IDENTITY+BRANDING

IDENTITY+BRANDING, EXHIBITION // BOOK PUBLICATION, ADVERTISING, SOCIAL, PRINT + WEB DESIGN

UNDER ERASURE

under-erasure.com

I co-curated the Under Erasure exhibition with my husband, art critic and writer, Raphael Rubinstein, on view from November 2018 – January 27, 2019 at Pierogi Gallery in New York. Taking its title from Jacques Derrida’s concept of “under erasure,” the exhibition included over 80 visual artists and contemporary writers whose work featured different varieties of erasure. For Derrida (as for Heidegger before him) to put a word under erasure (sous rature) is to signal the inadequacy of inherited language while also recognizing its inevitability. Since Derrida introduced the concept of under erasure in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, this emphatically visual act of intervention has become an indispensable technique in diverse disciplines.

The exhibition was reviewed in the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, and Two Coats of Paint.

I designed and published the limited edition book that accompanied the exhibition.
My spouse and I wrote the 50 word poems that correspond to each artwork in the book.
Printed Matter in New York carries the book.
A lo-res version is available here as a PDF //
I designed and published an exhibition website in conjunction with the opening.

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IDENTITY+BRANDING // PUBLIC ART, GRANTS // BOOK DESIGN, ADVERTISING, PRINT, SOCIAL, T-SHIRT + WEB DESIGN

THE MIRACULOUS: HOUSTON

themiraculousinhouston.com

A pubic art project at the University of Houston: What are the boundaries of a book? What happens if reading becomes a public rather than a private experience? Can a story be a work of public art? Can buildings be made to speak? These are some of the questions we hope to find answers to with our text-based public art project The Miraculous: Houston. But perhaps the most important aim of this installation is to bring the realm of contemporary art to a wider audience.

By displacing these micro-narratives about the lives and works of contemporary artists from the world of museums, galleries and art criticism into the public realm, we hope to share with the university community, and the larger Houston public, some of the wondrous human activities that, for lack of a better term, we call “contemporary art.”

Composed as a series of brief texts ranging from a single sentence to two pages, The Miraculous (first published in book form by Paper Monument in 2014) is largely focused on conceptual and performance art. The Miraculous recounts feats of endurance, acts of absurdist wit, projects that confront political repression and racist attitudes, and celebrations of the natural world. Many of the artists included perform their work in the streets, parks and squares of big cities, unleashing the creative potential of public spaces. Several texts highlight the loss of historical memory or the contradictions between the spiritual ambition of art and its status as a market commodity. A number of episodes describe moments of revelation, often seeming to occur by sheer accident, when artists discover their true creative path, the work they were meant to do.

As a public art installation, The Miraculous: Houston is concerned with, among other things, the effects of displacement. At the heart of the project are two simultaneous displacements or migrations: 1. the movement of a book from private individual reading to public reading, and 2. the movement of contemporary art from spaces dedicated to its exhibition to public spaces in which there is no expectation of encountering an artwork nor even of referring to the subject of art. Designed to be highly noticeable against the subdued palette of the university’s buildings, with colors and fonts that refer to the original Paper Monument edition, this project departs from most previous architecture-text experiments in that it involves transposing the entire contents of an existing book and dispersing them across a wide area; it can be thought of as an “exploded book.” Each of the 50 works is numbered and a map showing their locations is available on signs around campus, as well as in distributed hard copies and online at themiraculousinhouston.com. While many people will encounter these textworks randomly, as they walk to or from a class, The Miraculous: Houston is also a network of sites for viewers to seek out according to their own psychogeographical itineraries. As in the book form, the texts do not identify the artists by name, allowing viewers/readers to encounter each episode without being influenced by the fame or obscurity of the artist. The suppression of the names (which are available on the printed map and online) also suggests how, in the words of Joseph Beuys, “everyone is an artist.” Anonymity is a way of celebrating the inclusive, open-ended quality of contemporary art.

In The Human Condition, philosopher Hannah Arendt emphasizes the spatial qualities of public life, how democracy and a sense of citizenship depend upon people being engaged in political discourse in commonly shared spaces. Arendt goes so far as to say, “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.” It is our hope that The Miraculous: Houston, by activating (and disrupting) the architecture and landscape of the University of Houston campus, by inserting stories and metaphors and parables and biographies and conundrums and protests and jokes and a few fictions among these otherwise factual narratives, may encourage the public to become more conscious of our commonly shared space, and the cultures and ideas that flow through it.

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DESIGN EXPERIENCE:

Creative Director // Art vs Literature // 2007+ // Location remote

Creative Director // Whiteboard Labs // Houston, Texas // 2003-07

Art Director // Royal Dutch Shell // Houston, Texas // 2002-2003

Senior Designer // NASA and Lockheed Martin // Houston, Texas // 2002

Creative Director // ChevronTexaco // Houston, Texas // 1999-2002

Senior Designer // AIM Mutual Funds // Houston, Texas // 1999

Graphic Designer // Sachnowitz & Co. Advertising // Houston, Texas // 1998-1999

Graphic Designer // Killion Corporation // Indianapolis, Indiana // 1997-1998

Education Director // Houston International Festival // Houston, Texas // 1996-1997

Production Assistant // Campbell Mithun Esty Advertising // Houston, Texas // 1993-1996