PUBLIC INTERSECT: ANYANG REDUX
May 20 through July 1st, 2011
The Periscope Project
300 Block / 15th Street / Downtown San Diego
Contact: Chuck Miller info@theperiscopeproject.org
The Periscope Project for Art + Architecture will present Public Intersect: Anyang
Redux from May 20 to June 24 2011. Simply, the exhibition will showcase graduate
student responses to the thematics developed by professor Kyong Park in his role as
director of the 2010 Anyang Public Arts Project (APAP 2010). Yet the exhibition
emerges not via typical institutional hierarchies (Institution > Curator > Artist), but from a
set of informal dialogs forming a horizontal nexus of agents. This dynamic will hopefully
become analogous to the relationship of the exhibition space to its content: moving
beyond a simple showcase, The Periscope Project seeks to provide a platform upon
which to test the relevancy of hypothetical aesthetic responses outside of their native
institutional framework.
Sybil Wendler, the exhibition’s original organizer, encapsulated the thematics of APAP
2010 as follows. “APAP 2010 begins the artistic and polemic discourse about the
current on-going erasure of the older architectonic landscape in cities throughout South
Korea. The destruction and rebuilding affects the ideation of time and memory of the
vanished spaces by creating a compressed temporality for the transient population that
inhabits the newly built neighborhoods and commercial centers. Continuing this thread,
APAP 2010, as a municipally funded project, attempts to mediate the breakage
between history and place, residents and memory that occurs with redevelopment.”
In the winter of 2011, Park prompted graduate students to produce a hypothetical
project responding to the core problematic of the APAP 2010: what is at stake,
culturally and politically, as redevelopment initiatives erase the spatial referents of
place?
A loose consortium of the students, Park himself, and The Periscope Project, has
challenged the “hypothetical” nature of the initial prompt, symptomatic perhaps of the
brevity of an academic quarter, and UCSD’s sprawling remove from any notable urban
coherency. Via The Periscope Project, these projects have the opportunity to engage
with urban narratives outside of the UCSD ivory tower, where new resonance between
the otherwise disparate locales of Anyang and San Diego, or between The Periscope
Project and the APAP 2010 initiative, comes to the fore. But this is only half of the
equation.
The artists represented in Public Intersect have their own voices and their own
agency, to respond to the initial prompt with embrace or rejection, or a critical
balancing of the two. Platforming the results, new tangents, critical perspectives, and
material realizations enrich the dialog. The emerging program at Periscope attempts to
triangulate a dialog between the artists / students, the prompts of their pedagog, and
the analogous problematics that APAP and The Periscope Project confront.
The exhibited works themselves present a broad spectrum of approaches. From
Jamilah Abdul-Sabur’s choreographic / sculptural response to Anyang’s Manan Bridge,
to Misael Diaz’s protracted collaborations with Tijuana street vendors proximate to the
redevelopment of San Ysidro’s Port of Entry, to Josh Tonies’ designerly / dystopic reimagining
of San Diego’s Horton Plaza, Stephanie Lie’s conceptual paralleling of
Lagoon preserves in north San Diego County with Anyang’s water parks and artificial
creeks, and Sam Kronick’s playful appropriation and application of American suburbia’s
mediated artifacts. The projects operate as visual object lessons working across formal,
representational, poetic, technological and conceptual registers. Such will set the stage
for dynamic conversations to follow.
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, May 20 / 7 – 10PM
The Periscope Project / 300 block of 15th Street
PANEL DISCUSSION with Kyong Park, Teddy Cruz, Featured Artists and The
Periscope Project
Wednesday, June 8 / 6pm