for oh how i burned

but i could never be your country
you didn't mean me

II.
don't tell me
there is no us

i have worked too hard
to turn quietly
from your scorn

watch me cleave
like an angry wife

if i hurt you
it proves
we exist

III.
thin armour of culture
to hide every
weakness

mistrust anger fear
our tin can golem
rolls across a foreign
heart land
to flatten every `hood
for the oldest blood lie

thick skin contains
the you from the me
but nothing is so easily
pierced

"Global Warning" (Luis H. Francia. 2007)

Rushes
Between morning and evening
a fierce argument

The afternoon, dialectical, sprawls

Along the day's perimeter guns sing
their arias, fires do a
lion dance, red maned, roaring
through neighborhoods of mom and pop

through the city of torn angels,
a carnival--bankers and cops,
agents and high-octane pimps,
low-riders and wheeler-dealers,
do a high-wire, to juggle is to
live, to tumble, to die

In a kind of desperate prayer, lights
interrogate sky and earth,
holding cells for bewildered dreams

desert air fills with oratorios for purgatorios

Afternoon, now partisan,
withdraws its hand from light,
extends it towards night.

My steps circumambulate
an imaginary palace, winding
towards a blue lake in the wilderness

Thoughts pop, a fusillade of cameras--
this is the way we treat our kings
we film we beat
we film we jail
we film we kill
we film and crown their lives with thorns
B movie film noir cinema verité

that give us this day our daily crucifixions
O paradise O unholy wood
O young men who know no other drummer but death
who sing
forgive us our trespassing
but we forgive you not who trespass against us

in the wilderness, voices
in the wilderness, the stars are out of sync
in the wilderness I step into a palace
free at last
but cries of Cut!
flood the screen

Nightmare on Main Street
Last night the television switched us on and watched and watched and watched.
Detergent popped into my hands, and in a flash the kitchen sparkled like
Xanadu even as a decorator rendered our place a glorious palace.
My wife and I jumped into a plush car we never knew we had, and an
adorable dog from nowhere came along for the ride.
We zipped through mountains and deserts, fording raging rivers easily,
then came to the edge of a lovely green pasture.
The trees and sky were perfect, the men and women were perfect who
ran up to us, with bottles they drank from as they dazzled us with their teeth.
We too drank from their brew and voila! our bodies grew younger, the
wind no longer messed our silky hair as we danced with the perfect
men and women who never once were out of breath.
My skin turned fair, my eyes blue, my jaw squared, my height and build
that of a linebacker. My wife emerged a blonde, brighter than
the sun, and Dallas cheerleaders had nothing on her figure.

And then the television switched us off.

My wife and I looked at one another, at the untidy kitchen and the faded
living room, at our middle-aged bodies, at the blemishes on the walls as
the perfect men and women faded into the gloom.
The next day we filed for divorce, and I shot
the dog, our neighbors', it turned out.
I shot them, too.

growing pains
if blackboy redboy yellowboy
brownboy hit
whiteboy

ohboy badboy kickyou beatyou
boy go to jail nowboy
paytheprice boyboy

if whiteboy hit blackboy redboy
yellowboy brownboy
attaboy

goodboy smartchristian
boy gotoitboy
we're behind you boy

goddamn boyohboy
you're a man now

Boy

"Body Burden, Placebo, Early Bird" (Carlos Andrade and Todd Ayoung)

"Rabbit, Snake, Rooster: Paradise (top), Rabbit,Snake, Rooster: Home,"
(Kyungmi Shin, Christine Nguyen, Huntz Liu)

acrylic and ink on lambda print

"MCMXCII" (Viet Le, Viet Nguyen, Wendy Cheng, Beverly Andrews)

"The Same Elsewhere"
(Connie Samaras [photograph], and James Rojas, Eve Luckring, Susan Silton, Adrian Rivas)

"Let Go"
(Clockwise from top left to center: Nodeth Vang, Young Chung, Tala Mateo, Permi K. Gill, Vince Golveo)

mixed media on paper

"Weed 2" (Candida Alvarez)

pencil on vellum, 9x12

"Weed 1" (Jin Lee)

archival pigment print, 2006

"Line, North Adams," 2006 (Wendy Jacob)

The project presents borders as porous divisions, and uses a single raised line, made of wire rope, to pass through them. Not tied to the existing system of ground travel that answers to rules regarding property and traffic, the raised lines have the ability to go through buildings - in one open window and out another - suggesting possibilities for multiple and seamless border crossings. A professional tightrope walker walks on the line. Line, North Adams, 2006 documents the second in a series of walks.

"Former Housing Project St. Louis, Missouri," 2006 (Jason Reed)

In this body of work, I was dealing directly with the spaces and places of ruin and abandonment, in both a physical and psychological sense. I was searching for and documenting landscapes that contained a certain latent historical presence Ð places that exist on the margins of society, forgotten with time, but so rich in cultural meaning and significance and thus so very beautiful.

untitled (Kim Mitseff)

mixed media sculpture

untitled poster (Bia Gayotto, Haruko Tanaka, Dee Williams, Amy Bowen)

"Haan" (Ji Young Yoo)

video

Koreans say "Haan is entrenched in my soul" when they feel sorrow and pain. Haan is defined by Minjung (People's) theologians as "an accumulation of suppressed and condensed experiences of oppression." It is also described as the "bitter, raw, ferment of oneÕs internalized remorsefulness caused by an unresolved feeling that arises out of the peopleÕs experience of injustice." The L.A. Riots are Haan for Koreans. Through the destruction and violence they experienced, Koreans realized that working hard and paying taxes doesnÕt make them "American." Rather, they felt themselves perpetual foreigners, out of place in American society. Different from western cultures, the Korean understanding of time is nonlinear; pas experiences exists together with present ones. Thus, the Haan of the L.A. riots will always stay in Koreans' mind and run through their veins.

"Zapata" (Salomon Huerta)

oil on canvas

Emiliano Zapata a revolutionary leader from the Mexican revolution. His goals were best encapsulated in the slogan, "land and liberty."

"Exquisite Shrunken Bully Corpse," 2006 (Petra Schilder)

mixed media (sculpty, plastic, rubber, wool, tulip pigments),

The Czech poet Moroslav Holub once wrote that human beings have an inescapable fascination for the miniaturized thing; the smaller the artifact, the greater the fascination and reverence. In the spring of 2001 a charismatic little red calf with a bent nose was born in a fringe of reeds next to the canal in the country side of Holland and named him Bully. Because of his deformed nose, Bully would gorge himself, and then vomit almost all of the food he took in. I became intrigued by the labor of cow stomachs as well as my own single stomach. I began to make associations between single stomachs, Bully's two stomachs, and the experience of vomiting. In my own stomach, I physically experience emotions such as disgust, nausea, love, and fear. Not only was I drawn to the cow stomach through my musings on Bully, the actual shape of the gut intrigued me. The four-chambered stomach is like a body within a body-organ-like bulges of fleshy meat held together by strands of fat and pinkish-blue membranes containing ruminated food. I positioned the stomach in various ways and photographed it. The most compelling pose resembled the fetus of a manatee. Suddenly, Bully was given a new body. This composition, I realized, was analogous to Theseus' killing the Minotaur and shrunken heads from the Jivaro headhunting Indians of Southern Ecuador.

"Untitled (Vermont & 3rd)", 2006 (Jose Sarinana)

2 bricks, liqour store paper bag, primer paint, one acrilyc tongue, ashes in the fall.

During the Los Angeles riots, my grandparents bought a VCR from a guy off the street, most possibly a looter, when they opened the box they found two bricks.

"Untitled" (Odili Donald Odita)

paint, plexi

"Untitled" (Kim Yasuda)

suspended bundt cakes

"Untitled" (Deborah Boardman)

"Knot for Sale or Speed Queen, I Think I Love You" (Ellen Krout-Hasegawa)

men's cotton undershirts

"What What" (Jin Soo Kim)

acylic on canvas

"HALF-FRAMES" (Bavo Defurne, Cirilo Domine, Dredge Byung'chu Kang, Nguyen Tan Hoang, and Anne Smolar)

Each artist contributed ten to fifteen images based on their interpretation of the curatorial statement. The individual images, representing half-frames, were paired with others to make up twenty full-frame diptychs. A common response by our team to the show's themes is the face to face encounter with a foreign culture: a Flemish in Budapest, a Filipino American in Tokyo, a Vietnamese in Bangkok, a Korean American in Berlin, a Walloon encountering alterity within Brussels, the center of Europe, itself. These half-frames-partial documentation of recent military coups, increasing tourism in former socialist states, economic and cultural legacies of Western colonialism and imperialism, and the promiscuous traffic of physical and electronic bodies over national borders and across cyberspace-exhibit surprise, delight, nostalgia, confusion, boredom, doubt, ambivalence, danger, and desire.

"SpiRituals," 2006 (Jette Hye Jin, Kate Hers, Kim Kyung Yeon, Daniel Bastian Tandjung)

15 min. video, orig. 4-channel installation

(David Khang & Henry Tsang)

T-shirts

"(Not to be) Pigeon Holed" (Patrick "Pato" Hebert, Jaime Cortez, Peter Precourt)

"Untitled" (Carrie Patterson)

suspended sculpture

"Catharsis" (Elaine Brandt)

mixed media collage

I title the work Catharsis and superimpose a revised version of Matisse's La Joie De Vivre. The background consists of images of civil unrest in the African-American community provoked by, and following the exoneration of L.A. police officers accused of beating Rodney King in 1991, an atrocity captured on video. The so-called "riots" were no surprise. Relations between the L.A. police and black the community had been vicious for decades, so the only surprise was why it took so long to become physical retaliation on the part of the community. That the "riot" was instigated and inflamed by the L.A. Police Department itself, is well-known by all. Thus, it was cathartic on both sides - for the rioters and the riotees.

"Raising the Baton" (Salvatore Reda)

ink, pencil, watercolor on canvas

"Tossing Water into Flame," 2006 (Vincent Johnson)

Epson archival digital print

"Invisible Tower"
(Le Thi Viet Ha, Kelly Le Lan Phuong, Ly Hoang ly, Rich Steitmatter Tran, Le Quy Anh Hao, Nguyen Duc Thinh, Nguyen Nhu Huy)

"Faith for Miracles"
(Other: Arab Artists Collective - Joe Namy & Rola Nashef, Sarita See and Bill St. Amant)

A product of conversations amongst a filmmaker, sound and multimedia artists, a carpenter-architect, and a literary critic, "Faith for Miracles" splices together archival footage from the 1967 Detroit riots with images of present day Detroit and the manifestation of Arab owned gas stations. These images are then scored with a sound collage titled "Resurget Cineribus" by Sterling Toles and interviews from the 1992 documentary Sa-i-gu by Christine Choy, Elaine Kim, and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson.

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"Flowers"(Midori Yamamura)

Andy Warhol's sellout exhibition from 1965 "Flowers" that took place at the Leo Castelli Gallery, to me, has a special significance. Prior to the Flowers, Warhol experienced difficult time selling his more politically explicit earlier silkscreen artworks-most representatively Mustard Race Riot (1963). But Castelli's clients adored Warhol's Flowers for their removed obvious political association. I believe Flowers are Warhol's cynical response to the tacit political oppression imposed on artists by entrepreneurial collectors, curators, dealers, and writers, which consequently deprived artists' freedom of creativity. Thus, Warhol observed Marxism and capitalism shared the same goal.

"Please Please Please (for JB)"
(Mark Bartlett & Jeffrey Skoller)

digital photo montage

A collaboration inspired by the disjunctivYoung Min Moon,e relation betweeYoung Min Moon,n the violent events set off by the exoneration of the policemen that beat Rodney King in 1992, and the work and spirit of the late James Brown, whose life was exemplary of the exact opposite forces. The text superimposed over the photo, consists of "lyrically" rewritten police reports of the 53 people who died in the riot/rebellion/uprising. The red texts honor those who in different ways, died while attempting to help or save the lives of others and highlights the extraordinary humanity and courage that arises even, perhaps especially, in the face of extreme calamity.

The brutality of these deaths is emblematic of organized, state violence, while the heroic acts of those trying to help others, embody the forces of popular, spontaneous resistance to it-as did the life of James Brown.

To honor them means reading about those who suffered horrific death...

"Riotous Displays: Celebrating Diversity and Peace"
(Jennifer Chan, Yoshiko Shimada, Pikki Leung)

"Public Identity," 2007 (Young Min Moon)

3 inkjet prints Public Identity: Coffee (18 x 24), Black (18 x 24), Artichoke, (24 x 28)

Arche's Corpse (Contributed and created by Laura Kang, David Lloyd and Fred Moten)

This poem was composed for Exquisite Crisis "exquisite corpse" style. Each participant composed two lines at a time, sending on only the second line to the next participant by e-mail. That participant in turn composed two lines, sending on the second to the third participant, and so on. At no point until the composition was completed did anyone have a sense of the whole composition. We agreed on 45 linesÑthree participants writing a total of fifteen lines each in honor of the fifteenth anniversary of the L.A. uprising.

The recording was made after several experiments in the form of a round: one speaker begins with the first stanza, the second reader begins from the first stanza as the first speaker comes to the second, and the third speaker begins to read as the second speaker begins the second stanza. The resultant blend of individual and group voices provides some correlative to the mode of composition as well as hopefully capturing the cacophony of conflicting voices.

Listen to a reading of this poem:

A Tattoo of batons on the bruising flesh
A Under-rhythm of the American dream
B dreamt elsewhere, those shy, twitching settlements
B jut beyond these kempt measures of commemoration
C like a broke anniverse, a migrant shore, an interstate

C of stragglers and involuntary volunteers. they got shot
A and it don't stop and it won't stop, that beat goes on
A like it's the wrong song laid down too long
B what might have been chant or rhyme fades
B into a murmur of polite passing, a graze, jostling

C and some rough driving by to hop out quick
C for tickets and loose smoke and delicate bags
A imploding under the force of the fist, exhaling
A face this, face this, the true is the unfit, phrase
B afeard or febrile, all those hurtling to from atop

B here pitch, come press in on, having been where
C having been there, having been air, having been
C flore, flare, police passing, our delicate underground
A flashing in flight and and crying out, fuck no
A to the dry see saw of go along to get along

B would and should all pegged to which we
B wedge, then tamp down nestling until then
C which is far off in a never township. come tussle
C with me through the fade, play through the argument
A as if he were lying there, as if he were lying there

A with that dumb look of a corpse, all ash and
B bauble and filling, even through dusted rubble
B past torch and kiln, a remnant sheen keeps
C of a burnt circle but maybe it will be a birthday
C I want to call him kiril and I wonder what he will

A turn to, in the dark days with rainclouds over Simi
A and his colors all blazoned, holding the blue line
B above is a swarm that might rev up to something
B below the hands stutter in vivid but desolate halls
C like the broken video in the first place, the cramped
C frame into an open boulevard, new bebop in reply
A blazing up against that white song that I live
A surrounded by, white noise on the skyline
B is just that, a glitch, a scribble against sky
B swooping sea, whose edges blur and throb

C on sand and concrete inlet and broken rock
C reflecting the city above and the city underneath
A as if they were two maps clapping slowly together
B hesitantly unfolding or trickling to some polite hush
C the frenzy of other intervals

"In my house, the walls are yellow, the trim is red and black, the floor is brown...the celing is white." (Lucy Lippard)

vinyl letters